The above is a “path to renewal” that “inspires” Americans to a new beginning? Really? (We’ve explained in some detail that, romantic illusions of the media notwithstanding, OWS is unlike the pragmatic anti-draft protests of the sixties that covered themselves in fancy talk if only to hide the naked self interest of many of the protesters.) Still, OWS does have its creative moments, and the Meow Chant seems to be one of them.
preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic…
the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.
Maybe this can succeed as an election strategy, though we’re dubious in a world where Independents have so decisively flipped their allegiance. But it’s difficult to see how a victory by this coalition results in a coherent governing strategy (particularly if both the House and Senate go GOP).
Occupy Wall Street has a benefit album planned with Jackson Browne, Third Eye Blind, Crosby & Nash, Devo, Lucinda Williams and even some of those drummers who kept an incessant beat at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Participants in the protest movement said Wednesday that “Occupy This Album,” which will be available sometime this winter, will also feature DJ Logic, Ladytron, Warren Haynes, Toots and the Maytals, Mike Limbaud, Aeroplane Pageant, Yo La Tengo and others. Activist filmmaker Michael Moore is also planning to sing…There’s a long history of benefit albums, from George Harrison’s “Concert for Bangla Desh”
The Concert for Bangladesh was the name for two benefit concerts organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, held at noon and at 7 PM on August 1, 1971, playing to a total of 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The concert was organised to fund relief efforts for refugees from East Pakistan following the 1970 Bhola cyclone and atrocities during Bangladesh Liberation War. The event was the first ever benefit concert of such a magnitude. It featured a supergroup of performers that included Ravi Shankar, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Billy Preston, Leon Russell, Badfinger, and Ringo Starr
The OWS album sounds great. Can’t wait for the film!
Plan EJ 2014, which is meant to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice, is EPA’s overarching strategy for advancing environmental justice. It seeks to: 1. Protect the environment and health in overburdened communities.
2. Empower communities to take action to improve their health and environment.
3. Establish partnerships with local, state, tribal, and federal governments and organizations to achieve healthy and sustainable communities
In July 2010, EPA introduced Plan EJ 2014 as a concept for public comment and initiated the development of implementation plans. This product is the culmination of nearly a year’s effort by EPA programs and regions, as well as engagement with stakeholders, to develop nine implementation plans with the goals, strategies, deliverables, and milestones outlined herein.
Plan EJ 2014 has three major sections: Cross-Agency Focus Areas, Tools Development Areas, and Program Initiatives. The following summaries outline the implementation plans for Plan EJ 2014’s five cross-Agency Focus Areas and four Tools Development Areas
This is the sort of nonsense we’re spending taxpayer money on in these troubled times? Tellingly, the 181 page brochure on “environmental justice,” whatever that is, has quite a few pages with the legend “this page left intentionally blank” — so you can waste paper when printing the document. Everyone connected with this should be fired immediately. HT: PL
As the Occupy Wall Street movement has continued and spread, its esteem in American voters’ eyes has slipped. Last month, when PPP first asked about the movement nationally, voters were split, with 35% supporting the movement’s goals and 36% opposing them. Now, that is 33-45, 11 points worse. Still 52% of Democrats support their goals, but opposition has risen from 16% to 24%. Meanwhile, both Republicans (from 13-59 to 11-71) and independents (from 39-34 to 34-42) have moved 13 or 14 points against O.W.S. That now makes the movement less popular than its right-wing counterpart, the Tea Party
It’s hard to gauge how accurate this poll is, since the D/R/I breakdown is not specified. However, the generic R congressional candidate was ahead 39/36 among I’s, which seems less that what you’d expect, given other surveys. The change in OWS polling numbers is of course a principal reason that the mayors all over the country coordinated their shutting down the nasty camps. Why run an ad for the GOP every night on the local news?
Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America…The young people in Zuccotti Park and more than 1,000 cities have started America on a path to renewal. The movement, still in its first days, will have to expand
The NYT editorialized as follows just the other day:
The Occupy Wall Street protest continues to inspire demonstrators across the nation and beyond…As their numbers grow, the protesters seem to be increasingly welcomed…Occupy Wall Street is not merely yelling and screaming. The movement’s progress is heartening for all Americans suffering lost opportunity
It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger
Physician, heal thyself. Time to refer to the checklist. We live in a world that seems to be precisely 180 degrees out of phase with that of the Times’ editorial board. Taranto has a helpful guide to the activities of the “increasingly welcomed” OWS crowd. We continue not to understand why on earth the Democrat party and its media affiliates choose to associate themselves with these people.
Could this possibly be true, that Gloria Steinem, of all people, defended Herman Cain from the latest allegations in the pages of the New York Times?
The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the presidential candidate is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, he took ‘no’ for an answer…we have a responsibility to make it okay for politicians to tell the truth — providing that they are respectful of ‘no means no; yes means yes’ — and still be able to enter high office, including the presidency. Until then, we will disqualify energy and talent the country needs
We heard that Ms. Steinem disparaged the accuser’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, because Allred had called Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice “Uncle Tom types.” Could that be true as well? If so, we’re finally making real progress in this country.
Remember that really strange bit about the US needing a “civilian national security force” from the 2008 campaign? It was supposed to be just as strong and well-funded as the military. The idea was both disturbing and bizarre. Of course the press didn’t follow up on it. (What if Rick Perry or Herman Cain had said it?) Well, all of a sudden we have a civilian volunteer movement today. It is composed of buffoons, criminals, the deranged and the addicted, and is led by community organizers and other professional troublemakers. Maybe that is the fulfillment of a campaign promise and dream. If so, we may have skipped the tragedy bit and gone straight to the farce. It’s unlikely, but here’s hoping!
the media and Cain’s detractors have over-played their hand. By Friday night, Politico, which broke the original story, had published 94 articles on the allegations in under six days. Every other major publication had followed suit. Every time he stepped out of a room, Cain was mobbed by reporters. Yet despite the maelstrom, Cain’s accusers remain anonymous and the details of the allegations oddly vague. With many conservatives believing that sexual harassment lawsuits are an industry and that frivolous cases are often settled to avoid more expensive litigation, there was a growing sense that Cain was being treated unfairly. Cain’s very amateurishness became almost endearing. Rather than mouthing slick talking points, Cain got angry with the journalists (a profession loathed by most Republican activists) and claimed that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”…Those who leaked the details of the 1990s sexual harassment cases might have thought that they’d destroy Herman Cain and leave his campaign dangling from a tree. But, as befits this strange and unpredictable election campaign, a funny thing happened on the way to the lynching.
We haven’t commented on this pig-pile, because we’ve had nothing useful to say. However, it seems clear enough that a substantial portion of the electorate has revolted against — what exactly?
On the Thursday before election day in 2000, the Bush DUI’s were leaked to Fox and hit the airwaves. On election day, we seem to recall that some early predictions suppressed turnout in the Florida panhandle. In 2004, CBS and the NYT collaborated on a scandal story a couple of weeks before the election about a vast number of weapons that had dissappeared in Iraq. This was the same CBS that used obvious forgeries of documents from a troubled guy in an attempt to sink the Bush re-election campaign against a guy with some more fact-based problems. And Bush wasn’t very much of a conservative. In 2008 the 12-to-1 media fell all over themselves to praise their candidate, and couldn’t be bothered with his scandals and strange, outlandish rhetoric. The legacy media now seem to be paying the price for this behavior.
It would appear that a substantial portion of the electorate has adopted as a default position that a partisan narrative chosen by the establishment media is a lie until proven otherwise. That’s quite a big change in a short span of years.
Jean Quan, mayor of Oakland, and the Oakland city council have made “preserving disorder” the official municipal policy. On Wednesday, the “Occupy Oakland” occupiers rampaged through the city, shutting down the nation’s fifth-busiest port, forcing stores to close, terrorizing those residents foolish enough to commit the reactionary crime of “shopping,” destroying ATMs, spraying the Christ the Light Cathedral with the insightful observation “F**k,” etc. And how did the Oakland city council react? The following day they considered a resolution to express their support for “Occupy Oakland” and to call on the city administration to “collaborate with protesters.”
That’s “collaborate” in the Nazi-occupied-France sense: The city’s feckless political class are collaborating with anarchists against the taxpayers who maintain them in their sinecures. They’re not the only ones. When the rumor spread that the Whole Foods store, of all unlikely corporate villains, had threatened to fire employees who participated in the protest, the regional president, David Lannon, took to Facebook: “We totally support our Team Members participating in the General Strike today — rumors are false!” But, despite his “total support,” they trashed his store anyway, breaking windows and spraypainting walls.
As the Oakland Tribune reported: “A man who witnessed the Whole Foods attack, but asked not to be identified, said he was in the store buying an organic orange when the crowd arrived.” There’s an epitaph for the republic if ever I heard one. The experience was surreal, the man said. “They were wearing masks. There was this whole mess of people, and no police here. That was weird.” No, it wasn’t. It was municipal policy…
At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: The government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class, and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class.
It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot…that’s all it takes to get the media and modish if insecure corporate entities to string along…
Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window-smashing starts.
Okay, we get all that. But as an electoral strategy this course seems to head straight in the direction of unprecedented landslide defeat. (And a generational discrediting of the movement’s media accomplices to boot — sweet!) So what part of the clever plan are we missing?
We don’t get what’s going on with the administration’s strategy of embracing OWS. Reasons: (a) there are twice as many conservatives than there are liberals in the United States, 40-20% or more; (b) moreover, according to Democrat observers, Independents are much closer to the R party than the D party, further increasing the dominance of conservatism in the electorate; and (c) here’s Joe Klein of all people talking about OWS, which “includes a generous measure of weirdos, ideologues and free-range troublemakers. A recent, unscientific New York magazine poll of 100 demonstrators found that 34% believed the U.S. government is no better than al-Qaeda.” (These findings are consistent with Doug Schoen’s.)
So we’re a center-right country, moving more right, and even committed liberals like Joe Klein can see that OWS are losers and worse. So what’s the administration’s strategy here? There may be some allies of the administration who envision that OWS protests may lead to increasing levels of violence one way or the other and that this will inure to the benefit of the D’s as the proletariat rises up. But the country described in the paragraph above is neither Venezuela nor Cuba. In a bid to restore order, it’s hard to see a majority choosing left-wing authoritarianism. A greater probability is the opposite outcome. Again, what’s the strategy here?
Oops, it’s not that darn cat. It’s those darn fat cats and VDH asks who they are:
Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply…
was the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs a suspect billionaire? Should I be mad or grateful that he made billions by permanently replacing my old scissors, paste, and bottle of Liquid Paper of the 1970s?
Did Johnny Depp really have to earn $50 million last year alone — or Leonardo DiCaprio $77 million? Couldn’t they have settled for $2 million in salary in 2010, and thereby passed on a little bit of the savings to their ticket-buying fans? What kind of system would allow Oprah Winfrey or the late Michael Jackson each to accumulate nearly $1 billion? Is left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore — reportedly worth $50 million — a one-percenter? Why does such an enemy of capitalism need so much capitalist largesse?
Do this administration and its supporters really wish to separate millions of diverse Americans by a moral divide of the “few at the top”? Are liberals like Sens. John Kerry and Dianne Feinstein — among the richest in the U.S. Senate — in that elite group?
How about Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, together worth over $100 billion? They are certainly philanthropists. But their charities are predicated on two assumptions: They both apparently trust the private sector more than government to administer their vast estates, and neither sees much of a problem in avoiding billions in inheritance taxes that would one day be due to a now-broke federal treasury.
Is George Soros a “corporate-jet owner”? He nearly broke the Bank of England by shorting the British pound and was convicted in France of insider training. Rather than comply with new federal financial-disclosure regulations, he told some of his outside investors just to keep their money. Is Obama’s former director of the budget, Peter Orszag, a “fat-cat banker”? He left the administration to enter the “revolving door” of Wall Street, where he is now a rich banker for Citigroup.
There’s more than a little desperation in this pathetic approach to governance. The Hill: “The numbers say that voters don’t think he deserves reelection, he has no meaningful accomplishments, and the nation is headed off in the wrong direction under his watch. He is simply not viable by any measure.” Foolishness begets foolishness.
The world is on fire. Greece, the US economy, and so forth. And yet, and yet. When the media get their knickers in a twist and start calling for a politician to be forthcoming about some trivial this or that because the public has a sacred right to know, try this answer: Rashid Khalidi.
They’re burning the midnight oil over at Polipundit. Utahprez described a company that seems even worse than the firms of Wall Street. Among other things, the company
– Is a monopoly, yet somehow manages to lose trillions of dollars every year
– Refuses to manage to a budget, most recently not even presenting one for over 2 years
– Carries a large segment of employees who are paid to do nothing productive…
– Has massive unfunded pension liabilities on the books
– Borrows profligately and has record amounts of debt
– Often acts contrary to the best interests of its shareholders and its board of directors
– Uses the shareholder’s money for projects with which they disagree…
– Provides salaries, benefits and job security that are far beyond those of their own shareholders
– Follows dubious accounting rules that do not meet American GAAP…
– Can set its own rules, and ignore them if they so choose
– Can force us to buy their products and services…
– Can confiscate private property for its own use or turn it over to others that it favors…
– Has a CEO that makes roughly 10 times that of the average employee…
– if you include the cost of the other bennies -– fully paid health care, private security for the CEO and his family, company cars and private jets -– it is more like 100 times…
– the CEO is guaranteed that salary for the rest of his life
Bonus fun: the CEO of the company “warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.” Can’t happen soon enough.
