Occupy Wall Street -- Who's the Target?

As Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco noted recently, the protests now known around the world as "Occupy Wall Street" are not a movement just because they are protesting. He argues that

The revolutionary pretensions of a youthful counter-culture aside, Occupy Wall Street must become genuinely representative of the vast majority of Americans now struggling as a result of inordinate corporate power and political influence, reflecting also the legitimate aspirations of small business owners, small farmers, and working families of the poor and middle-class majority whose voices in the established political process are too often drowned out by powerful corporate interests.

In other words, it's not enough to be angry or frustrated, or even to act on that anger in an organized way. If the people occupying downtowns across the country have accomplished anything, it's the articulation of a particular kind of anger at unequal distribution of wealth and the ways in which government promotes it. The protests serve as an outlet for people, especially yong people, to draw attention to the sense of helplessness they feel in the face of huge multinational corporations.

But the protests so far have only highlighted the helplessness, rather than alleviating it or addressing it. Some have compared the protests here to those in Tahrir Square in Cairo, where the mere presence of protesters toppled a regime. Both groups appear to be following the script of an elderly American named Gene Sharp, who has received a fair amount of attention recently. His central tenet, according to one account (I have not read his book myself)

is that the power of dictatorships comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern – and that if the people can decide together to withhold that obedience, a regime will crumble. “Dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are,” says Sharp, “and people are never as weak as they think they are.”

What's happening in Zucotti Square, however, can't really apply this idea. From whom are they withholding obedience? The police? The mayors? When protesters break curfew, are they highlighting the injustice of such rules? Are they trying to demonstrate that the government is incapable of enforcing such rules? If so, the efforts have been a dismal failure, because the latter is false and the former would not be widely accepted even among sympathetic Americans.

If the "movement" is achieve anything, then, it has to do something fundamentally different from what happened in Egypt or Tunisia, something even more radical and much more difficult.

I don't know whether they can pull it off, but in the next post I'll tell you what I think the aim is (or ought to be).

Foreign Affairs and the G.O.P.

The Republican Party likes to look tough. The latest indication of this desire was its effort to bar all non-US citizens from the judicial system in terrorism cases.

Their argument is that  "it would be dangerous to let terrorists exercise the protections against self-incrimination and other rights of civilian courts that they might use to avoid surrendering critical information to investigators." As the "investigators" involved keep saying, though, this line of reasoning is badly mistaken. Neither the Justice Department nor the DoD wants to lose the option of criminal trials because that option can get people into and throught the system more effectively and efficiently. Law enforcement and even spooks get better information that way.

Mainly, though, the push was an effort to look like the baddest boys on the block at a time when the president is looking pretty damn bad. Bush could not find or kill bin Laden, but Obama did. And has has been remarked on this blog on several occasions, Obama has killed more terrorists in one-to-one operations than any president in history. Not only that, but Obama did exactly what he said he would do in Libya: kick out a brutal dictator and then go home. Neither Bush did that.

That makes Republicans hopping mad. Michele Bachman reportedly complained that

Now we have a mess in Libya. We don't know who the ruling party will be going into Libya....There's tremendous uncertainty and chaos. And of course, when there's uncertainty and chaos in a nation, that's when you see trouble and potentially extremist elements that could come into power.

I suppose she can't see the desperate irony in these complaints, given her protrayal of Obama as wishy-washy compared to Bush, but I hope her audience can.

I don't much like the fact that Obama is trigger-happy; I think his policies are illegal and therefore not helpful in the long run. But the GOP has to get itself in order here.

David Brooks Advising Obama?

David Brooks is the kind of conservative I can read. He appeals to reason, maintains a laudable sense of consistency and fairness and proposes policies and ideas that attempt to help the whole country, not "the base" or the political expediency of the day. It was with some anticipation, then, that I read his recent column advising President Obama to tone down his rhetoric.

In many ways, he delivered in all the ways he generally does. His point was not to shoot the president down or to launch ad hominem attacks, but to suggest that Obama ought not abandon the virtue of calm and reason in the thick of political dogfights. Most of the time I would agree with this advice.

But I'm one the people who wants to see Obama make some hay these days. It's clear that Republicans are not trying to govern responsibly, preferring instead to do and say only what will get them short-term boosts in popularity. Too many Republican leaders, Mitch McConnell most of all, want only to attack in the interest of the next election. They are demagogues and bullies and need to be called on their nastiness.  In other words, it's not mere name-calling when Obama raises the negativity of his rhetoric. It's a form of leadership.

A Question on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

This is a remarkable moment. That people in so many American cities have taken to the streets at once may be unprecedented.

The central criticism of the movement so far has been that it is pointless -- that there is no agenda. And that may be.

But I wonder what effect it is having. Who is being pressured by the camps and occupations? Whose interests are affected? For me the issue is not about an agenda, but a target.

I plan to have my Dissent class work on this next week.

What the TEA Party Thinks is Success

Our political system faces a serious danger. It's not exactly new -- the United States has confronted similar problems periodically throughout its history -- but that does not make it any less severe.

The danger is the foolish, obstructionist behavior of people calling themselves "TEA Party conservatives." These people take pride in stopping progress, in ignoring empirical fact, in disrupting rational dialogue. They appeal to an ugly form of "patriotism" that emphasizes exclusion and strife over cooperation. They pretend that anger is a political platform rather than an emotion.

Take, for example, Michelle Bachman, who wants to make being gay or having an abortion illegal, but also wants to make it illegal to call for Sharia law. In other words, she wants to impose her religion while making it sound scary foir anyone else to try the same. She wants to protect Americans against those evil-doers who clean hotels in El Paso. She wants government to disappear completely while also ensuring that the economy grows. These are contradictory positions, but they sound good separately and they appeal to a certain irrational us-against-them mentality that drives many of her supporters.

How about Rick Perry, who insists that his environmental deregulation in Texas helped clean up the air? Not so, says "Larry Soward, a Perry-appointed member of the Texas agency's three-member ruling commission from 2001 to 2007....

Soward said that even though air quality in Texas has improved during Perry's tenure, the credit goes to increasing federal regulations, not state initiatives. With the budget cuts, the agency "simply won't have the resources, budgetary or staff-wise, to really provide a rigorous scrutiny over air quality permits or more rigorous inspections or enforcement."

Even that bastion of left-leaning MSM silliness, Business Week, can see how ridiculous Perry's claims are.And like Bachman, he tends to focus on how creepy "others" are: in his case, he finds Mitt Romney scary because he's a Mormon.

This is not leadership. We can't pull ourselves from the quagmire by crowing every time we avoid confronting our problems. Immigration is not the problem, and gay couples are not the problem. No rational person thinks they are.

Leadership consists in standing up to jingoism and racism and obstructionism and pointing us forward. The TEA Party is dangerous not only because its own ideas are stupid, but because it prevents less stupid ideas from coming forward.

President Obama and John Boehner and others have to make it clear that we will not tolerate calls by bullies for us to lash out while ignoring the problems we face.They have to confront the ignorant, dangerous voices of the TEA Party and make it clear that adults are in charge

Obama's Failures

Americans elected Barack Obama because he asked them to take a risk. Hope, the foundation of his platform, always entails a little doubt. Like faith, it suggests optimism in the face of fear or uncertainty. Considering the state of the American psyche in 2008, in which fear of the future and of ourselves dominated everything from our economy to our foreign policy, we needed a boost of hope.

Obama's first months in office reflected this aggressive optimism, as he promised early withdrawal from Iraq, quick release of the people held in Guantanamo Bay and a massive health care overhaul, among other things. In the spring of 2009 I heard Richard Haass speak at the Millbrook Country Club, and he said his major early concern about the Obama Administration was that it had kicked into high-energy emergency mode right from the start. Haass said that he worried, literally, about whether the president and his team were sleeping enough when they had the opportunity, and whether they would exhaust themselves before a real crisis arrived. Whether Obama fully recognized it or not, he was taking a lot of risks early, and that meant that his chances of failing were even higher than they otherwise would have been. He was not taking the cautiously politic approach taken by Bill Clinton, who was re-elected in part because he backed off from such measures.

The 2010 midterm elections demonstrated exactly what kind of risk he was taking. Republicans, led by fire-breathing TEA Party types, whomped on the Democrats and took control of the House. The two-house majority that allowed him to pass the huge health care bill dissolved, and he was left in a very tenuous position.Today, his pproval ratings are horrendously low, and the president has not done much to inspire the confidence so many of us had in him in 2008.

Of all people, National Review columnist Nick Shulz has given Obama the best road map out of this predicament. A few weeks ago, he wrote a piece explaining the enormous success of Steve Jobs. His central thesis is this: "Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails." He goes on to explain.

Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.  I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and "The Corner" on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.  All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.  

Obama has done too little to explain why his moves are indispensable. We need him, and the Democratic Party he leads, to be more aggressively optimistic. We are in a crisis now, just as Haass predicted, and we can't have the president's energy flag.

In Libya, the president implemented an extremely successful policy of intervention based not on jingoistic hyper-violence, but on cooperation and retsraint. We are not trapped in a a catastophic quagmire like in Iraq and we did not ignore a moral imperative like we did in Rwanda. Other nations are actually willing to work with the United States now because Obama has not asserted a claim to imperialistic dominance the way Republicans would prefer him to do.

All of us, including the insurance companies who fought against reform the most, are better off as a result of the health care Obama pushed despite the political peril it entailed. He has to show us why that is so. Now.

It's fashionable now to compare Obama and FDR, because Roosevelt faced similar problems. I'm not certain of the parallels. But Obama has moved us ahead in the ways he promised. It's not our job to be patient, it's now his to continue.

If the Courts Don't Function, Do we Have a Government?

I was called to jury duty last week, and while my "service" consisted of reporting to a jury room, offering to come back the next day and then being excused, I learned a lot.

The Commissioner began our day by explaining that the State of New York, because it had no money, had restricted the way the court system could operate. In order to avoid paying court personnel, like court reporters, any overtime at all, the state's Chief Judge, Jonathan Lippman, ordered that courts operate under strict time limits: lunch must start exactly on time and court must end no later than 4:30. Furthermore, the position of family court judge was never filled when the last judge retired. As a result, Judge Stephen Greller must fill two roles in about half the time. In the morning he clears his "part" of routine pleas and motions, handles family court issues and deals with administrative tasks. Then he can preside over criminal matters for exactly three hours a day.

As the Dutchess County Commissioner (whose name, oddly enough, had disappeared from the website within the last 24 hours) pointed out to us in the room, one consequence of all these cuts is that the wheels of the system grind even more slowly than usual. Jurors only have to work half days, but for twice as long. Delays in adjudication mean that some people have to settle civil cases when they ought to go before a judge. Criminal defendants must wait longer.

During the Civil War, in a case called Ex Parte Milligan, the US Supreme Court ruled that government could be considered in tact so long as the courts were open for business. If the courts could not function, civil government effectively did not exist and martial law could be imposed. What does it say about the state of New York that our courts are operating at half steam? Might it be worth funding them fully so we could say, in all honesty, that we do have a functioning government?