Yesterday my attention was drawn to an Andrew Breitbart publicity stunt on BigGovernment, one in which some nobody advertised as a person of experience in computer security, had infiltrated an Occupy Wall Street mailing list and dumped the contents onto the net.
I had a look at them. And for those who take the time to sift through the pile a bit, the net effect is the opposite of what the far right hoped for.
They make the people participating look decent and fairly normal. Just as they appear on television.
There is nothing particularly remarkable or outrageous in the spill, just lots of comments, links to various stories, some complaints about media along with praise, advice on where to march and the usual eye-crossing amount of re-quoting of previous messages in the serial presentation.
For example, from my notes:
Oooh. Here’s dangerous stuff. An e-mail telling OWS readers than when talking to reporters “speak about Wall St. and what it does to people.” Run to the police! Subversion!
There’s an e-mail on how to avoid “kettling,” the tactic British police used in London to squash protests into a narrow area. Seems sensible and legitimate use of free speech to me.
Excerpt on the 17th : “everyone hates bankers and corporations … we are demanding the rich pay for this crisis and that we support peace and justice for all races.”
Another excerpt, poignant: “One of the biggest problems I’ve had as an unemployed person seeking work is the ageism rampant in the job market. It is unbelievable how blatant and ubiquitous this is. And I think a larger number of older people would be drawn to an oppositional movement of resistance if that movement did not replicate such ageism … even sought to address this particular problem.”
One of the primary complaints the defenders of the status quo level at OWS, and any protests in general, is that they’ll lose legitimacy if they dare become uncivil.
Davos Nick Kristof is big on civility. Everyone at the top is.
Okay, we’re all in trouble when the first encampment of Real Americans that Joe discovers is located tucked away “in an affluent suburb of St. Louis.” (No Real Americans in St. Louis itself? How about East St. Louis? Who am I kidding?) At a time of 15 percent real unemployment in the country, and 8.8 percent officially in St. Louis County, is there a reason why I should care particularly what any of these people think? There are a lot of places where you can find what’s really going on in this country, and an affluent suburb of St. Louis isn’t high on that list. Things fall apart even there, alas, because a local Tea Party blowhard goes off ranting and everybody else runs for the canapes.
There’s nothing else here except a little local more local color, and a nice little moment at the end where Joe picks up a broom and helps a guy sweep up a sidewalk. Oh, and there is a lot of talk about civility in our politics, and how we’d all be much better off if everybody would just stop yelling at each other and agree to… wait for it… a Grand Bargain to solve our nation’s many problems …
And when I hear someone, anyone, appeal for a return to “civility,” I generally run headlong to the door.
This country has faced serious problems before, and it has overcome them, and of all the tools it used to overcome them, “civility” is one of the least significant. The fight against slavery took place in a lot of different arenas, public and private, but in none of them was it civil.
“Sylvester Stallone, the star of Rocky, is Johnny Kovac in F.I.S.T., a Gene Corman production of a Norman Jewison film … F.I.S.T, a motion picture achievement that will be talked about and remembered for years to come!”
They repeatedly made the case how vital Afghanistan was. Afghanistan, informed 60 Minutes, costs $300 million a day. There were videos of schools being built, fortifications being made, roads being graded. Heavy US equipment was everywhere.
The MRAPs explosive resistant truck has morphed into a gigantic armored beast you’d imagine at home in a science-fiction movie set on a hostile desert planet. It looked invulnerable. It also looked like the very picture of fail.
There were 50 some al Qaeda men left in Afghanistan, 60 Minutes estimated.
Here at home, everything rots except the fortunes of those building MRAPs and providing supply for the war.
“Over the last couple of years, about 250,000 teachers have been laid off back home … ” reporter Scott Pelley said. “The U.S. has 98,000 troops here, plus 40,000 from NATO,” he said a bit earlier.
Ryan Crocker wore a dashing pair of sunglasses inside a helicopter.
In what has become a strange display of American feudalism, people are now contributing messages to Erickson’s 53 Percent site and boasting about being screwed by the economy. As Gawker notes, one 53 Percent post features a man who proudly says that he works hard yet lacks health insurance and can “barely afford??? his rent. Another, a “former marine,??? says he hasn’t had “4 consecutive days off in 4 years.??? Blogger Max Read thinks Erickson has exposed “where the best of American values meet their most masochistic applications.??? Reading through the contributions to the 53% site, Read concludes: “‘paid time off’ and ‘health insurance’ and ‘a living wage’ are apparently the demands of an unreasonably entitled parasitic class.???
“Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.???
A few even feel personally attacked, and say the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks are just bitter about their own economic fate and looking for an easy target. If anything, they say, people should show some gratitude …
Generally, bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps. “Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull’s-eye on their back,??? the hedge fund manager said.
He’s most famous for helping to screw up the anthrax case early on by using his reputation and real estate at the New York Times to tar the wrong man. Which is about the same order of pox as Judith Miller.
Davos Nick is the archetype of the hand wringing sincere namby-pamby always trying to purvey the proper amount of sincerity, good will and concern over what he views as the problems of the day.
So he moistens his index finger with a bit of spittle and holds it up to the wind. If there’s a hurricane starting to blow he’ll write something like he did today, on Occupy Wall Street, furnishing the obvious with the authority only a man such as him can provide.
More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder.
Wow! Banksters have gotten “away with murder.”
But more recent research suggests the opposite: inequality not only stinks, but also damages economies.
Double wow! Inequality “stinks.”
Inequality also leads to early deaths and more divorces — a reminder that we’re talking not about data sets here, but about human beings.
Wow! Wow! Wow! Poor people die earlier.
Some critics think that Occupy Wall Street is simply tapping into the public’s resentment and covetousness, nurturing class warfare. Sure, there’s a dollop of envy.
They’re envious! Woo! Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.
“I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground,” reads the tagline. “Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.”
My, 1,170,184 “Followers” on Twitter. Thatsa lotta lickspittle.
You can be my friend on Facebook. It’s more exclusive.
About once a week DD spies a story in the mainstream on how the jobs are out there, it’s just that Americans are too stupid to do them.
These are all part of a a structural unemployment argument, one based on the idea that most of the mass unemployment is due to jobs and skills mismatches. It’s all working Americans fault because they simply aren’t highly trained enough.
It’s been refuted again and again by many respected economists who look at the plight of the US and call the current morass a demand side problem.
To come up with this argument it has essentially one data point, the say-so of Siemens in America.
Further:
Technology giant Siemens Corp., the U.S. arm of Germany’s Siemens AG , has over 3,000 jobs open all over the country. More than half require science, technology, engineering and math-related skills.
Current unemployment, according to the BLS is 14 million. Another 2.5 million were only marginally attached to the workforce and so were not counted. And 9.3 million people were underemployed.
Three thousand unfilled jobs at Siemens in the USA, if filled, would make up 0.00012 of the shortfall.
If Siemens had 100 times the openings, it would still only be 1.2 percent of the entire unemployment picture.
“Caterpillar and Motorola … has at any given time about 200 open positions,” reads the Reuters piece.
The numbers are fly specks, dribs and drabs, statistically unimportant
in terms of the magnitude of the unemployment crisis.
To continually air the complaint from US manufacturers re these small numbers and the unsuitability of American workers is odious.
“These companies’ inability to fill open jobs suggests that part of the unemployment problem confronting the nation could be more of a structural nature rather than a downturn in the business cycle,” asserts the Reuters article.
The numbers in the agency’s own story do not slightly support this argument. But reporters have never been good with arithmetic.
Americans are not suitable for the new manufacturing positions because they are deficient in “math-related skills” as well as other things, it is said.
Politically, part of this seems to be some high-end private sector manufacturing initiative to get more engineers into the workplace. And since they cannot be quickly furnished by universities, this ties in with Jeff Immelt and the presidential jobs council recommendation earlier in the week to expand hiring for foreign scientists.
Which, of course, has nothing to do with easing unemployment.
A group of students stormed Goldman Sachs’s central Milan offices on Friday ahead of worldwide protests against financial inequality planned for the weekend.
The Italian demonstrations are the latest bout of anger at banks and financiers as outcry spreads throughout the world following the occupation of Wall Street in New York by protesters over the past month.
Students managed to break into the hall of the Goldman Sachs building in the heart of Milan’s financial district …
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.
The only reason the Lloyd Blankfeins and Jamie Dimons of the world survive is that they’re never forced, by the media or anyone else, to put all their cards on the table …
The so-called “Too Big to Fail” financial companies – now sometimes called by the more accurate term “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” – are a direct threat to national security.
Will the pitchforks eventually come out, even symbolically? I have no idea. But a year ago there was no name recognition of anti-Wall Street populist anger anywhere but on Paul Krugman’s real estate.
Right now the plutocracy is wondering if it can just wait it all out. Still might be a safe bet.
From the Financial Times, the most famous hedge fund man, John Paulson, reported as losing 6 billion on a gamble that a US recovery would occur. After making a fortune shorting “US subprime mortgage securities.”
John Paulson made his name in 2007 for the greatest trade ever. He may now be losing it, fear some, with one of the worst.
So far this year, Paulson & Co, the giant hedge fund Mr Paulson founded in 1994, has lost an estimated $6bn or so of his investors’ – and his own – money …
Mr Paulson’s current losses are a factor of a far less esoteric trade: a bet in which he wagered, at a greater scale than anyone else, that the US economy was on the road to rude health.
The FT piece then goes on to explain all the hedging Paulson’s firm is now engaged in to protect itself from further “market volatility.”