Live Blogging #OWS - 11/4/11

10:14 AM: Income inequality denialiam had been popping up before OWS, but since OWS, it's picking up speed. Kudos to Jonathan Chait for calling it what it is - bullshit!


10:21 AM: Tomorrow, November 5, is move your money day - so, if you're still banking with a mega bank (and many, many people no longer are), move your money. It's a small, but effective way to fight back against the 1%. And really, it's the least you can do. There are people sleeping in the cold, going to jail and getting pepper sprayed for the 99%. Can you really come up with an argument for not moving your money in light of their sacrifice?

10:44 AM: Allison Kilkenny on Oakland general strike.

10:48 AM: CIA following Facebook and Twitter.

3:43 PM: You really never want to be on the wrong end of a Matt Taibbi take down (Bloomberg edition):

To me, this is Michael Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette moment, his own personal "Let Them Eat Cake" line. This one series of comments allows us to see under his would-be hip centrist Halloween mask and look closely at the corrupt, arrogant aristocrat underneath.

Occupy Wall Street has not yet inspired many true villains outside of fringe characters like Anthony Bologna. But Bloomberg, with this preposterous schlock about congress forcing banks to lend to poor people, may yet make himself the face of the 1%’s rank intellectual corruption.

5:13 PM: Another Iraq veteran seriously injured by Oakland police.

5:16 PM: I'm really late to this, but here it is...



5:35 PM: Sarah Jaffe posted on twitter and it seemed apropo...



5:40 PM: Laurie Penny (Penny Red) on OWS.

5:42 PM:

7:44 PM: Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance.

8:15 PM: In which Ben Stein is a shameless hack and the mainstream media are vacuous whores...

I don't know if anyone saw Ben Stein over the last few days dissing OWS. The impression I got was that he was hawking a book or something and seemed to be taking a couple of cheap shots at OWS so he could gin up a little publicity. The three ineffective (and below-the-belt) shots were:

1) Banging bongo drums is useless. On one level, this is just run-of-the-mill, DFH red meat. But the claim of ineffectiveness is just patently wrong at this stage. I have interviewed several policy-wonk types over the past couple of weeks and they universally say that OWS has changed the agenda. You can be surprised by OWS's effectiveness, you can predict it won't translate into anything meaningful, but you can't say it has been ineffective.

2) "Get a job." Yep, bongo drums followed by "get a job" - clearly, this is someone who embraces the hackneyed. His argument is that people can get jobs if they would just lower their standards. This is a talking point I've heard more than once, but it's just false. Currently, there are 4.5 applicants for every 1 job opening (and that's all jobs). So, as a matter of arithmetic, it's just not true. Given that Ben Stein supposedly has economic training of some sort, he has to know this.

3) His third argument is that if OWSers are upset about fraud committed on Wall Street, they should go to law school and prosecute the people who committed fraud. Of course, just because you're a lawyer doesn't mean you can prosecute Goldman Sachs' executives for fraud. That decision is made by the DOJ and/or States' AG Offices. In other words, it's a political decision. Which, of course, is why it's not happening. As with Stein's reality-challenged "get a job" argument, the become-a-lawyer-and-prosecute-fraud argument doesn't hold up to even mild scrutiny.

My problem here really wasn't Ben Stein. He's washed up and needs to jump in any spotlight he can find. The disappointing part was the media just eating up the hippie punching and being so completely unfazed by such crap arguments. They basically had him on as a name-caller and didn't care at all that what he said made no sense. And the thing is, they lost journalistic integrity so long ago I really don't think we even notice how vacuous and whorish they've become - we're just used to it.