November 25, 2011 - Daily Blog

Occupy Wall Street Sign of the Day

Good idea cute girl!

12:02 AM: Michael Moore for my Mom (and this is the video you wanted Mom - everyone should watch it, it's amazing):



12:05 AM: OPD raid Occupy Oakland Thanksgiving.



12:15 AM: Reports of twitter censorship.

12:26 AM: New Citizen's Radio with OWS segment from Occupy Oakland journalist Susie Cagle.

12:54 AM: I'm a 90% Eisenhower era-levels girl, but I'd take 70%. The 70% top marginal work  is Diamond and Saez, but on a side note, Pikety and Saez deserve the Nobel IMO: Yes, it was just a study of the data in 2004 that showed the gains were going to the top 1% of the top 1%, but it changed everything. When you say "We Are the 99%," you owe something to Pikety and Saez. Here's Paul Krugman helping us all out by translating the Diamond and Saez argument into plain english.

1:35 AM: These are dated, but I'm catching up so, you can too:

• OWS and Creative Protest
• The rise of paramilitary police forces.
• I am so interested in Occupy Homes. More here.
• Pepper Spray wont kill the movement.
• The People's Library limps on (Destroying books Bloomberg? For shame).
• Civil society at ground zero.
• The Democratic promise of Occupy Wall Street.
• Woman miscarries after being beaten and pepper sprayed by police.
• Taibbi - Welfare fraud = prison; commit fraud and crashed world economy = walk free.

1:42 AM: David DeGraw of Amped Status on OWS.



10:47 AM: Here's the Pepper Spraying Cop Tumblr with lots more hilarious photo-shopped pics. (h/t friend of the blog, rjs). Make sure to see yesterday's Daily Blog as well. Here were my favorites:

11:26 AM: Matt Taibbi on the UC Davis Pepper Spray incident:

Anyone who commits violence against a defenseless person is lost. And the powers that be in this country are lost. They’ve been going down this road for years now, and they no longer stand for anything.

All that tricked-up military gear, with that corny, faux-menacing, over-the-top Spaceballs stormtrooper look that police everywhere seem to favor more and more – all of this is symbolic of the increasingly total lack of ideas behind all that force.

It was bad enough when we made police defend the use of torture and extrajudicial detention. Now they’re being asked to defend mass theft, Lloyd Blankfein’s bailout-paid bonus, the principle of Angelo Mozilo not doing jail time, and 28% credit card interest rates.

How strong can anyone defending those causes be? These people are weak and pathetic, and they’re getting weaker. And boy, are they showing it. Way to gear up with combat helmets and the the full body armor, fellas, to take on a bunch of co-eds sitting Indian-style on a campus quad. Maybe after work you can go break up a game of duck-duck-goose at the local Chuck E Cheese. I’d bring the APC for that one.

Bravo to those kids who hung in there and took it. And bravo for standing up and showing everyone what real strength is. There is no strength without principle. You have it. They lost it. It’s as simple as that.

12:12 PM:  Michael Moore's proposals for OWS "demands."

1:02 PM: I have an interview with Corey Robin in editing. His book Reactionary Mind - which is a must read IMO - takes on the idea that Modern (a/k/a Movement) Conservatism is fundamentally different than traditional Burkean conservatism. I'm still not quite convinced (even though Corey easily swatted down my comparison of William F. Buckley and Sarah Palin). This David "Axis-of-Evil" Frum piece is a great example of the types of defections that fuel my continued skepticism:

Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

2:02 PM: Remember not to shop today - it's Black Friday.

2:04 PM:  I'm updating my OWS columns (on the left) - it's not supposed to be comprehensive, but I'd like to have the really important pieces. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

2:16 PM: Paul Krugman from yesterday : We Are the 99%. So, here's the conclusion:

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.        

When Krugman asks whether we should hate the 1%, he's eluding to the elites' claim that calls for redistribution of wealth is motivated by envy. I reject the notion that anyone is envious, but I also reject Krugman's claim that the 1% do not deserve condemnation. To the extent the 1% have committed fraud, to the extent the 1% are motivated by greed, to the extent the 1% place private gain over the public good, to the extent the 1% receive societal goods in excess of their societal contribution, to the extent the 1% are indifferent to human suffering, they are deserving of condemnation and scorn. That's not about envy, it's about justice.

4:12 PM:  Naomi Wolf on the police crackdowns:

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

(make sure to read the whole thing, it gets pretty scary)

4:30 PM:  Occupy the Highway marchers reach DC.

7:25 PM:  10 violent moments caught on tape.

7:28 PM:  Why are police treating Americans like military threat.

7:36 PM:  So, this is old news, but I missed it and it's so important it HAS to be covered to death. Basically, a memo of a PR firm plan to smear OWS was discovered - the price was a very reasonable $850K.

8:40 PM: Apparently, Occupy Philly is facing eviction Sunday at 5:00 PM. Occupy LA is headed towards a showdown.

UPDATE: With respect to Dept. of Homeland Security crack down, please see POTENTIAL CORRECTION on November 26, 2011 Daily Blog.