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thinkahol *

The Moment When the Police Lost the Occupy Portland Narrative | Blogtown, PDX - 0 views

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    Well, it turned. The police bureau is starting to crack after six weeks of Occupy Portland. And one picture, right here, crystallizes the precise moment when it happened. During a choreographed effort to pull a few dozen protesters out of the Chase bank branch outside Pioneer Square, part of today's hundreds-strong N17 day of action, Portland police officers resorted to a decidedly more muscular show of force in a clash watched by TV cameras and rush-hour commuters earlier this evening. Suddenly all the fun-the dance parties, the union songs, the peaceful arrests earlier on the Steel Bridge and at Wells Fargo-was for naught. Tromping in with mounted officers, they pushed marchers who had gathered on the sidewalks along SW Yamhill into the street-forcing them to block MAX trains, something no one was doing until the heavily armored riot squad showed up-and then poked and, for the first time, pepper-sprayed the marchers. Significantly, some of the spraying came after protesters had clearly retreated to the opposite sidewalk. (In another odd shift, there also was no federal-court-required verbal PA warning that chemical munitions would be deployed-a hallmark of every other mass police action to date.) Meanwhile, at almost the very same moment, Police Chief Mike Reese was on TV blaming Occupy Portland for his officers' inability to respond to a rape victim for three hours today. Consider that tantamount to a declaration of war. Reese's point? Officers are tired and have been too distracted to do their main jobs: responding to actual crimes. It was an attempt to spin sentiment against the movement, which seems to be attracting adherents. Even the O today said the movement is "building momentum" and said the average age of some 34 arrestees earlier today was 50-not a bunch of young, anarchists/punks/hoodlums/hippies/road warriors etc. But that might come back to haunt him, judging by a wave of outrage on Twitter and elsewhere among those who noted that it
thinkahol *

Economist's View: "The Greatest Increase in Poverty and Hardship Produced by Any Law in... - 0 views

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    Mathew Yglesias: CBPP Analysis of John Boehner's Plan: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes that if enacted, John Boehner's debt ceiling plan "could well produce the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history." That sounds to me like something that would create strong incentives to not be poor and, indeed, to fully incentive richness. Consequently, we'll have massive economic growth. Right? Think of all the old people who will be willing to do odd jobs, whatever, in order to pay for health care. No more free-riding from grandma and grandpa to slow the economy down. The CBPP adds: This may sound hyperbolic, but it is not. The mathematics are inexorable. ... In short, the Boehner plan would force policymakers to choose among cutting the incomes and health benefits of ordinary retirees, repealing the guts of health reform and leaving an estimated 34 million more Americans uninsured, and savaging the safety net for the poor. It would do so even as it shielded all tax breaks, including the many lucrative tax breaks for the wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations. As for the way the debt ceiling talks are going, what a disaster.
thinkahol *

A Primer on Class Struggle | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.
thinkahol *

The Xtremes: Subversive Recipes for Catastrophic Times | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    "In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")
thinkahol *

World | David Graeber: The Shock of Victory - 0 views

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    The biggest problem facing direct action movements is that we don't know how to handle victory. This might seem an odd thing to say because of a lot of us haven't been feeling particularly victorious of late. Most anarchists today feel the global justice movement was kind of a blip: inspiring, certainly, while it lasted, but not a movement that succeeded either in putting down lasting organizational roots or transforming the contours of power in the world. The anti-war movement was even more frustrating, since anarchists and anarchist tactics were largely marginalized. The war will end, of course, but that's just because wars always do. No one is feeling they contributed much to it.
Skeptical Debunker

Op-Ed Columnist - Senator Bunning's Universe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax. Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe. More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
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    So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Sarah Eeee

Income Inequality and the 'Superstar Effect' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try.
  • It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
  • The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation. The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
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  • Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
  • Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits. Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
  • Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
  • Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy. Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking
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    (Part 2 of 2 - see first part below) What impact do the incredible salaries of superstars have on the rest of us? What has changed, technologically and socially, to precipitate these inequities? This article also offers a brief look at the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, comparing the US throughout its history and the US vis a vis several European countries.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

PETA // Save the Sea Kittens - 0 views

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    The people for the ethical treatment of animals have decided that if they get people to start calling fish "sea kittens", people will have trouble telling the difference between their pet cats and the alewives washing up on the beach. Yeah, that will work. They wrote a children's book for this campaign. One of the characters in it, "Tony the Trout", is said to have pursued a double major in neuroscience and environmental studies. Pity he didn't augment the neuroscience with a little psychiatry. Maybe he'd be able to diagnose the problem ailing the person who came up with this campaign.
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