Category Archives: Social policy

#OccupyOakland General Strike Closes Port, 5th Biggest in US

I had been somewhat concerned at OccupyOakland’s call for a general strike, since failure to have a tangible impact would undermine rather than enhance the notion that the movement has power. A visible failure could easily produce a shift in the tone of ever-fickle press coverage.

But this first effort by an Occupation at flexing its muscles seems to have gone well. One indicator: the Financial Times took note of the strike, placing the story on the front page of its Web edition. Key extracts:

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Police Crackdown Effort at #OccupyOakland Raises Bigger Questions About Movement Evolution

Most readers by now no doubt have heard about the aggressive police crackdown at Occupy Oakland on Tuesday, in which police critically wounded Iraq war vet Scott Olsen while using tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to clear Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. The footage right before the tear gassing began does not show any signs of provocation by the protestors, but other reports say that a small group which most believe were anarchists rather than OWS members, had engaged in aggressive actions earlier.

Like many of the police efforts to rein in Occupations, this one seems to have backfired.

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On Making Unions a Productive Social Force

It has become fashionable to criticize unions in the US, when many of their shortcomings result from corrupt or at best unimaginative leadership. The fact that we have child labor laws, restrictions on working hours, workplace safety rules, were all the result of hard fought battles by workers. And as an article in Foreign Affairs stresses (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck), Europe has much less income inequality than the US, which the author George Packer sees as a serious and difficult to remedy contributor to America’s decline. Strong unions have been a significant contributor to Europe’s less skewed distribution.

This discussion on Real News Network describes how unions have unduly narrowed their focus and gives some ideas and examples for ways they could be more effective on their own behalf and for the broader community

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Iceland: From Crisis to Constitution

Yves here. I’m intrigued by the way Iceland’s post crisis experience does not get the coverage it warrants. This is a country whose banking system collapsed and its citizens suffered months of real privation (I dimly recall that it was difficult to import medicine, for instance, because no finance more or less means no trade). Yet after a period of serious dislocation, things somehow got sorted out, and with a cleaned up financial system and a much cheaper currency, the Icelandic economy has rebounded nicely.

One aspect of this housecleaning was writing a new constitution. Its preamble calls for a just society, an idea which seems to be at the core of OccupyWallStreet’s demands: “We, the people of Iceland, wish to create a just society with equal opportunities for everyone.” I think readers will find both the process of developing and ratifying this document as well as its major provisions to be eye-opening. The model for the US Constitution was the Corsican constitution of 1755. Could this Icelandic document also have a disproportionate impact?

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On Wall Street’s Private Police in NYPD Uniforms

We reported a bit more than a week ago on how JP Morgan had given a troublingly large donation of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. As we recounted, that foundation was established in 1971, which was when the city was sliding into its fiscal crisis, as a way for companies and individuals to bolster the NYPD’s budget. And even though in theory contributions go into a general coffer, one has to suspect in practice that big donors will get more attention from the cops. Even though this donation was the biggest the police foundation had ever received, it was still peanuts relative to the total NYPD budget. Nevertheless, as Richard Kline pointed out, the gesture was significant:

To me, the telltale with the JippyMo ‘donation’ is that it was _publicly_ announced. Jamie the Demon and his top heads want the public to know that the banksters LIKE the police, as opposed to those daft, sloppy, protestors.

The bankster/Kochster assault on unions was excruciatingly badly timed. It aims directly at public service unions. At their pensions. At their staffing levels. At their equipment. One of the most cogent remarks coming out of the intitial Wisconsin action (before the org-heads diverted it into failing to elect more Democrats) came from the police there, to the effect that lower staffing levels threatened _their_ safety. The local police were markedly sympathetic to the capitol building occupation in Madison. Some of this has clearly been whispered in the ear of the financial oligarchs by their paid consultants to the effect that alienating the police is not in the interests of the 1%. I don’t think that the sum of money is especially relevant or substantial. What matters is that it is a public demonstration that the banksters _like_ the police, with the implication that they will be prepared to drop a little more loose change on them if they’ll clap the rabble into Rikers like good fellows.

And it turns out that big financial service firms have also been buying protection via the NYPD. Literally.

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On #OccupyWallStreet and the Power of Open Source and Consensual Processes

I’m fascinated by how many political operatives seem keen to tell the participants in OccupyWallStreet that they are doing lots of things wrong, and really should shape up and follow traditional lines, like issuing demands and seeking to apply pressure in more conventional ways. Given that the movement is getting lots of free and mainly favorable PR and is mushrooming all over the US, there does not seem to be a lot of empirical support for this view.

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#OccupyWallStreet Publishes First Issues of “The Occupied Wall Street Journal”

The first issue of “The Occupied Wall Street Journal” was published last week, and I’m surprised that it hasn’t gotten much notice, given that reader Deontos tells me they printed 50,000 copies. It’s a quick read but nevertheless helps give a feel for what the movement is about. We’ve posted the second issue here, which puts more stakes in the ground than the first (both contain a section which lists five things that people who want to help can do now)

The first is an initial statement of principles, or more accurately, “Principles of Solidarity”:

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Alan Grayson Shreds P.J. O’Rourke on #OccupyWallStreet

One of the intriguing things about the commentary by the media and political operatives on OccupyWallStreet is how often they try to denigrate it, usually via ridicule and attacks on the appearance or presumed demographics of the participants. The underlying message is that the protestors are slovenly unproductive losers and hence have nothing in common with respectable middle class people. That flies in the face of the evidence on the ground, where the crowd in Zuccotti Park has gotten to be both older than it was at its inception and more mixed ethnically, and many of the Occupy demonstrations in other cities have solid representation of the middle aged and retirees.

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On #OccupyWallStreet and the Danger of Elite Capture

We’re now in the process of clearing up an interesting blogoshere miscommunication. Paul Krugman made a gracious reply to a remark in Links on a post of his on OccupyWallStreet that I was very keen about (Krugman gets it) and a related New York Times op ed that I liked save one paragraph which rubbed me the wrong way:

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Philip Pilkington: Marginal Utility Theory as a Blueprint for Social Control

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

A prisoner kneels before the watchtower in a drawing of Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’. The Panopticon was an architectural form that Bentham envisioned for a variety of social institutions. The idea was to have a central platform where an observer could cast their gaze over all the observed, thus making them feel constantly under watch and ensuring, in Bentham’s own words, “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Jeremy Bentham is also the father of modern utility theory – a theory often associated with individual liberty, which is actually at heart a blueprint for social control.

It’s not hard to forget just how nonsensical, simplistic and childish the so-called theory of marginal utility is.

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Mark Provost: Occupy Boston – Day One (and Other OccupyWallStreet Updates)

Yves here. Police efforts to contain OccupyWallStreet have had the opposite effect to what the officialdom no doubt assumed would happen: that the demonstrators would either become discouraged or become violent, which would make it easy to discredit them. Instead, the macing of a group of women last weekend, followed by the arrest of over 700 people on Brooklyn Bridge on Saturdy, has given the movement legitimacy and media attention. It was the lead item on the BBC website over the weekend.

Press efforts to diminish the potential of this effort are now shifting.

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Is JP Morgan Getting a Good Return on $4.6 Million “Gift” to NYC Police? (Like Special Protection from OccupyWallStreet?)

No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.

“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

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Friedrich Hayek Joins Ayn Rand as a Hypocritical User of Medicare

We’ve been a bit hard on the left of late, so we figured we’d take some steps to balance our programming. Mark Ames, who has been doggedly on the trail of the Koch brothers, found a delicious failure to live up to his oft-repeated standard of conduct by a god in the libertarian pantheon, Friedrich Hayek. And this fall from grace was encouraged one of the chief promoters of extreme right wing ideas in the US, Charles Koch.

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