Update: It Wasn't a Joke. It Should Have Been.

Congratulations to the Republican party, for screwing the pooch so thoroughly that even the worst debate performance in modern American history (and a lingering depression) couldn't get you the White House.

Sincere congratulations to America, meanwhile, for making sure that they DIDN'T get the White House. Wasn't sure you had it in you. Sure, the Republicans still have the House, but one thing at a time, right?

Ryan? Is this some sort of joke?

Oh, I had to come back for THIS.

Paul Ryan is Romney's running mate? You've gotta be kidding me. Really, this must be a joke. 

This whole election is about concentration of wealth. It's about how the "one percent" (really the zero-point-zero-zero-one percent, but who's counting) are screwing over the rest of America, if not the rest of the world. It's about how the middle class, working class, and lumpenproletariat are finally starting to wake up to the reality that they've been screwed over for going on thirty years now. It's not even just Occupy: that's what the Tea Party was really about, even if the poor bastards were completely co-opted by the handmaidens of wealth.  Everybody's already pissed, and they're getting more pissed by the day.

With Romney as the Republican nominee, that's the only way it COULD have gone. That's why the Republicans were so desperate to nominate somebody else: Romney's the worst possible choice for a candidate in a situation where Americans are already starting to light the torches and sharpen the pitchforks. Obama's people don't need to be political experts to realize how to take advantage of the situation, and Romney's played into it quite nicely with the tax issue.

So why the fuck would you pick Ryan as the running mate?

Literally the only thing that he has to sell himself is his budget plan. There's nothing else to the guy. Sure, you could sell him as a wonk and a thinker, but Romney doesn't NEED one of those. They aren't going to appeal to Republicans and independents in the first place.  He's a good looking youngish guy, but he's not going to match Obama on that, and he's not going to carry states.

No, it's all about the budget proposal. And that budget is the worst possible thing for Romney to be running on. Not only is it utterly dishonest bullshit—Paul Krugman must be licking his chops at the prospect of carving Ryan up on a weekly basis—but it's a direct attack on both medicare and the middle class on behalf of the wealthy minority that Romney and Ryan both represent. That budget isn't going to defuse Romney's negatives. It'll MAXIMIZE them.

The only thing Ryan has going for him is the whole "DEFICIT! DEBT! DEFICIT! DEBT!" hysteria. That hasn't been the defining issue in American politics since 2010, not since all that supposed hyperinflation failed to materialize. There are bigger issues now. The effect that global warming is going to have on food prices are going to be more important than that.

Seniors will hate this choice.  The middle class will hate this choice. Minorities will hate this choice. Women will hate this choice. Independents will hate this choice. The only people who will endorse this choice are the exact same wealthy white men that Romney already has in his pocket.

Sure, he might still win. If he does, though, he'll do it in SPITE of Ryan. Ryan's a loser. What a ridiculous choice.

A Roberts Court After All?

May have been a bit too fast on that "Scalia Court" last month. Who knew that Roberts was going to show some self-awareness? Who knew that he'd realize that going along with the Scalia Faction would finally nail down people's nascent realization that the Supreme Court is in the tank for the Republicans?

Don't get it wrong. He still did solid wingnut work. He's opened the door to all sorts of plump challenges to Commerce Clause stuff, and that Medicare expansion funding thing is going to be exploited by every Republican-owned state in the Union. We should also all remember that Citizen's United was a more vicious attack on individuals' rights and freedoms than striking down ACA could ever be.

But, hell, at least Americans' health care won't be quite as embarrassing as it has been. That's something to take comfort in.

(At least until we find out just how badly global warming has fucked the price of food.)

Walker Won Wisconsin

Well, what were you expecting after Citizens United? Walker outraised Barrett by eight to one, with most of that money coming from outside anti-union moneymen. It would have been shocking if Walker HADN'T won.

The Scalia Court won this recall vote. Nobody else.

"Job Creators"

Yes, this point in ThinkProgress about how small businesses wouldn't be affected by the Buffet rule is an important one. Useful, too, since it highlights just how disconnected Republicans are with actual small business.

It's still important to remember that we are the job creators, not them. Capital allocation is important, but without labor and without consumers, you can't have a functioning economy! Somebody needs to do the work. Somebody needs to buy the product. If you don't have either of those, the best capital can do is sink the money into real estate or even more speculative nonsense. That never works for long.

There is no functional economy without laborers who can live off their work, and there is no  economy whatsoever without consumers. The smartest and wisest of the ultra-wealthy are already coming around to that realization. People like Gates and Buffet are saying "tax me" for a reason. It's the dumb, shortsighted, and ideologically blinkered ones that are bankrolling the Republicans.  The Kochs and Scaifes and whatnot, who got their fortunes through oil or luck. They don't know jack, and they ain't worth listening to.

Progressive Bloggers and Whatzisname

Huh. I'd been keeping an eye on this nonsense going on with the Canadian "progressive bloggers" list—quasi-summary here by "Doctor Dawg"—but wasn't expecting to be dropped in the middle of it by Antonia Zerbisias. Zerbisias has a point. Whatzisname didn't exactly cover himself with glory. But it's odd to see this come up again.

Funny thing is, I'd mellowed out towards ol' Kinsella over the years. I don't think he's changed, but his weird idiosyncratic issues about pseudonymity doesn't strike me as relevant anymore. Canada's got bigger issues, just as America does, and his holdout position against pseudonyms just isn't shared by too many people these days.

I also think he's right about how the Liberals and the NDP need to get together. Yes, some Liberals may break away. So? Screw 'em. Liberals have far more in common with social democrats than hard-right conservatives. If they defect to the Conservative party of Stephen Harper (of all people!) they weren't liberals to begin with.

That's the issue. Words like "liberal" and "progressive" and "conservative" actually have to mean something. You really do have to draw lines, and you can't let everybody in. That's one of the reasons why the American political parties don't use labels like that, and call themselves "Democrats" and "Republicans". You can have conservative Democrats and progressive Republicans and still get all the benefits of partisan unity.

(Not that that's entirely the case, the Republicans are conservative to a man, but that's the general idea.)

If you have to draw lines, you're going to have people going over the line. That's what happened with the progbloggers, where a few progressive-in-name-only-bloggers went over the line on women's rights to choose, and were justifiably shredded for it by the real progressives. The real progressives questioned whether the fake progressives had any right to the name. They went to the admins, and the admins freaked out, because they forgot that WORDS MEAN THINGS.

Then Kinsella comes charging in and just makes it worse. His claims are ridiculous. Fern Hill's clearly just pointing out that "even the Dominion nuts hate being spied on". It makes sense! I hate being spied on too! Kinsella's being awfully silent on that side of it. He talks about the "what" but never the "why" when the "why" is critical. Doesn't seem to mention the whole abortion thing, either. Not sure what that means.

But I have to ask: what's the POINT of it? He wants the Liberals and NDPers to merge or align or whatever. Does he really think that this sort of thing is going to help? Does he really think that that new party isn't going to have lines that can't be crossed? Does he really think that any sort of progressive movement worth the name is going to invite anybody and everybody that doesn't call themselves "conservative"? Does he realize WHY all this is happening? What is he THINKING?

He's supposed to be a clever political strategist. I think there's something to that. I did pay attention to that last election in the Canadian province of Ontario that he was involved in, where it looked like he managed to help turn back a serious and potentially disastrous Conservative surge and keep a basically progressive Liberal government in power. He knows how these sorts of things work.

So I'm honestly baffled at the angle here. Both the Fern thing and the Zerbisias thing are bad opinion journalism and bad politics. It makes the merger he's advocating far less likely, and it's far more likely to push people away from the "Progressive Bloggers" than anything else.  It's only helping Harper. It just doesn't make sense.

(Edit: Oh, one more thing. Changing the text of Zerbisias' blog comments was just plain silly. I haven't the foggiest about the legal side, but the dumb is unquestionable.)

(Re-Edit: Fixed Zerbisias' name. Sorry, Antonia.)

Hope You're Having a Good Easter

The Republic isn't seeing its best days. So it's good to take your positive moments when you get them.

What the Hell is WRONG with California?

Libraries? You're seriously cutting state funding for PUBLIC LIBRARIES?

Granted, this is a problem across all of America, as ignorant legislators assume that because their kids can afford iPads, everybody else in America doesn't need public sources of information. (Or trained professionals to help them find it.) But, honestly, CALIFORNIA? The heart of the information revolution SHOULD DAMNED WELL KNOW HOW IMPORTANT PUBLIC ACCESS TO INFORMATION IS.

The worst part is that the same worthless wingnut shitheels that always complain about too-high taxes will also be the ones complaining about the unemployment, underemployment, and piss-poor test scores that come from this. An educated populace is the foundation of a modern economy, and California appears to be doing its level best to make sure that they don't have those.

But, hey! At least your property taxes won't go up!

Upward Jobs Tick

Apologies for the lack of updates. Been occupied (heh) of late.

Not quite sure if I buy that the latest upward tick in the jobs numbers is a good thing or not. Certainly it's a good thing for the newly employed. No-one would deny that. But any sort of improvement is going to be seen as a reason to lay off on low interest rate policies, to deny any further need of stimulus, and even to avoid changing anything at all about US economic policy.

That's not a good thing. America still has the same problems. It still has manufacturing jobs moving to other countries, especially China: not because of low wages, but because of the ease of access to suppliers and appropriate human capital. That's why Apple's there, that's why everybody else is there, and that is NOT something that Indiana is going to solve by nuking public-sector unions.  It requires a sophisticated understanding of the role of public investment. Those Chinese factories didn't spring up out of nowhere. Read the story: the Chinese government had a hand in it. As long as America is still led by people who think that government is the enemy of success, America won't have success.

America also still has the problem of financialization, and the fallout from that sector's dominance. Matt Taibbi's right that it's good that the foreclosure scandal hasn't been completely buried...but considering it was one of the biggest and more prevalent scams in U.S. history, the fact that it came as close as it DID is a problem.  Smart people are still moving out of the real world and into Wall Street chasing the big financial dollars, or simply trying to find a decent job as other sectors empty out. That's not right. That's not sustainable. And it's nothing to build an economy on.

But, mostly, America is STILL behind on one of the most important trends in the 21st century: renewable energy. Look at this story on India: the price of solar panels is absolutely crashing there. That story in the New Scientist quoted analysts as saying that solar could as cheap as grid energy across half of the globe by 2015. That's three years from now. This will absolutely revolutionize how the world looks at energy...and what is the United States doing? FRACKING! Jamming toxic chemicals into the earth to extract more hydrocarbons, possibly causing honest-to-goodness earthquakes, while the increasingly-inaccurately-named "developing world" says "heck with it" and just builds cheap solar panels! Panels that they may soon produce without any sort of American help whatsoever!

So, yes, this is good news. But it doesn't address the underlying problems.

Payroll Tax Cut Extension

Credit where credit's due. Obama and the Dems faced the Republicans down, got a big win, made them look like chumps, and demonstrated a bit of stones for a change.

Heck, look at this:

Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer reached out to the White House early in the standoff to convey their view: They can win without giving an inch. The White House agreed, giving way to a no-compromise strategy championed internally by senior adviser David Plouffe, who, like the president, was in a fighting mood, according to multiple sources.

Their thinking, according to White House and congressional aides: Obama and Senate Democrats already negotiated through McConnell. They made concessions. Eighty-nine senators, in a rare moment of overwhelming bipartisanship, approved the deal. And the public, according to polls, was on their side. Case closed.

“We were resolved to hold the line on this from the moment the speaker’s office indicated they were going to cave to the pressures from the fringe element of their caucus,” said a Senate Democratic aide. “We felt we had such a resounding vote in the Senate that they were going to be trapped. It was going to be impossible for the Senate Republicans to walk away from it. They were doomed to be divided because of that.”

I don't even think that the Senate unanimity had much to do with it. The Republicans have been more than successful without it in the past. The simple truth here is that fighting for legislation that is publicly popular works. Yes, you need to be smart and canny about how you do it, and I was impressed by the full-court press the White House executed to get this thing passed. The lesson's still clear. With any luck at all, they'll remember that going forward into 2012.

This is a bit bittersweet, though. You can't help but wonder about how different the world would be if the White House had been willing to do this from the beginning.

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

Yep. See it for yourself. Well, at least it's not Zuckerberg again. Or Paul Ryan, which was apparently a serious possibility.

Sure, it's logical enough. The Arab Spring changed the middle east, the Occupiers changed the American discourse on wealth, and a lot of expectations about the utility of protest were upended. The biggest thing that seemed to jump out of these protests is that having a dedicated structure and organization almost seems like a liability; if there are no faces, there's no way to muck about and find ways to discredit them.

That's the whole "Anonymous" lesson that people keep on forgetting. The whole reason they were able to take on the Church of Scientology was because their structure made it damned hard for the CoS to try to respond. The Occupiers picked this up from Anonymous—witness all the Anonymous masks at the protests—and that's helped them remain relevant. There's been attempts to try to discredit them by attacking their "leaders", but it just doesn't stick. The only thing that's come even close to working is just straight-up violence.

The violence is the part that Time doesn't talk about, by the by. One of the odder bits in the piece was the claim that Occupiers didn't stand to get "beat up or shot" like their middle-eastern counterparts. The "shot" part, I'll grant, though I'd wager that that has more to do with the general peaceability of occupiers than anything else, but stating that they haven't been beaten is just ludicrous. They have. Often. Quite savagely at times, and that's not even getting into just how bad pepper-spraying really is. Were the Time editors unaware of this? Or did they just not really care, since it was their countrymen doing the spraying and beating?

Still, I think that they've missed the real story here. The real story is about the tension between the public and the elites. That's what the 99% vs. 1% thing is really about: it's not about wealth, per se, but about a relatively small elite that call the shots without even pausing to consider the wishes or interests of the rest of the population. As Lawrence Lessig pointed out on The Daily Show last night, that 1% thing is a bit misleading: it's actually only about 0.05% of the public that have access to lawmakers—that really have any say at all.

And the elites are fighting back. Nevermind the cops being sent to beat up protesters. Look at Europe. Look at what's happened in Italy and Greece. Look at the appointed economic "experts" that have been brought in to supposedly "fix" things by gutting the public service and social services. They're taking money from the 99% to pay off debts owed to the 1%. They won't even consider anything that might increase aggregate demand by putting money in the hands of the vast majority of people who would really use it. They believe in price stability over all else, and are willing to drive unemployment into the ground in order to do it, even though all the pressures right now are DEFLATIONARY pressures. And they weren't even elected. They were imposed.

Look what's going on with this supposed deal to save the Euro. As Paul Krugman, Felix Salmon, and loads of others keep on pointing out, this whole thing is profoundly misguided. They're pretending that a balance-of-trade problem is somehow a sovereign debt problem. Countries like Ireland and Spain weren't awash in sovereign debt before the crisis. Quite the opposite.  Yet instead of solving the real problem, the Eurozone is going to put straightjackets on member governments attempting enact counter-cyclical policies and get their economies back on track.  Unemployment in every Euro country whose name doesn't end in "many" will keep going up, social spending will keep going down, and the lives of the 99% will become more and more nightmarish.

What are people supposed to do in that case? They have no access, because access costs money. They have no votes; Italy, Greece, and the new move towards fiscal unity prove that policy is now imposed from above, instead of elected from below. They have no say. The elites are calling the shots, despite the elites' bungling incompetence being proven over, and over, and over, and OVER again throughout the last half-decade.

They find themselves with only two choices: take to the streets, or take to the hills. They're choosing the former. Good on 'em. But I don't think we should ever, ever forget that in this cold war between the public and the elites, they can always decide to choose the latter.

You're Killing Your Grandchildren, You Idiots

So Arctic methane's being released faster than anybody had expected, thanks to the melting of polar ice. Methane's an even worse greenhouse gas than CO2, by an order of magnitude, and it was responsible for at least one big extinction event in history: the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

You hear that word? "Extinction"? It means "everybody's dead". Not just you, but your kids, and your grandkids, and every other generation that would have come of that. It means that your life was pointless, because everything you did, and everything you made, is wiped out, along with everybody else who might have remembered you.

But go ahead and keep on babbling about "hoaxes" so that you can keep driving that sweet SUV. I'm sure your progeny will understand. Or, well, would have understood.

This is How Bad It's Gotten

Watch this video. Right now.

This is what America has sunk to.

No, let me amend that. America has always treated its minorities this way when they get "out of line". The police have been defending their own privilege using overly violent means for years.

This is something different. This was a cold, calculating, pointless assault on these protesters. There was no move to arrest or detain, and certainly none of the violent resistance that pepper spray is supposed to be used to deter. This doesn't fit any sane rules of engagement for police, and yet the officer didn't even do this furtively, afraid of being caught. He calmly walked up and used a burning, blinding chemical weapon on these kids' faces.

What's worse is that they aren't even defending their own privilege. Cops aren't wealthy. They aren't powerful...not really. They sure as hell aren't part of the 1% of wealthy Americans that are at the center of this, nor will any of them ever be part of that group.  Their own pensions are being raided to pay for the bailouts; their own children are facing a lifetime of un- and underemployment. Their own family members are out of work, and may never find work again.  They're defending the privilege of a tiny mob that they will never, ever belong to: a mob that created the intolerable future that America now faces.

Yet here we are, with a police officer betraying everything his badge and his country stands for, in order to protect people who neither acknowledge nor appreciate it. People who are, frankly, being utter douchebags about the whole thing.

Edit: One of the protester chants sums it up pretty well. They shout, repeatedly: "Who do you serve? Who do you protect?"

Good question. In fact, it's the only question that matters.

Congratulations, Mayor Bloomberg!

No, really. We should give the guy a hand. He's given the order for the cops to clear Zucotti in the middle of the night, and he's accomplished a lot of things in doing so!

-He's confirming every negative thing that Occupy has ever said about the attitudes and behavior of the ultra wealthy elite that he belongs to;

-He's going to radicalize absolutely everybody who has come anywhere near that park by sending in riot cops with batons and pepper spray, meaning that a lot of potentially-reasonable people are now going to be both furiously angry and rigidly defiant; and

-He's going to make sure that the clearout is a big story, by preventing the media from sending helicopters overhead to show what's going on, and by (allegedly) having his officers take the press credentials away from people. Not that that'll stop people from seeing what's going on: there's a nice live feed going on right here on UStream, and everybody in that park is going to be furiously recording every minute action of the police. What it will do, though, is give the media the opportunity to talk about its absolute favorite subject: itself.

As I type this, they're saying that the people in the kitchen are being tear gassed. TEAR GASSED. How the hell can you justify that? What kind of idiot would write rules of engagement that even considered that?

I'm not sure. I do know what kind of idiot gives the order though. So take a bow, Bloomberg. You just made yourself a parkful of martyrs.

Edit: And now there's video out of them roughing up protestors. And here's video of them using tear gas.

OWS: "Screw the Pundits". Good on 'em.

One of the best parts about the "Occupy" movement? The fact that it baffles and enrages television and print pundits. Not all are as incoherent as, say, Canada's Andrew Coyne, who thinks that poor people should shut up because they have microwaves and color televisions(!), but it's pretty universal.

As Dalia Lithwick points out in Slate, that may be part of the point:

I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.
What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you...

...Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another.

Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

They don't necessarily trust the Internet, either, though they surely trust it more than they trust the cable networks. Is it really any wonder, though? Television news is basically rich people talking to rich people about rich people's problems. Someone like Andrew Coyne doesn't have the foggiest idea how the 99% live, or what their issues are. It's an academic, abstract issue to him, which is almost certainly why he fell back to "what are they complaining about? Color televisions, people! COLOR!" These people want simple solutions to the problem of poverty because isn't their problem. They just want it to go away and stop bothering them with the minimum amount of hassle. 

People might have been willing to go along with that when the Great and the Good were benefiting their lives. Those days are over. The 99% are now of the opinion that they've been scammed by the pundits and their cronies, and they're PISSED. That's the message. What they're planning on doing about it isn't quite certain yet. But that's the message.

Krugman's Take on OWS: "Panicked Plutocrats"

The Brooks twaddle I just mentioned makes a bit more sense when you read Paul Krugman's piece about "Panicked Plutocrats".

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

Okay, fine, that last link was my addition. Times columnists aren't technically allowed to take shots at each other, though everybody knows that Krugman spends a fair bit of time tearing apart Brooks' arguments, even if he can't actually name the man. Only fair to fill in the gap on his behalf.

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is...

...What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

And now we've reached the point where people like David Brooks are so terrified on behalf of their tiny sliver of plutocrats that they're already throwing the words "anti-Semitic" around.  The man must be absolutely shitting himself at the thought of what OWS represents.

David Brooks Went From Zero to "OWS are Anti-Semites" in Four Paragraphs

This has to be a new record.

Sure, the piece itself is ridiculous nonsense. He bandies about that raising the income taxes on people making "between 1 and 10 million" would only cut 1% of the national debt, completely ignoring that it's the national deficit that matters, that salaried income aren't their only (or even principal) source of wealth, or that extreme concentration might mean that people making more than ten million might be part of the problem. It certainly doesn't help that he's sourcing some right-wing think tank instead of a reputable source, either, nor that he won't acknowledge just how concentrated wealth is.

There's also a great wealth of bullshit about how dividing up the country is "self-limiting", when the whole point of the OWS movement is that the country is already divided.  But, hey, never mind that,the whole point of his sort is to make the rest of us identify more with this wealthy "sliver" (in his words) than with each other.

But, accusing them of anti-semitism? That's a new low.

Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. This uprising was sparked by the magazine Adbusters, previously best known for the 2004 essay, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” — an investigative report that identified some of the most influential Jews in America and their nefarious grip on policy.

 Wow. Brooks is actually arguing that the only thing that Adbusters is known for is this seven-year-old article about supposedly "nefarious Jews", and therefore is not only anti-semitic but has rendered OWS anti-semitic as well.  This despite the fact that Adbusters has been around for decades, and is hardly the only or principal reason why OWS started.


Never mind that this is insulting and quite possibly libelous. Is it really a good idea to try to discredit a movement decrying wealth concentration by calling it anti-semitic? Doesn't that sorta internalize the absurd notion that Jewish people are all wealthy bankers and movie moguls and whatnot, instead of just being, well, Americans? The vast, vast majority of Jewish-Americans are part of the 99%, just like anybody else; so why the hell is Brooks trying to build up this notion of a connection between extreme wealth and Judaism? It is poisonous and destructive. Why on earth would he DO that?

Well, okay, we all know why. He wanted to get a cheap shot in, and didn't think of the connotations or the consequences. He didn't realize that this is about to absolutely enrage pretty much every Jewish-American who is tired of these stereotypes, along with any who would resent being so cynically exploited.

(It's also going to do nothing to affect OWS. If anything it'll embolden them: this is such an obvious and pathetic cheap shot that it could hardly do otherwise.)

I'm sure he'll get away with it. Those who truck in stereotypes and myth to defend the interests of that "sliver" get enough cover to get by. But it's a useful lesson for any of you who think that Brooks is some sort of "moderate". He isn't. He may not give a shit about social issues...but when it comes to defending the interests of his precious sliver against the interests of the rest of the world, he will say ANYTHING. No matter how odious.

Edit: The Jewish magazine Tablet has much the same take.  And I missed the lovely bit where Brooks said that OWS has nothing to say about "wage stagnation or polarization". That's pretty comical, considering that's the entire damned point of the exercise.

As Dean Baker reminds us, he's little more than "the bard of the 1%". He's just there to make them feel better about themselves, which is probably why his hateful little scrawling attempts to call OWS "ineffective" and "milquetoast". It's wishful thinking by the bucketload.

"Occupy Wall Street"

I had thought it would fizzle out. It hasn't. It's getting bigger, it's getting more coherent, and it's finding a winning narrative with this "we are the 99%" line.

Mainstream media ignore it at their peril. This could be bigger than the tea party.

Edit: People keep asking "what do they want?"

Isn't it obvious? They want want Lincoln talked about: they want "government of the people, by the people, for the people".  They know that isn't the case. Not all of them can articulate it, but they all know somewhere that the American government—and, in fact, pretty much all modern governments—act at the behest of corporations. These corporations are given the same rights as actual citizens, and carry outsized weight due to their enormous economic power...and as they are generally owned by a tiny minority of people, they provide an outsized voice to that tiny minority.

That's why there's all this talk about the "99%" and the "1%". The 99% have no real voice. The only voices that are listened to are those of the corps, and the corps are overwhelmingly owned by that tiny minority. Even if members that tiny minority wanted to help the rest, they can't, because the corporations that act on their behalf are (somehow) legally obligated to fight anything and anybody that threatens the income of that minority.

(That's what corporations are for, after all. They make money. That's it.)

People get that this situation cannot continue. They get that this isn't working properly. They aren't yet quite sure why, or how to get out of it, but they KNOW that things are broken. They're looking for someone to fix it. If someone doesn't, they'll do it themselves.

Re-Edit: The truly bizarre part is that even people on Wall Street know that the current system is broken.  They don't like being blamed, true, but they know the problem. The issue is that the people with actual power and influence won't believe it for ideological reasons.

The ISI and the Kabul Attacks

Well, it looks like the ISI had a hand in the Kabul attacks.

Pakistan's powerful intelligence agency communicated with Afghan insurgents who attacked the U.S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in central Kabul last week and appear to have provided them with equipment, according to U.S. military officers and former officials.

Communications gear used by the insurgents "implicated" the directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan's spy service, a senior U.S. military official said Thursday. The equipment was found in a 14-story building under construction that the attackers used to lay siege to the embassy compound for 19 hours on Sept. 13, according to the official, who would not describe the equipment recovered.Bruce Riedel, a former White House advisor on Pakistan and a retired senior CIA official, said administration officials told him that "very firm intelligence" linked the Pakistani spy agency to the embassy attack, which killed at least nine Afghans.

"There are [communications] intercepts and the attackers were in cellphone contact back to Pakistan," he said.

In a dramatic appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged that the insurgents had received "ISI support" not only for the attack on America's most prominent diplomatic and military symbols in the Afghan capital, but also for a massive truck bomb assault this month on a U.S. combat outpost in Wardak province west of Kabul that wounded 77 U.S. soldiers.

Pakistan's government angrily denied any involvement. But Mullen's comments are the most direct, and most explosive, accusations by a senior U.S. official of direct complicity by Pakistan's chief intelligence agency in attacks on American facilities and military personnel.

Not any sort of surprise that they would deny it. Relations between the U.S. and Pakistan have been strained for a while, and this is likely to seal their fate.

It's almost certainly true, though, and it's difficult to say what it'll mean. Pakistan's a nuclear power, so any sort of direct action is impossible even if it weren't a bad idea, but the United States will have to do something to make it clear that the ISI cannot be allowed to continue supporting this sort of action.

What's likely, then, is that the American government will take this as a go-ahead for continued drone attacks in Pakistan on the Haqqani network that was behind this attack.  It keeps Americans out of harm's way, and they're insulated from Pakistani objections by the fact that the ISI is partially responsible for this in the first place. It won't solve the problem, but it's the only plausible action that presents itself.

Orwell on Unemployment

From Wigan Pier:

But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven’t met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude—and solitude is never easy to obtain in a working class home—you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which everything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

Welcome to America's future, ladies and gentlemen. The longer this nonsense lasts, the worse it gets. And with the choice of a Democratic president that—according to Suskind's latest—doesn't understand the central importance of aggregate demand on the economy vs. a Republican opposition that devoutly wishes that the long-term unemployed would just crawl into a hole and die quietly, it's likely to be getting worse for a good long time.