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Posted by Phoenix Woman on November 15, 2011
Watch the Murdoch Media go out of their way to ignore this:
Occupy Wall Street marcher Michael Glazer calls New York Police to report that his Torah was destroyed when protesters were ordered to temporarily leave Zuccotti Park for cleaning. Glazer is marching from New York to Washington, D.C. as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. (Nov. 15) (Elizabeth Flock/The Washington Post)
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Posted by Charles II on November 15, 2011
An exchange occurred on the Tyler Cowan thread that I would like to memorialize by promoting it to a full post. I suspect it is based on the wrongheaded idea that Mercury Rising is somehow anticapitalist, which is simply ridiculous. I think I speak for all of us in saying that Mercury Rising represents the best of the Founding Fathers ideals for the country: to establish a place where people could achieve their greatest potential without at the same time limiting or harming others (and, yes, I am aware that they failed at that task by not extending their conception of what constitutes a human being to slaves and the indigenous population). Capitalism can certainly be a part of that– no alternative system for the exchange of goods and services has been demonstrated to work in complex societies– but capitalism is not God.
So, here, unedited, is the initial comment, and what it inspired:
fairelaissez said November 15, 2011 at 12:09 am e
As painful as it is to make a logical comment on this ranting, here goes. Alan Greenspan betrayed Ayn Rand, her philosophy and himself. His opinion either way is irrelevant. Capitalism has never been tried, not fully. Not even halfway. We had a taste of it a hundred years ago. Little is left of it now. We have to start over.
Fairelaissez, that’s exactly what Marxists say about communism! Stalin and Mao betrayed it, it has never been tried, etc. etc. They will not concede the possibility that it contains a structural flaw.
But I think it’s more important that you’ve managed a fail at the most basic point, i.e., your implication that you are making a logical comment. Most prominent is the fact that the thread is about Rand, not about capitalism. Unless you believe that Rand represents the only flawless exponent of “real” capitalism, it does not follow that a failure to embrace Randianism represents a failure to embrace capitalism.
But the fail is far deeper than that. Logic implies well-defined terms, a limited set of reasonably defensible axioms, and a proposition which connects axioms into a theorem which itself is not falsifiable. On all accounts, your comment is a fail.
Since capitalism, according to you, has never actually existed, using it as a term is problematic. If I were to claim that we would all be happy if only we worshiped the Magic Duck, no one would take it seriously. But because there are a number of people with a lot of money who sincerely wish for a capitalism that doesn’t cause human suffering, the same unsubstantiated claims circulate decade after decade.
Well, let’s concede that in a real world we always deal with impure quantities. If we have experience with 99% pure gold, we probably have a pretty good idea of how 100% gold would behave. It’s always possible that there could be a discontinuity of behavior, but if the ideal is greater than what can be achieved, we cannot posit such a discontinuity. We have to argue our case through careful extrapolation.
The generally agreed upon definition of capitalism, let’s say Wikipedia’s (“elements of capitalism include private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit, competitive markets, and wage labor”), does not include Rand’s vision of (again, Wikipedia) “a market system with no interference by states.” So, you wish to use a definition that resembles a Magic Duck in that most people simply don’t accept it.
But, ok, let’s humor you. A market system with no interference by states it is. Such states do exist in the form of small villages. Unfortunately for your case, they tend to be socialistic. People may not be coerced by the state to share their bounty, but they do not engage in the sort of sociopathic behavior that Rand advocates, if only for a healthy fear of being shamed publicly. And, before you take “sociopathic” as some sort of insult, it is fully grounded in fact. She based one of her fictional heroes on William Edward Hickman, a man who kidnapped and dismembered a 12 year old girl. In this case, Wikipedia does not do justice to the man or Rand’s relationship to him, so I refer you to this and this. If you are unwilling to explore those links, then you do not know Rand.
But, of course, Rand’s little idiosyncrasies do not discredit the Magic D…er, pure capitalism.
click to continue reading
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in abuse of power, Ayn Rand, capitalism as cancer | Tagged: Ayn Rand, capitalism, laissez faire, objectivism | 7 Comments »
Posted by Phoenix Woman on November 15, 2011
This just in (hat tip David Dayen):
Deputy Mayor Sharon Cornu has resigned, effective immediately, the second member of the mayor’s team to submit her resignation Monday and the fourth in a month.
She spoke with Oakland Tribune reporter Sean Maher about the decision:
“I felt I wasn’t being effective,” Cornu said in an interview, adding that her work didn’t seem to be meshing well with the style of Quan’s existing team. Cornu said she made her decision last week. She had been in the post a little less than a year.
[...]
Quan’s longtime friend, confidant and legal adviser Dan Siegel also quit Monday, saying he couldn’t support the mayor’s choice to dismantle the camp. Police Chief Anthony Batts quit four weeks ago and public relations guru Nathan Ballard, a respected crisis communication expert hired by Quan in the wake Batts’ departure, also quit.
City Hall sources said City Administrator Deanna Santana was ready to resign over how Quan handled the Oct. 25 police raid on the camp, but was talked out of it by another City Hall leader.
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Posted by Phoenix Woman on November 15, 2011
From MyFDL, confirming what was long suspected:
Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”
Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.
Meanwhile in New York City, the NYPD Chief Ray Kelly and his $20-billion puppet mayor Michael Bloomberg blatantly defied a judge’s order when they cleared out Occupy Wall Street in the wee hours this morning:
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Zuccotti Park would remain closed while the city sought clarification on a judge’s order earlier in the morning ordering the city to allow protesters back into Zuccotti Park.
Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Lucy Billings issued the temporary restraining order at 6:30 a.m. barring the city and Brookfield Properties, which owns Zuccotti Park, from evicting Occupy Wall Street protesters or preventing them from returning to the park with their tents and tarps. About 200 people were arrested during the overnight raid that saw hundreds of police in riot gear surround the park.
Bloomberg, obviously aware that the entire world knows he’s Ray Kelly’s puppet, and perhaps as a way to get out in front of the long-suspected rumors that the various assaults on the Occupy protests nationwide were coordinated, tried to proclaim that the decision was “mine and mine alone”. However, there are pictures of Kelly standing at the barricades during the eviction, and his mayoral-election organ, the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post, says he was there:
Under the watchful eye of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, hundreds of cops marched on the lower Manhattan encampment shortly before 1 a.m. and handed out fliers ordering demonstrators to get out and remove their personal property.
By the way, back in Oakland, Quan’s own legal adviser, Dan Siegel, has quit in disgust over her forced eviction of the Occupy Oakland protesters:
“No longer Mayor Quan’s legal adviser,” Siegel tweeted in the early hours before the second Occupy Oakland evacuation. “Resigned at 2am. Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators.”
The move comes after weeks of disappointment and frustration in his old friend’s leadership tactics, Siegel told Mercury News, stemming from the beginning of the Occupy Oakland protests.
“I thought the decision to evict the campers on [October] the 25th was a really bad decision,” Siegel said, “and city’s been turned upside-down by it.”
Quan’s trying to downplay the whole thing, and the national media’s largely ignored it even as they go out of their way to spread anti-Occupy stories, but this is a world-shaker in Oakland.
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Posted by Phoenix Woman on November 15, 2011
If this surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention:
Athens’ international lenders have pushed for cuts to the 750 euro minimum monthly wage to boost competitiveness, a welcome call for Germans, French and other voters in the currency area who have bridled at having to bail out Greece.
But for people like 33-year-old magazine editor George Theonas, that wage floor is a myth, as his and other companies use the crisis to skirt legal pay rules by tearing up collective wage deals and forcing employees into contract work.
“I can’t pay my bills and I can no longer live without my parents’ support,” said Theonas, 33, whose employer moved him from permanent to temporary status, making 700 euros a month working 12 hours a day, seven days a week instead of the four days on his contract.
“I’m not looking for a new job. There is nowhere to go. This is Greece,” he said.
Theonas is one of the lucky ones. Others at his company earn as little as 300 euros a month under trainee schemes that are extended for years, even though they do the work once bestowed only on full-time employees.
With Greek unemployment now at a euro-era record high of 18.4 percent, workers are forced to stay put, as their employers say thousands more people are standing in line for their jobs.
“Most of my friends are unemployed. I only hear of people losing their jobs. What choice do I have,” said Theonas.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: bailout, euro, Europe, Germany, Greece | 1 Comment »
