It Just Never Fails

Every time a good number of people get together to express disagreement with their governments, those governments always seem to go into Hyper-Authoritarian Mode. Nothing new in that. We've seen a bunch of reminders in the last several months. It just comes as a little jolt when it happens here in the US, even tho' our history is filled with the repeating pattern of Unrest leading to Demonstration leading to Violent Authoritarian Reaction.

Now let's add a little wrinkle by considering the fact that Zuccotti Park is a privately owned public space. Say that out loud a coupla times and let the 1984-ish-ness of it wash over you while you watch this clip:
(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)



The cops in NYC have to identify themselves as The Government - they wear numbered badges and name tags and everything. But Free Market Security Forces apparently aren't similarly restricted. With the cops, we can at least pretend there's a little accountability - not so when you call Rent-a-Goon to get a ready-made battalion of pud-knockers to do your dirty work.

And oh yeah - these guys have been very well trained; they have lots of experience (our tax dollars hard at work); and now that they're home and out of the military, we'll have to find something for them to do - so it makes perfect sense to use them to bring us a little law and order right here at home.

Put that together with all those unAmerican Terrorist Sympathizers who got their panties in a knot worrying about how red-blooded God-and-country patriots might abuse the powers of DHS and The USA PATRIOT Act.
From Wonkette:

Remember when people were freaking out over the Patriot Act and Homeland Security and all this other conveniently ready-to-go post-9/11 police state stuff, because it would obviously be just a matter of time before the whole apparatus was turned against non-Muslim Americans when they started getting complain-y about the social injustice and economic injustice and income inequality and endless recession and permanent unemployment? That day is now, and has been for some time. But it’s also now confirmed that it’s now, as some Justice Department official screwed up and admitted that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated the riot-cop raids on a dozen major #Occupy Wall Street demonstration camps nationwide yesterday and today. (Oh, and tonight, too: Seattle is being busted up by the riot cops right now, so be careful out there.)

What's It All About?

The Short answer is: Nobody knows what it's all about.  And that's pretty encouraging to me.

When the Tea Party thing first popped up, it had a kind of organic feel to it, but almost immediately, when Michelle Bachmann jumped in front of it - and then when Dick Armey slithered in - suddenly it was all about GOP talking points or some other templated 'conservative' nonsense.  The rallies had all the authenticity of an Up With People performance from 1970, and the original themes that grew out of a reasonable rejection of Tax Payer bailouts for the crooks on Wall Street morphed into the old familiar bits about Tax-and-Spend, Deficit Hawkery and National Debt Anxiety.  It was one of the slickest bamboozles anybody'd ever seen (and btw: it made Dick Armey a fuckload of money).

So along comes OWS.  Basically the same thing as the Tea Party (albeit without all the blue hair).  And while there have always been crazies of the type who always gravitate towards any kind of power center, OWS has maintained a very different feel to it.  They don't have a real org chart.  They don't have designated spokespeople.  They have a generally stated list (of sorts) of the things they want to see addressed and/or remedied, but they're resisting efforts to be defined and then co-opted by the very entities they're determined to push against.  By staying more or less passive and unconfined by conventional politicking, they gain strength while they wait to discover what OWS is to become.

If you want a fair parallel, go back and watch The Social Network again, and pay close attention to the conflict between Zuckerberg and Saverin when facebook was still just a college campus thing.  As facebook was starting to take off, the 'normal' next step was to figure out how to monetize it - to make it make money.  But Zuckerberg resists, saying they don't know what it is yet - that they may have created something that fundamentally changes the way people interact; on a truly global scale.  Trying to shoehorn the thing into the standard Harvard Biz School model would be like Secretariat pullin' a plow.

So there's absolutely no need to make OWS fit neatly into whatever frame of reference we have on hand right now today.  In fact, I think what OWS needs is to resist all efforts to rein it in and to make it into something it's not.  I get a weird feeling that OWS is a very close approximation of what democracy is supposed to look like.  Maybe that's why we're having such a hard time recognizing it.

Today's Shitty Little Fact

Of the 100 biggest economies in the world, 53 are corporations - which is up from 51 a year ago.

The Story Of Stuff

"Our enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our ego satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate." --Victor Lebow

Let's figure out how to move from a linear system to a circular one, but let's try to be careful about the disruption that must always accompany such great shifts.

We Are So Fucked

I'd like to think there was a time when this shit didn't go on.

The next national election is now less than a year away and congressmen and senators are expending much of their time and their energy raising the millions of dollars in campaign funds they'll need just to hold onto a job that pays $174,000 a year.

Few of them are doing it for the salary and all of them will say they are doing it to serve the public. But there are other benefits: Power, prestige, and the opportunity to become a Washington insider with access to information and connections that no one else has, in an environment of privilege where rules that govern the rest of the country, don't always apply to them.

Watch the video from 60 Minutes at CBSNews.com.

Obama Meets The GOP Women's Caucus

Always looking to connect a few dots - even when they seem pretty far apart.



At about 30:00, talking about The Unibomber and Eric Rudolph - "As a side note, I have no idea what it is with white folks and the woods - but whatever it is probably explains why black folks don't do a lot of camping."

Verterans' Day

"We wear our widow's weeds like nuns, and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifice"

Turd Blossom Rides Again

Elizabeth Warren scares the holy bejeebers outa some folks. Kinda like bleach scares a fungus.

Penn State Update

From Michael Collins at The Agonist:

The relentless deviate, former PSU defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, is accused of sexually assaulting children for years. According to the grand jury, he gained easy access to children and early adolescents through a foundation he founded in 1977, the Second Mile Foundation. He continued the assaults at his home and in the PSU showers on at least one occasion. The foundation serves over 100,000 at-risk youth. Sandusky started the foundation as a group home for "troubled boys" in 1977. Since hiring Jack Raykovitz, PhD, a licensed psychologist, as president, the foundation has grown into a multimillion (sic) enterprise serving over 100,000 children throughout the state.

I'm not advocating violence - don't kick him in the nuts and don't throw anything at him - but if you see this Sandusky guy out in public, he needs to be made to feel as small and unwelcome as it is humanly possible to feel.

Today's Pix

From Funny Or Die

Hat Tip - Daily Dawdle

Herman Cain’s Campaign Promises with Mike Tyson from Mike Tyson

Having It Both Ways

Art vs Life

One way to put it:
"Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it." --Vladimir Mayakovsky

I don't know what that really has to do with anything right now, but I got to thinking (usually kinda dangerous for me) about parallels and coincidences and intersections, and I can't help but assume that there's no way I'm the only one in the world who wonders about the eerily converging similarities between the Duke brothers from the movie Trading Places and the Koch brothers.

Mortimer and Randolph Duke

Chuckles and Davy Koch

Olbermann On Joe Pa

It's one of the saddest things ever. Joe Paterno has been a hero for a lot of us for a very long time. And while I think this is something that happened as much in spite of his management rather than because of it, I also think this is a good example of what can happen when somebody stays in a position of great power for way too long.

Word is that Paterno will resign at the end of the season. I have to agree with Keith on this one (fire his ass today), but I'd go one more step and say that Paterno should be in front of a judge right now, trying to make a case for why he should not be in jail.

NYT Late To The Party - Again

Some pretty decent analysis from Numerian at The Agonist, on the main reason our 4th estate is in the middle of an Epic FAIL.

As an ex-subscriber to The New York Times, I too have been outraged by such stories, but not because I read them in the paper of record, which is not simply very late to the game of reporting on this phenomenon - it is too late. I’ve been outraged by these stories because I have been reading about this for years on internet blogs. Some of the most persistent reporters and analysts who write about this problem include Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, Yves Smith at the Naked Capitalist blog, and Karl Denninger at the Market Ticker blog. All three of these writers have no doubt lost some readers over the years because they write about these stories over and over, and manage to maintain a sustained fury over the debasement of the rule of law that is evidenced by the way the big banks operate, and the inability or refusal of the government to do much about it.
These are the sort of people who have been criticized for years by The New York Times for sloppy reporting because they don’t have to live by the strict journalistic standards that are upheld every day by the mainstream media.

Whether or not this is true – and for the most part these writers have been careful about ensuring that the facts they present are verified – it is definitely the case that mainstream media reporters and analysts have not taken the angry, vituperative, and in some cases vulgar tone that bloggers take when talking about the collapse of the rule of law.

Therein lies a problem, and it is one that the mainstream media is only now beginning to comprehend. The undermining of the US Constitution and the laws as passed by Congress, and the refusal by government to investigate or prosecute these violations, which are now rife, represent some of the most serious challenges imaginable to a democracy based on a republican form of government. Anyone who takes their responsibilities as a citizen of the US seriously should be outraged by these circumstances.

Maybe we're starting to see some signs of revolt from inside the closed-loop crony-driven system which has tied Business, Government and Press together into a neat little bundle. We need that rebellion because we've allowed our little experiment in self government to slip into the oldest game in the world - ie: once everybody's guilty, nobody can be held responsible.  We have to figure out how to split it all up again, and put clearly discernible dividers back into place.  Balance has gone out of the system and must be reestablished.