Better Get Organized: Lessons From Tahrir Square

Over at Digby’s David Atkins has another great piece up titled Lessons from Egypt:  Occupy the Democratic Party.  Essentially, Atkins (who, not coincidentally, is involved with the Democratic Party in California) points out that despite the fact the Egyptian revolution was largely set off by the liberal parties and youth activists who occupied Tahrir Square, the big winners in the recent Egyptian elections were Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis.  The reason for this, Atkins explains, is simple:  the Islamists were better organized.

There is a lesson here.  No matter how well-intentioned the revolutionaries and no matter how successful the revolution, at the end of the day organizational power will step in to win the day.  It always does.  That organizational power can be a force for good or for ill.  But especially in democratic societies, the ability to leverage organized support for specific ends will always trump anarchic mass sentiment.  (emphasis added)

Here, Atkins is touching on something that has long concerned me about the Occupy movement:  the insistence that a lack of formal organization is one of its fundamental tenets. 

Over the summer I read Hacker & Pierson’s Winner-Take-All-Politics, which chronicles the subversion of the US political system over the last 30 years until it now functions almost exclusively for the 1%; if there is one lesson I took away from that book it is that in modern politics nothing is more important to achieving one’s goals than is effective organization.  The 1% are highly organized and they know precisely where to apply the sharpest pressure to our body politic to get what they want; for the Occupy movement to imagine that a loose agglomeration of ordinary citizens – completely and willfully disorganized – can ever hope to match the political effectiveness of the 1% is simply naive. 

If they truly want to effect change, if they truly want to accomplish something concrete that might materially improve the lives of the 99% on whose behalf they march, then the Occupy movement eventually is going to have to organize itself in some way.  And, in order to be politically effective, they are going to have to organize themselves either within the Democratic Party or – and this would be much, much better – outside the Democratic Party but associated with it and pulling it strongly back to the Left.

I pay a lot of attention to the Occupadores and it causes me no small amount of heartburn when I hear some of them say things like “the entire system is corrupt,” and then suggest that they would rather not even vote than sully themselves by taking part in the corrupt political process that now exists.  I remember heaving a sigh of relief only about a month ago when I read that -- after much discussion in Occupy Wall Street's General Assembly -- OWS had voted not to make abstaining from next year's election its official political position.

But don’t get me wrong . . . I understand their frustration, really I do; like everybody else who voted for him, I did hope that once he was ensconced in the White House Barack Obama would at least try to do something other than “business as usual.” 

Nevertheless, we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.  I lived in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, and had Ralph Nader not insisted on running as the “Purity Party” nominee (or whatever the hell it was he called his ticket) we would have been spared 8 years of Dubya.  Hell!  We might even have been spared 9/11.  Don’t forget that it was the outgoing Clinton National Security team that warned the new administration to focus on Osama bin Laden; had Gore won the election that team might have remained in place and might even have prevented the greatest American tragedy since December 7, 1941.

Just imagine what the 21^st century would look like without 9/11.  No wars in Afghanistan, or in Iraq.  Our civil liberties still more or less intact.  An American soul not permanently stained by half its citizenry arguing that torture is okay “when we do it.”  Thousands of lives, immeasurable treasure not thrown away.  All of that possibly avoided but for a vanity campaign pandering to the self-righteous and proclaiming that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between Nobel Prize winning environmentalist Al Gore and . . . George W. Bush.

Yeah.

Steve M. had a great line yesterday in a post asking Does Obama Have His Nader Now?:  “if you respond to the awfulness of Democrats by ignoring the unspeakableness of Republicans, you’re going to repeat 2000.”  And if the people calling for a new American politics are determined to sit the game out until the rules get changed to their liking, we’re going to end up repeating the last thirty years.

We can do better.

The Driving Dream of MORE

Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run.  The truth is Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.

                                                --Atrios

                                    

That right there.  What Atrios said.  

Digby wrote something the other day quoting Joseph Stiglitz’s assertion that the ultimate fate of the 1% “is bound up with how the other 99% live.”  Digby then added that “a stable society with a thriving middle class is more necessary to [the 1%’s] survival than a quick buck to add to their already depraved level of wealth . . . .”

With which Steve M. quibbled:

Maybe [these statements] are true in the very, very long run, but I can’t live on a planet in which North Korea’s regime has endured for decades, thriving as its population starves, and believe that the overdogs in our society can’t keep bleeding us relatively slowly for as long as we’re willing to put up with it.  They don’t need for us to thrive – they’ll sell to a Chinese or Indian or Brazilian middle class if ours isn’t thriving.  Or they’ll sell to one another.  They don’t need for us to thrive any more than they’ve ever needed a thriving middle class in any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories.

But I think Steve M. gets it wrong here, because I think Steve misapprehends the issue.

Digby and Stiglitz might have been discussing the division between the 99% and the 1% that obtains here in the United States, but that division is being replicated around the world and so their argument applies on a global scale.

It is fine to blithely suggest that Our Galtian Overlords will sell to a Chinese or an Indian middle class if the US middle class isn’t flourishing, but neither the Chinese nor the Indian middle class are flourishing either.  Sure, you can point to the high growth rate of the middle class in either country, but that is only because when one’s starting point is essentially zero any uptick at all implies, mathematically speaking, a growth rate of infinity.  (I exaggerate, obviously, but I think you take my point.)

The reason we have a “global savings glut” (Bernanke, Krugman, Roubini), or - stated another way - a “dearth of economic investment opportunity” (Stiglitz), or - stated another way - an “overaccumulation of capital” (Marx) is because Our Galtian Overlords in pretty much every country are appropriating for themselves alone almost all the profit from their growing economies and not recycling that profit back into the system in the form of higher wages for everybody else.

By doing so, they are at once accumulating capital for themselves and destroying any market in which they might later deploy that capital.  It’s not that they are eating their seed corn so much as they are storing that seed corn away until it rots from disuse.

This is also why Steve M.’s point about the 1% never having needed a thriving middle class in “any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories” is misplaced.  The cruel genius behind the idea of employing third-world workers at slave wages to manufacture goods for export is that those goods, by definition, are intended to be sold elsewhere; by keeping their labor markets and their consumer markets absolutely separate, manufacturers could impoverish the former without shrinking the latter.  But the genius of this little stratagem evaporates once one attempts to replicate it on a global scale.  When the entire world’s labor supply is impoverished, the entire world’s consumer market is as well.

And as for the idea that the world’s 1% might simply sell to one another if they can no longer sell to the 99%?  Well, they certainly intend to try doing that; in fact, that seems to be the fundamental idea underlying CitiGroup’s infamous “plutonomy memo” from 2005.   But to again quote Kunkel: “this substitution was never likely, for as Keynes observed, ‘when our income increases our consumption increases also, but not by so much.’”  Simply stated, not even the greedy gobs of the Galtian Overlords can swallow an entire world’s production, over and over and over again.

Which leaves us, finally, with the suggestion that perhaps Our Galtian Overlords will learn to be content with living the way Kim Jung-il does in North Korea:  luxuriously, wanting for nothing, content to pile up riches while the rest of the world beggars itself for their comfort.  To which I respond . . . maybe.  Maybe they could learn to live this way, but I doubt it.

It is one thing to beggar a nation, it is quite another to beggar the world.  Kim Jung-il might not be vexed by the idle wealth he is amassing at the expense of North Korea but remember . . . at the end of the day it’s still only North Korea.  How much wealth can he possibly be amassing over there?  After Kim shoots a few new action-adventure Godzilla blockbuster movies and springs for another giant waterslide, how much can he really have left over with which to play the role of Scrooge McDuck?

 (h/t Anderson Cooper)

But The World is . . . The World. 

Grab up all of The World’s resources and you can’t just let that stuff sit around doing nothing.  You’ve got to find some use for it . . . exactly the same way campus police at UC-Davis or the cops in New York just needed to find a use for all that cool new military equipment that until recently had been just lying around.  “Money – excess capital – needs to be put to work; it needs to earn profit, or else it is just useless.”  As useless as an unopened can of military grade pepper spray.

Besides, at the end of the day anyone who has climbed to or spent their life in the coveted position of a Galtian Overlord, anyone as sociopathic as the Koch Brothers who – not content to possess a combined wealth of $50 Billion -- still feel the need to purchase governors, destroy workers’ rights, eliminate all business regulation, and disenfranchise voters merely to suck up even more money. . . anyone like that is never going to be content just to kick back and enjoy their unimaginable wealth.

Because the truth is that people so batshit, Koch brothers-level insane are just a little more imaginative than you or I could ever even think of being.  And what they tend to imagine is what it would be like to have more.  And not even more money, not necessarily.  Just . . . more.  More power, more control, more authority, more stuff, more, more, more and always, always, More Than Anybody Else.

More is what drives them.  Because, in the end, it really isn’t the money.  In the end it simply is that such people are – to borrow Atrios’s term – assholes.

* * *

So, yeah . . . Stiglitz gets it right when he says that the well-being of the 1% depends on them not destroying the very markets they need in order to keep realizing their ever-present dream of More.  

Nevertheless, the 1% persists in destroying those markets anyway because these people are perfect singularities of covetousness, reflexively grubbing up anything that crosses their greed field's event horizon.  It remains true that their very well-being depends to a large extent on the well-being of all the rest of us but, as Digby says, “they are too thick” to realize that simple fact.

Digby wins the round on points.

Hope Springs Eternal

As I mentioned last night, Matt Yglesias already has gone on record expressing the belief that Bloomberg’s decision to shut down the occupation of Zuccotti Park “has ensured continued relevance for the issue.”  And this does seem to be shaping up as the favored consensus among those working in the Left Blogosphere.

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog Steve M. refers to this phenomenon as “The Dubious New Pundit Meme:  Bloomberg Did Occupy Wall Street a Favor.”  He cites Ezra Klein arguing that Bloomberg’s clearing of the park was done “in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.”  He also cites Derek Thompson of The Atlantic arguing that “[w]ether or not the protesters return to their tents, New York police have given them a chance to lift up, take stock, and pitch their energies in an issue worth occupying . . . .”

Gaming Out the Sarah Palin Death Spiral: Not a Bang, But a Whimper

(I know, I know . . . I shouldn't be thinking at all about the blight on our national politics that is Sarah Palin, but like a sore tooth one's tongue keeps poking I just can't stop myself.)

It's become pretty clear that Sarah Palin is a status obsessed celebrity wannabee. Almost from the moment she was picked by our country's angriest old uncle to be his backup plan, Sarah Palin has never failed to prove that her formal career as a politician is over and that she doesn't regret that for a moment. After John McCain gave her the opportunity to try her schtick out on the national stage and she discovered that she could make people like National Review's Rich Lowry see starbursts, Palin lost no time chucking the governorship of her "much beloved" Alaska so that she could hang out with the cool kidz on the national circuit.

But not because she wants to be a politician on the national stage; she just wants to be on the national stage, full stop.

The Excruciating Choice: To Hope for a Romney or a Perry Nomination?

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve M. asks Is Beltway Denial of GOP Insanity the Reason Romney Won't Fight Back? Essentially, Steve points out that a large portion of the media Village can't bring itself to admit that the modern GOP has basically gone insane because it hurts them too much to acknowledge this. (For my money, this is because they're afraid that recognizing the modern GOP's insanity would sound too "partisan" and thus would damage their self-identification as "politically savvy -- yet at the same time politically innocent -- insiders"). He suggests that Mitt Romney actually believes the Villagers when they assert that large swathes of the GOP still consist of reasonable, moderate voters and that those voters are sufficient to prevent Rick Perry from stealing what Romney thinks is his nomination.

Like Steve, I don't believe that -- I think the nomination is going to be decided by the increasingly unhinged teabaggers and their supporters, who are after all the most active and strident group within today's GOP. And so I think Steve is onto something when he suggests that "denial of the GOP's psychopathy harms the one not-quite-crazy Republican still standing in the race." Truthfully, though, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that.

On the one hand, and for strictly short-term political reasons, I think I'd be delighted to see Perry get the nomination over Romney. Were Romney to get the nod, it would only provide further cover for the Villagers to continue denying that the modern Republican Party has gone off the rails. Moreover, I think Romney would have a real chance at winning the general election given how terrible the economy is likely to remain. And that, of course, would be pretty much all that is needed to complete the corporatization of America.

I also believe quite the opposite about Perry. Personality-wise, Perry is pretty much as extreme as they come these days: an unapologetic Bible thumper whose only clearly articulated plan for dealing with the problems that beset our country and his own State of Texas is to pray for Jesus to make it all better, an adolescent who brags about how he named his custom-made boots "Liberty" and "Freedom" and that he carries a laser-sighted pistol with him when he goes jogging, and a snarkish bully captured on video after announcing his presidential bid telling a journalist to "give [Romney] my love" and blowing a kiss toward the camera.

This type of blowhard might play well in Texas and amongst the GOP faithful in general, but they tend to turn off everybody else. Bush may have been just as psychopathic, but at least he had the political acumen to run for president claiming to be "a compassionate conservative." Perry, on the other, seems to revel in hippie-punching and pissing off as many non-(GOP)believers as possible. Which is at once why he is now the Republican front-runner, and why I also think that he would lose the general election to Obama. It is also why a Perry nomination would help to "immanentize the eschaton" of getting the pundits and the bipartisan fetishists (and I'm looking at you, Mr. President) to acknowledge how far off the rails the GOP has driven itself.

On the other hand . . . hoping for a Perry nomination just seems wrong. I tend to think that nobody should be actively hoping that a callous, hot-headed know-nothing might snag the presidential nomination of one of our country's only two national parties. And, hey, I have to acknowledge that I could also just be wrong about Perry's chances of winning the general election. Romney would knowingly and greedily complete the corporatization of America, but Perry would do the same out of simple thick-headedness and a Texas understanding that this is how "bidness" gets done. But Perry would also further institutionalize the worst Christianist, xenophobic and anti-science impulses our nation has to offer. Which would be even worse.

So when it comes to hoping for a particular GOP candidate, that's the choice presented. Gamble I'm right about my assessment of Perry's chances in the general election and root for him to win the Republican nomination, or hedge my position and root for Romney and then hope that Obama beats him in the general election but console myself that - even if Obama loses - at least Rick Perry isn't squatting in the Oval Office.

It's a tough call, and looking over the Republican field all I can say is Thank God (and my state's election laws) that as a registered Democrat there is no possibility that I will be forced to actually vote on this.

We Are Doomed

Picking up on this story out of Kentucky, about two Iraqi refugees arrested for attempting to send arms back to Iraq and Mitch McConnell's call to have them sent to Gitmo -- as opposed to, y'know, just trying them in the normal course of justice -- because it is "the only way we can be certain there won't be retaliatory attacks in Kentucky."
(H/t to Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog.)

Let me go ahead and apologize right off the bat: I'm sorry for using offensive language. But I cannot think of another word that carries the same level of disdain, contempt and visceral impact. Probably because I am not well-read enough.

But . . . seriously, when did America become a nation of pussies? Jesus H. Christ! We looked Hitler in the eye and said, "No." We went through decades of a steely-eyed staring contest with the USSR when the stakes were nuclear war. We lifted ourselves out of the Great Depression, we revolutionized food production and computer engineering, we gave rise to the indomitable idea of the Great Middle Class.

And now we're just a bunch of pussies. 'Cause some brown guy with a beard might look at us squintily.

Screw the GOP. I don't like them mostly because all of their ideas are wrong, but God in Heaven!  How the hell people can look at that party and consider it anything other than a bunch of pantie-clutching schoolgirls is beyond me.