Dohiyi Mir

The Social Contract was dead: to begin with.

Our first viewing of A Christmas Carol this season brings to mind a post from last year.  Just swap 1% for Simpson-Bowles...

ntodd

Thanksgiving Day Eve Snow!

Just about 4 inches so far...

ntodd

Depraved Disposition

Some semi-random quotes on my mind.

Adam Smith:

[Profit] is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of [business], therefore, has [no] connection with the general interest of the society...

...

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [business], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Economic Populist:

This system, with the highest rewards going to those who create nothing, is antithetical to a capitalist economy. We have turned the underlying premise behind our entire economic system on its head. Now, those who create little, if any, societal wealth receive the most wealth in return.

Moreover, the wealth now inappropriately channeled to Wall Street is harming our society in a myriad of ways: First, money inevitably leads to political power through donations, lobbying, access, and more. Inevitably, trading-related money is now further distorting our capitalist economy by influencing legislation for its own anti-capitalist benefits.

Robert Reich:

If there’s a single core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy. With money comes political power.

Bonus points for getting the post title (not Bentham, nor Brooks, but you'd be on the right track).

ntodd

Tuesday Princessblogging

Is that snow Pippa espies? No, it's Biggie, arch nemesis of Dear Departed Vinnie [1 year gone today], strutting around like he owns the place.

ntodd

So I'm On A Madison Kick

Today marks the 224th anniversary of James Madison's first Federalist essay--10th in the series--being published in New York's Daily Advertiser.  A germane excerpt from The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued):

It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Indeed.  Mayhaps it's time to call for a convention?

On a related note, as I've said a number of times I don't mean to over-venerate Madison or any of our founding generation.  Yet when we're confronted by "historians" such as Newt Gingrich and Michelle Bachmann who claim to have unique understanding of the Framers' original intent, I do find it instructive sometimes to return to the source.

Interestingly enough, the Father of the Constitution himself observed in Federalist 14 the week after his first contribution:

Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience? 

Something for the so-called "originalists" to consider: we can have high regard for the folks who bequeathed a Constitution to their posterity whilst also doing that which makes sense to us in today's environment.

ntodd

Our Framers On The Super Congress And #OWS

Other folks are doing a bang up job covering the Super Catfood Congress' failure (which is A Good Thing from where I sit).  But in following what the Austerity For Thee Elites are debating on the Hill and the Occupiers are pointing out at Zuccotti, UC Davis, et al, a couple things occur to me vis the framing of our Constitution.

On July 2nd, 1787, the actual anniversary of our declaring independence from Britain, the Constitutional Convention was debating the legislative branch.  You all know the big concerns of big states, small states, slave states, etc.  But you might not know that the folks in Philadelphia annointed a grand committee to resolve the impasse:

General PINKNEY. [P]roposed that a Committee consisting of a member from each State should be appointed to devise & report some compromise.

Mr. SHARMAN. We are now at a full stop, and nobody he supposed meant that we shd. break up without doing something. A committee he thought most likely to hit on some expedient.

...

Mr. RANDOLPH favored the commitment though he did not expect much benefit from the expedient.

...

Mr. WILSON objected to the Committee, because it would decide according to that very rule of voting which was opposed on one side [equal representation by 11 states in attendance]. Experience in Congs. had also proved the inutility of Committees consisting of members from each State

Mr. LANSING wd. not oppose the commitment, though expecting little advantage from it.

Mr. MADISON opposed the Commitment. He had rarely seen any other effect than delay from such Committees in Congs...

Mr. GERRY was for the Commitmt. Something must be done, or we shall disappoint not only America, but the whole world. 

Unlike the Super Committee's failure, that one did forge a multilateral compromise that ended up being, with some modification, the Great Compromise (for better or worse).  During the discussion, another issue relevent to today was brought up by Gouverneur Morris:

The Rich will strive to establish their dominion & enslave the rest. They always did. They always will...

A firm Governt. alone can protect our liberties. He fears the influence of the rich. They will have the same effect here as elsewhere if we do not by such a Govt. keep them within their proper sphere. 

We should remember that the people never act from reason alone. The Rich will take advantage of their passions & make these the instruments for oppressing them. The Result of the Contest will be a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism. The schemes of the Rich will be favored by the extent of the Country.

The people in such distant parts can not communicate & act in concert. They will be the dupes of those who have more knowledge & intercourse. The only security agst. encroachments will be a select & sagacious body of men, instituted to watch agst. them on all sides.

But don't count on "historian" Newt Gingrich or any One-Percenters recalling these tidbits of our founding...

ntodd

Drown The City Streets And Country Roads

We must try to radicalize the American people as so many of us have been radicalized--not by pushing them up against the wall, but by helping them to regain the sense of power over their destiny that should be their birthright.

 - The New Democrat, 29 August, 1970

Since #OWS is growing more powerful, and the powerful are flailing about with various degrees of violence in response, I guess it's inevitable that Kent State comes up in discussion.  A friend linked to this piece on FB yesterday, wherein Ann Coulter opines: It just took a few shootings at Kent State to shut that down for good.

Charles Pierce is right to be mad about the deadly implications in Coulter's comment, but he--understandably--missed an important myth contained therein.  As Allison Krause's younger sister, Laurel, wrote back in 2009 (emphasis mine):

To Allison, it was an obligation to show dissension to the government invading Cambodia. She made her decision, and we all know the outcome.
...
Allison’s death symbolizes the importance of our right to protest and speak our truths freely.
...
Looking back, did the Kent State protest and killings make a difference? Well, there was a huge response by Americans.

The Kent State shooting single-handedly created the only nationwide student strike with over 8 million students from high schools to universities speaking out and holding rallies afterwards.

Indeed, it turns out that violent repression often results in greater mobilization of the masses, and Kent State is a good example (emphasis again mine):

[T]he majority of Americans supported the Guard's actions at Kent State. Many parents viewed the shootings as the tragic lot of a generation weaned on permissiveness. This view directly contradicted student reaction and resulted in further division between generations. The country experienced its first national student strike, in which over one third of the Nation's campuses were involved. There were approximately one hundred strikes per day for the four days following the deaths, as universities throughout the nation were besieged by protesting students. One hundred thousand marched in Washington to protest the war and the killings at Kent. 

Jerry Rubin said afterward: It was the most significant day of all of our lives because in 48 hours more young people were radicalized, revolutionized and yippieized than in any single time in American history. 

What's more, in the wake of Kent and the Jackson State killings later that month, we saw "nearly a million marchers on both coasts in April, 1971; 12,000 activists performing civil disobedience in Washington in May; and 100,000 marching in 1972 against the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, and at the January, 1973, 'counter-inaugural' against the bombing of Hanoi."

Interestingly enough, Kent State happened in the midst of the first rumblings of student strikes, and the massacre appears to have galvanized the movement and became a rallying event as much as the Maine, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11 (emphasis mine once more):

The slight hope and deep frustration on which the Movement had been floating was transformed to pure despair and pure rage. There was nothing to talk about, only sides to be taken. After Nixon's speech announcing the invasion, scores of campuses had gone out on strike in a contagious competition. After Kent State, it was hundreds, and it was untenable for students opposed to the war to cooperate with the part of the System with which they had the most contact and the most control, their universities.

Not just for students but for their parents, who were part of the Silent Majority Nixon needed, Kent State was a stunning event. A gasp of recognition rippled through mainstream America: these were their kids being shot down! The madness of the war, if not the war itself, had finally come home. These "average Americans" could accept the use of state power to draft lower and middle-class kids...They could accept the unleashing of the raw power of the state against unruly and disdainful foreigners. They could even accept police killings of black activists...What they could not accept was the state turning on their own kind, and when parents of Kent State's dead went on television, bitterly denouncing the attack, the Silent Majority listened.
...
When I and two other strikers began leafleting in an advanced science class, the professor recovered from his astonishment at the sight of these hairy barbarians and politely asked us to wait a few minutes until class ended. We complied equally politely, but after Kent State, bands of raging strikers roamed the campus in search of offending classes, and Chicago went down for the count.
...
Now America's ruling elite worried less about how to win the war and more about how to avoid losing the country. The young were gone, the troops were unreliable, and unions were starting to break ranks with the hawkish AFL-CIO. America's house was becoming divided, and the owners' strongest instinct was to tone down the war as much as was needed to save their power at home.
...
By the fall of 1970, America's elite, unrepentant but pragmatic, had moved to a new consensus, in essence telling Nixon and congress to cut the necessary deal: the end of the war for the end of the Movement. Now the war was really over...The Movement dwindled and died from 1970 to 1973 as all US forces came home...After the US air and ground combat role ended with the signing of the 1973 peace accords, the Movement could only watch the slaughter from the sidelines. It had become a Sword of Damocles, as the SWP's Fred Halstead said, hanging over Nixon and then Ford should they try to increase aid or reintroduce US forces, but the sword stayed in its sheath.

Kent State didn't shut down protest.  It did scare folks, but it wasn't The Movement: it was the very people we were resisting who had a vested interest in the status quo.  When did The Movement fade away?  After they'd essentially won.

While the level of thuggery from our current regime hasn't quite reached Nixonian levels yet--eerie coordination between DHS and city police forces notwithstanding--it's still dangerous, disturbing, and yet entirely expected.  What's been most amazing to me is the continued use of various nonviolent tactics in the face of brutality.  It's also been gratifying that so many observers now understand how violent repression only strengthens #OWS.

Let's keep flooding the streets and public places.  We're winning...

ntodd

A Vision Softly Creeping

Even more powerful video from UC Davis:

From The Second Alarm:

A press conference, scheduled for *4:00pm* between the UC Davis Chancellor and police with local press on campus, did not end in an hour, as planned. Instead, a mass of Occupy Davis students and sympathizers mobilized outside, demanding to have their voice heard. After some initial confusion, UC Chancellor Linda Katehi refused to leave the building, attempting to give the media the impression that the students were somehow holding her hostage.

A group of highly organized students formed a large gap for the chancellor to leave. They chanted “we are peaceful” and “just walk home,” but nothing changed for several hours. Eventually student representatives convinced the chancellor to leave after telling their fellow students to sit down and lock arms (around 7:00pm).

Often when people think of nonviolent protest, they imagine lots of chanting and yelling and such.  Yetsilence (Method 52) should not be forgotten as an old, very strong shaming tactic:

Corporate silence has...been used as a method of expressing moral condemnation.  The silence may be a main method for expressing the attitude, or it may be an auxiliary method combined with another, for example a march or stay-at-home demonstration...

During the 1964 free speech controversy at the University of California in Berkeley, one night (about October 1) a crowd of students opposed to the free speech movement heckled and molested student demonstrators and threw eggs and lighted cigarette butts at them.  The demonstrators responded with simple silence, and after forty-five minutes of provocations the hecklers left.

Bravo to the UC Davis students who really seem to get what nonviolent action is all about.

ntodd

Repeating Myself

I said this elsewhere, but once more for good measure: I'm heartened by the incident at UC Davis. All regimes flail when confronted with real people power, and the point of OWS is to provoke a response, so this is an inevitable and probably necessary stage on the way to change. And the response by occupiers all over the US shows that folks understand how nonviolent, collective action works.

ntodd

Throwing Out The Baby...

...with the recycling.

ntodd

Friday Dogblogging

Tommy, er...Neppy takes a break from playing pinball. He's been doing a bit better and we seem to be zeroing in on the right level of insulin, which makes us all happy.

ntodd

Thursday Carblogging

The Druid Mechanic builds Carhenge.

ntodd

Familienähnlichkeit

Samuel gets philosophical, just like dear old Dad.

ntodd