Today's Smartest Thing

They're talking about the sausage-making in DC, and at around the 4:45 mark, Alexis Goldstein (OWS) makes an observational analogy that just knocked me my off my chair.

Paraphrasing - lobbyists get in to see the Congress Critters so regularly and so often - effectively pushing constituents and consumers and "regular people" off to the side - that it starts to look like a Denial of Service Attack.

Watch, and gape - and then try to explain to me how you think your Reps in congress are there to serve you.

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Occupy Explained

From Mother Jones:

Americans are not opposed to the rich getting richer—as John Steinbeck is said to have noted, "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." But this prospect only satisfies so long as people believe that with luck and hard work, their ship, or at least their kids' ship, may some day come in. In a system overrun by piracy—a system in which the pirates also, sorry to stretch the metaphor, run the Navy—the dream becomes hard to sustain.

Seemed Like A Good Idea

Occupy Melbourne protesters seemed to have hit on a way to thwart efforts to evict them from the park by wearing their tents as clothing. The police had other ideas. If mayors and police chiefs would stop giving Occupiers something to push back against, the thing would most likely just fizzle and die. I guess authoritarians aren't equipped to understand that.

Another War Of Independence

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic:

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.

Coates describes the Civil War being characterized as a tragedy in the white-folk narrative, but points out that it was, in fact, the War For Freedom for black-folk (more broadly, a step towards a more perfect union, but when the main cause is slavery and the main outcome is freedom for black-folk, then it's not a big stretch).

If I look at the Civil War in that light, I can take the circumstances leading up to the American Revolution and the Civl War and the Labor Riots and The 30s and The 60s; overlay them onto what's been bubbling up since the 2008 Implosion, and I can see a truer meaning of the phrase "freedom ain't free".

Remember that it's never about what the popular narrative tell us it's about.