Occupy L.A. Speaker: “One of the speakers said the solution is nonviolent movement. No, my friend. I’ll give you two examples: French Revolution, and Indian so-called Revolution.
Gandhi, Gandhi today is, with respect to all of you, Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us. French Revolution made fundamental transformation. But it was bloody.
India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.
So, ultimately, the bourgeosie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class.
Long live revolution! Long live socialism!”
Crowd: [Cheers.]
(Insert comments about how he doesn’t represent the movement below.)
Seriously – we keep finding anarchists, nutjobs, anti-semites and Democratic operatives, but none of them ever represent the movement.
So what are they all doing there? And where ARE the people who do represent the movement?
Earlier today as I perused Myiq2xu’s post on union influence at Occupy Boston, I was drawn to a name mentioned in the link to the Politico story: Doug Forand. The Politico article is on the March on Mansions protests planned for NYC earlier today. I make it a habit of googling names I come across in news articles, especially if it’s part of a larger, on-going story the media is following. You can often uncover interesting histories and flesh out networks by doing this. Doug Forand was quoted extensively in the Politico article, and labeled “the spokesperson for 99 New York, the coalition which organized the protest.” He was erroneously called “Occupy Wall Street spokesman,” in an earlier edition of the story (no note about the revision on the article, either). That’s what originally caught my eye.
It turns out that Doug Forand, the resident of Brooklyn whose name is becoming quickly associated with news reports of the OWS protests, is a partner at Red Horse Strategies, LLC, the consulting firm that has been credited with the Democrats rise to power in 2008. According to the public statement at the firm’s founding, Forand was described thusly:
Doug Forand has over ten years experience leading campaigns and working in the New York State Government. Most recently, he served as Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of the DSCC under Senate Minority Leaders David Paterson and Malcolm Smith. In 2002, he was the campaign manager for Alan Hevesi’s winning 2002 Comptroller campaign and served as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for Comptroller Hevesi following his election.
So now Doug Forand has joined forces with and become spokesperson for “99 New York,” which I can’t find much on except for this Firedoglake report, which describes it as “UnitedNY, Strong Economy for All Coaltition (sic), NY Communities for Change, the Working Families Party and a bunch of other community organizations.” According to someconservative websites, the Working Families Party has been busted hiring protesters for Occupy Wall Street. Red Horse is not listed among those groups, but the report is not a journalists article and it may be publicly identified with the group. I don’t know. As I said, there’s not a lot of info on the group online, except for them being cited and quoted in news articles.
What I do want to know is why is a guy, who is up to his neck in electing Democrats like Forand is, suddenly trying to organize the kind of confrontational street theater operations like we saw last year with unions and Bank of America executives, and again this year with unions and Republican state senators in Wisconsin? And why is he using Occupy Wall Street to do it? Something is definitely stinking here.
This is a debate with a focus on economics. Herman Cain will share center stage with Mitt Romney. This is the first debate since Cain moved up into contender status.
Big questions for the night:
1. Will Perry get his shit together?
2. Will Cain solidify his status?
3. Will the audience cheer or boo inappropriately?
The fun starts at 8 pm eastern (5 pm out here on the left coast)
I’m not going to try to keep up with every question and answer. I can’t watch, type and drink all at the same time.
Top pollster Stanley Greenberg is not shy about criticizing the White House when he thinks it’s warranted, and his opinion is widely respected by Democrats in Congress. So if Greenberg tells moderate Senate Democrats that they vote against Obama’s jobs bill at their own peril, will they believe him?
In an interview with me this morning, Greenberg made a strong case that moderate Senate Democrats in red states would be foolish and shortsighted if they vote against the American Jobs Act today, as some of them appear to be prepared to do. The White House and Dems have been railing against Republicans for opposing the jobs bill, but if a few Senate Dems defect, and a simple majority of the Senate doesn’t support it, that will dilute the Dem message that Republicans are the key obstacle to progress on the economy.
But Greenberg’s case for voting for the bill went significantly beyond this concern about overall party messaging. He argued that moderate Democrats who vote against it are actually imperiling their own reelection chances.
“They reduce their risks for reelection by showing support for a jobs bill that’s going to be increasingly popular as voters learn more about it,” Greenberg said. “They have to be for something on the economy, and this the kind of proposal they should support. If I were advising them, I’d say you want to be backing a jobs bill with middle class tax cuts paid for by tax hikes on millionaires. Moderate voters in these states very much want to raise taxes on the wealthy to meet our obligations.”
Crucially, Greenberg pointed out that if moderate Dems are hoping to show distance from the President and his low approval numbers by voting against the jobs bill, they run another risk: Dem disunity on the economy could backfire on them.
“Voting No would increase their risk of losing,” Greenberg said bluntly. “Democrats would look divided on their central agenda. In the end you all go down with the ship here. Why would you send Democrats back to the Senate if they are divided on the most important issue facing people? Here you can show unity and purpose, which Democrats have not had an opportunity to do during budget negotiations.”
That’s a mighty big assumption.
“They reduce their risks for reelection by showing support for a jobs bill that’s going to be increasingly popular as voters learn more about it,” Greenberg said
You know what happens when you make an assumption.
Do you have any poll numbers showing that it’s popular now? If it’s not popular now, why should it get more popular later? The Senate Democrats on the bubble are the same ones elected back in 2006. They won seats that normally would have gone to the GOP and next year they’ll probably go back.
There was a window of opportunity when the Democrats could have passed anything they wanted. They wasted it on a bad stimulus bill and Obamacare. Both bills are hugely unpopular even though one hasn’t even taken effect yet.
Now Obama is trying to use Bad Stimulus II to get himself reelected.
Don’t get me wrong – I’d be all for it if I thought there was even a decent chance it would help. But tax cuts don’t create jobs. Not only that but the tax cuts Obama is proposing will affect the solvency of Social Security, giving the GOP more ammunition in their quest to “reform” it.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is vetoing legislation requiring police to obtain a court warrant to search the mobile phones of suspects at the time of any arrest.
The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.
Police across the country are given wide latitude to search persons incident to an arrest based on the premise of officer safety. Now the nation’s states are beginning to grapple with the warrantless searches of mobile phones done at the time of an arrest.
Brown’s veto message abdicated responsibility for protecting the rights of Californians and ignored calls from civil liberties groups and this publication to sign the bill — saying only that the issue is too complicated for him to make a decision about. He cites a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding the warrantless searches of people incident to an arrest. In his brief message, he also doesn’t say whether it’s a good idea or not.
Instead, he says the state Supreme Court’s decision is good enough, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court let stand last week.
“The courts are better suited to resolve the complex and case-specific issues relating to constitutional search-and-seizure protections,” the governor wrote.
Because of that January ruling from the state’s high court, the California Legislature passed legislation to undo it — meaning Brown is taking the side of the Supreme Court’s seven justices instead of the state Legislature. The Assembly approved the bill 70-0 and the state Senate, 32-4.
It is the job of the courts to interpret the law and to decide if it is constitutional.
It is the legislature’s job to MAKE the law.
California law does not allow for a veto override so our only hope is a ballot proposition.
This is a sad day for civil liberties. If I had known that Brown would do this I would not have voted for him.
Last year Rolling Stone magazine published an article about Barack Obama called “Destiny’s Child” by Ben Wallace-Wells. The story deserves a second look, because at the time Obama was a virtual unknown to most of the public.
The piece begins with Obama’s arrival in Washington D.C., then shifts to his meteoric rise in the Democratic party:
Obama’s ascent from rookie senator to presidential contender is one of the more startling and sudden acts in recent political history. Those around him aren’t quite sure what has happened, and neither, for that matter, is the senator himself. Obama says he experienced the change as a call from the crowds that always stalk him, a summoning to a new role. First there was Hurricane Katrina, when the talk shows called him, assuming he had something to say. Then there were the throngs that lined the roads on his trip to Africa last summer, and the same excitement from domestic audiences on his book tour last fall. “I realized I didn’t feel comfortable standing on the sidelines when so much was at stake,” he tells me. “It was hard to maintain the notion that I was a backbencher.” The early, wonkish humility was gone, replaced by a man who began to speak of himself in sprawling, historic terms. “Just being the president is not a good way of thinking about it,” Obama says now. “You want to be a great president.”
[...]
Most politicians come to national prominence at the head of a movement: Bill Clinton had neoliberalism, George W. Bush had compassionate conservatism, Reagan had supply-side economics. Even Obama’s rivals have political calling cards: John Edwards has devoted himself to a poverty-fighting populism, Hillary Clinton is defined by a hawkish centrism. These identities give them infrastructures, ideologies, natural bases of support. Obama is trying to pull a less-conventional trick: to turn his own person into a movement. “I’m not surprised you’re having trouble categorizing him,” one of his aides says. “I don’t think he’s wedded to any ideological frame.” With Obama, there is only the man himself — his youth, his ease, his race, his claim on the new century. His candidacy is essentially a plea for voters to put their trust in his innate capacity for clarity and judgment. There is no Obama-ism, only Obama.
“People don’t come to Obama for what he’s done in the Senate,” says Bruce Reed, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. “They come because of what they hope he could be.” What Obama stands for, if anything, is not yet clear. Everywhere he goes he is greeted by thrilled crowds, trailed constantly by a reporter from The Chicago Tribune who is writing a book about the senator with a preliminary title so immodest that it embarrassed even Obama’s staff: The Savior. The danger here is that the public has committed the cardinal sin of political love, forcing Obama onto the national stage before knowing him well enough to gauge whether he’s ready for it. The candidate they see before them is their own creation — or, rather, it is the scrambling of a skinny, serious, self-reflective man trying to mold his public’s conflicted yearnings into something greater. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” says Cassandra Butts, a friend of the senator’s from law school and now a leader at the Center for American Progress. “People see in him what they want to see.”
So far the article seems on the money. The entire Obama campaign has been more a policy-free cult of personality than anything else. But the part about feeling called to run is disturbingly reminiscent of George W. Bush.
Then the article introduces us to Reverend Jeremiah Wright: (more…)
Any time someone in the USA, usually an immigrant or child of immigrants, says something along the lines of ”this particular thing happening here makes me uneasy because it reminds me of why our family left the old country”, most Americans shrug it off. Things might be bad but it could never get that bad. Not here.
Well, tin foil Tuesday means I can be as pessimistically self-indulgent as I want. Every immigrant has their own national history to remind them of why they decided to leave. I thought about talking about my particular nationalhistory, but that seems boooring. Instead let me sum up what happened there:
Charismatic dude gets elected. Charismatic dude starts massive spending program (infrastructure, renewal, blah blah blah) which acts as a cover for both graft, favor-trading, and expansion of power. (To implement so & so program, must create this new agency, with these powers & funding, etc). Many programs get initiated but they don’t seem to work as promised — mostly they get the contractors, who happen to have ties to the Dude, richer. Economic growth slows. People get poorer, lose jobs, crime rises. Dude uses Treasury funds, intimidation, and fraud to get re-elected. People are unhappy, lots of new protest and opposition groups form, lots of protests going on everywhere. Some peaceful, some violent. Finally at an opposition rally, bombs go off which kill some opposition leaders. M blames the militants but historians agree that this was probably done by his own provocateurs. In other words he did it himself to take out the democratic opposition and then blamed the militants. Then M uses the bombing as his “last straw” and says it forces him to declare martial law to restore peace and order. That keeps him in power for a couple of decades until ill-health & luck makes it all fall apart. But the damage done to the national psyche … who knows if it will ever be repaired.
So, do I need to say anymore or is it pretty clear why a lot of stuff going on today seems like the refrain of an old song to me?
Boston police moved in and began arresting scores of Occupy Boston protesters who refused to leave a large part of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway early this morning.
At 1:20 a.m., the first riot police officers lined up on Atlantic Avenue. Minutes later, dozens of sheriff vans and police wagons arrived and over 200 officers in uniforms and riot gear surrounded the Greenway.
Police Superintendent William Evans and Commissioner Edward F. Davis watched from across the street. Evans gave the crowd two minutes to disperse from the park, warning that they would be locked up if they did not comply.
The crowd of protesters, energized by the sudden appearance of the Boston and Transit police officers, chanted, ‘‘The people united will never be defeated,’’ “This is a peaceful protest,” and “the whole world is watching.’’
About 10 minutes later, the first officers entered the park and surrounded the group. Evans, using a loudspeaker, gave one more warning and then each protester was individually put on his or her stomach, cable-tied, and dragged off as others tore down tents and arrested and detained people on the fringe of the park.
About 100 people were arrested, Davis said. One police officer was hit in the face.
According to police, no protesters or police were injured.
In the early morning hours on Tuesday, Boston, Seattle, Dallas, St. Louis, and Atlanta police departments reportedly moved in on “Occupy” demonstrator camps. Twitter has been lit up with various accounts of police confrontations in these cities.
There is a reason these things take place during the early morning hours. That’s because in each place, overnight camping is prohibited. Over the weekend Sacramento and San Francisco took similar actions.
My question is what is the point of the overnight camping? Couldn’t these protests achieve the same effect if they were held daily at the same locations?
Occupy Wall Street protesters planned to march to the homes of five New York billionaires Tuesday to protest the expiration of the state’s millionaire’s tax.
Organizers are planning to protest at the homes of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, businessman David Koch, hedge fund manager John Paulson, real estate developer Howard Milstein and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch, according to CNN Money.
The protesters plan to present oversize checks at each home to illustrate how much less the billionaires will pay after New York’s two percent tax on millionaires expires on Dec. 31.
“While everyone else is struggling and being asked to make sacrifices to get through the economic downturn, these folks are actually being given more money to line their pockets,” Occupy Wall Street spokesman Doug Forand told the amNewYork newspaper. “They live in luxury — these folks don’t need a tax break.”
The demonstrators plan to leave their established zone of “occupation” at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and travel uptown to 59th street near Central Park, where they will start their march just after noon.
The march is planned by groups associated with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations – UnitedNY, the Strong Economy for All coalition, the Working Families Party and New York Communities for change.
The plan has “This won’t end well” written all over it.
