Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Marshall Auerback was on Fox Business last week talking about the European sovereign debt crisis. He said he is very concerned not just about the national solvency problem in the euro zone but also about the debt deflationary policy remedies now being implemented across the whole of the euro zone. He […]
Read more...Jon Walker at FireDogLake teases out an issue that has probably occurred to many of you: how exactly have these big, and now coordinated, crackdowns on OWS been paid for? In cash-strapped Oakland, for instance, the first big raid, the one in which Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen was critically injured, the city called in forces from 17 different operations. In New York, as the Grey Lady reported in loving detail, the police engaged in extensive, secret rehearsals before going live. This wasn’t policing. It was a military operation.
Read more...By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled
See the guy in the photo there, dangling an ax from his left hand? That’s Greece’s new “Minister of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks” Makis Voridis captured back in the 1980s, when he led a fascist student group called “Student Alternative” at the University of Athens law school. It’s 1985, and Minister Voridis, dressed like some Kajagoogoo Nazi, is caught on camera patrolling the campus with his fellow fascists, hunting for suspected leftist students to bash. Voridis was booted out of law school that year, and sued by Greece’s National Association of Students for taking part in violent attacks on non-fascist law students.
Read more...A longstanding NC reader and lower Manhattan resident e-mailed me:
Read more...I was curious about the first couple of pictures in this set from the NY Times. How were they able to get pictures of the NYPD gathering by South Street Seaport, before the raid?
We’ve commented how the police kept the media far away during the crackdown in Zuccotti Park last night so as to prevent capture of images of the efforts to clear the square. There were reports at the time via the live feed of protestors being tear gassed and dragged away by their arms and legs, and later of the use of pepper spray and batons.
This video was from this morning, when the police were keeping protestors out of the park, an illegal violation of a court injunction. The protestors show a copy of the court order and are (predictably) denied access to the park. The woman was punched at around 1:45; the footage does not show the actual blow, but you can pretty clearly infer from her suddenly being on the ground in obvious pain what happened.
If this is what you see, imagine what happened last night, with no cameras and videos to constrain police aggression.
Read more...The crackdowns on the Occupations around the US are as ugly as they seem.
The area around Zuccotti Park was subject last night to a 9/11 level lockdown over peaceful, lawful protests by a small number of people. No credible case has been made by the officialdom that the protestors had violated any laws. Martial law level restrictions were in place. Subways were shut down.Local residents were not allowed to leave their buildings. People were allowed into the area only if they showed ID with an address in the ‘hood. Media access was limited to those with official press credentials, which is almost certainly a small minority of those who wanted to cover the crackdown (the Times’ Media Decoder blog says that journalists are describing the tactics, as we did, as a media blackout). Moreover, reading the various news stories, it appears they were kept well away from the actual confrontation (for instance, the reported tear gassing of the Occupiers in what had been the kitchen, as well as separate accounts of the use of pepper spray and batons). News helicopters were forced to land. As of 10 AM, reader Wentworth reported that police helicopters were out in force buzzing lower Manhattan.
Gregg Levine tells us, based on a BBC interview of Mayor Quan of Oakland, that as some readers and this blogger speculated last night, the 18 police action was a national, coordinated effort. This is a more serious development that one might imagine.
Read more...I just got the alert via e-mail. They are doing open mike now and calling for people in NYC to come to Zuccotti Park in large numbers.
I’m not clear on the immediate conflict. The current open mike discussion has a black disabled person objecting to police stop and frisk, which is apparently being done in the park. Will go to Twitter and update.
Live stream:
Read more...This is the last day of Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Don’t miss the chance to participate. So far, over 840 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar, another credit card portal or by check (see here for details). Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and our current target.
Welcome to our new guest blogger Susan of Texas, who writes at The Hunting of the Snark. Follow her on Twitter at SusanofTexas.
Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband’s family; but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that rising inequality and social unrest go hand in hand. Wealth and therefore power in the US are becoming concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and the deliberate exercise of this power has created one of the highest levels of inequality in the world.
Read more...By Mark Ames, author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine who writes regularly at The Exiled.
If you’ve been reading Naked Capitalism for any period of time without giving back in donations—and most of us have been hooked from the time we discovered Yves Smith’s powerful, sharp voice and brilliant mind—then you you’ve been getting away with murder. Naked Capitalism is that rare blog that makes you smarter. Smarter about a lot of things, but primarily about Yves’ area of expertise, finance.
By a quirk of historical bad-luck, the American Left has gone two generations without understanding finance, or even caring to understand. It was the hippies who decided half a century ago that finance was beneath them, so they happily ceded the entire field—finance, business, economics, money—otherwise known as “political power”—to the other side. Walking away from the finance struggle was like that hitchhiker handing the gun back to the Manson Family.
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. Over 620 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check or another credit card portal, on our kickoff post and one discussing our current target.
Dean Baker is co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He previously was a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. His latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism, has recently been released to download free of charge on the CEPR website.
Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
Philip Pilkington: The overarching thesis of your book The End of Loser Liberalism is quite a provocative one. This isn’t just a book about economics as such. Instead, if I were to venture using a term that appears to be coming back in fashion, it’s a work of political economy. You write that the current political debate – wherein the left are seen as restricting and constraining the ‘free market’ while the right are seen as letting it free to work – is completely skewed. You write that liberals and progressives need to take a different line on this. Could you explain this basic premise in a little more detail, please?
Dean Baker: The conventional view is that conservatives place a huge value on market outcomes. It is common for progressives or liberals to deride them as “market fundamentalists”, as though they worship the market as an end in itself. By contrast, liberals/progressives are supposedly prepared to use the hand of government to override market outcomes in order to promote goals like poverty reduction or equality. I argue in the book that this view is completely wrong, and worse that it plays into the hands of the right.
I argue that the right has quite deliberately structured markets in a way that have the effect of redistributing income upward. The upward redistribution of the last three decades did not just happen, it was engineered.
Read more...Corrente has a post up by Affinis on a potentially important, and troubling development at OccupyOakland, namely, the fact that the movement has a relatively small group within it that believes in the use of violence to achieve its ends. It numbers are roughly 200 members out of an estimated 7,000 to 40,000 that have participated in demonstrations. However, they have disproportionate influence on the decisions made at the General Assembly, since many of the Occupy participants are transient (as in participate in demonstrations only or only occasionally show up for GA) while the black bloc is a much bigger proportion of the group that stays overnight on a consistent basis.
Affinis give some insight into why this is view is being tolerated:
Read more...Lambert Strether pointed to this video of a Real News Network interview of the very well meaning and articulate Norman Solomon. Unfortunately it also serves as a object lesson of why progressives are losing.
Read more...It is interesting to see how the popular desire for Occupy Wall Street to issue demands is leading various pundits and experts to boil down and update their views on what really needs to be done to fix the financial and political systems. (Note we are of the minority view that OWS is being shrewd in not acceding to pressure to reduce its desire for broad-based change to soundbites and an easily-to-digest program.
Bill Black give his usual forthright views on this segment on Real News Network. Enjoy!
Read more...Reader Sufferin’ Succotash asked whether Papandreou would turn out to be Pericles or Petain. We now have our answer. His finance minister, Evengelos Venizelos, went to the G20 in Cannes (going directly after being discharged from the hospital, meaning he almost certainly did not inform and therefore intended to betray Papandreou) and issued a statement arguing that the need to get the next cash dole from the bailout program and maintain “international credibility” trumped all other considerations. Papandreou backed down and canceled the referendum.
Even though everyone who is not part of the problem recognizes that an eventual Greek default (or much deeper debt restructuring) is inevitable, it seems the Greek population must be ground into the dust first to discourage any rebellion against the new order of rule by creditors. The wild card is whether the level of civil disobedience rises to the point where the government has to change course. We’ve already read of serious signs of breakdown: widespread failures to collect trash, frequent power interruption, such reduced schedules for public transportation that it becomes difficult for those who still have jobs to get to work.
Although this segment was taped before the Papandreou volte face, this discussion on Democracy Now with Michael Hudson illuminates some of the underlying dynamics behind this showdown.
Read more...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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