Freedom is free. Fascism, however...

By Carl 

So it turns out that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has yet another black eye in his third term – Occupy Wall Street:

After eleven months of talking in the courts, New York City has agreed to pay Occupy Wall Street almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The lawsuit, filed on May 24, 2012, by lawyers representing OWS, claimed that 3,600 of 5,000 books in the free People's Library were destroyed during the violent raid and eviction of the protest camp in Zuccotti Park.

In addition to books, also destroyed were computers, live streaming equipment and bicycles which were owned and operated by an environmental nonprofit, Time's Up.

It's barely a victory... after all, people were harassed and arrested and injured for the crime of protesting and assembling peacefully, and $186,000 of that is eaten up by attorneys' fees... and yet, it's a start.

The greater victory is this: the city actually acknowledged responsibility for the actions of its police officers. This is diametrically opposed to the usual, "Who? Him? Don't know him. Rogue cop."

I can sympathize with the city, but to a limited extent. The administration of a city the size of New York demands some corner-cutting somewhere, and the fact that rights were trumped is indicative of that. Safety and health have importance, too, as well as the rights of other people.

With OWS, however, we see a situation where – some sanitation issues aside – peaceful protestors were using a public space, admittedly provided by a private corporation but in exchange for zoning variances, effectively making it a public space. It was this company that demanded OWS be removed, which started the whole mess back in 2011.

Read more »

Matt Damon's leftier-than-thou rant against Obama

By Richard K. Barry and Michael J.W. Stickings

RKB:

Yeah, well, I like Matt Damon. I think he's a smart guy. I usually like his movies. I generally like his politics. But I don't think much of his "leftier-than-thou" rant about Obama's performance in the White House.

In an interview with Elle magazine, Damon had this to say:

"I've talked to a lot of people who worked for Obama at the grassroots level. One of them said to me, 'Never again. I will never be fooled again by a politician.'" He then added, "You know, a one-term president with some balls who actually got stuff done would have been, in the long run of the country, much better."

Referencing the Occupy protests, Damon said the Democrats have received a mandate from people who are "just wandering out into the streets to yell right now because they are so pissed off." He wondered aloud, "Imagine if they had a leader."

Here's a little piece of important information for you, Mr. Damon. Social movements are not the same thing as electoral politics. They can work well together to achieve spectacular results, but they are not the same thing. Movements can often send a clear and important message about what needs to happen. Politics is the art of compromise that sometimes gets some of that done. 

I understand that a lot of people don't like politics because you are always in the process of finding the votes to make good on your promises. It requires compromise and it's easy to get shut down when your opponents are able to use or even abuse the rules of the game to make your life difficult.

So, you say that Democrats have received their marching orders from Occupy protesters and all they need to do now is do it, whatever the "it" is.

Mr. Damon, you have no idea what political leadership is, how hard it is. I'll bet making movies is a lot easier. You get to write down how things come out and that's exactly what happens. Not so much in real life. But thanks for coming out.

I liked what Obama had to say about an earlier instance in which Damon criticized the president:

"I've even let down my key core constituency: Movie stars," he said. "Just the other day, Matt Damon — I love Matt Damon, love the guy — Matt Damon said he was disappointed in my performance."

Obama then threw in a zinger of his own, saying "Well, Matt, I just saw 'The Adjustment Bureau,' so... right back atcha, buddy." 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

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MJWS:

I like Damon a lot as well, including, for the most part, his politics. And I understand progressive frustration with President Obama as well. But come on. If you paid any attention at all during the 2008 campaign, you knew that he was something of a non-ideological centrist. Yes, there was all that talk about change, but the demands of a campaign call for exaggeration.

Now, has there been change? Well, first, he himself is change. Think about what he means, what it means to have him as president. There's a reason so many Republicans have been so virulent in their attacks on him. You think it all has to do with his policies? Not, it has more to do with him, with what he represents, namely, something other than a privileged white man occupying the highest office in the land.

And, second, what about health-care reform? Even if it wasn't as much as many of us wanted, it was a hell of a lot. Democrats had been trying for decades to reform a corrupt, unjust, and simply cruel system. Obama actually did it. Or how about the stimulus package? Is there more he could have done? Maybe. But it's hard to do a lot when you've got a Republican opposition that absolutely refuses to work with you, a conservative movement that has taken it upon itself to try to destroy you.

If you want to criticize him, go after his continuation of some of the worst elements of the Bush-Cheney national security state. Fine. I'm right with you. But to abandon him because he hasn't lived up to your inanely high and totally unreasonable expectations? That's just ridiculous.

Could he have been more ballsy? Sure. Am I disappointed with him so far? Yes, of course. But not to the point where I'll refuse to support him ever again, and not to the point where I'll never trust any politician ever again. If that's what you think, or if that's what your gut tells you, you really don't understand politics at all.

And Matt Damon, a really smart guy, should know better.

It makes me think he should stick to making generally entertaining movies (i.e., not The Adjustment Bureau) and doing his fantastic impersonation of Matthew McConaughey on Letterman.

Your moment of when

By Carl 

It was time for a correction anyway. What we have learned is that winning elections isn’t on its own enough to produce change. What’s needed is a clear policy agenda and a strong external movement that can help progressives in power implement that agenda – and stop others in power from implementing a bad one. That requires a movement in which electoral organizing is just one piece. In other words, the progressive movement needs to grow not only in numbers but in the diversity of what it does.

That isn’t what drives most Occupiers, however. Occupy is also a rebuke of organized politics. They’re in the streets because they believe it’s the only way change can be produced. What it has revealed is that distrust of government is now rampant on the left as well as the right. To most Occupiers, government is the enemy. And their confrontations with local governments showed this. Even though the vast majority of local electeds in the big cities are sympathetic to the Occupy movement and are no friend to the 1% (with Bloomberg being a notable exception), Occupy’s choice of tactics reflected their belief that anyone in government was either incapable of helping or was determined to break the protest. And Occupy has brought a new group of people into political activism. New voices are popping up online, new leaders are emerging, and they are much less interested in the more incremental changes that the progressive movement had unfortunately become accustomed to accepting.

Occupiers are openly advocating revolutionary change from the streets. But here is where I think the progressive movement’s love affair with OWS should find its limits. Occupy alone won’t produce the changes we need in this country. By focusing on physical occupation of public space, they’ve muddled their early message and have alienated potential allies. On the other hand, they have succeeded in kicking a door open. The public wants action on inequality and wants to go after the 1%. Progressives should walk through the door that Occupy opened – and they should be willing to work with anyone, Occupiers or not, who are interested in providing the leadership that is needed to make lasting change happen. 

Shorter Cruickshank: Those Occupy folks ought to get out of the way. 

I say that because Cruickshank expects perfection from the first crocus to peek thru the winter snow. Let Occupy be Occupy. They seem to be learning from their mistakes as they go.

That said, I've made a harsh assessment of Cruickshank's column to invite you to go read it and think for yourself. Here are my thoughts on his post:

I agree the left is voluminous enough to support two groups and they don't necessarily have to be in sync: an activist group that goes beyond MoveOn to legitimize street protest and a political arm that can actually try to drag the rest of the nation into the direction of the ideas espoused by the activist arm.

Ideas. That's the key: right now, the "left" in this country (as defined by the moderately left-centrist Democratic party, with exceptions in both directions. I'll get back to that in a moment) acts as a damper on bad centrist and right-wing ideas: privatizing Social Security, eliminating the minimum wage, and so on.

What the left needs is a shot in the arm of vitamin Good Ideas, ideas that show there are alternatives to "this tax cut versus that tax cut." Like providing services. Like enriching the lives of everyone. Like lifting all boats in the harbor by raising everyone's water levels, not just the yachts.

The activist arm can do that, but unfortunately, it has been mocked and derided and minimized.

Until OWS pointed out the inherent inequity now found in the system. We've reached a breaking point in this nation. The only way we can drag the country kicking and screaming into the 21st Century is to drag the damned left kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. 

So here's what I'd like to see: Let Occupy by Occupy. Let them take radical stances and openly defy the mainstream media noise machine AND the political establishment. It's what drove the anti-war movement. It's what drove the civil rights movement.

The left fed off those ideas (and if you recall with the civil rights movement, the left was distinctly Republican) and incorporated them into legislation because it was the will of the people. The movements got big enough, and eventually enough Americans agreed with the aims of those movements.

(hat tip: LGM)

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

"The Protester" is Time's Person of the Year

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's a bit goofy, but, then, Time often goes goofy with this award. Remember when you -- yes, you -- were Time's Person of the Year? Maybe that made some sense, but it seemed pretty stupid at the time.

Well, 2011 was indeed a year of protests, particularly in the Middle East but also Occupy Wall Street. And whatever the outcomes of those protests (regime change here but not there, OWS protests forcibly shut down and the movement fading), there is no denying that they achieved a great deal (e.g., in Egypt and Libya) and effectively challenged a corrupt and unjust status quo (e.g., in Greece, as well as OWS generally), changing the content of political discourse and bringing much-needed attention not just to issues like income inequality but to those suffering under the weight of that status quo.

The question now is whether 2012 will see any sort of follow-through from these protests or whether the protesters and that for which they protested will be relegated to the dustbin of history. We can hope that it's the former, but we will all need to play our part in not letting the status quo prevail.

One percenter Newt Gingrich doesn't like the whole 99 percent thing

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I repudiate, and I call on the President to repudiate, the concept of the 99 and the 1. It is un-American, it is divisive, it is historically false.

Seems like The Newt, a perpetually self-aggrandizing multi-millionaire plutocrat, is mixing up concept and reality. He may not like the concept, which challenges his far-right ideological presuppositions, but there's no denying the reality. The top one percent has seen an extraordinary rise not just in absolute income over the past few decades but in relative share of the country's wealth. Indeed, what we have been witnessing is the increasing concentration not just of wealth but of power, which in America is largely derived from wealthy, in the hands of the super-rich, that is, in the hands of people like Newt Gingrich, while everyone else has been declining not just in relative but for many in absolute terms as well.

Would Newt prefer the concept of the 98 and the 2? Or the 90 and the 10? Whatever. The point remains the same.

Is it un-American? No, what is un-American, at least in terms of what what America was supposed to mean in its glory days of the 20th century, is plutocracy, the rule of the super-rich, both individual and corporate, at the expense of democracy. You think Madison and Jefferson would be amused? Even Hamilton would see in today's gross inequality of wealth the makings of discord, of a social fabric torn asunder, the seeds of the end of the American era of domestic expansion and global dominance.

Is it divisive? No, what is divisive is the reality, not the concept, and it is the Republicans, with their insistent focus on tax cuts (particularly for the wealthy) and their right-wing agenda of cruelty and brutality (including opposition to health insurance for tens of millions), that is driving, and exacerbating, that reality.

Is it historically false? No, it is the new reality, or rather the reality of the past few decades, and, if Newt and his fellow Republicans get their way, it's here to stay. Newt is an historian, if not a good one, and something of an intellectual, the media constantly tells us, a man of ideas. But he's not. He's an unabashed partisan and rigid ideologue. It just so happens he's a bit of a policy wonk, too, and one who, unlike, say, Rick Perry, can string his thoughts together and speak well. As for American history, he clearly doesn't know what's false and what isn't. Or, at least, he doesn't care.

Newt is very much a part of the problem, not the solution. If he wants to know what's destroying America, he need look no further the reflection in his own mirror.

Zuccotti Park, Michael Bloomberg, and the 1% Police State: "Wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy..."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you know, Michael Bloomberg ordered his NYPD thugs to clear Zuccotti Park the other night. As James Downie wrote at WaPo:

Early Tuesday morning, New York police raided and evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park in southern Manhattan. The behavior of the NYPD and the mayor's office, in ordering this brazen action while blocking the press and the public from reporting on the eviction, is a disgraceful display of unnecessary force on a protest that for the most part has behaved lawfully and respectfully throughout its two-month existence.

*****

The offered reasoning for the eviction? The same canard as the last time Bloomberg wanted to sweep away protesters: "public health and safety." Never mind that Occupy Wall Street has continually cleaned the park itself, or that health experts who have visited the park have pronounced it sanitary, or that even Bloomberg could cite only one incident that threatened public safety in his statement about the eviction. No, such "facts" were turned away, just as the police sought to turn the media's cameras elsewhere. All this while, as Matt Taibbi put it last week, "in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes." Nobody arrested the bankers for pushing fraudulent loans and subprime mortgage investments, or the ratings agencies and government regulators that neglected their duties and helped Wall Street crash the global economy. But putting tents in a public park? Time to bring out the batons and pepper spray.

As hard as the NYPD and New York City's government might try to obscure the truth though, one truth remains: At 1 a.m. this morning, in the heart of New York City, protesters exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly were swept away by the state, while that state also did all it could to prevent media coverage. No matter what one may think of the occupiers or their cause, nothing they've done justifies blockading the press or ignoring court orders. Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other New York leaders who ordered the eviction should take a long, hard look at their handling of the occupation. This morning's action may not be what a police state looks like, but it's certainly how one begins.

Indeed it is. I've praised Bloomberg in the past, particularly for his eloquent handling of the Park51 Islamic community center ("Ground Zero mosque") controversy, but this is bullshit. The OWS protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful (and clean), including in New York City. Yes, there have been a few instances of inappropriate behavior, but the right (and the defenders of the status quo generally) have held the rare exceptions up to impugn the entire movement. And ultimately, while Bloomberg and others have defended the First Amendment right to free speech (and assembly), they put their foot down -- and clamp down -- whenever the threat to their wealth and authority gets a little too real.

This is how the 1% stays in power. They tolerate you, and then they crush you.

Thankfully, though, the protests will continue, if now without tents and sleeping bags. (And maybe being evicted from Zuccotti Park, even only temporarily, was the best thing to happen to OWS.) The fight must go on.

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A while back, I posted the incredible version of "The Ghost of Tom Joad" Bruce Springsteen does with Tom Morello. The original -- perhaps Springsteen's best song on his best album -- is also great, though. It's slower, quieter, acoustic, more haunting. Here's The Boss performing it the way it was first meant to be:

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

Does the Tea Party want its Wall Street back?

By Richard K. Barry

I hadn't thought much about this small piece of the political dynamic around Occupy Wall Street (OWS), but I think it is true that the Tea Party movement is frustrated that their earlier criticism of high finance in America is being taken over by OWS (as different as those critiques are).

As Ryan Grim at The Huffington Post writes:

The Tea Party was founded on a sense that something ephemeral had been stolen by someone and that a movement was needed to "take the country back." Occupy Wall Street is now getting the media attention the Tea Party believes is rightfully theirs, and the perceived slight can only inflame the movement's sense of victimhood. They didn't just lose a country as they knew it. Now they've lost coverage on CNN too.

But the idea that the Tea Party, aligning itself with Republicans and fiercely critical of Democrats and the Obama Administration, could also think that its critique of Wall Street makes sense is bizarre.

How could they fail to understand that creating conditions for Gordon Gekko levels of greed and wealth accumulation is what the Republican Party has always been about? Do they really think that Democrats are the party of privilege?

Conservatism in America is at the best of times confusing, as it combines populist elements with theoretical rationalizations for great concentrations of wealth and power, but Tea Party anger at OWS really forces us to unpack some of this.

As I understand it, there is a perception on the part of the right that the American capitalist system, suffering as little regulation as possible, is a thing of beauty, providing fair and equal access to prosperity, and that its occasional failure is only the result of the nefarious activities of the few as well as the unhelpful interventions of liberal politicians.

I sometimes think, in this context, of the support 18th-century British parliamentarian Edmund Burke gave to the grievances of the American revolutionaries. It was not, he argued, a revolution at all but rather an attempt to bring things back to a previous condition of fairness. The system, he might have said, was fine. Bad actors had interfered with the goodness of the natural flow of things.

But, for the Occupy Wall Street protesters, and those who support their goals, the system is most certainly not fine. Gross inequalities are a built-in feature of the way we currently allocate resources and, for those of us who think it is important that we live in a society where everyone has enough, some pretty big things would have to change.

To put a fine point on it, the Tea Party movement would seem to be saying, "We want our Wall Street back," implying that we need only go back to a time when there were no bad men and women profiting from subprime mortgage crises and government regulation didn't gum up the works. But of course there will always be bad men and women who wish only to line their pockets in spectacular ways, and without government regulation things would only be worse.

Let's face it, whatever the Tea Party movement's critique of Wall Street, it was always incoherent and few paid attention to it. Even if only at an intuitive level, the OWS position seems to make sense to a lot of people. On its face the mere fact that so much of the wealth in our country is controlled by so few is not acceptable. If the reply from the super wealthy is that those are the rules of the game, then the rules should be changed. Why is that so hard to understand?

Note to the Tea Party: Wall Street has always been corrupt and, just as with all those other vaguely articulated notions of an America that once was, the good Wall Street is not real.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

John Boehner says he understands Occupy Wall Street "frustrations"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Try not to snicker as the Speaker plays the faux populist card:

"I understand people's frustrations," Boehner said during an appearance at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. "The economy is not producing jobs like they want and there's lot of erosion of confidence in our government and frankly, under the First Amendment, people have the right to speak out... but that doesn't mean they have the permission to violate the law."

Allow me to respond:

First, only an extremely tiny minority of protesters, and not even real protesters, are violating the law or otherwise acting in anything other than a peaceful manner. But of course those who oppose the protests, those in the GOP and right-wing media, are holding up those rare exceptions as a way to discredit the entire movement.

Second, the movement is not only, or even mostly, about the current state of the economy. It's not about jobs or confidence in the federal government. To put it that way is to suggest that the movement is angry with Obama, whom Republicans like to try to blame for the bad economy and lack of jobs (when of course they really only have themselves to blame for opposing adequate measures to get the economy, as well as the job market, going again). The movement is about the plutocracy of the 1%, the domination of America (and the vast majority of Americans) by the wealthy few, specifically those in the financial industry. Note that it's Occupy Wall Street, not Occupy Capitol Hill or the White House.

Third, calling them "frustrations" is a way to write them off as irrational and essentially unworthy of being addressed in any serious way. The protesters aren't just frustrated with the way things are, they're speaking out against the gross injustice that is rotting the core of American society. (Calling them frustrations also allows for those committing and profiting off that injustice to be excused of all responsibility. You can be frustrated with the weather or with the traffic. So what? This is about so much more.)

Fourth, Boehner may understand these "frustrations" more than most other Republicans, but that doesn't mean he gets what the movement is all about. He clearly doesn't.

Fifth, understanding doesn't mean giving a shit (or wanting to do anything about it). That's the key distinction here.

Domestic terrorism at Occupy Maine

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you may have heard, the Occupy Maine protest was attacked with a chemical explosive on Sunday. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.

But shouldn't this be classified as yet another act of right-wing domestic terrorism?

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It's similar, for example, to the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade bomb in Spokane, Washington, earlier this year? The FBI called that an act of domestic terrorism, with the perpetrator linked to a neo-Nazi group.

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Even after the awful Oklahoma City bombing, even with America's long history of right-wing violence (say, against civil rights workers in the South), why isn't more attention being paid to this serious threat to freedom?

Obama both right and wrong about Tea Party / Occupy Wall Street comparison (but mostly wrong)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

ABC News:

President Obama, who has become a target of the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the country, today embraced the economic frustration voiced on the streets and said in an exclusive interview with ABC News that his vision for the U.S. economic system is best suited to resolve protesters' concerns.

"I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests," Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in the interview to air this evening on ABC News "Nightline" from Jamestown, N.C.

"In some ways, they're not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren't looking out for them," he said.

Not that different? Huh. Well, sure, superficially they're somewhat the same -- or, that is, if you look at them superficially. Both are, supposedly, grassroots movements expressing populist frustrations directed at the establishment, whether political or economic.

But the Tea Party has been bankrolled by the establishment, and specifically by conservative organizations with a partisan agenda, hence the ease with with with the Tea Party and the Republican Party have basically co-opted each other. While efforts have been made to make it appear as if the Tea Party, or the various groups that loosely make it up, are independent, the truth is quite different. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street movement is truly populist and anti-establishmentarian. Democrats are more or less aligning themselves with its interests and objectives, more less than more, but it's clearly not a partisan tool, or a movement with decidedly partisan aims, partly because the Democratic Party is in bed with Big Finance as well, if not necessarily to the degree the GOP is.

The Occupy Wall Street movement can't just be dismissed, as much as various elites (political, media, etc.) tried to initially. The reason is that it reflects genuine discontent with the system, with the elites that control the U.S. economy and allow the 1% to control the 99%. The Tea Party reflects discontent as well, but it's a libertarian, anti-government discontent that implicitly and effectively enables these elites to keep doing what they're doing. Not all Tea Partiers may understand this, but their "hands off my money" agenda would allow those in the private sector with power to accumulate even more power by removing the one institution that actually tries to, or at least has the power to, keep those elites in check, namely, the federal government. Sure, you can pay less in taxes to a skeleton government, but then what? Then the elites have you even more firmly by the balls.

It doesn't help that Obama has been a president for Wall Street, bailing out the big banks and surrounding himself with a Goldman Sachs economic braintrust. And his policies thus far have been directed not at the 99% but at protecting the 1%, whatever his occasionally populist rhetoric. This is one of the great disappointments of his presidency. He may be more centrist technocrat than change-we-can-believe-in progressive, and may have been so all along (even if so many of his supporters misunderstood him), but nonetheless the fact that he has focused his priorities on the elites of credit and capital over the people who have been severely abused by those elites is beyond even what most cynics, justifiably or not, expected.

It's all well and good that the president understands the frustrations that people are expressing, but... so what? What is needed is action, and he has shown himself unwilling to do what needs to be done to fix a system that is sick at its core, that enhances the plutocracy of the few while leaving the many to suffer at their hands.

Obama said the most important thing he can do as president is express solidarity with the protesters and redouble his commitment to achieving what he described as a more egalitarian society.

Then fucking do it, Mr. President. And show you mean it. You have history on your side, and votes to win, and the men and women occupying Wall Street, unlike the Teabaggers, seek to rescue America from those who would destroy it.

Occupational Hazard

By Capt. Fogg

I first heard of it a few days ago from a blogger noted for outrageous claims, but I have been late to pick up on the ploy, even though it has been used against liberals and liberal causes for some time. Similarly overbearing "conservative" commentators once assured me that of course Bill and Hillary Clinton were obvious anti-Semites and if you're old enough to read this you'll remember that Barack Obama was of the same racist, intolerant and bigoted stripe and perhaps even a Hitler Sympathizer and Muslim terrorist.

Of course there's always an anecdote, a selected collection of irrelevant or even fabricated 'facts' to prove the point -- and of course and strangely, those making the claim aren't often Jews. I've learned to discount these attacks, of course, you should pardon the metaphor, for many reasons including the observation that the accusations most often come from iron fisted defenders of a faith only they call Christian and who have only suddenly and temporarily stopped accusing Jews and other infidels of persecuting them. ( Sorry Muslims, you'll have to wait your turn for forgiveness.)

So for now, this week only and especially for you, I'm offering 99.99% off (what a deal) on the notion that the Occupy Wall Street people are really there to express their anti-Semitic notions about bankers and brokers and not their antiestablishmentarian anger at those who accepted massive and expensive rescue only to continue their shoddy practices to the detriment of the public and national survival.

That's a sentiment strangely similar to the Tea Party disdain for government bailouts, and the strange bed-fellowship implied here is difficult to sweep under the rug for those who need to look like the only ones discontent with the status quo on Wall Street. So how do you make the Tea Party look good and other people with the same idea look bad? You find something or someone atypical or irrelevant and promote it or him as the prototype.

The Jewish Journal today reminds us of the infamous "protocols of the Elders of Zion" that was used by Czarist supporters to identify the feared and hated Jews with socialism, a practice not unknown to this day and a book that was printed by "Christian" organizations around the world until recently -- if indeed they've stopped. I certainly remember the promotion of Abbie Hoffman to leadership of the many disparate and mostly respectable protesters in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I was there and I'd never heard of him until I heard on the news that he was my leader, but of course it was enough to taint the many clergymen, Vietnam veterans and business leaders with the yellow star.

The fear of being labeled a racist of any stripe is, I think, being used quite deliberately to downplay the legitimacy of this protest. It isn't enough to play up the numbers of people who are making a mess of the city and its public and private facilities, particularly for a party trying to wear the mantle of some 18th century destructive, anti-Government protesters. It's hard to convince us that they're really secretly Mexican illegals or African Americans demonstrating their disdain for enterprise and civility, but anyone can be a Jew, or at least accused of it and so the sudden concern by the Religious right that their best friends are being offended on these holiest of holy days, by those unwashed, free loading, anti-Semitic hippies who seem to be gathering around the world calling for regulation.

And of course President Obama we already know to be a Jew hater and if he tries to impose regulations on the Jew-Dominated financial and banking interests, we have additional proof that regulation equals bigotry and not just Communism - just don't think about it too carefully and you won't notice the absurdity -- and if you do, the Tea Party will turn on you too, you bigot!

(Cross Posted from Human Voices)

Occupation distraction: The incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street movement

Guest post by Infidel753

Infidel753 was born in New York state, grew up in California and now lives in Oregon. His area of academic specialization was the Middle East. He is a life-long atheist and long-time liberal with a special interest in social issues and technology.

(Ed. note: This is Infidel's second guest post for us. You can find his first, on the ignorant fundamentalism of the Republican Party, here. -- MJWS)

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I'm increasingly worried that the Occupy Whatever movement could do the progressive cause in this country some real harm. It's sucking up attention and enthusiasm which, especially right now, are needed elsewhere.

If you haven't already, please read the critiques I linked to in the last link round-up over at my place, by Joseph Cannon and Feminisnt. The problem with the Occupy movement is that (a) it does not have specific, clearly-articulated goals, and (b) there is no sense of how, exactly, the actions it is taking are going to achieve whatever the goal is.

The movement claims inspiration from Tahrir Square. But Tahrir Square had a clear goal -- the end of the Mubarak regime. And it succeeded because it was a mass movement -- the protests drew hundreds of thousands of participants, not just thousands. When the Occupy movement can get 300,000 mainstream Americans together in one protest, in one place, and they stay there for weeks or months, it may accomplish something, but right now it seems very far from that point.

Others have drawn inspiration from the Arab Spring. Earlier this year, anti-austerity demonstrations in Portugal and Britain drew hundreds of thousands of participants. Yet notice that even they have not been able to force their governments to change course, partly because these were one-day events, big but quickly over. Also, democratic governments are less brittle than dictatorships.

Today, the people of Greece are launching their own campaign against the austerity policies which their craven rulers are forcing on them at the behest of the EU -- a campaign of mass strikes and a tax revolt. They've got a chance if participation is high enough -- hundreds of thousands of working people, not just thousands of people from the fringe.

Some have made an analogy with the Teabaggers, hoping that the Occupiers can become a similar force for the left. But insofar as the Teabaggers have accomplished anything, they did it by focusing on electoral politics -- supporting candidates and getting them into office. Amorphous ranting against "the system" has certainly been there, but that's not what got things done.

How many of the Occupiers voted in 2010 -- when a collapse of turn-out enabled the Republicans to take the House and create the paralysis they decry? How many will vote next year?

So far I see nothing that suggests the Occupy movement has the potential to achieve any concrete results whatsoever (well, there's one small exception, but I'll get to that in a moment).

Right now, we do have an opportunity to achieve something real. With his American Jobs Act (AJA), Obama has finally broken away from the Republican navel-gazing over the deficit that has consumed Washington for months, and made a serious proposal to deal with the greatest concern of mainstream Americans -- unemployment. Economists agree that the plan will stave off another recession at least. As Booman Tribune points out, Obama is finally doing what his critics on the left say they want -- drawing a line in the sand and showing willingness to fight for what the country needs. The Republicans insist the plan is DOA, but mass public pressure has swayed legislative outcomes before -- never forget how, in 2007, a mass outpouring of public fury (which crashed the Senate's telephone system) stopped an illegal-alien amnesty which had bipartisan support and was considered a done deal. Who's to say that a similar mass display of support now couldn't scare enough Congressional swing votes to get the AJA through?

Yet when I look around the liberal blogs today, I'm seeing very little being posted about the AJA, and a lot being posted about the Occupiers. The energy and enthusiasm which, properly focused, might actually get something done, is being diverted into what looks like an exercise in plowing the sea.

As I mentioned, I do see one small sign of hope about the Occupy movement. This is the fact that it's attracting some significant support from unions. Unions are pragmatic and not ideological; they have clear goals and know what works and what doesn't work to achieve those goals, and they're very engaged with electoral politics and the Democratic party. And -- forgive my bluntness -- their decision-makers are people older and more experienced than those who seem to predominate among the Occupiers.

If the union connection can help the Occupy movement become coherent -- help it develop specific practical goals and grow into a large-scale, sustained movement with a plan for achieving those goals -- then it may actually get something done. (And by "large-scale" I mean what I said about Tahrir Square above. 500 people in each of 15 cities doesn't mean anything.) A sign of this would be if the movement starts pushing for action on the AJA.

(Cross-posted at Infidel753.)