OKC occupiers to march downtown Tuesday

When last I blogged, the occupation of Kerr Park by Occupy OKC was tentatively scheduled to begin today, Monday. This evening, after I finally caught up with my schoolwork--and after a brief break to allow my brain to unstick itself from the inside of my skull--I headed downtown to see what was going on.

"I won't believe corporations are people until Texas executes one."

It was a smaller crowd than on Friday night. People were standing and sitting around in small groups getting to know each other, playing musical instruments, and discussing political ideas and strategy. (One fantabulous group of women was playing hacky-sack.) I thought there were about fifty folks when I got there a little after 7 p.m. The General Assembly had taken place earlier in the day, so maybe there were more people earlier.

"Privatized Gain = Socialized Loss"

Talking with several participants and moderators, here is what I found out. Tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday, a march will step off from occupied Kerr Park at 2 p.m. Marchers will visit Chase Bank and travel along Park Avenue. In order to keep this demonstration legal without a permit, marchers are asked to walk single file, to stay on sidewalks, and not to block traffic or entrances to buildings. Signs are encouraged, but please don't carry a sign on a stick or wear a mask.

"Workers Rights Are Human Rights"

Occupy OKC does have permits to be in Kerr Park continuously from October 10 through October 12. They are asking for donations to help cover the cost of permits to stay there for additional days, as well as to cover the cost of porta-potties. There is a kitchen now that is feeding occupiers, and folks have started donating food and blankets for the occupiers. My hunch is that more of these donations would be welcome as well. Kerr Park is located on Robert S. Kerr Avenue between Broadway and Robinson.

While the participants in Occupy OKC have a variety of political opinions--see sign photos included with this post--Friday night's GA seemed to reach consensus that Occupy OKC endorses this statement by Occupy Wall Street. This is, in general, a statement against corporate greed, militarism, environmental destruction and discrimination, and for the rights of workers and other living beings. You can find out more about Occupy OKC on their Facebook page, via Twitter, at their Web site, or through their online forums.

99% of us are being exploited by a ruthless elite.

Updated 10/11/11 to fix some grammatical errors.

Background information

Occupy OKC is inspired by the Occupy Wall Street demonstration that has fascinated the nation, and is part of the fast growing Occupy Together movement. While many participants in the OKC General Assembly emphasize the need for supporting concerns specific to Oklahomans, there also seems to be widespread suppport for the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.

In addition to its Facebook page, Occupy OKC has a Web site and a forum page where you can join a subcommittee/working group, familiarize yourself with issues and discussions, share information, and discuss your opinions. The subcommittees include the following:

• Public Relations and Message Team
• Action Committee
• Infrastructure
• Visual Arts
• Spiritual Team
• Legal
• Medical
• Media.
  

Much of the work of Occupy OKC is done by these subcommittees, so if you want to take a part in shaping the work of these groups, the thing to do is to jump in and volunteer. In order for the work of the general assembly to move quickly, participants need to do the work to understand issues in advance of each meeting. The place to do that is in the forums.

In other news, Occupy OKC has made its first appearance on Channel 9.

How it felt to go the OKC General Assembly

The General Assembly of Occupy OKC met Friday evening in Kerr Park in downtown Oklahoma City, and probably agreed to begin its occupation of Kerr Park on the afternoon of Columbus Day. I say "probably," because when you get 300 people trying to do consensus decision making without much prior experience, you get a few rough edges.

You get the tension between wanting to have a coherent strategy and consensus about goals, and wanting to take action while energy is high. You get the tension between wanting to have unified positions, and honoring diversity of experience and belief. You get a meeting that goes on that it probably should have, with people getting a bit cranky because they probably need a nap and a snack. You get all of the complications of communicating via "human microphone" to avoid breaking of laws requiring a police permit to use amplified sound.

This is not paint-by-numbers. This is not the packaged cake mix that is fast to fix, but oh-so-bland and unsatisfying. This is going to be the real homemade work of art, the thing that produces broken eggs and broken crayons and probably a few broken hearts in the process of creating a new world.


I sat there scribbling notes, but now I can't seem to find words for what I feel. Maybe it's irrational hope. For the past thirty years the patriarchs, the capitalists, the race-baiters, the gay-haters, the generals, the right-wing t.v. preachers have made the United States into a meaner, greedier place, a place where 99 percent of us are sinking fast. I feel that I have done what I've known how to do to change it, but that hasn't seemed like much. And now, maybe here is a chance for something to be better.

So it looked like most of the people in the crowd were in their twenties or thirties. The crowd was not entirely white, but there were few people of color there. I felt much more comfortable in this crowd than I'd expected to feel--this was even before I found a few trusty Herland dyke friends to sit with--but much more than half of the people in the crowd were male. But half or more of the moderators and team leaders seemed to be women. And this was a crowd that despite its differences seemed to be united in its egalitarianism.

For instance, when Brittany, the representative of the Action Team, spoke in favor of beginning the occupation on Monday, a large part of her reasoning had to do with the fact that Columbus Day symbolizes the fact that "this land was taken from indigenous people"--and that we have a responsibility to counteract that injustice.

And when one speaker insisted on the importance of having a clear list of demands, one young man standing in the back row said something like, "We all agree that we need the one percent to stop acting like dicks."

Exactly, sir, And I appreciate your dedication to the cause of ending patriarchy.

More on Occupy Wall Street

If you missed it, my first post is here.

Betsy Reed at The Nation has an interesting analysis of the march and its supposed lack of demands:

t’s not that the demands being suggested by OWS’s volunteer policy advisors in the blogosphere are not worthy ideas. At a time when we desperately need to rein in financial speculation and change the incentives on Wall Street, a financial transactions tax is a terrific policy proposal. Dean Baker has been talking about it for years. The thing is, we on the left don’t have a scarcity of policy ideas. We are positively bursting with them. Create a housing trust fund! A national infrastructure bank! And, yes, sure, eliminate the carried interest loophole so fat cats don’t get a bigger tax break than working people. (Some even have more radical ideas, which are quite sensible too.) But at best, we get a polite hearing for these ideas, which then fade away or are hopelessly watered down. We simply lack the power to put them into practice.

And in the recent past, even the most smoothly organized, expertly messaged mass demonstrations have not made a whit of difference in this regard. Consider the last big march on Wall Street this past May 12. The coalition behind it was admirably diverse, including unions like the teachers and SEIU’s 1199, as well as local community organizations such as Citizen Action NY, Coalition for the Homeless and Community Voices Heard. The “May 12 Coalition,” which turned out thousands of protesters on the appointed day, presented the Bloomberg administration with a proposal that exhibited great thoughtfulness in its rigor and detail, asking banks like JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley to take a 20 percent cut in their contracts to handle functions like child support disbursements or income tax remittances for the city. This would have saved $120 million, part of $1.5 billion that could have been extracted from the banking sector to prevent the city from having to slash education and social services, according to the coalition.

I would also like to nominate this song by Bonnie Lockhart as the movement's unofficial anthem:

Occupied

A few weeks ago I started receiving e-mails from organizations who were sponsoring a protest to occupy Wall Street. I deleted these e-mails without paying much attention to them. Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the stock market or the financial speculation industry that seems to have eaten the US economy, and I remember how they helped to crash our economy. But I didn't think these protests sounded as if they'd been planned very well, and I couldn't imagine them being effective.

I seem to have been very wrong.

Now, the mainstream and alternative news (and my inbox) seem to be full of news of a movement that has spread across the US in the past two or three weeks. Busy grad student that I am, I am still trying to sort through all of this stuff and make sense of it.

Here is what I've figured out so far.

First, the feminist peace group Code Pink is leading an effort to make sure the demonstrations are inclusive and have a feminist perspective. See this great post on AlterNet by Melanie Butler:

If Week I of Occupy Wall Street was about surviving, Week II has been about finding our voices. This protest is about the 99 percent of people in America who have been on the short end of the economic stick, but it appears the media believes it's 90 percent made up of men. Some of the organizing and facilitation processes we've developed to make our movement inclusive and participatory have proven not to be enough, and we are constantly adapting and regrouping to ensure that everyone's voice in this broad and vibrant coalition is heard.

Via an e-mail from Code Pink, I also found out about Occupy Together. Their Web site says that they're "an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.," and they also have a Facebook page.

Thanks to a link shared by a friend on Facebook, I found out that there is a local Occupy OKC group, which as a Facebook page and a Web site. Their next "general assembly" is scheduled for tomorrow, Friday Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. at Kerr Park in downtown OKC. I'm not sure I'll be able to make this, but it looks interesting.

Death of a pioneer

Nah. I'm not talking about Steve Jobs. I think that the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth probably did more to make the world a better place. Shuttlesworth was a leader of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, and personally faced many dangerous situations in furtherance of the cause. According to a report on NPR's All Things Considered last night, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, himself a civil rights veteran, credits Shuttlesworth's work with making possible the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in," Lewis said. "He led an unbelievable children's crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs that moved and shook the nation."

Reporter Allison Keyes had a fascinating retrospective on Morning Edition today.

Against Social Security except for themselves

 The Nation has a fascinating post about right-wing billionaire "free market" proponent Charles Koch writing to  economist Friedrich Hayek, encouraging him to sign up for Social Security. The irony in this is that both Koch and Hayek were leading opponents of Social Security and other safety net programs.

A copy of the letter, written in 1973, is available here. Nation reporters Vasha Levine and Mark Ames explain that Koch wanted Hayek to come to the United States to serve as a senior scholar at Koch's libertarian Institute for Humane Studies in 1974. Initially, Hayek turned down the offer. Hayek had health problems. His native Austria had a program of almost universal health care that had provided him with gall bladder surgery. In the United States, he would not be able to afford private health insurance. Not to worry, Kock said. Hayek might be eligible for Social Security, based on his employment at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. In that case, he would also be eligible for Medicare to cover hospital expenses.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Levine and Ames go on to explain how the Cato Institute (originally called the Charles Koch Institute) carried on a stealth campaign to undermine Social Security and other social safety net programs.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

Asking and telling

This poem, which I wrote two or three years ago, expresses the complication of my feelings upon hearing about the end of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allowed lesbians and gay men to serve in the U.S. military so long as they did not reveal their (our) identity. It's a long poem. I've got a lot of feelings about this topic.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
how back in 1969,
My junior high school was a school
for smart kids from all over Philadelphia.
But my classmates were all smarter than I was,
because all of them were protesting
the Vietnam War.
Me, I was protesting them,
I was the only one who would pledge allegiance,
I was the only one who would try to sing
the Star Spangled Banner in the school assembly.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
that back in 1969,
when I was 13 years old,
I wanted to be a man,
I wanted to be free,
not protected and controlled as women were.
I wanted to be free and strong and brave.
I wanted to be the one who did the protecting.
and at the end of the musical comedy,
I wanted to be the one who married the girl.

I would have volunteered to join the army
or maybe the marine corps.
I would have volunteered to go to Vietnam.
to protect the people from communist aggression,
to help them be free from tyrants and dictators.
I wanted to go.
but the army would not take 13-year-old girls,
whether or not they were going to become lesbians.
They didn't allow women into combat at all.
They said that war was too horrific for women,
but years later it crossed my mind that they
didn't really mind women being in combat
so long as
the women couldn't shoot back.

You didn't ask, but I am going to tell you
this story from the Vietnam War.
How the helicopters brought our soldiers
into the hamlet of My Lai,
with instructions to destroy it,
and to kill all of the enemy there,
and they did.
Our soldiers killed all of the enemy,
but on that day,
the enemy was not strong young men
armed with rifles and shooting back
at our troops.
On that day the enemy was old people,
and babies, and little children,
and of course women,
who could be raped as well
as bayoneted,
shoved into the irrigation ditch,
and slaughtered with bursts of
automatic rifle fire.

Our soldiers followed their orders
so well that in the morning there were 700 people
living in My Lai,
but by the end of that day
fewer than 200 were left.
As the saying used to go,
they destroyed that village in order to save it.
Not only did they butcher the people,
they also killed all of the animals,
burned down all of the buildings,
and poisoned the wells.

This happened in March of 1968,
and the army top brass was modest about it, too,
They said only that 128 of the enemy had
been killed in a fierce fire fight,
and they stuck to that story for over a year,
(well certainly, they admitted, there are
always a few unintentional civilian casualties),
they stuck to that story for over a year,
but then the truth came out.

The truth has a way of coming out,
even if no one asks for it.
People who know the truth, people who feel
the truth, always seem to want
to tell. There were brave men who were
there at My Lai,
brave men who could not stomach what they had seen,
what they had been forced to do,
and they told the truth without being asked.
They told the truth again, and again,
until congressmen and journalists had to listen.

After that, the generals said what
generals always say,
They said what they said after
Wounded Knee,
after the fire-bombing of Dresden,
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
after Kent State and Jackson State,
after they overthrew the democratically
elected governments of Guatemala and Iran,
after they trained the Islamic militants
who eventually became Al Qaeda,
after they mined Nicaragua's harbors,
after they blockaded Iraq and allowed
half a million children to starve,
after the revelations about the abuses
at the prison at Abu Ghraib.

They said that the My Lai massacre was
a tragic mistake,
that civilians cannot imagine the stress
of soldiers in combat,
that those men went a little bit
over the edge in what they did
but they were defending our way of life,
our freedom of speech,
our right to be ungrateful and criticize
our government for its conduct of a war
in defense of innocent people,
a few of whom, unfortunately, must always
be sacrificed in furtherance of that goal,
that now of all times was not the time
to cut and run, just because a few bad apples
had gone to a slight extreme in their
defence of liberty.
And they took one lieutenant and
locked him away for a four and
one-half months to show just how sorry they were.

In the middle of everything that was
happening to me when I was 13 years old,
I could not comprehend that my
government was lying to me.
I didn't know that
it hadn't been our civil war
until my government decided to take charge
after the Vietnamese drove the
French colonialists away.
I didn't know we had stopped elections
from taking place,
because we knew our side would lose.
I didn't know we'd installed a president
in South Vietnam, then murdered him
when he didn't do what we wanted.
I didn't know about people
being forced to live
in strategic hamlets, and if they didn't
stay there, they would be in free-fire
zones where my government would attack
them with napalm and rockets and bombs.
I wanted to believe my government when
it told me My Lai was a mistake.
I could not bear to ask
whether my government
might be
lying.

But the truth has a way of telling itself
even when you don't ask to hear it,
and later, when I was just a little older,
I fell in love with a woman who was a
little bit older than myself, a woman
who had been a protester.
I fell in love with a woman who knew
what our government had done, and I
believed what she told me,
I read for myself,
and I thought about what I'd read,
and then I understood that my government
hardly ever told the truth,
especially when it talked about its
foreign adventures.

I found that my government had a nasty
habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
in the Phillipines, in Latin America,
in Iran. I learned that
my government
has the nasty habit of supporting dictatorships
in the name of democracy,
and overthrowing elected governments
in the name of democracy,
and it crossed my mind
that my government was giving
democracy
a bad name.

And since then I have spent many
hours standing on many street corners
holding up protest signs,
sometimes in the freezing cold,
sometimes in the pouring rain,
I have stood on street corners
sometimes by myself,
often with just a few others,
I have stood on street corners
trying to tell my sister and
brother citizens the truths
that my government doesn't want them
to hear.

And in my own way I am doing my best to
serve my country,
I am doing my best to
defend democracy,
because free speech cannot be defended
with bullets or bombs,
democracy cannot be defended by
shoving helpless people into a ditch
and slaughtering them with bursts
of automatic weapons fire.
Free speech can only be defended by
speaking out,
by writing,
by doing your best to think for yourself.

And so,
to my gay brothers
and lesbian sisters,
here is what I want you to know:
If you say it is your country,
and your right to serve,
and I look at the world through your eyes,
I have to admit that this is so.
But can you look at the world
through my eyes?
Can you understand why once,
I would have volunteered to join
the army, or maybe the marine corps,
but now that is not so.
Can you understand why,
that if they asked me,
I would not go?
That even if the generals ordered me,
I would not go. I would say no.
I would say, "Hell, no."

Enough is enough

Janinsanfran at Can It Happen Here? has the best reflection I've seen on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. Noam Chomsky also has some interesting things to say.

Supporting workers and saving the planet.

Hat tip to Progressive Breakfast for serving up this eloquent post by former AFL-CIO officer Joe Uehlein at Common Dreams.org.

The broad public interest that ordinary Americans truly seek is sustainability. Even those who are misled into believing that government budget deficits are the greatest threat to our future are motivated by a concern to put that future on a sustainable basis.

Our greed-driven society is economically unsustainable – witness the renewed catastrophe of the global economy. It is socially unsustainable – witness the destruction of the middle class and the polarization of rich and poor worldwide. And it is environmentally unsustainable – witness the melting of the Arctic, the rise in sea levels, and the unprecedented increase in extreme weather events caused by our failure to halt climate change.

Sustainability includes but goes beyond the environment to encompass social and economic sustainability as well. This is often summed up in the “triple bottom line” that calls on corporations to be accountable not only for their environmental performance, but for their economic and social performance as well.

To have a future itself, organized labor needs to reorient itself around the objective of providing a sustainable future for all working people and the world we inhabit. That means putting millions of people to work creating a sustainable economy, society, and environment.

Uehlein describes the personal history that led him to understand the connection between the environment and the well-being of workers in an earlier post at Common Dreams. This earlier post is also an excellent introduction to the issues involved in the effort to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Hurricane Irene

I'd rather be suffering through record heat in Oklahoma than going through Hurricane Irene back home in Philadelphia, thank you very much. According to the New York Times, the storm made landfall in North Carolina about 7:30 Saturday morning, and continued to move slowly northward along the Atlantic Seaboard as of a little after midnight Sunday morning. New York City shut down in anticipation of the the storm's arrival, including the city's subway system.

A variety of online written and live video sources reported that there were some deaths. The highest number I heard so far was nine. This seems like a remarkably low number given that the hurricane is affecting the nation's most heavily populated area. The relatively weak but massive hurricane seems to be causing widespread flooding and power outages.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a time-lapse video of the storm as it made its way from Puerto Rico and the Bahamas to the East Coast of the United States, and a graphic that will let you track the storm.

Given that it is seriously past my bedtime, I am reminded of  this old folk song.

More news on the student exchange from hell

The New York Times has picked up the story, which I found re-posted by the National Guestworker Alliance. The Times has a lot more information than what I was able to find online yesterday.

Yesterday, someone asked me, "But why didn't the students find out exactly what kind of job they would have?" I think that's a good question, but on the other hand, look at the Web site for the Council for Education Travel, USA, which the Times identified as "the organization that manages the J-1 visa program for the State Department." (This is the student cultural exchange program.) There is nothing on the organization's site that would arouse my suspicion.

On the other hand, the response given by their spokesperson to the Times didn't sit right with me.

Rick Anaya, chief executive of the council, said he had brought about 6,000 J-1 visa students to the United States this summer. Mr. Anaya said he had tried to respond to the Palmyra workers’ complaints. “We are not getting any cooperation,” he said. “We are trying to work with these kids. All this negativity is hurting an excellent program. We would go out of our way to help them, but it seems like someone is stirring them up out there.”

If people are being overworked and ripped off--apparently the tipping point came when the students discovered they were being charged much more for rent than other tenants in the apartment complex where they are housed--you can't expect them to have a positive attitude.

The student cultural exchange from hell

On Wednesday, an incredible story showed up in my e-mail inbox from the folks at Jobs With Justice.

According to  Jobs With Justice, this summer the Hershey's Company has been exploiting hundreds of student guest workers who thought they were coming to the United States on a cultural exchange. These students reportedly paid between three and six thousand dollars to take part in this program. Instead of a cultural exchange, they have been packing chocolates for Hershey's under abusive conditions. After automatic deductions for rent in company housing, the students are said to make only $40-$140/week.

Some of the students themselves tell their grim story. I found a link to the following video included with the Harrisburg Patriot News coverage of a Wednesday protest at the warehouse where the students work. A civil disobedience action that was part of the protest resulted in three arrests.



These jobs would otherwise be living-wage union jobs for people living in Central Pennsylvania, who could surely use the work. The students' supporters have blamed the Hershey company's willingness to subcontract the jobs for creating the situation.

According to the Associated Press, "An official for the The Hershey Company said the packing plant is run by another company, Excel(sic), and like all vendors is expected to treat workers fairly." The Harrisburg Patriot-News reports that "The warehouse [where the students work] is operated by Exel, an Ohio-based logistical firm that provides services for businesses in the Harrisburg area."

A Hershey's company Web page says that company seeks to "provide high-quality Hershey products while conducting our business in a socially responsible and environmentally sustainable manner." If they're sincere about being socially responsible, doesn't that include some responsibility to make sure that their contractors are also socially responsible?

The protester are demanding the end of exploitation of the student workers, the return of the fees they paid to come to the US, and that Hershey's hire local workers at a living wage to do this work. The students have also filed a complaint with the State Department alleging violations of the J-1 visa program under which they were brought to the United States. You can find more information about the protest at Web sites of the National Guestworker Alliance and Jobs With Justice.

Obama as the New Nixon?

Paul Krugman has a link to a fascinating and thoughtful post by Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and Treasury Secretary under George H.W. Bush. Bush argues that Barack Obama has been a moderate conservative president who continues the policies of his Republican predecessors--just as Richard Nixon was a moderate liberal who continued and expanded the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson.

In the process, Barlett gives a concise and cogent analysis of much of the political and economic history of the United States since the Second World War. For instance:

Liberals initially viewed Bill Clinton the same way conservatives viewed Eisenhower – as a liberator who would reverse the awful policies of his two predecessors. But almost immediately, Clinton decided that deficit reduction would be the first order of business in his administration. His promised middle class tax cut and economic stimulus were abandoned.

By 1995, Clinton was working with Republicans to dismantle welfare. In 1997, he supported a cut in the capital gains tax. As the benefits of his 1993 deficit reduction package took effect, budget deficits disappeared and we had the first significant surpluses in memory. Yet Clinton steadfastly refused to spend any of the flood of revenues coming into the Treasury, hording them like a latter day Midas. In the end, his administration was even more conservative than Eisenhower’s on fiscal policy.

And just as pent-up liberal aspirations exploded in the 1960s with spending for every pet project green lighted, so too the fiscal conservatism of the Clinton years led to an explosion of tax cuts under George W. Bush, who supported every one that came down the pike. The result was the same as it was with Johnson: massive federal deficits and a tanking economy.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Oklahoma City and Oslo

Today both The Southern Poverty Law Center and Common Dreams have interesting analytical pieces comparing the recent tragic act of terrorism in Oslo with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Both posts point out that it's wrongheaded and dangerous to scapegoat Muslims as a threat to peace when right-wing Christian fundamentalists pose a serious threat.

The Common Dreams post is authored by Pierre Tristam, and crossposted from FlaglerLive.com. Tristam points out that after both incidents, news media initially made the assumption that the attacks were the work of Muslims:

After the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, speculation flew on television news stations about Arab terrorists seen in the vicinity of the federal building. The thought that a home-grown, Midwestern Army veteran of the first Gulf war could possibly murder 168 people, including 19 children at a day care center, seemed as foreign as those Islamic lands that were then inspiring so much of bigotry’s latest American mutant. McVeigh turned out to be as all-American as he could possibly be, with extras. His paradoxical worship of the Second Amendment was the faith that fueled his hatred of a government he felt had betrayed American ideals by enabling what he called “Socialist wannabe slaves.” His idealism of a golden-age white America was the Christian translation of al-Qaeda’s idealized caliphate.

It became quickly evident that the bombing in Oslo and the massacre on Utoya Island on Friday had been carried out by Anders Breivik, who surrendered to police 40 minutes after beginning his killing spree on the island. Yet the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on Saturday putting the blame for the attack on Islamist extremists, because “in jihadist eyes,” the paper said, “it will forever remain guilty of being what it is: a liberal nation committed to freedom of speech and conscience, equality between the sexes, representative democracy and every other freedom that still defines the West."

Of course, the problem is that there are is a strong, right-wing contingent of Anglo Westerners that is very much in opposition to such notions as freedom of speech and equality between the sexes. As SPLC's Heidi Beirich points out, Oslo terrorist Anders Breivik recently published a 1500-page tirade in which he accused something called "cultural Marxism"--meaning liberalism and multiculturism--with destroying "European Christian Civilization." Lest we merely dismiss Breivik as a lone fanatic, we should keep in mind that

Fears of “cultural Marxism” have a long pedigree in this country. It’s a conspiratorial kind of “political correctness” on steroids — a covert assault on the American way of life that allegedly has been developed by the left over the course of the last 70 years. Those who use the term posit that a small group of German philosophers, all Jews who fled Germany and went to Columbia University in the 1930s to found the Frankfurt School, devised a cultural form of “Marxism” aimed at subverting Western civilization. The method involves manipulating the culture into supporting homosexuality, sex education, egalitarianism, and the like, to the point that traditional institutions and culture are ultimately wrecked.

A number of hate groups, including the racist Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), have raised the spectre of cultural Marxism as a way to explain contemporary events (click here to watch the CCC’s DVD on the theory). Some prominent conservatives also adopted the conspiratorial theory (culturalmarxism.org features MSNBC contributor Pat Buchanan and Texas Congressman Ron Paul). In 2002, William Lind of the Free Congress Foundation, a far-right outfit long headed by the now deceased Paul Weyrich (one of the founders of the Moral Majority), gave a speech about the theory to a Holocaust denial conference. Saying he was “not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred,” Lind went on to lay blame for “political correctness” and other evils on so-called “cultural Marxists,” who, he said, “were all Jewish” (Lind is mentioned in passing in Breivik’s manifesto).

As an apprentice librarian, I believe it's important to uphold everyone's right to free speech, even when this speech is hateful. But it's important to recognize that hateful speech does have consequences, and sometimes those consequences are extreme.

A synonym for "debt crisis"? How about "charade"?

Economist Michael Hudson, interviewed on Democracy Now! has an unusual way of pronouncing the word "charade," but his analysis of the artificial crisis around raising the federal debt ceiling is very revealing:

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Hudson, what could President Obama do?

MICHAEL HUDSON: He could say, "This debt ceiling has nothing to do with policy. You want to argue about the tax policy? Fine, let the Democrats and Republicans do it under non-crisis conditions. But this has nothing to do at all with the debt ceiling. If you want to refuse to increase the debt and plunge the economy into disaster, maybe you’d better talk to your campaign contributors and see what they want, because I know what they say. Your campaign contributors, in the Republicans, are my campaign contributors. They don’t like crises." And you’ll find that it’s all—the charade will—it’s just like pricking the balloon.

I've almost decided to just stop worrying about the debt limit. As Dean Baker points out, there could be some positive effects from failing to raise the debt limit:

If the question is default, that would end the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry. The downturn from a default would be very bad news for all of us, but the end of the supremacy of the U.S. financial industry would likely be good news for the rest of us. This would radically reduce the political power of this sector and their ability to steer the government to serve Wall Street's agenda. We could instead pursue economic policies that serve the rest of the economy with the resources consumed by the financial sector redeployed to more productive uses.

All work and no pay (but you could run off to Camp NaNoWriMo)

Over at Truthout, they've picked up this excellent description of the conditions faced by US workers today, from "part time" college instructors, to working mothers, to blue collar workers, to the people who work in your local big-box chain store. The original article, by Monica Bauerlein and Clara Jefferey, comes from Mother Jones.

On a bright spring day in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled "on the side." It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.

"Ah," he said, "the speedup."

His old-school phrase gave form to something we'd been noticing with increasing apprehension—and it extended far beyond journalism. We'd hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn't hold it together. (And don't even ask about family time.)

I so wish I had written it myself. I have so lived every sentence and paragraph of this article, and I bet you have, too. Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, because it holds the open secret to why ordinary people are getting kicked in the teeth by this economy. Fewer workers are working harder and harder for no increase in pay, while corporate profits are up 22 percent. (And the f***ers don't even want to pay taxes on their ill-gotten gains.)

But enough ranting for the moment. I'm heading off for Camp NaNoWriMo to play with my novel. You could go, too.

Sharing the pain to reduce the deficit

Richard Eskow at Campaign for America's Future has a good analysis of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders "Shared Sacrifice" plan for addressing the federal debt and deficit. As Eskow points out:

The question is whether we reduce the deficit only through spending cuts, or also by raising taxes on the rich. This should be an easy issue for Democrats to stand on ... and run on. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 72% of of those surveyed agreed that federal taxes should be raised for households making more than $250,000 - including 55% of Republicans. Yet even with the GOP leadership far to the right of the country on this issue, Democrats haven’t taken an unequivocal position.

Who's speaking for this Republican majority (and most everybody else) in Washington? Only Sen. Bernie Sanders, Socialist from Vermont. Sanders has unequivocally said that he won't support a deal to raise the debt ceiling unless it includes higher taxes on on the rich. Where are the Democrats? Nancy Pelosi's been marginalized from the discussions, even though a deal won't be possible without the support of Democrats in Congress. The White House and Harry Reid have refused to take a firm stand.

Sanders has gained lots of positive attention from progressives for his speech on the Senate floor Monday, in which he called for each dollar of cuts in social programs to be matched by a dollar of tax increases on the wealthy and corporations in order to achieve deficit reduction, as well as "significant cuts to unnecessary and wasteful Pentagon spending."

As has been noted in this space, the federal deficit and debt are something of a long-term problem for the United States, but their impact has been greatly exaggerated by Republicans looking for an excuse to  help the wealthy at the expense of ordinary people. CAF has a useful Web page that examines this issue in light of the current controversy. A link on that page leads to a commentary by Dave Johnson that illustrates the dangers of crashing the economy if Democrats cave in to Republican demands in order to raise the debt limit.

Most progressives understand that the deficit is not a serious immediate economic concern in a country that is on the verge of a double-dip recession. Cutting government spending at this point is likely to make the problem worse. But the Republicans are not likely to concede any of this. What Senator Sanders has offered is a practical and principled compromise. If Republicans truly believe that reducing the deficit and debt is the most serious problem facing the country, they need to be willing for the wealthy and the powerful to share the sacrifice necessary to make that possible.

If you would like to add your support to this position, Senator Sanders has started a petition to President Obama to urge him to follow this approach. CAF has a page that allows you to contact your senators and congressperson about this issue. Maybe this time the Republicans have gone too far. Maybe ordinary people will be willing and able to take their country back.

Update: If even a Fox News commentator thinks that US corporations should pay more taxes, maybe there is real hope for this solution. (Hat tip to US Uncut for that link.)

Sexual harassment is not the same as private misconduct

In a blog post at thenation.com, Amanda Marcotte dismisses "Weinergate" as destructive gossip. Dana Goldstein begs to differ, expressing anger that Rep. Weiner, an advocate for progressive issues such as universal healthcare, "would risk his important role in the public debate by giving strangers access to such embarrassing photographs He must have—should have!—known there was a chance the pictures could leak, putting his career at risk."

Echidne of the Snakes gets right down to the real issue, which is sexual harassment. (If you follow the link, you'll have to scroll down a bit to find the relevant section):

The case of Gennette Cordova is the one I have most evidence about. She did not invite Weiner's underpants picture and she was not pleased to receive it.

What happened to her next is disgusting. First, the press invaded her campus:

Media outlets from all over the world are calling and sending emails to staff at Whatcom Community College after a lewd photo was sent to a student from the Twitter account of a New York congressman.
Students at the college are being careful about talking to strangers on the campus, said KIRO 7 Eyewitness News North Sound reporter Lee Stoll.
WCC student Kelsey Rowlson said the campus has had a lot more visitors than usual this week.
"(The) 'Today' show was here today and then 'Good Morning America' called yesterday, … New York Times," said Rowlson, laughing.

This is a private individual, mind you. And here are the consequences, as she wrote about them some time ago:

The last 36 hours have been the most confusing, anxiety-ridden hours of my life. I've watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.
My friends have received phone calls from people claiming to be old friends of mine, attempting to obtain my contact information. My siblings have received tweets that are similar in nature. I began taking steps, though not quickly enough, to remove as much personal information from the Internet as possible.
Not because I "was exposed as Weiner's mistress" or because I "was responsible for the hack," as Gawker has suggested. I removed my information because I, believe it or not, do not enjoy being harassed or being the reason that my loved ones are targets of harassment.
I have seen myself labeled as the "Femme Fatale of Weinergate," "Anthony Weiner's 21-year-old coed mistress" and "the self-proclaimed girlfriend of Anthony Weiner."

It's like being pecked to death by vultures. Those labels she mentions appear to come mostly from the right-wing blogs. A summary can be found here, though I should warn that the quotes are sexist and racist and just plain nasty. Vultures. Did I already say that?

My only disagreement with Echidne is that vultures actually play a useful role in the circle of life. If vultures could read, they would probably be offended at being compared to the perpetrators of this media circus.

We're not broke

Hat tip to Mike Hall at the AFL-CIO NOW BLOG for posting a link to this eye-opening position paper from the Economic Policy Institute. According to the paper's author, EPI President Larry Mishel

To fully understand the growth trends in income and wealth in recent decades, one must recognize that the growth has been very unequal: households at the top of the scale have seen much faster growth in their incomes and wealth accumulation than have those in the middle or bottom of the distribution. For instance, the top 10% of the income distribution has claimed almost two-thirds of the gains in income since 1979, with the top 1% alone claiming 38.7% of those overall gains. Moreover, the wealth of the median (or ‘typical’) household was lower in 2009 than in 1983, in spite of the 40.3% growth in the average household’s wealth.4 When the median is substantially lower than the average, it indicates very lopsided growth, which has been the case for the past 30 years: there was no growth in wealth for the bottom 80% of households, while those in the top fifth enjoyed a 50% increase.

So if the private sector has grown for the past 30 years (albeit very lopsidedly), and the projections for the next 30 years indicate comparable total income growth for the economy, then what is the story for the public sector?

It is true that all levels of government are facing budget difficulties as a result of falling revenues during the recession. Higher unemployment and depressed economic activity have certainly depressed tax revenues, and past tax cuts at all levels of government have seriously eroded revenues as well. But some policymakers and pundits want to have it both
ways: choke off the revenue stream to governments while slashing budget expenditures. For instance, the current domestic spending cuts proposed by the House of Representatives for this year were smaller than the revenues lost from extending the upper-income Bush tax cuts and the inheritance tax cut legislated last December

In other words, the extremely rich have benefited much more than everybody else from the nation's increase in productivity over the past 30 years. The extremely rich have also enjoyed huge tax cuts. If the rich paid a bit more in taxes, we could afford government programs that help poor and middle-class people. Choosing not to raise taxes on the rich is just that--a choice.

The full EPI report is easy to read and fairly brief. You can see it (and download it) here.