The Davos Class, Greenway, Romney’s taxes, etc.
Punk Mum, by Banksy
I resolve to try, in 2012, to do more posts with fewer items. But here’s a link dump of stuff that’s been accumulating on my browsers:
(1) Susan George on “The Davos Class”: The Transnational Institute has a great report called The State of Corporate Power 2012: Exposing the Davos Class. The lead article is an excerpt from Susan George’s book Whose Crisis, Whose Future?. Here’s a tidbit:
‘“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” seems in every age of the world to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,’i wrote Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, universally considered the first comprehensive inquiry into the nature and practice of capitalism.
The masters of mankind are still with us: I call them the Davos class because, like the people who meet each January in the Swiss mountain resort, they are nomadic, powerful and interchangeable. Some have economic power and usually a considerable personal fortune. Others have administrative and political power, mostly exercised on behalf of those with economic power, who reward them in their own way. Contradictions among its members can most certainly exist – the CEO of an industrial company does not always have exactly the same interests as his bankers – but generally speaking, when it comes to societal choices, they will agree.
I’m not impugning anybody’s individual morality here – there are surely plenty of kind-hearted bankers, generous traders and socially responsible CEOs. I am simply saying that, as a class, they can be counted on to behave in certain ways if only because they serve a single system. The Davos class, despite its members’ nice manners and well-tailored clothes, is predatory. These people cannot be expected to act logically because they are not thinking about longer-term interests, usually not even their own, but about eating, right now.
You can find the Davos class in every country – its members do not belong to a conspiracy and its modus operandi can be readily observed and identified. Why bother with conspiracies when the study of power and interests will do the job? The Davos class is always extremely small relative to the society and its members naturally have money – sometimes inherited, sometimes self-made. More importantly, they have their own social institutions – clubs, top schools for their kids, neighbourhoods, corporate and charity boards, holiday destinations, membership organizations, exclusive fashionable social events, and so on – all of which help to buttress social cohesion and collective power. They run our major institutions, including the media, know exactly what they want and are much more united and better organized than we are.
But this dominant class has weaknesses too; one is that it has an ideology but virtually no ideas and no imagination. Their programme since the 1970s, usually called ‘neoliberalism’, is based on freedom for financial innovation, no matter where it may lead, on privatization, deregulation, and unlimited growth; on the supposedly free, self-regulating market and free trade that gave birth to the casino economy. This economy has failed spectacularly and is now thoroughly discredited, at least in the public mind.
Read the rest of the excerpt. The TNI report has lots of great infographics, including this one:
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Planet Earth: A Corporate World
There’s also a Spanish version of the report.
(2) Greenway Conservancy Scandal: I’ve been enjoying an emerging scandal surrounding the Greenway Conservancy, the 501(c)3 nonprofit that manages the Rose Kennedy Greenway, one parcel of which (Dewey Square) Occupy Boston took over for a couple of months. It was the Conservancy that asked the city of Boston to evict Occupy Boston (see item 3 in this post, and item 2 in this post for more details).
Last week Nancy Brenner, executive director of the Conservancy, tripped up when a reporter from the Boston Herald, our right-leaning newspaper, asked her to disclose her salary. She sent an email to her PR consultant asking which of several ways of avoiding answering the question she should opt for–but she sent it to the Herald reporter by accident. Find the original cover article after that gaffe here. Since then, Transportation Secretary Richard Davey asked the Conservancy to release records (which it did, reluctantly) and he has since said that they should “begin to wean itself off government support” (see here).
We’ll be covering this story as it unfolds. Besides the Occupy Boston connection, there are multiple other ironies (e.g. millions of dollars going from the Transportation Department to the Greenway even as the MBTA threatens fare hikes and service cuts, while the MBTA is saddled with debt from the “Big Dig”–the Artery Tunnel Project that serves the city’s automobiles and created the Greenway).
(3) Romney’s taxes: I haven’t seen this item from the LA Times referred to elsewhere: Romney tax returns detail funds not reported in ethics forms.
(4) Two items on Summers:
- From CJR: Summers: “Inside Job Had Essentially All Its Facts Wrong.”
- From the New Yorker: Summer memo from Obama transition released.
(5) India Factory Workers Revolt, Kill Company President: From Forbes.
That’s it–saving some juicy items for later.
–Chris Sturr
New Issue, plus Various Occupy Links
Occupy the Stairs--by a kid in Lansing, W.Va.
(Hat-tip to Jenny B. for today’s potentially irrelevant image.)
(1) New Issue! Our Jan/Feb 2012 issue is finally at the printers. Print subscribers should get their magazines in a week to ten days; e-subscribers should get their full-color pdfs in about twenty minutes. Not a subscriber? Please subscribe right now, here.
I have posted two articles from the new issue to the website: Jeannette Wicks-Lim’s The Great Recession in Black Wealth, and John Miller and Katherine Sciacchitano’s Why the United States Is Not Greece.
(2) Various Occupy-Related Links have been occupying my browser tabs, which I’d like to clean up. (Are we going to get tired of playful deployments of the “occupy” metaphor? Are we already tired?)
Here they are:
(a) David Graeber on Giant Puppets: On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets, and why cops hate them more than they hate the black bloc. Look for a review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years in our March/April issue.
(b) Vanity Fair Oral History of OWS: Revolution Number 99. This is good despite quoting the annoying Jeffrey Sachs. They quote David Graeber, which is cool.
(c) Jo Freeman 2nd-Wave Document: I must have known about this before, but forgotten. Newly salient. The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
(d) Oakland Police Backpedaling on Crime During General Strike: I try not to link to Daily Kos, given its Dem-friendliness, but here’s a good piece: No Surprise, Oakland Police Chief Lied to Discredit Occupy Oakland. More on this from KTVU.
(e) Solidarity Economy Briefs from the Solidarity Economy Network: Briefs for Occupy from SEN: Occupy the Economy!
(f) Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police. I can’t remember if I have already posted this from the Portland Occupier.
(g) By Yours Truly in the Boston Occupier: Bursting the Economists’ Bubble. I already posted the text of this here. It is now in print–15,000 copies are being distributed at T-stops across Boston and beyond.
(3) Keystone link: I don’t think we should believe that the Keystone Pipeline won’t be built because Obama has backed off from it for now. To remember how important it is that it not be built, check out this piece by James Hansen: Silence is Deadly.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
ASSA/AEA Protests; Repubs on Bain; Davidson
"I Was Wrong"
(1) ASSA/AEA Protests: I apologize for the delay posting–I was in Chicago for the annual meetings of the Allied Social Sciences Association, a/k/a the American Economic Association and its marginalized poor cousins. My last post mentioned the protests that were planned. Here is an article I whipped out for the Boston Occupier (the print newspaper of Occupy Boston) on the protests, which were a blast:
Occupy the AEA!
The movement takes on free-market economists at their annual meetings in Chicago.
By Chris Sturr
In January 2009, as economists gathered in San Francisco for the annual meetings of the American Economic Association (AEA), the economy was in a shambles as a result of the financial crisis and recession. The crisis took mainstream economists by surprise, perhaps because of the free-market orthodoxy that pervades their discipline. The profession could hardly ignore the crisis; heretofore proponents of laissez-faire policies suddenly embraced fiscal stimulus and other government intervention in the economy. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, famously told a congressional committee that he was “shocked” that free-market models had turned out to be flawed. “I was wrong,” the “maestro” admitted.
But the 2009 meetings of the AEA showed a profession remarkably unperturbed by economic collapse. Patricia Cohen of the New York Times reported that conference attendees and the discipline as a whole appeared “unshaken” by the financial crisis. “Free market theory, mathematical models and hostility to government regulation still reign in most economics departments at colleges and universities around the country.” What would it take for the profession to change? Cohen quotes David Card, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley: “If unemployment is still high three years from now, then you might start to see a paradigm shift, Mr. Card said; economists will ‘have to say that the market isn’t supposed to work this way.’”
Three years hence, with unemployment still high, no paradigm change was in evidence at the 2012 AEA meetings, which were held in Chicago, ground zero of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of free-market economics, January 6-8. But there was one key difference: now we have the Occupy movement.
A coalition of groups including Occupy Chicago, StandUp! Chicago, the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education (CACHE), Jobs with Justice, the Chicago Political Economy Group (CPEG), and the Union for Radical Political Economists (URPE) staged a series of events and demonstrations targeting the AEA and its role in the economic crisis. From the flyer promoting the actions dubbed “Occupy the AEA”:
“The American Economic Association (AEA) has for years fostered a narrow, free-market orthodoxy in the economics profession. Mainstream economists of both parties move fluidly between academia and government, not only spinning out the most narrow-minded free-market theory, but attempting to construct the economy in the image of this theory. In so doing, they lend a helping hand to the interests of the 1%, providing a scientific aura for deregulation, low tax rates for the wealthy and corporations, slashing necessary programs and privatization. Tell the AEA: ‘The show’s over.’ The 99% are onto their machinations and manipulations. Call them out! Join labor, community, and ethical economists’ groups in two days of outrage, and challenge the AEA to serve the people, not the rich and powerful.”
An image on the flyer, created by Hope Asya of the Occupy Chicago Arts Committee, depicted Occupy as a hand holding a pin, pricking a bubble surrounding the AEA’s official seal. This image captured not only the role of free-market, deregulatory economics in creating speculative bubbles, but also the way in which mainstream economists operate in a bubble that insulates them from the real-world struggles of the 99%.
One example of that bubble: the AEA and the economics discipline as a whole, unlike most any other discipline, had no code of ethics. Other professions—from physicians to physicists, and from sociologists to statisticians—have codes requiring (among other things) disclosure of potential conflicts of interest, but economists have been free to sit on corporate boards while expounding on policy that affects those corporations. In the wake of the financial crisis, and with public attention directed toward the profession’s shabby ethical practices (most prominently in Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job), more than 300 AEA members signed a petition asking the organization to adopt a code of ethics, which it did, finally, on the Thursday before this year’s convention.
Friday’s events began with political theater in which the “1% economists” were invited to have lunch with members of the 99%. Occupy activists set up a table and chairs on the corner of Michigan and Wacker Avenues, outside the main conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, and served “RAHMen noodles,” in mock tribute to Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emmanuel. Sitting at the table to represent the 99% were Lourdes Guerrero, a laid-off art teacher, and 85-year-old activist Ruth Long, who spoke about how cuts in education and social services have affected them. Simultaneously, members of Occupy Chicago dropped a banner from a bridge over the Chicago River with the famed Wrigley Building in the background. The banner depicted an AEA economist, looking like the rich guy from Monopoly, urinating on the 99%, under the title “Trickledown Economics.”
After the luncheon, activists marched down Michigan Avenue by Millennium Park and Grant Park with radical economists from URPE and CPEG, and an escort of Chicago Police Department officers riding bicycles. The small band of marchers was undeterred by the arrest of one of the main organizers of the protests from Occupy Chicago, whose only offense seems to have been insufficient deference to the police. After spending a few hours in jail, he was cited for “failure to obey an order to disperse,” an order which none of the participants in the march seem to have heard.
There were also “The People’s Economic Conference”—two days of teach-ins at Roosevelt University led by radical economists, including Nancy Folbre of UMass-Amherst, Chris Tilly of UCLA, Stephen Marglin of Harvard (who teaches the heterodox alternative to Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics course), George DeMartino of the University of Denver, and Steve Zarlenga of the American Monetary Institute. “I was excited to learn about URPE and that there are economists who are critical to the failed economic, academic theories of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan,” said Marty Donakowski, a graduate student and member of CACHE. “It is inspiring and elating that there are active economic theorists who advocate on behalf of the common good, especially in the face of the current recession.”On Saturday, CACHE held a mock award ceremony for the economists most responsible for the financial crisis and recession. For the record: the BP Toxic Waste of Space Award went to Larry Summers of Harvard and to the Obama Administration; the Martha Stewart Award for Most Conflicted Economist went to Columbia Business School’s R. Glenn Hubbard; while the Glenn Beck Award for Excellence in Indoctrination and Propaganda went Harvard University’s N. Gregory Mankiw. (In early November, 70 of Mankiw’s students—some of them Occupy Harvard activists—protested his teaching in their own way, by staging a walkout from his introductory economics lecture; see “Walking Out On Mainstream Economics,” Boston Occupier Issue 3.)
The CACHE demonstration also focused on problems in economics education. CACHE activist Ben Schacht explained why he joined the protests: “I’m here to protest the way that economics curricula have become just a vehicle for very narrow theories of self-interest and rationality which basically legitimate the system of economic organization that works for very few people, and hurts the vast majority of people—99% of people.”Though the protests and teach-ins were not large—the largest rally peaked at about a hundred fifty people—they were loud and spirited. They also brought together a wide range of people and groups; in addition to the already-named groups, members of Ocupemos el Barrio, Occupy the South Side, and Iraq Veterans Against the War were in attendance during the events.
“In the actions and especially in the teach-ins, it really felt like activists, citizens, and economists were together taking economics back for the people, for the 99%,” said UCLA economist Chris Tilly, who is director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Unemployment. “It was exciting and prefigurative in some of the same ways that the entire Occupy movement has been.” Now that there’s an Occupy movement, there’s a better chance that mainstream economists will escape their bubble, and generate fewer bubbles. Maybe some of them will even join in the struggle to build an economy that works for the 99%.
The image at the top is of someone from Occupy Chicago with an Alan Greenspan sign. Here’s a video of the “RAHMen noodle” street theater, featuring Lourdes Guerrero and Ruth Long (eventually the police told us we couldn’t have the table on the corner, so it had to be carried around, which of course made for better theater):
And here’s the video from which I got the Ben Schacht quote:
Arthur MacEwan’s Critique of the AEA in 1969: Our columnist and co-founder, Arthur MacEwan, stopped by the office the other day. When he heard about our protests in Chicago, he wanted to give me the text of a scathing critique he delivered to the AEA business meeting in 1969. Here it is:
Statement at the Annual Business Meeting of the American Economic Association, December 29, 1969, read by Arthur MacEwan:
We have come to denounce the American Economic Association, and to denounce the dominant economics for which the A.E.A. provides the organizational support.
Economists in the United States work as a group and work contrary to the interests of the masses of people. The affluence and the power of the economists derive from their support of the elite, the elite which controls the institutional structure and the sources of power that perpetrate and reproduce the oppression of millions—the economists are the sycophants of inequality, alienation, destruction of environment, imperialism, racism, and the subjugation of women.
Economists are the priests and prophets of an unjust society. They preach the gospel of rational efficiency, justifying the reduction of man and nature to marketable commodities; they treat human beings as capital and tell us the poor are poor because they lack “productive skills”; all they tell us about the war in Vietnam is how to fight it more efficiently; they apply mathematical models that “prove” that foreign investment helps the development of poor countries; they tell us that racism is the result of “personal preference”; they tell us that private property and wage differentials present a system of personal material incentives “necessary” for “growth.”
But the economists do not merely praise the system; they also supply the tools—indeed, they are the tools—instrumental to the elite’s attainment of its unjust ends. They show how to manipulate people so that the system’s binges are smoothly oiled. Economists are minimizers of just discontent: in the face of police riots in cities, it is the economists who develop “people appeasement” programs to prevent rebellion; when a reactionary government controls a poor count r y, economists are sent to “rationalize” and “stabilize” its economy; when students rebel on campuses, it is the industrial relations economists and game theorists, the rational arm of the police, who provide the program for repression.
The American Economic Association must be denounced as the organization through which these economists operate. But further, the A.E.A. plays directly destructive roles in our society. It serves to insure the perpetuation of professionalism, elitism, and petty irrelevance. It serves to inhibit the development of new ideas, ideas which are reflective of social reality.
Our conflict with the A.E.A, is not simply an intellectual debate. The A.E.A. cannot lessen our condemnation by their willingness to partake in debate, or by their willingness to provide a room to radical economists at this meeting. Our conflict is a basic conflict of interests. The economists have chosen to serve the status quo. We have chosen to fight it.
Plus ça change…
(3) Repubs Critique Vulture Capitalism: Have you noticed that the Republicans (or at least Romney’s opponents in the primaries) have suddenly become harsh critics of predatory capitalism? Here’s a link to the film by Newt’s SuperPAC, Winning Our Future, that Newt has been excerpting in his anti-Romney ads: When Mitt Romney Came to Town. It’s a hoot. Hat-tip to John Miller.
(4) Critique of Adam Davidson: Hat-tip to Bryan Snyder for pointing out Alternet’s excellent critique of economist Adam Davidson, who is behind NPR’s Planet Money: Mr. Davidson’s Planet.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
#D17; OB eviction; Gar everywhere; Eurozone; odds and ends
(1) D17: Big protests in NYC and elsewhere to commemorate the third month of #OWS. Click on the image above for info about NYC events; visit your local Occupy’s website for info about protests near you. I know some places are having rallies in support of Bradley Manning whose birthday is tomorrow and who is finally getting a pre-trial hearing, after more than 500 days incarcerated.
(2) #OccupyBoston evicted: Since my last post was about the imminent eviction of #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square in the Rose Kennedy Greenway, you may have figured out that that happened. I think it went down about as smoothly as could have been hoped, and the Occupation continues post-eviction; two General Assemblies have been held indoors, after at least a couple were held in the Boston Common; the one I went to on Tuesday had around 200 people I would say, and Working Group meetings, rallies, and other events have been continuing apace.
I haven’t gathered the best material on the eviction, but here are two items: a nice piece that underscores how stupid it is that the Greenway Conservancy was behind the eviction, given that #OB is the best use to which the Greenway was ever put (it is usually empty of people, especially this time of year, and perhaps especially Dewey Square): Rescued from Real People, Boston’s De-Occupied Dewey Park Now Re-Landscaped for Passing Motorists. And there was a ridiculous piece in the Boston Business Journal saying that the clean-up/restoration of Dewey would cost $40K-$60K. (They moved in with new soil and leveling and landscapers the very day of the eviction, indicating that it was long planned.) The Conservancy is swimming in money and is non-transparent and non-accountable and undemocratic. Look for #OB to make public statements denouncing them as serving the 1%. (The Boston Business Journal piece was in their real estate section.) Related: nice piece from the LA Review of Books on post-eviction OccupyLA and the corruption of the Democratic mayors who so enthusiastically evicted.
(3) Gar Alperovitz is everywhere: Did you catch that Gar Alperovitz, author of America Beyond Capitalism, whose new edition D&S just co-published, had the lead op-ed in the NYT yesterday? He was also on Democracy Now!.
(4) Eurozone: We’re working on a great piece on the eurozone crisis by Katherine Sciacchitano for our January/February issue. In the meantime, hat-tip to John Miller for two good pieces: one is Alan Blinder’s WSJ op-ed, which, as John puts it “is pretty clear on how countries in the euro zone had just one option – deficit spending — for counteracting a downturn in their economy instead of the three usual options (deficit spending, increasing the money supply, and devaluing their currency).” And a take on the crisis that is actually radical vs. just being clear, by German left economist Heiner Flassbeck, in this video from the Real News Network.
(5) Bits ‘n’ Pieces:
–Nice interview with David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist who has been heavily involved in Occupy (in NYC) and whose book on debt we’ll review in our March/April issue;
–Occupy Student Debt Campaign, which we’re covering in our Jan/Feb issue;
–The Massachusetts legislature met yesterday to discuss whether to have a public option or single-payer health care (my impression was that they were going to pick one or the other). Frequent D&S author Jerry Friedman testified; I may post his testimony soon, which was great and witty. Here’s the Globe piece in advance of the session.
–Great piece on what happened when a board of ed member too the standardized tests they force on kids. Very thoughtful commentary: WashPo story. We’ll be covering neoliberal reforms in education in our March/April or May/June issues.
–Interesting data from Pew about public opinion about Occupy. Upshot: lots of people share the movement’s views, but some of those who do do not agree with the movement’s methods. (I’d chalk this up to the way crackdowns get blamed on the protesters.)
–Surge in free lunches at schools, according to the NYT. Hat-tip to Shirley K.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
#OB Restraining Order Lifted; Alperovitz Videos, etc.
(Find more great Occupy art here.)
(1) Restraining Order Protecting #OccupyBoston Lifted: The judge who had imposed a restraining order against the city of Boston and the Boston Police Department against evicting #OccupyBoston from Dewey Square has lifted that order. An emergency General Assembly has been called for 7pm tonight. Here’s a statement from the Mass ACLU:
Statement of the ACLU of Massachusetts on decision re Occupy BostonDecember 7, 2011The following statement may be attributed to Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts:
We are disappointed with today’s decision and are reviewing the decision with our clients to determine all their options.The Occupy Boston community is making a significant contribution to national discussion of important issues–not merely through what protestors are saying, but their modeling of an alternative to what they see as imbalances and injustices in our society.Just because the court ruled today that the city can shut down the encampment at Dewey Square does not mean that it should. As city officials have repeatedly–and recently–stated, there is no immediate need to remove Occupy Boston from Dewey Square. If city officials decide, nonetheless, to do so, how they go about it also sends an important message. Occupy Boston has always been a peaceful political protest, aimed at drawing attention to the growing inequalities in our society. At a minimum, Boston city officials and the police must exercise restraint and respect with regard to the Occupy Movement and the concerned citizens it represents. Although we don’t agree with the ultimate holding, the Judge recognized that Occupy Boston activities–its model of daily life–were intended to send a message that was communicated and understood, noting:“There can be no doubt that at this writing in Boston, and perhaps throughout the country, an enclave of tents and in a public park connotes the Occupy movement and their 99%/1% view. Matters of finance and the present economic situation are of intense concern to many people. There is considerable media attention devoted to Occupy sites, and most articles, per journalistic custom, restate the Occupy position. The media has clearly understood the plaintiffs’ contribution to the national conversation.”With the exception of the heavy-handed removal of demonstrators from the Rose Kennedy Greenway early in the morning on Oct. 11, Boston has already become a model of respect for freedom of speech to other cities around the country, where Occupy encampments have been broken up with levels of force that have even shocked people who were not involved in the Occupy movement or sympathetic to its aims.Boston, as part of the long New England tradition of town meeting and grassroots democracy, has an important role to play again in how it responds to today’s decision. We believe that Boston can–and must–set an example for the entire nation in protecting the rights of Occupy Boston participants.For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts’ work on behalf of Occupy Boston, go to:
http://aclum.org/occupy
I encourage everyone to watch the videos of Gar’s talk–here’s the first of three:
Here are parts two and three:
Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 2 of 3
Gar Alperovitz “America Beyond Capitalism”: Video 3 of 3
(3) Forbes Piece on Obamacare and Single-Payer Hat-tip to Marilyn F. for sending along an interesting piece from Forbes: The Bomb Buried in Obamacare Explodes Today–Hallelujah!. The author, who refreshingly (for Forbes) favors single-payer, argues that the health-reform law’s provision that “that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit” will cause lots of companies to go under, paving the way for single-payer. Sounds great! But is it true? I asked Jerry Friedman, UMass-Amherst economist and author of our July/August 2011 cover story on single-payer. Here’s what he said, alas:
Yes, the PPACA requires medical loss ratios of 80% (85% for large insurers). No this will not be an end to private insurance in the US anymore than it has been for private insurance in Massachusetts where it has been the law since 2006. First, these are very attainable ratios for decently managed companies. (The average MLR in Massachusetts is over 90%.) Second, because these ratios are very squishy and easy to manipulate. This is a good provision in the PPACA but Unger is going way overboard.
So unless the situation is somehow different elsewhere than in Massachusetts, it looks like the author is off base, unfortunately.
(By the way, I just posted Jerry Friedman’s excellent article on the assault on public-sector workers from the Nov/Dec 2011 issue.)
(4) Bahrain and Israel Train U.S. Cops to Crush #OWS? My last post reported that the guy behind the “Miami model” of policing that has brought all the pepper spray into protesters’ eyes recently has been hired by the government of Bahrain so they can deal with their protesters with methods short of torture. Now Max Blumenthal has an article in The Exiled claiming that Alameda Co. Sheriff Dept. staff, who used excessive force against #OccupyCal and #OccupyOakland, trained alongside Israeli Border Police and the Bahraini military in a program called Urban Shield 2011. Creepy.
(5) Mel King on Occupy: There was a nice and sympathetic piece in the Boston Globe about comments by veteran Boston-area activist Mel King on the Occupy movement. He’s not so sure it’s worth it to defend Dewey Square–something to think about now that the restraining order has been lifted.
(6) Rick Wolff in Brooklyn on Dec. 11th: Rick Wolff will be speaking at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture this Sunday, Dec. 11th, from 11 to 12:30. More info here.
(7) California Unions Back Bad Brown Tax Plan: Not a huge surprise in the case of SEIU, but disappointing nonetheless: here’s the report from BeyondChron.
(8) Julio Huato on CELAC and EU: Nice blog post by Julio Huato of St. Francis College and URPE, on the new Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, comparing it to the EU.
(9) Audio of the WGBH Piece Interviewing Me about #OccupyHarvard: Here’s the link to the text version; you can click on the “pl;ay” button right below the picture to hear the audio. Pretty snappy quotes; nice piece on the whole.
That’s all for now.
–Chris Sturr
The “Miami Model” and Bahrain; Europe; Walker
Disorder Control Unit memo
(1) Timoney and Bahrain: (Note today’s possibly irrelevant image–can’t remember where I downloaded it, but it was apparently found in a police van in lower Manhattan recently.) The other day I linked to an article from the Atlantic that gave a useful account of the recent history of police tactics with respect to large protests. We are now in the era of the “Miami model,” which involves “strategic incapacitation.” From that article:
9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful. The police had armored personnel carriers.
And here’s a table comparing the successive policing models:
Now from the Miami Herald and the AP, word that the police chief who developed the Miami model, John Timoney, has been tapped by the government of Bahrain to train its police.
Yet another connection between the protests here and the Arab Spring: we are contending with similar police tactics (though the Miami Model is a step up from the “torture and excessive force” that an independent commission found had been used against pro-reform protesters. Nice to see the U.S. policing community helping undemocratic governments repress more gently. Timoney’s family must be proud. Maybe he can hire Lt. John Pike to help with the training.
(2) Europe: We are cooking up a good account of the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone for our January issue. In the meantime, Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog has been great about taking mainstream media outlets to task for claiming that the crisis is about “profligate spending.” Only Greece had serious deficits before the financial crisis; Spain, Italy, and the other countries now in trouble had only small deficits or even surpluses. See also Krugman on this point.
(3) Walker to Charge Protesters to Be Pepper-sprayed: This is not from The Onion–it’s true: Walker Intends to Charge Citizens Fee to Protest.
(4) Frank Luntz “Frightened to Death” of OWS: The Republican Party’s version of “framing” guru George Lakoff–in charge of micromanaging the party’s “messaging”–told the Republican Governors’ Association:
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Let’s hope he’s right. Check the article out. He’s advising the GOP to avoid the terms “capitalism” and “middle class” and “tax the rich” in favor of “free market system,” “hardworking taxpayers,” and “take from the rich.” Let me test drive those: “We need to take from the rich because the free-market system is screwing hardworking taxpayers (and the rest of the 99%).” I think it still works.
(4) Wall Street and the Criminalization of Immigrants: An excellent piece from the America’s Program.
(5) NYT Piece on the Power of the 99% Slogan: In case you missed it, here it is.
(6) Rich Homosexuals Reward Cuomo for Being “Progressive”: My former student, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is mentioned (and his fiancé is quoted) in this NYT article about how big money is coming in for NY governor Andrew Cuomo because of his support for gay marriage in NYS:
Mr. Cuomo’s recent fund-raising tied to same-sex marriage began in April, when he was the beneficiary of an event at the SoHo loft of Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook, and his fiancé, Sean Eldridge, a senior adviser at Freedom to Marry. The couple said they planned to wed at their home in Garrison, N.Y., in June.
“The governor has earned a place in history as someone who has led on this issue in a remarkable way,” Mr. Eldridge said in a telephone interview. “I certainly think that the L.G.B.T. community, and the broader progressive community, won’t forget it.”
Does the “broader progressive community” include the unions that Cuomo is busting and the public-sector workers he is screwing? Jerry Friedman points out in the current issue of D&S:
Republicans have been the face of the attack on public employees but Democrats, even liberals, have been right there with them. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, Massachusetts’s Deval Patrick and California’s Jerry Brown have all found political advantage in attacking public employee unions. Indeed, in his 2011 state of the state address, Christie found support for his anti-worker stance in the words of Cuomo and Brown, whose calls for austerity and wage cuts, Christie declared, were inspired by New Jersey’s example. By lending credibility to reactionaries like Christie, liberals like Brown and Cuomo provide political cover for attacks on public-sector workers.
I guess if you are a gay or lesbian teacher who gets laid off, at least you can get married. And maybe you’ll get invited to one of Chris and Sean’s homes for a soirée.
(7) Speaking of Teachers–Bloomberg’s Latest: Here’s the latest outrage from the billionaires who mouth off about education: Bloomberg: If I Had My Way I’d Dump Half of NY Teachers. According to the mayor, a kid is better off in a class that’s twice as big with a better teacher (contrary to all research about how important small classes are). Plus he takes a slanderous swipe at teachers by saying that they are mostly from the bottom 20% of their classes, and from not very good schools. The 1% is on a rampage. #OWS needs to hound this guy until he can’t make a public appearance out side of Bermuda (which would probably suit him just fine).
–Chris Sturr
Parade, Sports, Leftovers
(1) Are John Pike’s 15 Minutes Up Yet? I have read one good piece sympathetic toward the “casually pepper-spraying cop”: Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike, at The Atlantic. The point is that it’s structural, and there’s a nice review of changes in police tactics to deal with civil unrest: pre-70s (“escalated force”), up to the 90s (“negotiated management”), and essentially post-”Battle of Seattle” to today (“strategic incapacitation”). Anyhow, he had me from the moment he quoted James Baldwin. A nice piece, well worth reading.
In the hopes that Lt. John Pike’s 15 minutes are over, here’s my own crude contribution to the meme (after which everyone can just stop it, ok?):
One last related item: hat-tip to Portside for this great blog post from Scientific American about the science and history of pepper-spray.
(2) A Bunch of Links About Sports:
- The NYTimes reports a tentative deal to end the NBA lockout. For background check out Dave Zirin’s excellent piece NBA Players: Welcome to the 99%.
- Katha Pollitt has a good piece about patriarchy and college sports, Penn State’s Patriarchal Pastimes. Read it along Taylor Branch’s truly eye-opening Atlantic article The Shame of College Sports.
- Dave Zirin connects the Penn State scandal with the UC Davis events: Two Scandals, One Connection. The president of Penn State and the chancellor of UC Davis were both on the “the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which ‘promotes discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI.’” Creepy.
(3) Leftover Item to Post: Last week I posted a great first-hand account of the actual eviction of #OWS from Zuccotti Park; since then I found a great first-hand account of the attempted eviction a few weeks before–when Bloomberg had to back down because thousands or more flocked to the park to protect the encampment. $5 Chess Game, Best of Three, Zuccotti Park, by David Hill, at McSweeney’s. A really really nice piece, especially the way he deploys the concept of Zugzwang (really).
–Chris Sturr
#OccupyThanksgiving! plus: Stealing Thanksgiving
Vanity Ballroom, Detroit
(This post’s “possibly irrelevant image” is from a heartbreaking group of photos by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit.)
(1) #OccupyThanksgiving! I’ve seen the suggestion go around: many of us are having Thanksgiving with family and/or friends who may not know enough about or be involved enough in the Occupy movement. It might help accelerate the movement if everyone pledged to talk to their family and friends about it and why you’re involved, dispel misinformation, etc.
Here’s an anecdote that makes me think this could be very important. I got a lengthy voicemail from D&S pal Larry Peterson, who contributed many useful posts to this blog in the early days of the financial crisis. He was calling from his hometown of Brockton, a working-class suburb of Boston, where he’s been spending time with his recently widowed mother. He was calling to say that at that moment he and his mom were at an anti-foreclosure rally, in Brockton, with roughly 4o other people, most of whom looked like it was the first political rally they’d ever been to. He and his mom (whom he has always described to me as apolitical) were chanting, he said. People driving by were honking their horns in support. People were holding homemade signs, including one guy whose sign said “Occupy!,” who (again) looked like he wouldn’t have anything to do with the movement. “This is something the likes of which I never thought I’d see!” said Larry. Larry later told me that when he went to church (his mom always drags him), and people in the congregation found out he’s been involved in #OccupyBoston, they were badgering him, not because they were suspicious of the movement or its participants or goals, but because they wondered why they hadn’t sent anyone down to Brockton to organize them!
So I think one next step for the movement is for people who’ve been involved so far to reach out to others, even to people we never would have thought might get involved. What better time than Thanksgiving?
(2) Stealing Thanksgiving: Great piece by our friend Judy Ancel on the CNN website about “Black Friday” creeping into Turkey Day: Shop on Thanksgiving? No Thanks.
(3) Account of the Raid on Zuccotti: A compelling account of the the shutting down of the #OWS encampment at Zuccotti park, by a member of the #OWS tech group: The Arrogance of Power. I like his point about how he was essentially robbed by armed thugs.
(4) Retired Police Captain Arrested: A great video (just so it doesn’t seem like we’re piling onto the police) of a retired Philly police captain who was arrested on Nov. 17th:
More evidence that more people can be reached than we might have thought.
Happy Thanksgiving!
–Chris Sturr
The John Pike Meme; Rick Wolff Video; EU
(1) The Lt. John Pike (UC Davis pepper-spraying cop) meme:
See more pictures of UC Davis Lt. John Pike casually pepper-spraying innocents here and here and here.
Find a template to make your own image here.
(2) Video of Rick Wolff’s Excellent Talk at #OccupyBoston, November 17, 2011. Thanks to Doug G. of the Zinn Memorial Lecture Series for taking and posting the videos. Worth watching all the way through.
Find part 2 (the question period) here.
(3) The #OWS NYC 11/17 “Bat Signal”:
Would be great to have one of these in Boston to project on the Artery Tunnel vent that forms the back of the “mainstage” at the camp.
(3)Two Items on Europe: Quickly, since I have to prepare to be part of a panel discussion at Harvard’s Dudley House on the Occupy movement:
From the Independent (via Barry Ritholtz): Is Goldman Sachs the New Master of the EU?
By Marshall Auerback (who is writing a comment on the European sovereign debt crisis for our Jan/Feb issue), on Fox News, “The More You Deflate, the Bigger the Debt Problem Gets,” via Naked Capitalism and Credit Writedowns.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr
UC Davis Brutality; Greenway Letter; etc.
(1) Police Brutality at UC Davis Watch the video for yourself. Watch to the end–there’s a happy ending!
Find another video of the same scene here.
Good coverage at the Davis Enterprise.
A useful primer on the legalities of pepper spray and excessive force. Here’s the money quote (this is from Vineyard v. Wilson and Stanfield, but the primer reviews several cases, including the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case Headwaters v. County of Humboldt):
“To balance the necessity of the use of force used against the arrestee’s constitutional rights, a court must evaluate several factors, including ‘the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.’” The court continued: “In determining if the force was reasonable, courts must examine (1) the need for the application of force, (2) the relationship between the need and the amount of force used, and (3) the extent of the injury inflicted.” Graham dictates unambiguously that the force used by a police officer in carrying out an arrest must be reasonably proportionate to the need for that force, which is measured by the severity of the crime, the danger to the officer, and the risk of flight.”
And here’s a letter from a assistant professor of English at UC Davis, calling for the chancellor’s resignation (brave for a junior faculty member):
Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi
18 November 2011
Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi
Linda P.B. Katehi,
I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in the Program in Critical Theory and in Science & Technology Studies. I have a strong record of research, teaching, and service. I am currently a Board Member of the Davis Faculty Association. I have also taken an active role in supporting the student movement to defend public education on our campus and throughout the UC system. In a word: I am the sort of young faculty member, like many of my colleagues, this campus needs. I am an asset to the University of California at Davis.
You are not.
I write to you and to my colleagues for three reasons:
1) to express my outrage at the police brutality which occurred against students engaged in peaceful protest on the UC Davis campus today
2) to hold you accountable for this police brutality
3) to demand your immediate resignation
Today you ordered police onto our campus to clear student protesters from the quad. These were protesters who participated in a rally speaking out against tuition increases and police brutality on UC campuses on Tuesday—a rally that I organized, and which was endorsed by the Davis Faculty Association. These students attended that rally in response to a call for solidarity from students and faculty who were bludgeoned with batons, hospitalized, and arrested at UC Berkeley last week. In the highest tradition of non-violent civil disobedience, those protesters had linked arms and held their ground in defense of tents they set up beside Sproul Hall. In a gesture of solidarity with those students and faculty, and in solidarity with the national Occupy movement, students at UC Davis set up tents on the main quad. When you ordered police outfitted with riot helmets, brandishing batons and teargas guns to remove their tents today, those students sat down on the ground in a circle and linked arms to protect them.
Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.
What happened next?
Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.
This is what happened. You are responsible for it.
You are responsible for it because this is what happens when UC Chancellors order police onto our campuses to disperse peaceful protesters through the use of force: students get hurt. Faculty get hurt. One of the most inspiring things (inspiring for those of us who care about students who assert their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly) about the demonstration in Berkeley on November 9 is that UC Berkeley faculty stood together with students, their arms linked together. Associate Professor of English Celeste Langan was grabbed by her hair, thrown on the ground, and arrested. Associate Professor Geoffrey O’Brien was injured by baton blows. Professor Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, was also struck with a baton. These faculty stood together with students in solidarity, and they too were beaten and arrested by the police. In writing this letter, I stand together with those faculty and with the students they supported.
One week after this happened at UC Berkeley, you ordered police to clear tents from the quad at UC Davis. When students responded in the same way—linking arms and holding their ground—police also responded in the same way: with violent force. The fact is: the administration of UC campuses systematically uses police brutality to terrorize students and faculty, to crush political dissent on our campuses, and to suppress free speech and peaceful assembly. Many people know this. Many more people are learning it very quickly.
You are responsible for the police violence directed against students on the UC Davis quad on November 18, 2011. As I said, I am writing to hold you responsible and to demand your immediate resignation on these grounds.
On Wednesday November 16, you issued a letter by email to the campus community. In this letter, you discussed a hate crime which occurred at UC Davis on Sunday November 13. In this letter, you express concern about the safety of our students. You write, “it is particularly disturbing that such an act of intolerance should occur at a time when the campus community is working to create a safe and inviting space for all our students.” You write, “while these are turbulent economic times, as a campus community, we must all be committed to a safe, welcoming environment that advances our efforts to diversity and excellence at UC Davis.”
I will leave it to my colleagues and every reader of this letter to decide what poses a greater threat to “a safe and inviting space for all our students” or “a safe, welcoming environment” at UC Davis: 1) Setting up tents on the quad in solidarity with faculty and students brutalized by police at UC Berkeley? or 2) Sending in riot police to disperse students with batons, pepper-spray, and tear-gas guns, while those students sit peacefully on the ground with their arms linked? Is this what you have in mind when you refer to creating “a safe and inviting space?” Is this what you have in mind when you express commitment to “a safe, welcoming environment?”
I am writing to tell you in no uncertain terms that there must be space for protest on our campus. There must be space for political dissent on our campus. There must be space for civil disobedience on our campus. There must be space for students to assert their right to decide on the form of their protest, their dissent, and their civil disobedience—including the simple act of setting up tents in solidarity with other students who have done so. There must be space for protest and dissent, especially, when the object of protest and dissent is police brutality itself. You may not order police to forcefully disperse student protesters peacefully protesting police brutality. You may not do so. It is not an option available to you as the Chancellor of a UC campus. That is why I am calling for your immediate resignation.
Your words express concern for the safety of our students. Your actions express no concern whatsoever for the safety of our students. I deduce from this discrepancy that you are not, in fact, concerned about the safety of our students. Your actions directly threaten the safety of our students. And I want you to know that this is clear. It is clear to anyone who reads your campus emails concerning our “Principles of Community” and who also takes the time to inform themselves about your actions. You should bear in mind that when you send emails to the UC Davis community, you address a body of faculty and students who are well trained to see through rhetoric that evinces care for students while implicitly threatening them. I see through your rhetoric very clearly. You also write to a campus community that knows how to speak truth to power. That is what I am doing.
I call for your resignation because you are unfit to do your job. You are unfit to ensure the safety of students at UC Davis. In fact: you are the primary threat to the safety of students at UC Davis. As such, I call upon you to resign immediately.
Sincerely,
Nathan Brown
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Program in Critical Theory
University of California at Davis
(2) Funny Video of Nov. 19th Actions in NYC: You have probably heard about the ridiculous police response to the inspiring day of actions in NYC. Things were pretty exciting (though on a much smaller scale) in Boston. My sister has been visiting from West Virginia, and we emerged from the South Station T exit into Dewey Square (where the #OccupyBoston encampment is) just as the solidarity march for #OWS NYC was arriving back at the square, with maybe a thousand marchers, who sang “Happy Birthday” for the two-month anniversary of the movement. After taking a tour of the encampment, we managed to hear a great talk by left economist Rick Wolff–I’ll post the video of that talk once our comrades from the Zinn Memorial Lecture Series make it available. Meanwhile, enjoy this funny video celebrating #OWS’s 11/17 day of action and the NYPD:
the raid on zuccotti park from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.
Here’s the original link.
(3) Greenway Board Betrays #OccupyBoston. The board of the Greenway Conservancy sent this letter to the mayor of Boston:
(Odors? Really? And the farmers market seemed to get along great with the protesters, from what I could see.) But luckily some great folks from the Legal Working Group of #OccupyBoston had the foresight to ask a court to issue an injunction preventing the city from evicting us, which they did. Here’s the Boston Globe piece about it; download a pdf of the injunction itself here.
(4) Matt Taibbi Comes Around. Here’s a great article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone that I keep forgetting to post. The main point I liked was his explanation of the idea, which we’ve discussed here, that Occupy “prefigures” a better society:
There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.
But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it’s at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned “democracy,” tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.
But read the whole thing–it’s great.
(5) Glenn Greenwald on Apparent Attempt to Co-opt #OWS for Obama. I would like to hear more about this: Glenn Greenwald on SEIU president Mary Kay Henry apparently attempting to co-opt #OWS for Obama’s re-election (SEIU has already endorsed him). (Interestingly, she was arrested in NYC on Nov. 17th, I heard.) It definitely sounds creepy and Greenwald is right that it seems likely to backfire.
That’s it for now.
–Chris Sturr