Category Archives: Social values

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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#OccupyWallStreet Visits the Upper East Side

What a pleasant surprise. I was on the phone and heard chanting and drumbeats outside, and lo and behold, it was OccupyWallStreet across the street from me (on the west side of Park Avenue). Unfortunately, I have meetings this PM and so I could only run out briefly to see them on the street, but this was a perfect day to come this far uptown. The police told me they had walked up from Zuccotti Park, that’s a good 7-8 mile hike.

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Twitter Reports of Cops Beating Participants in #OccupyBoston, Breaking Up Encampment

The police decided to clear out the OccupyBoston crowd overnight.

The video footage shows the police moving in, then about 90 seconds of crowd unhappiness, and then it gets a bit chaotic. It looks like some veterans were forced to the ground with the crowd calling “Shame”.

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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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Michael Hudson on #OccupyWallStreet and the Need to Treat Banks as Utilities

On the Real News Network, Michael Hudson discusses some possible ideas for reforming finance to deal with the concerns raised by the OccupyWallStreet movement. I’ve noticed both here and on some news stories I heard in passing on MSNBC on Friday that the OccupyWallStreet movement has already succeeded in expanding the space of what is now being discussed as remedies.

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Capital is enough

By Sell on News, a macro equities analyst. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

The global economy is not simply suffering from a European debt crisis. Debt itself is in trouble. This morning on Radio National there was an interview with David Graeber, Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmith University London and author of “Debt — the first 5,000 years.” Graeber, who is involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He made the point that debt is a promise and then asked the question: ”Why are some promises considered more important than others?” Why is a promise to repay to a bank considered inviolate, while the politicians’ promise to say, eliminate university fees (in the case of the UK) considered something easily broken because “circumstances have changed”.

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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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Why #OccupyWallStreet Doesn’t Support Obama: His “Nothing to See Here” Stance on Bank Looting

Despite the efforts of some liberal pundits and organizers (and by extension, the Democratic party hackocracy) to lay claim to OccupyWallStreet, the nascent movement is having none of it. Participants are critical of the President’s bank-coddling ways and Obama gave a remarkably bald-face confirmation of their dim views.

As Dave Dayen recounts, Obama was cornered into explaining why his Administration has been soft of bank malfeasance. His defense amounted to “They’re savvy businessmen”: “Banks are in the business of making money, and they find loopholes.”

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Poll Shows Majority of Veterans Doubt Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Worth Fighting

Pew Research conducted a large scale survey of veterans (divided into pre and post 9/11) and civilians on their attitudes toward the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. While there have been a number of news reports on the results, they are actually somewhat confusing because the findings in the data aren’t easily boiled down to snappy summaries.

For instance, the headline of this post, which is similar to typical MSM headlines, is technically accurate but somewhat obscures the survey results.

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Matt Stoller: The Anti-Politics of #OccupyWallStreet

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Journalist Amy Goodman arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention

What do the people at #OccupyWallStreet actually want? What are their demands? For many people, this is THE question.

So let me answer it. What they want… is to do exactly what they are doing.

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