Welcome to our regime of political capitalism, where merit matters but political connections matter even more. In an unalloyed capitalist system, money flows to those who offer goods and services of value to consumers. In a political capitalism system, money flows to special interest groups with friends in high places.
In his 2018 book Political Capitalism, Florida State University economist Randall Holcombe defines it as a regime marked by cooperation between political and economic elites for their mutual benefit at the expense of the masses. Among the benefits pursued by elites, of course, is maintenance of their positions of power.
The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement was born from opposition to political capitalism. Indeed, OWS members rightly sensed that financial bailouts and the Federal Reserve's rescue of the banking system during the Great Recession were products of a system favoring politically connected bankers and their friends in Congress. OWSers denounced the recipients of government favors as the "one percent" and contrasted them with the "99 percent" who were often left to shoulder the high costs of such policies.
What the OWS movement failed to see, however, is that it's not just Wall Streeters who are favored by the political capitalist regime. This broad organizing force underpins most government spending and regulatory decisions.
Consider the export subsidies that have been around for decades. These handouts mostly benefit the same giant manufacturers, like Boeing and GE, that were the main beneficiaries decades ago. It doesn't matter which party is in power: Big exporters will collect their largesse and express their gratitude to friends in Congress with campaign contributions and votes. This is why The Wall Street Journal's Andy Kessler calls this crony system "Kickback Capitalism."
Once you understand how political capitalism works, it becomes obvious that it drives most decisions in Congress. For decades, sugar subsidies have benefited the same small group of wealthy sugar-beet farmers and processors through an unholy alliance with politicians that goes far beyond who happens to be in power in Washington, Florida, or Louisiana.
The CHIPS and Science Act, passed last year, is another episode of politicians granting favors to their friends in the semiconductor industry. The previous episode took place in the 1980s and ran through the 1990s.
The COVID-19 era's $54 billion in airline bailouts were allegedly granted to avoid the layoff of some 30,000 airline employees. Yet during that same time, Regal Cinemas announced the temporary closure of all 536 of its U.S. locations and furloughed 40,000 employees. There was no one in Congress calling for a special Regal bailout (thankfully). The simple reason is that the airline bailouts were not about airline employees as much as they were a means of granting a favor to airline shareholders who have many friends in Congress.
Maybe the most striking example of political capitalism took place during former President Donald Trump's administration, on live TV no less. Back in March of 2018, Trump hosted a "listening session" with steel and aluminum executives he had invited to the White House. The whole thing was televised, allowing us to see Trump joking around with his CEO friends while they pleaded for government support for their industry. The head of Nucor, for instance, told the president how his 25,000 employees would really benefit from steel tariffs imposed on American buyers of steel. And just like that, those of us watching saw in real time the president grant Nucor's demand.
These are the same steel companies that will benefit from the semiconductor subsidy requirement that recipients of the government handout use domestic steel to build production facilities.
Political capitalism isn't restricted to companies. Other elite groups benefit too. Student loan forgiveness can be seen as a gift from President Joe Biden's administration to tomorrow's economic elites and to today's young voters. Last year's infrastructure bill, with all its requirements, is rightfully seen as a handout to unions. Unions are great political allies, always among the top political contributors during elections. The strong relationship between teachers unions and politicians in Congress helps explain the billions of dollars that went to public schools during the pandemic, even though most students were kept at home to receive subpar educations and large doses of anxiety.
From sugar and steel consumers to students who already paid off their loans or used their savings to pay for their education, political capitalism punishes those who aren't elite or can't organize to extract favors from politicians. Sadly, it gives a bad name to both politics and capitalism.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
The post America Needs a Better Kind of Capitalism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The American tradition of political idealism," writes Noah Rothman in his new book Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, "is imperiled by a growing obsession with the demographic categories of race, sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—the primary categories that are now supposed to constitute 'identity.'"
While phrases such as social justice and identity politics are usually identified with the progressive left, Rothman, an associate editor at Commentary and a contributor to MSNBC, argues provocatively that the rise of Donald Trump shows "victimization has bipartisan appeal."
In today's Reason Podcast, I talk with the 37-year-old journalist about the roots of identity politics, the rise of street violence among alt-right and antifa types, and how we might restore belief in an inclusive, forward-looking America built around common ideals rather than bitter enmity.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes.
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The post Donald Trump and Social Justice Warriors Are 'Unmaking America': Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Where does the Bernie Sanders' "revolution" go from here?
Will the over 12 million people who voted for Sanders in the Democratic primaries and caucuses maintain their passion after the next president is inaugurated by becoming the next Tea Party and radically changing the agenda of the party's establishment? Or will they fizzle out like the much-publicized but hardly effectual Occupy movement of 2011, whose central complaint about income inequality (We are the 99%!) was the backbone of the entire Sanders campaign?
Writing for Vox, Andrew Prokop calls the Sanders movement/Tea Party comparison "apt" because the latter "was motivated partly by a deep and growing frustration with the way things are going in this country, and a sense that the party establishments weren't up to the task of fixing it."
That may be true, but there are important distinctions. First, Bernie Sanders IS his movement. There are no other members of Congress willing to openly wave the banner of Sanders-style "democratic socialism," whereas in 2010, 87 newly-elected Congresspeople took office as loosely-affiliated members of the Tea Party.
With so much of Sanders' movement invested in what his supporters believe is his unimpeachable personal integrity — as well as a very convenient villain to oppose in the form of the compromised, corporatist, war-mongering Hillary Clinton — it's tough to imagine scores of fresh-faced political outsiders being able to drum up as much support at the local level promising things like free public college tuition without the force of personality Sanders exhibited during his presidential run.
Also, Sanders will return to a Congress where only nine current members of the House and only one of his Senate colleagues endorsed him over Clinton. Such overwhelming support for his primary opponent owes a great deal to the fact that Clinton is a larger-than-life figure within the Democratic Party, but also the more obvious fact that she is an actual Democrat, as opposed to Sanders, a once-and-again proud Independent, who merely rented the Democrat tag to run for president.
The long-ambiguous state of Sanders' party affiliation was put to rest yesterday, as he made clear he intends to return to the Senate as an Independent who will caucus with the Democrats:
Bernie Sanders tells @bpolitics breakfast w/reporters he'll return to the Senate as an Independent, not a Dem: 'I was elected as an Ind.'
— Susan Page (@SusanPage) July 26, 2016
Though Sanders supporters (and even many Clinton supporters) are proud that they were able to exert their influence in the creation of the most "progressive Democratic platform" to date, party platforms introduced at the quadrennial conventions are only mission statements, born of negotiations within the party that have little to do with how the elected members of the party will legislate afterward, when they have to negotiate and compete in the arena of votes and ideas against an antagonistic party.
Additionally, even though FiveThirtyEight reports that 90 percent of Sanders supporters intend to vote for Clinton, a loud chorus of disgruntled "Bernie or Bust" demonstrators have been urging their comrades to abandon their Democratic Party registrations in an effort they have been hashtagging on social media as #DemExit.
It's too early to tell if Sanders' motivated and engaged base of voters will continue to be politically active, either by running simpatico candidates in local elections or even voting at all, but if the the Occupy movement's brief moment in the spotlight is any indication, it doesn't look good for democratic socialism's electoral prospects. In 2014, Mark S. Mellman wrote in The Hill of the divergent political paths forged by the Tea Party and Occupy:
Perhaps the most important difference was the choice each made about politics. The Tea Party was avowedly political. It participated in campaigns and ran its own candidates, some of whom were successful (though others were spectacular failures). But the end result was Tea Partiers in the halls of power and almost every Republican lawmaker looking worriedly over his or her right shoulders at every vote. The Tea Party had power in the sense defined by my teacher, Yale's Robert Dahl, who died last week at 98. "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do." The Tea Party demonstrably got Republicans to do things that they would not otherwise have done.
Occupy Wall Street moved in the opposite direction, actively eschewing politics. Its members saw no place for themselves in the electoral system and often shooed away elected officials who attempted to visit their encampments, displaying contempt for politics and politicians. As a result there were no Occupy members of Congress, nor did anyone look over their left shoulder worried about a primary threat from Occupy.
Therein lies the big difference. Sanders ran an insurgent campaign and forced Hillary Clinton to pivot much further left than she seemed to want to, just as Tea Party candidates forced the GOP establishment (briefly) to bend to its will.
My Reason colleague Elizabeth Nolan Brown visited the Democratic Socialists of America's "Socialist Caucus" yesterday in Philadelphia, where one speaker insisted their movement had to become the Tea Party of the next electoral cycle. They are correct that for any meaningful influence on the Democratic Party created by Sanders' run to survive, they need to have more avowed democratic socialists in office.
But since its birth in the early days of the Obama administration, the Tea Party has become such a mish-mash of personalities all tenuously held together by opposition to the federal government's bank bailouts and runaway government debt that the label has become almost meaningless. Absurdist former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been described as a "darling" of the Tea Party movement and the much-loathed by his own Republican colleagues Ted Cruz might have been the movement's last best chance at the presidency, but Tea Party "favorites" have also included thoughtful libertarian-ish types such as Rand Paul, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie. This was never a coaltion built to last.
And with the rise of Donald Trump, a demagogue of incoherent political philosophy who is certainly no fan of limited government, you could make the argument that the Tea Party's wave of outsized influence over the GOP has crested and isn't exactly an ideal model to follow. But unlike the Occupiers, they did have their moment.
The post Bernie Sanders' "Revolution" Won't Change the Democratic Party the Way the Tea Party Changed the GOP appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Washington Post's "Wonkblog" features "What it's like to be a part of the world's richest 1 percent, in 15 incredible photos."
One of them has a striking infinity pool very high in the sky, goddamnit! Another shows evidence some richie rich bastard employs two maids to make their beds! Gah!
Note their headline locution: "world's richest one percent."
You know what it takes to be in that, Americans? According to one estimate this decade, a U.S. annual (after tax) income of $34,000. You can use the "Global Rich List" site to see where you likely stand. (Precise numbers for things like this are always questionable, but you are in the range at least.)
The article could have had a picture of someone driving a 2002 Nissan Sentra to shop at Family Dollar in Ames, Iowa, and been very true to the spirit of the "world's richest 1 percent."
It is quite common for Americans who like to bitch about/be envious of the American "1 %" and contemplate policy to help level them for the benefit of the masses to ignore the redistribution theoretically demanded by their own role in the worldwide 1 percent.
Also, anti-1 percenters strangely rarely focus on free trade and immigration policies that work as natural levelers of income and opportunity around the world.
It is a near-universal belief of the American left: everyone richer than me needs to be cut down to size.
Hat tip: Jarrett Skorup's Facebook page.
The post How Americans Define the "1 %" Up to Feel Better About Cutting <em>Them</em> and Not <em>Us</em> Down to Size appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The latest cinematic adaptation of the 1977 Broadway musical hit
Annie wastes no time at all kicking sand into the eyeballs of the title character's creator, the newspaper comic-strip legend Harold Gray.The film begins with a head-faking close-up of an orange-haired, freckled-faced moppet named Annie punctuating an upbeat classroom report on William Henry Harrison with a little soft-shoe ta-da, as her New York City public schoolmates roll their eyes. Then a more contemporary-looking girl named Annie B. heads up to the front of the class and the center of the film. But this is not the insult in question.
No, what would enrage Harold Gray is what comes next—arguably the most succinctly awful encomium to the New Deal in Hollywood history. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president, Annie informs us in her interactive, percussive presentation, almost everybody was poor. "Pretty much just like now, but without the Internet." (Pretty much! Except without the bread lines, the 15% unemployment for a decade, the absence of stuff like air conditioning, etc.)
To illustrate her point, the plucky tyke then divides the class between rich and poor, with only the front row representing the haughty moneyed types who thought they were smarter and better than the foot-stomping masses of poors behind them. Thankfully, as Annie demonstrates by high-fiving her comrades from the 99%, FDR triumphed over the grumpy fatcats, gave jobs and money to the people, and everything got better. Why, when the poor were finally allowed to have their fair share, even the rich got richer!
It's not just that this bowdlerized version of the 1930s would trigger apoplexy among narrative-challenging economic historians such as Amity Shlaes (to the extent that they care about the classroom spoutings of fictional pre-teens, of course). But as comics nerds and old free-market hands could tell you, Harold Gray was the exact opposite of an FDR cheerleader.
Little Orphan Annie, which ran under Gray's hand from 1924 to his death in 1968, "was…one of the few popular voices raised in opposition to the New Deal," Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty recalled in 2009. And Gray's opinion of FDR was brutal: "I…have despised Roosevelt and his socialist, or creeping communist, policies since 1932, and said so in my stuff, so far as I was allowed to do so," he once wrote.
Writer/director Will Gluck is not the author of Gray's reinvented New Deal politics, of course. That honor lies chiefly with the Broadway-Annie book-writer Thomas Meehan, who, in the approving words of theater critic Lucy Komisar, managed to turn "a right-wing, anti-union story by a conservative free-enterpriser who hated Roosevelt into a pro-New Deal musical where FDR has a cameo role." (Quite a bit more than a cameo, actually: As fans of the musical and 1982 John Huston movie can attest, the president basically kickstarts the New Deal thanks to Annie's successful lobbying efforts on a reluctant Daddy Warbucks, and the three join together in celebratory song.)
To wrap your head around the enormity of the ideological switcheroo between Depression-era Little Orphan Annie and the musical four decades later, imagine someone in 2014 making a Broadway hit about Doonesbury with show-stopping numbers in which Richard Nixon would wrap his arms around Zonker and sing the praises of the Silent Majority. It's that blatant.
What's interesting in the 2014 experience, aside from the usual pleasures of watching anti-1% lectures financed by Jay-Z and Will Smith, is that a slew of critics are zooming right over the perversion of Harold Gray's artistic intent, and instead complaining that Gluck's update on class warfare did not go nearly far enough.
"Considering this musical has its roots in Depression-era American, Gluck's contemporary take on the material is eerily lacking in observations about the rich/poor divide in this country," lamented Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer. The New York Times' A.O. Scott, after praising how the original musical "made room for Roosevelt and ended on a note of harmony between government and private enterprise," complained that "This 'Annie,' moving the story out of the '30s and into a smoothed-over version of the economically anxious, politically polarized present, gives Roosevelt a brief shout-out and then flees from any implication of historical or social relevance." Even Variety expressed regret over the C-word, with Ronnie Scheib averring that "Only David Zayas' turn as Miss Hannigan's eternally ignored but defiantly working-class suitor brings a believable if simplistic sense of class division to the film."
(It should be added that the lovable Zayas character also drafts Annie into committing the crime of changing the expiration dates on milk cartons, a lapse in ethics that my six-year-old found shocking. [Bonus fun fact: Did you know that milk-carton sell-by dates were reportedly the brainchild of another Depression-era character, Al Capone?])
Gluck thought he was demonstrating political virtue with the FDR opening; as he explained to Time's Lily Rothman, "The one thing I wanted to keep is the socioeconomic divide of the Depression, which sadly has even gotten bigger now and sadly is not going away." But by eschewing any of New York's ample supply of real-world squalor, and ignoring the inequal application of justice (fueled by messed-up government incentives), Annie's latest interpreter was left with little more than some standard-issue corporation-bashing—the real danger to our privacy, one character informs us, comes not from government but from cellphone companies—and that unconvincing soliloquy at the start.
"Annie does not inspire the President to believe that there really are plenty of shovel-ready stimulus projects out there," Rothman laments, tongue I hope at least partly in cheek. "[T]he audience doesn't come away singing a song about Obamacare."
But maybe we should all ease up on the ideological litmus tests here. No person of healthy mind truly wishes to see a song-and-dance routine about a national health care system, unless maybe they're British. Encasing cultural works in ideological or artistic amber is a recipe for irrelevance if not extinction; you don't hear many libertarians complaining that Captain America has evolved into an acerbic critic of the U.S.-led surveillance state, nor do all but the most joyless of music fans decry what Jeff Buckley did to Leonard Cohen or Elvis to Big Boy Crudup.
And if Spike Lee couldn't bring himself to portray the grim edges of ghetto life in a race-riot film about 1980s New York, we might be asking a bit much for a 2014 version of a beloved children's musical from the director of Friends With Benefits. As A.O. Scott grudgingly acknowledges, "I suppose a family entertainment needs to play it safe and avoid inflaming any public sensitivities."
Of course, if Hollywood's armchair Occupiers really wanted to inflame sensitivities, they'd be agitating for a version of Annie that openly reflected the iconoclastic politics of her creator. But we are probably all better off that producers of commercial entertainments, whether they be cartoons or movies, give first priority to the qualities Brian Doherty once hailed in Harold Gray's original strip: "lively and vibrant storytelling skills, …vivid characters, and…celebration of the timeless virtues of optimism, love, and pluck."
The post Critics: <em>Annie</em>'s Blatant FDR Revisionism Doesn't Go Nearly Far Enough! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>So it is disturbing but not really surprising to see a ProPublica story claiming this:
Senior officials [at the Red Cross] told staffers not to work with Occupy Sandy.
Red Cross officials had no concerns about Occupy Sandy's effectiveness. Rather, they were worried about the group's connections to the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
Three Red Cross responders told ProPublica there was a ban. "We were told not to interact with Occupy," says one. While the Red Cross often didn't know where to send food, Occupy Sandy "had what we didn't: minute-by-minute information," another volunteer says.
The three spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because they continue to work with the Red Cross. One says the direction came from an official based in Red Cross headquarters in Washington. Another understood the direction came from Washington. A third was not sure who gave the instructions….
Fred Leahy, a veteran Red Cross responder who was a Community Partnerships Manager in Sandy's aftermath, recalled a meeting a week after the storm in which he and two other officials, one from Washington, discussed "the political and donor ramifications of associating with Occupy Sandy due to its outgrowth from Occupy Wall Street." He says the meeting was called after an inquiry from Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern.
"Occupy Wall Street was not very favorably received by the political people in the city," Leahy says. Major Red Cross donors were from the same elite political circles "and they didn't understand Occupy Wall Street."
Leahy denies that there "explicit injunction" not to work with Occupy Sandy. Those three anonymous sources seem to disagree. ProPublica also interviewed several Occupiers who "say the Red Cross did not take their calls in the early days and weeks after the storm hit." One of them reports that a Red Cross worker said "they couldn't be seen working with us."
The sources differ as to how long the ban lasted. (That's partly because it may have stayed alive long after it was officially killed: "One person says the policy was rescinded in a matter of days, but that it took weeks to communicate to all the corners of the Red Cross relief effort.") But while it was in place, ProPublica reports, "some Red Cross responders were so troubled, they tried to work with people from Occupy covertly. They say they maintained a spreadsheet of Occupy contacts separate from the other contact lists to hide from senior Red Cross officials that they were working with the group."
To read the rest of the ProPublica piece, go here.
(Hat tip: Bryan Alexander.)
The post Did the Red Cross Let Its Fear of the Occupy Movement Interfere with Its Disaster Relief? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>issued an edict that the New York operation needed to start producing more meals.
That wasn't the problem, [Richard] Rieckenberg told his superiors. He was in charge of tracking food and, at the time, the Red Cross was already wasting three out of every 10 meals being prepared, he estimates. The real issue was that the Red Cross was failing to gather information about where hungry victims were located.
Officials at the Red Cross' national headquarters stood firm over Rieckenberg's objections. They directed a catering company to increase its output dramatically, from 20,000 to 220,000 meals per day. And it had to start with breakfast for 100,000 the next morning.
In the ensuing chaos, the caterer was only able to deliver 70,000 Danishes the following day, Rieckenberg says. The cost to the Red Cross: about $7 apiece, much more than normal. Top Red Cross officials had assured Rieckenberg that someone would get him the locations where staffers could deliver the meals. The list was never supplied. About half of the pastries were wasted.
Worse still, the leadership sometimes diverted resources from genuine relief to public relations. In Mississippi after Issac,
An official gave the order to send out 80 trucks and emergency response vehicles—normally full of meals or supplies like diapers, bleach and paper towels—entirely empty or carrying a few snacks.
The volunteers "were told to drive around and look like you're giving disaster relief," Rieckenberg says. The official was anticipating a visit by Red Cross brass and wanted to impress them with the level of activity, he says.
After Sandy, a much-needed emergency response vehicle was instead "dispatched to an early December photo-op with supermodel Heidi Klum to tour affected areas with Red Cross supplies." The reporters quote one official's response to the PR stunt: "Did you know it takes a Victoria's Secret model five hours to unload one box off a truck? I was so mad."
The article alludes a couple of times to the more decentralized and volunteer-driven groups that surfaced after the storms. A man from the Rockaways mentions that Mormon and Amish volunteers "appeared at my doorstep offering much-needed help" three days after Sandy, a response he contrasts with the two weeks it took before "the only Red Cross truck my neighbors or I saw" showed up. Later there is a reference to Occupy Sandy, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot whose horizontally organized relief work drew a lot of praise after the storm hit. (At one point, Occupy Sandy had four times as many volunteers in the field than the Red Cross did.)
It makes sense to expect such networks to be more flexible, more capable of adjusting to conditions on the ground, and—when the groups are themselves locally based—more receptive to local knowledge. This is understood even within the halls of the Department of Homeland Security, which commissioned a report last year that highlighted Occupy Sandy's successes. Occupy, the paper concluded, not just complemented the official effort but "in some cases filled critical gaps." (One interesting observation from the DHS report: "In circumstances of rising public distrust of hierarchical institutions, as is the case in many communities within the United States today, it would not be unusual for horizontal grassroots disaster relief networks with strong affiliations within certain communities to be chosen over professional response organizations that might try to assert control over a complex operating environment in a disaster.")
The Red Cross, in comparison, is a lumbering beast. It is essentially a public/private hybrid—the organization is chartered by Congress to fulfill specific mandates, including relief work coordinated by FEMA, but it is formally independent of the government and largely raises its own funds. It devotes far more of its budget to its (very valuable) blood and plasma services than to disaster response, but it uses disasters as a fundraising opportunity. It is clearly better suited for some sorts of recovery work, such as operating shelters, than others, such as the areas where the Mormons and Occupiers outperformed it. And to judge from the NPR/ProPublica report, it suffers from a severe surplus of bureaucracy.
To read the rest of the exposé, go here.
The post Waste, Bureaucracy, and PR Stunts: The Case of the Red Cross appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This past Monday's "Flood Wall Street" march and sit-in, organized by remnants of the Occupy Wall Street movement, was designed to provoke a confrontation with the police that would lead to mass arrests, which for the most part failed, but not before attracting national attention to their cause via theatrical civil disobedience.
Prior to the march, leaders of the happening used the human mic to offer "Non-violent Direct Action Training," which included instructions on how to be arrested peacefully and providing pens to write the phone number for the National Lawyers Guild on your arm.
Their stated goal was to "shut down" Wall Street, and by extension capitalism, to end the climate crisis, but after 8 hours of sporadic sitting and standing, performance art, and the return of Hipster Cop, the crowd had thinned-out significantly and only 102 arrests were made.
The part of Broadway in Lower Manhattan, just north of Bowling Green, is narrow and frequently congested even without 3,000 people in the middle of the street. Police erected barricades to separate the two sides of the street, and about a dozen bored-looking cops paced back and forth within those barricades for hours while Flood Wall Street had their moment.
Though most protesters were peaceful, many shouted insults at the police and some, like the prankster who tried to lasso the Wall Street Bull, came perilously close to assaulting police officers, which could have easily sparked a wider confrontation.
What most befuddled and frustrated the protesters was that the cops seemed to be in no hurry to crack skulls and drag thousands of hippies to the pokey.
They could be forgiven for expecting a heavy-handed reponse from the NYPD, given how the cops handled the eviction of the orignal Occupy Wall Street encampment, but credit where it's due, the police allowed the protesters to have their say before calling off the party as night fell, and then handling the dispersement as peaceably as possible.
Brooklyn College professor and police reform advocate Alex S. Vitale praised the NYPD for its patience, tolerance and professionalism, going so far as to award them credit for giving the First Amendment "a major victory":
A couple of thousand people showed up and at around 11:30 a.m. many sat down next the bull sculpture in the middle of Broadway just above Bowling Green. They were allowed to occupy that space for much of the afternoon. The police made no effort to arrest them, disperse them, or even to isolate them from onlookers. This was a major departure from past practice. Similar efforts in recent years have been met with widespread use of force to push demonstrators onto sidewalks along with often random arrests to intimidate others.
By around 3:30 PM many of those sitting in dispersed, but several hundred marched north towards Wall Street. Police made little to no effort to contain them until demonstrators attempted to breach the barriers blocking access to Wall Street. At that point a few people were subjected to pepper spray and punches as they wrestled with police over the barricades there–a not unreasonable use of force given the circumstances.
Even after that violent confrontation, police allowed people to occupy Broadway for another 3 hours before finally warning, then arresting the remaining 100 protestors in a calm, deliberate, and methodical manner.
While some may criticize the mayor for tying the NYPD's hands, in fact this is an example of the kind of more tolerant and flexible policing the city needs as an antidote to 20 years of aggressive zero tolerance approaches. The First Amendment scored a major victory this week.
Reason TV covered Flood Wall Street and the larger climate march on Sunday. Watch here, here, and below:
The post NYPD Helps Give 'Flood Wall Street' a Major First Amendment Victory appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>New York, September 22—"Stop Capitalism. End the Climate Crisis." That's the motto for the Flood Wall Street demonstration that aimed to "take to the streets of New York's Financial District" and "carry out a massive sit-in to disrupt business as usual" in order to "highlight the role of Wall Street in fueling the climate crisis." The would-be Flooders rallied at the World War II Memorial in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan. In contrast to the huge turnout for the People's Climate March on Sunday, Flood Wall Street attracted a hardcore group of about 1,000 protestors, many of whom were clearly nostalgic Occupy Wall Street veterans. Participants were asked to wear blue so that their sit-in would signify how rising ocean tides fueled by man-made global warming will eventually inundate the inner sanctum of global capitalism.
Since I had somehow missed Occupy Wall Street events, this was my first time enjoying the human "microphone" in which participants nearer the speakers repeat by shouting what they are saying so that others further back can benefit from their insights. I will say that the rhythmic call-and-response aspect of the "microphone" did make it easy to take notes. The first speaker at the Battery Park pre-Flood rally was Canadian activist Naomi Klein, author of the new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Klein began by reminiscing that the Occupy Wall Street movement had originated three years ago, almost to the same day as the Flood Wall Street protest. Occupy Wall Street "put corporate capitalism on trial," said Klein. "The entire world listened and the debate on inequality opened up." Klein continued, "We are oppressed by the knowledge that the system of short term profits and deregulated greed that deepens inequality and forecloses on our homes is the very same system that is foreclosing on our collective home." Klein ended, "We demand to Change Everything." Nice how she worked the title of her just released book into her exhortation. Listening to Klein it was pretty hard not to conclude that the real goal is imposing equality, and climate change is the excuse.
Next up followed a slate of speakers from around the globe representing "frontline communities" that are supposedly bearing the brunt of climate change caused by corporate greed. "A typical example of criminal acts caused by corporations is climate change that is already causing damages," declared socio-economist Mamadou Goita from the West African country of Mali. Specifically corporate climate change "is causing major losses in food production." Perhaps so. But World Bank data on cereal yields per hectare suggest a somewhat different story. While Malian grain yields do bounce around a bit, there is pretty clearly a long-term rising trend. In 2000, yields were 1,006 kilograms per hectare; by 2013 they had risen to 1,667 kilograms per hectare. "Corporations took power; devastated our nature; are destroying lives; and are dismantling all people's power," asserted Goita. He concluded, "Now it is the time to take back our power."
Brazilian anti-dam activist Elisa Estronioli is quite right that the rights of poor and indigenous people are all too often disregarded when it comes to constructing big hydroelectric dams in developing countries. She cogently asked at the Flood Wall Street rally how can electricity from such projects "be clean energy when it is produced inside a model that violates human rights?" Estronioli is an organizer against the giant Belo Monte dam largely being built and paid for by the Brazilian government in the Amazon region. "We are the victims of the same global model in which energy plays a central role," concluded Estronioli. "There is no clean energy in the capitalist system." Say what?
One other frontline community speaker was Miriam Miranda from Honduras. "The planet is collapsing and the time has come to act," said Miranda. Why is action necessary? Because we must fight "against the culture of death that we are being condemned to by the grand corporations of death and transnational capital," Miranda finished.
Once the featured speakers were done, it was time to configure the Flood. The protestors were instructed to arrange themselves into three cohorts depending on their willingness to be arrested: The most eager to be arrested in the front and the more hesitant at the back. However, one of the organizers whose name I didn't catch did knowingly assure participants, "We believe that if you've never been arrested before, this is the perfect action to join."
So off streamed the Flood festooned with a variety of anti-capitalist placards, buttons, posters, and so forth. One of the main attractions were a couple of giant mylar balloons symbolizing the fossil fuel industries' "carbon bubble" that activists argue is about to burst. The bubble supposedly exists because fossil fuel companies are overvalued because their worth is calculated using carbon energy reserves that they won't be able to sell in the future as the world turns toward renewables.
The Flood was firmly channeled by barricades up Broadway backed by police ornamented with garlands of white plastic flexi-cuffs. Expecting the Flood to eventually flow onto Wall Street itself, I took a back route and waited for the Flood to arrive in front of the New York Stock Exchange. While waiting, a single middle-aged demonstrator unmolested by the police waved around a poster reading "Global Warming Burns Me Up." A younger protestor climbed the steps of Federal Hall and yelled something like, "What are you going to do Wall Street when the oceans drown your kids?" He was quickly shooed off by two portly Park Service guards.
Some 30 to 40 minutes passed, so I went in search of the missing Flood and found that the police had halted the tide on Broadway. The protestors had ended up "flooding" just a couple of blocks of lower Broadway around Arturo Di Modica's Charging Bull sculpture. Some were sitting-in, others milling randomly, and an occasional chant rose from the stymied flow: "1-2-3-4, climate change is class war." Sometime around 2 p.m., a single demonstrator tried to run past the police line and was immediately caught and handcuffed in the view of several score cameras. After all that excitement, I left.
Later, when the police ordered the Flood to disperse, about a hundred refused and were arrested and booked. Wall Street was not Flooded.
The U.N. Climate Summit convenes 120 or so world leaders Tuesday to "catalyze ambitious action on the ground to reduce emissions and strengthen climate resilience and mobilize political will for an ambitious global agreement by 2015."
The post Flood Wall Street Climate Change Protest Is a Washout appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Stop Capitalism. End the Climate Crisis." That's the motto for the Flood Wall Street demonstration that aimed to "take to the streets of New York's Financial District" and "carry out a massive sit-in to disrupt business as usual" in order to "highlight the role of Wall Street in fueling the climate crisis." The would-be Flooders rallied at the World War II Memorial in Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan. In contrast to the huge turnout for the People's Climate March on Sunday, Flood Wall Street attracted a hardcore group of about 1,000 protestors, many of whom were clearly nostalgic Occupy Wall Street veterans. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey reports that the Flood was more like a trickle.
The post Ronald Bailey Finds Flood Wall Street Climate Protest a Washout appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 2010, Lindsey Graham could see it coming.
"You know what I worry most about?" the Republican Senator from South Carolina told CNN about the growing opposition to the war in Afghanistan. "An unholy alliance between the right and the left." If the war continued to yield no clear victories for the U.S., libertarian-leaning Republicans who believed it was "impossible for us to win" could join with "people on the left who are mad with the president because he is doing exactly what Bush did and we're in a war we can't win." Such a coalition would pose the gravest threat to the joint war-making project of the Republican and Democratic establishments. "My concern is that, for different reasons, they join forces and we lose the ability to hold this thing together."
Six months later, progressive icon Ralph Nader saw the potential power of a libertarian-left alliance, too, but welcomed it. Appearing with Ron Paul on Judge Andrew Napolitano's "Freedom Watch" show on Fox Business Network in January 2011, Nader issued a manifesto for "a dynamic political force" that would not only stop the war in Afghanistan but radically re-shape American politics. What he called "genuine libertarian conservatives" were "great allies" and together with "many liberals and progressives" could challenge "the bloated, wasteful military budget," "undeclared wars overseas," "hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare," "invasions of our civil liberties and civil rights," "the sovereignty-shredding, job-destroying NAFTA and World Trade Organization agreements," and the "completely out-of-control" and unaccountable Federal Reserve System. Nader could also have mentioned the criminalization of drugs, police abuses, and immigration restrictions, which the left and libertarians have fought together against for years.
In fact, Graham's fears and Nader's hopes have now been realized. Never has there been a greater convergence of libertarian and leftist activities, never has it given more trouble to the powers of Washington, D.C., and never has it been a greater cause of concern, hope, and conflict among the political intelligentsia.
Eight months after Nader's "Freedom Watch" pronouncement, Ron Paul supporters along with socialists, anti-market anarchists, and other lefties of various stripes were the first to set up camp in Zuccotti Park and launch the Occupy Wall Street movement. There were arguments over whether advocates of free markets belonged in the movement, whether the economic crisis was caused by deregulation or by government encouragement of high-risk financial speculation, and whether the solution to the crisis was greater or less government control of business, but the libertarians stayed. As Occupy spread to other cities, libertarians were almost always a visible—though minority—presence at the encampments. "One would more reliably come across vocal Ron Paul supporters at Occupy events than vocal Obama supporters," reported Michael Tracey in the American Conservative. "It was not lost on the Zuccotti Park crowd, for instance, that Ron Paul personally expressed a measure of support for the movement earlier than most any other national U.S. politician–aside from Sen. Bernie Sanders or Rep. Dennis Kucinich."
Occupy is often derided as having been leaderless and ineffective, but in conjunction with the Tea Party, few if any social movements in American history have done more to identify and discredit collusion between government and corporations. "Corporatism," once a term confined to academic discourse, is now routinely used to describe the general relationship between government and business in the United States. Moreover, it seems safe to assume that because of the efforts of Occupy and the Tea Party, which began in 2009 largely as a protest against the Troubled Assets Relief Program, few if any members of Congress will vote for another massive corporate bailout in the foreseeable future without fear of upsetting their constituents.
Since the start of 2013, the "dynamic political force" has proved itself to be just that. Obama's second inaugural address was greeted with tepid approval and grumblings of discontent from his formerly orgiastic supporters, who were likely more chastened by four years of relentless exposures and criticisms of their hero's policies by leftists and libertarians than by the policies themselves. In March, pundits who otherwise consider Rand Paul to be an exotic white supremacist cheered the Kentucky Senator as he filibustered the nomination of John Brennan as director of the CIA in protest of the administration's use of drones to kill U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism. At Salon, David Sirota called Paul's stand "heroic" while Jon Stewart celebrated him for "using the filibuster the way it's meant to be used." Straight-up communist columnist Ted Rall went further, declaring that Paul had become "the most, perhaps the only, establishment political figure expressing a progressive vision on a host of incredibly important issues… issues that have been abandoned by the state-sanctioned Left."
At the libertarian International Students for Liberty Conference in February of this year, Jeremy Scahill, whose associations include the International Socialist Organization, Democracy Now!, and The Nation even though he has consistently allied himself with libertarians on national security and foreign policy issues, forthrightly declared that Rand Paul was "reflecting what should be some of the core values of liberals, when it comes to questions of civil liberties, of the rights of Americans to know whether they're on a kill list, on the right of the Congress to know what assertions the White House is making about who it can assassinate around the world, how it determines the guilt of individuals that it wants to target for drone strikes." Scahill acidly noted that "not a single Democrat" would join with Paul in his protest.
Though various polls show that roughly two-thirds of Americans support Obama's use of drones against suspected terrorists in foreign lands, that number would almost certainly be greater were it not for the continued protests against the drone program by an amalgamation of libertarian-leaning Republican politicians, such as the recently-retired Ron Paul and his son Rand, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, and Rep. Walter Jones of North Carolina, anti-interventionist libertarian intellectuals and pundits, and public figures such as Scahill and Glenn Greenwald who are to the left of the Democratic Party establishment. This is the group that publicized the executive-ordered killings of U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, gave force to Rand Paul's filibuster protest, and turned public opinion against one of the administration's most significant, autocratic, unconstitutional, and dangerous foreign policy initiatives. Following Paul's day on the Senate floor, Gallup reported a majority of Americans opposing drone strikes against U.S. citizens, even against those on foreign soil suspected of terrorism.
In the summer of 2013 the "unholy alliance" wreaked havoc on the national-security and foreign-policy establishments. Edward Snowden, a Ron Paul supporter, received passionate support from both libertarians and a broad array of leftists for revealing, at the risk of imprisonment, the NSA's dragnet surveillance of American citizens. Snowden's disclosures were publicized by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, who is a regular speaker at the International Socialist Organization's annual Socialism Conference, a recipient of the Nation Institute's I.F. Stone Award, and according to Rachel Maddow "the American left's most fearless political commentator." But Greenwald is also, like Scahill, an eager collaborator with libertarians. He authored a study for the Cato Institute on Portugal's decriminalization of drugs and frequently praised Ron Paul for being "far and away the most anti-war, anti-Surveillance-State, anti-crony-capitalism, and anti-drug-war presidential candidate in either party."
According to USA Today/Pew Research Center polls, attitudes toward "the government's collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts" turned decidedly negative after Snowden and Greenwald began their exposé. In June 2013, when the public first heard of the NSA's program, 48 percent of those polled approved of it while 47 percent disapproved. By January 2014, approval declined to 40 percent and disapproval rose to 53 percent. That disapproval turned to rage that spilled into the streets and across the World Wide Web on "The Day We Fight Back," a global protest in February when more than 6,000 websites and tens of thousands of flesh-and-blood protestors in 15 countries demanded "new laws that curtail online surveillance." Supporters of the protest included the astonishing combination of FreedomWorks, Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty, the Libertarian Party, Greenpeace, and Green parties across the world.
Less than two months after Snowden and Greenwald took on the surveillance state, the Obama administration received yet another setback from the unholy alliance. While liberal and neoconservative pundits cheered the President's announcement on August 31 that "the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets" and his submission of a draft resolution to Congress seeking authorization for an attack, an unprecedented vanguard of limited-government, anti-government, and workers-government activists led thousands of people into the streets to stop the intervention. At demonstrations across the country, Ron Paul signs and Gadsden flags shared sidewalk space with banners of the Party For Socialism and Liberation. Even The New York Times noted "some unusual newcomers" at anti-war rallies—Tea Partiers mobilized by their local organizations and by FreedomWorks, which organized a phone bank of its members to lobby members of Congress to oppose intervention in Syria. Meanwhile, in the Congress members of the Republican Liberty Caucus joined with the independent socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and left-of-center Democrats to argue against Obama's resolution. That resistance compelled the White House to abandon its plans to send Tomahawk missiles into Syria and seek an agreement with Syria's Assad regime to destroy its chemical weapons cache. Widely derided by Republican hawks as "a failure," Obama's decision to forego lethal action should certainly be counted a great success for the antiwar left and libertarians.
In addition to these impressive achievements we have seen long-standing collaboration of the left and libertarians bring two revolutions to the consciousness of Americans. The movement to decriminalize drugs, which since the early 1970s has been led by left-libertarian organizations like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Drug Policy Alliance—an organization that receives funding from both George Soros and the Koch brothers—not only succeeded with the passage in 2012 of initiatives in Colorado and Washington legalizing recreational use of marijuana but also with a sea-change in American attitudes. In October of last year, Gallup reported that for the first time a clear majority of Americans—58 percent in their latest poll—said the drug should be legalized. When Gallup first asked the question in 1969, the year before NORML was founded, only 12 percent favored legalization.
Most recently, libertarians, progressives, and even many establishment liberals flooded social media and the airwaves in response to the police killing of the unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and to the subsequent use of tanks, snipers, and tear gas by the St. Louis County Police to counter protesters. The phrase "militarization of the police," first popularized by the work of former Reason senior editor Radley Balko, is now coursing through American political discourse. Noting that Rand Paul and the Congressional Black Caucus were leading the push on Capitol Hill for police reform in response to Ferguson, the liberal Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent welcomed this "left-right alliance" for focusing "national attention on the over-militarization of our police forces."
One might think all this would be cause for celebration among those who share Nader's objectives, but many find it more a cause for grave concern. Since last summer, liberal media outlets have streamed out warnings to their readers to "Beware of Libertarians Bearing Gifts," as the Center for American Progress put it. Any alliance with libertarians, even for a cause as worthy as reining in the NSA, "could kill the New Deal." Salon has frequently trafficked in hysteria over the libertarian "threat" to progressivism. "Don't Ally With Libertarians," admonished one of many headlines about the "fatally compromised" coalition that produced "The Day We Fight Back." At The New Republic, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz explained to the "liberal establishment" that had fallen in with Snowden, Greenwald, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that these purveyors of "paranoid libertarianism" were outside the bounds of respectable politics. They occupy "a peculiar corner of the political forest, where the far left meets the far right, often but not always under the rubric of libertarianism." Where unwitting liberals have "portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that's hardly their goal," Wilentz warned. "In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it."
Some left-wing observers have offered more constructive evaluations of the alliance. Ralph Nader continues to lead the way, with a new book on the "Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State" and a lengthy interview promoting it on Reason TV. Perhaps the most notable among the left-wing sympathizers to Nader's cause is Peter Frase, an editor at the socialist Jacobin, who questioned "this obsession with people like Greenwald and Snowden as vectors for noxious libertarianism rather than people who are doing courageous and useful work even if their politics aren't socialist." Frase identified "an instinct among some on the Left to suppose that defending the possibility of government requires rejecting any alliance with libertarians who might criticize particularly noxious aspects of the existing state." For those on the left who share Nader's optimism about libertarians, Frase's conclusion should serve as a manifesto:
One should not have any illusions that critics of the national security state all share socialist politics. But we should judge these critics by what they say and do and what their political impact is. An endless inquisition into hidden beliefs and motives, and the attempt to unmask a devious libertarian hidden agenda, makes for a satisfying purity politics for those who want to justify their own inaction. But it does nothing to contest the predatory fusion of state and capital that confronts us today, which must be confronted in the government, the workplace, and many other places besides.
Hear, hear. So let us say to leftists and libertarians: Unite! You have nothing to lose but your ideological chains.
The post Rise of the 'Unholy Alliance' of Libertarians and Leftists appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Senate report two years ago already declared fusion centers, facilities where federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies were to share information to fight terrorism, to be so much worthless, expensive crap. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations described the work of fusion centers as "often shoddy, rarely timely, …occasionally taken from already published sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism."
Today The New York Times has a host of documents showing exactly how unrelated they are. Specifically, they've got more than 70 pages of documents from fusion centers showing how they kept track of the Occupy movement from 2011 and 2012.
It appears that they kept track of Occupy the same way everybody else did if they were so inclined—they looked stuff up online about them and summarized it. The documents are full of links to news stories and videos posted online. One e-mail sent out to multiple fusion centers simply explains how to use Google and Twitter to track publicly listed Occupy activities in various cities.
Some documents do note that the events they're talking about are activities protected by the First Amendment and are intended as information to help authorities to prepare for crowds and traffic. But there are also "analyst notes" describing the backgrounds of various speakers at events in Boston, including whether they had engaged in previous acts of civil disobedience. Further documents also note coverage of fusion centers themselves and speculation that they were involved in crackdowns on occupy protesters. This is passed along via images of tweets linking to coverage.
The reports get really strange over concerns that the Occupy crowd was going to do something targeting Thanksgiving Black Friday shopping in 2011. A "Risk Briefing" was sent out detailing potential threats for malls and retailers. Oddly, one of the "threats" mentioned is that of activists boycotting the retailers. That is to say, the fusion centers were putting out warnings about people not going to malls and stores.
Among the "specific known threats" listed in the briefing were "free, non-commercial street parties," "alternative mass green transport activities," and a "wildcat general strike" where participants not only stay away from retailers but also go on a "green strike" and use no energy or fuel that day. A couple of pages of the briefing are devoted to detailing an arts and crafts fair and peaceful flash mob in Seattle, again tagged as "Specific Known Threats." Aren't arts and crafts fairs and flash mobs in Seattle also known as "Thursdays"?
Feel free to scroll through the documents yourself here and shake your head in despair at the kind of work we paid millions for, work that is sometimes assigned in the private sector to an intern.
The post Expensive Fusion Centers Tracked Occupy Movement with High-Tech Tools Like Google News Alerts appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Friday, Washington witnessed the dawn—and probably the dusk—of Operation American Spring, a populist protest that was supposed to involve millions of patriots occupying the National Mall nonviolently until the president and various other high officials agreed to resign. Turnout was a bit lower than the organizers anticipated: Instead of 10 to 20 million revolutionaries, they got a couple hundred. The National Journal's dispatch from the fizzled insurrection makes it all sound rather charming, with a woman called Momma Bear stepping up to take charge of the march when it became clear that the formal organizers weren't quite up to the task. The issues inspiring the crowd included Benghazi, the Bundy ranch, and the general state of the U.S. Constitution.
But the detail that leaped out at me was this:
Two hundred people or so, largely white and near the age of retirement, milled around among a few scattered college-age kids, many of whom donned Guy Fawkes masks.
Guy Fawkes masks! At this point those things have taken on enough contradictory meanings to fuel a dozen semioticians' PhD theses.
Maybe the meanings aren't completely contradictory. Those V for Vendetta masks tend to show up in networked, decentralized movements that directly defy authority: Anonymous, Occupy, the Indignados, the Arab Spring. Operation American Spring was clearly modeled on both the Arab Spring and Occupy, a fact that dismayed the protest's critics on the right. Should it be surprising that some of the demonstrators decided that this was how to dress for the part?
But even that common ground might be slipping away: Twitter's telling me people put on the masks at a rally for the military regime in Egypt, and I'm hard pressed to think of anything anti-authoritarian about that. At this point someone should start a cable news show where no one is identified, everyone wears a Guy Fawkes mask, and nobody agrees about anything. It'll be like Crossfire crossed with 4chan.
The post Operation American Spring: Guy Fawkes Comes to Washington appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Investment guru and free-market proponent Peter Schiff was recently on The Daily Show for a segment about the minimum wage. It didn't go well. As he explains in a column:
My use of the words "mentally retarded" (when Samantha Bee asked me who might be willing to work for $2 per hour – a figure she suggested) has come to define the entire interview. Although I had no intention of offending anyone, I just couldn't remember the politically correct term currently in use (it is "intellectually disabled"). Assuming she knew it, Bee could have prompted me with the correct term, but she chose not to. By including those comments in the final package, "The Daily Show" proved that they did not care who they offended, as long as they could make me look bad in the process. The volume of hate mail I have received in the show's aftermath confirms their success on that front….
"The Daily Show" was never interested in an honest debate about the minimum wage. Nor is it concerned with the intellectually disabled, whom they have no qualms about offending if they can get a laugh. In fact, it's "The Daily Show" that wants to tell the intellectually disabled they are worthless, as they want to make it illegal for them to have jobs. I did not notice any intellectually disabled people working at "The Daily Show." I'm sure many would jump at the chance, particularly if they were offered minimum wage or higher. But since they choose to pay their intellectually capable interns zero, why should they be expected to pay the intellectually disabled more?
I'm sympathetic toward Schiff, especially since he's proven to be an incredible persuader in many other circumstances. Check out this video Reason TV did with him where he's talking with Occupy Wall Street protesters. It's got almost half-a-million views and is electrifying stuff.
Reason TV was at the same minimum-wage rally that appears in The Daily Show bit. Here's what we saw:
The post Peter Schiff on The Daily Show, Talking Minimum Wage appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>War critics sometimes argue that modern militarism isolates Americans from the action, keeping the general population unaware of intervention's bloody costs. This theme is aired extensively in Andrew Bacevich's new Breach of Trust. Bacevich, a veteran Army officer and Boston University historian, has penned numerous critiques of U.S. foreign policy, and his latest contains valuable insights. But those who prioritize individual liberty will disagree with many of the book's conclusions, particularly its endorsement of conscription.
In the past, Bacevich argues, the United States maintained a "neat division of labor," comprising "a smaller regular army for everyday needs while mobilizing a much larger citizen-army in time of great emergency." Then Vietnam-era politics culminated with the end of the draft, leading Americans to become "disengaged from war, with few observers giving serious consideration to the implications of doing so."
In the new era, military service is no longer a shared national sacrifice but an elective personal choice. This shift coincided with a general desire to keep war remote. In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration solidified this new way of war, which Bacevich calls the "three no's": Americans refuse to share in the blood sacrifice, refuse to change their way of life, and refuse even to pay the financial costs up front. The "nation did not mobilize," he laments. "Congress did not raise taxes, curtail consumption, or otherwise adjust domestic priorities to accommodate wartime requirements." It's a familiar complaint.
Bacevich makes many good points in Breach of Trust. He thoughtfully questions U.S. Middle East policy, from the 1953 CIA-backed coup in Iran to Washington's tilted relationship with Israel. He warns against excessive anti-Islamism, faults Obama for continuing the Bush doctrine, punctures the triumphalism of early Iraq War enthusiasts like David Brooks, and laments the liberal establishment's lack of anti-war stalwarts.
Most important, Bacevich discusses the hyper-militarism that emerged after the Vietnam debacle. "Since the draft ended, along with Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, U.S. ground forces have intervened for stays ranging from weeks to years in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo," he notes. As for the popular Persian Gulf War of 1991, this "plunge[d] the United States more deeply into a sea of difficulties for which military power provided no antidote."
For Bacevich, the underlying problem fueling all this interventionism is that most Americans do not share in the burden of making war. Borrowing some Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, he casts soldiers as victims and everyone else as perpetrators: "the 99 percent who do not serve in uniform…ruthlessly exploit the 1 percent who do." His proposed remedy is neither libertarian nor original: coercive national service, including a military track.
Some anti-war figures, such as Noam Chomsky, have long advocated conscription as a way of avoiding war, but Bacevich at least knows that it's not a simple case of A preventing B. "Conscription hadn't dissuaded Harry Truman from intervening in Korea in 1950 or stopped Johnson from plunging into Vietnam in 1965," he observes. Still, he argues that having citizens put "skin in the game" would decrease the distance between the military and public, encouraging more public deliberation on war's costs.
Bacevich is not reflexively anti-intervention; he labors to distinguish America's historical wars, many of which he approves, from the exercise of U.S. military might today. So the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the two World Wars get positive nods, while the less savory post-World War II activity is framed at least in part as a function of the modern military-industrial complex. But in his eagerness to warn us that where "profit-and-loss statements govern, devotion to duty, honor, and country inevitably takes a hit," Bacevich glosses over the fact that the military-industrial complex also influenced decision making on the wars he prefers.
Breach of Trust favorably cites Smedley Butler's famous pamphlet War Is a Racket. But Butler was not writing recently; his booklet focused on the profiteers of World War I. Any suggestion that past wars were less commodified or politicized, or their costs more fairly distributed among the population, is not substantiated.
For instance, Bacevich condemns the reliance on reserve troops in Iraq: "The military…voided the implicit contract that had defined the terms of service for these part-time soldiers-that the nation would call upon them only in extreme emergencies." Yet whatever "extreme emergencies" prompted deployment in Cuba, World War I, Korea, and Vietnam, a consistent anti-interventionist would easily find as much fault in the wars before 9/11 as in the decade following.
Once upon a time, Bacevich writes, "Americans accepted fighting for freedom as their job; today, with freedom still their birthright, they expect someone else to do the fighting." But the problem might not be that everyday Americans wish to avoid combat but rather that they do not regard U.S. wars as a necessary tool for advancing freedom. If wars are misguided, perhaps we should discourage everyone from fighting rather than force the entire nation to share the costs.
Instead of reinstating the draft, there is a less drastic proposal, one more consistent with human rights, more conducive to peace, and more respectful of those on the front lines. That is, having a truly voluntary military.
Today, unlike most any other U.S. institution, the armed forces practice indentured servitude: Employees agree to a term of service and face imprisonment or even execution should they quit. We do not consider it a "voluntary" job if a warehouse or factory forcibly prevents workers from quitting at will. Those who wish to honor the humanity of America's soldiers should agitate not for conscription but for the freedom of service men and women to resign. The remaining soldiers would be there by choice, and if they continued fighting unjust, counterproductive wars, it would be harder to regard them as victims of bad leadership or an apathetic populace.
Many troops would have chosen to resign honorably before returning to Iraq or Afghanistan for a third or fifth time. True freedom for soldiers would foster peace.
Breach of Trust's remedies do not follow logically from its analysis-not if the goal is less war. Bacevich attempts to reconcile a critique of modern interventionism with a call for an even more entrenched and ubiquitous militarism, one with little chance of tempering the belligerence of the political leaders he criticizes. Libertarians should oppose this idea from first principles. Nothing would compromise American liberty more than a national army of slaves. Instead we need to nurture a culture of war-weariness, anti-militarism, peace, and individual liberty.
The post Conscription Is Not the Answer Either appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Writing in Commentary not long ago, Seth Mandel drew out a nice point about the resurgence of the Democratic left: "Complaints over the last few years about the GOP being pulled to the right by conservatives," he wrote, "were not about liberals' desire to meet in the middle and compromise, no matter how much they might decry the supposed extremist drift of the right. What they wanted was their very own Tea Party."
The Occupy movement briefly seemed to provide one, but it lacked the Tea Party's staying power. Still, the passions that animated the Occupiers have breathed new life into the left, from the East Coast — where Bill de Blasio won election as New York's new mayor on a promise to end economic inequalities — to the West, where Kshama Sawant, a member of the Socialist Alternative Party, won a seat on the Seattle City Council by campaigning for a $15 minimum wage.
Victories like those have inspired imitation: Several candidates in the Northeast have expropriated de Blasio's "tale of two cities" theme for their own campaigns, and President Obama ended 2012 with a speech calling economic inequality "the defining issue of our time."
All of this has the liberal commentariat rapturous. The abstract notion of equality is the lodestar of the American left, just as the abstract notion of liberty is the lodestar of the right. Or at least some liberty: Most conservatives care greatly about the economic kind, and the sight of an entrepreneur caught up in red tape enrages them. But certain conservatives care less about other kinds of liberty, such as the freedom of gays and lesbians to pursue their own happiness as they define it, or the freedom of a young black male in a hoodie to walk down the street with a bag of Skittles unaccosted.
Likewise, the left is selective in its ardor for equality. It is stirred by the cause of social equality for minority groups, and by economic equality for all. Other kinds of equality matter less — e.g., to evangelicals, the belief that we are all equal in the eyes of God is an immensely important social leveler. To at least the secular left, this solidarity of faith seems not only insignificant but potentially malignant — an "opiate of the masses," as Marx called religion generally.
Even on the question of economic inequality, many on the left tend to focus only on one dimension: the gap between the rich and poor. Conventional liberal opinion holds that the gap is bad not only because of its consequences, but inherently — and the bigger the gap, the worse things are.
But that doesn't follow. As self-described "liberaltarian" Will Wilkinson noted in a 2009 paper, U.S. inequality as measured by the Gini Coefficient (the most common measure of such inequality) is about the same as in Ghana. But being poor in the U.S. is much better than being poor – or for that matter rich – in Ghana. This raises another point Wilkinson makes, about consumption: When you look at how people actually live, what they have in the bank matters much less than their daily experience.
The difference between having a car of any kind or none at all is vastly greater than the difference between having a used Chevy and a new Porsche. And while the rich in the U.S. have gotten richer, so have the poor: Since 1979 the income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans has almost doubled, and market economics has provided them with riches, such as cellphones, once available only to the most well-off. This helps explain why the difference in happiness among income groups in the U.S. is vastly smaller than the difference in wealth. Which of those measures should matter more?
Focusing only on inequalities of result also ignores another important dimension to the question. Again, Wilkinson: "It's not enough to identify a mechanism of rising inequality. An additional argument is required to show that there is some kind of injustice or wrongdoing involved."
It is possible that inequality is rising because the system has grown more rigged. But as Mickey Kaus pointed out recently, while you would expect inequality in a rigged system, you also should expect it in a fair one: "Once the meritocratic centrifuge has sorted everyone out, there won't be that many talented people at the bottom to rise in heartening success stories." Divining how much truth there is in these competing narratives is vastly more complex than ideologues of any stripe would like to think.
Correcting inequalities caused by system-rigging is desirable, but "correcting" (as opposed to merely alleviating) inequalities caused by merit-sorting would actually be unjust. It also would require creating an inequality of a different sort: the inequality of authority.
Perpetual market interventions in the name of economic equality require a perpetual class of interveners who have the power to overrule the free choices made by everyone else.
Naturally, those coercive interventions require handing the levers of coercion over to progressives — which explains why this sort of inequality never seems to bother them in the slightest.
The post The Great Inequality Debate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>His legacy goes far beyond his nanny state war on cigarette smoke, salts and fat, but into his use of the NYPD (which he described as "his personal army") to spy on citizens and stop-and-frisk young men of color en masse, as well as his abuse of eminent domain to seize private property and hand it over to his fellow billionaire developers for massive vanity projects.
Reason TV takes a brief year-by-year look back at Mayor Bloomberg's most outrageous assaults on freedom of choice and civil liberties.
About 2 minutes.
Produced by Anthony L. Fisher.
MUSIC: "Requiem for a Fish" by The Freak Fandango Orchestra (http://www.freakfandango.es)
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The post The Mike Bloomberg Legacy: 12 Years of Little Tyrannies in 2 Minutes! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Here's Reason TV's Thanksgiving release from 2011. It's less than 30 seconds long and goes down like a chill shot of cranberry schnapps, which we sincerely hope does not exist. And it's a testament to however quickly contemporary memes come and go, old movies with high-pitched kids who sound like Towelie from South Park are forever.
Original writeup follows. Go here for links and downloadable versions.
In a time of 9 percent unemployment, a faltering global economy, toxic levels of political rancor, and the release of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, is there anything left to be thankful for?
Reason offers a message of hope, redemption, and dada.
About 30 seconds. Produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie.
Key moments in Thanksgiving history:
1621: Pilgrims in Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts and Wampanoag Indians celebrate a harvest feast that is generally acknowledged as the precursor to Thanksgiving.
1675-1676: About 40 percent of Wampanoag tribe killed by colonists and other Indians during King Phillip's War.
1777: During Revolutionary War, Continental Congress makes first Thanksgiving proclamation, declaring December 18 a day that no work should be done or fun should be had, thus paving the way for the contemporary tradition of spending time with family and watching dull NFL games featuring the Detroit Lions. The original declaration instructs "That servile Labor, and such Recreation, as, though at other Times innocent, may be unbecoming the Purpose of this Appointment, be omitted on so solemn an Occasion."
1863: Abraham Lincoln sets the last Thursday in November as the date for a national holiday dedicated to the idea that even with the Civil War raging, things had been going pretty well when you got right down to it: "Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom."
1915: Preacher William Simmons and 15 others revived the Ku Klux Klan by burning a cross on Georgia's Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving, tying the event to the Atlanta opening the following week of D.W. Griffith's pro-Klan movie, The Birth of a Nation.
1924: First Macy's Day Parade held in New York City featuring live animals on floats. After multiple episodes of tigers and bears eating beauty queens and local politicians, the animals are replaced in 1927 with balloons of Felix the Cat and other characters.
1939: In a bid to lengthen the Christmas retail season, Franklin Roosevelt unilaterally declared Thanksgiving would take place on the third Thursday in November rather than the last, thus giving rise to what was derided as "Franksgiving" and what lives on as Black Friday. In 1941, federal legislation declared Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, marking the last time that Congress passed a law that didn't cost future generations a lot of money.
1987: Ronald Reagan initiates the custom of publicly pardoning a turkey on Thanksgiving; lives to regret it when George H.W. Bush succeeds him as president. Subsequent presidents pardon two turkeys each holiday, because two is twice as good as one.
2009: President Barack Obama fattens turkeys with stimulus dollars, predicts swift end to surprisingly persistent economic downturn that he inherited from previous occupant.
2011: In a bid to appeal to GOP voters, free-falling Republican presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry of Texas refuses to review clemency requests and approves the execution of innocent turkeys. For the purposes of school-lunch programs, federal government declares pizza a vegetable and pepper spray a condiment for educational institutions.
Sources: Wikipedia, 10ZenMonkeys.com, Fevered Imagination.
The post Occupy Thanksgiving!: A Shot of Cranberry Schnapps to Clear the Drowsing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Pope Francis's Evangelii Gaudium about the "new tyranny" of "unfettered capitalism" might just be the biggest thing to hit the lefty blogosphere since Mitt Romney uttered the instantly immortal, irrelevant phrase "binders full of women."
"It's about time," says Daily Kos diarist Egberto Willies. "Great Pope or Greatest Pope?" wondered Wonkette's Commie Girl. "Pope Francis Strafes Libertarian Economics," celebrated Slate's Matthew Yglesias. It's like that time Sinead O'Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope, only this time the Pope is Sinead O'Connor, and the picture is capitalism! Yay!
I don't wish to stand in the way of people enjoying other people's prejudices, but Francis's hyperbolic rants about the role and allegedly dictatorial power of free markets are embarrassing in their wrongness. Cheering them on is like donating money to a Creationist Museum, only with more potential impact. To take one papal passage out of dozens:
Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.
More people have escaped poverty the past 25 years than were alive on the planet in 1800. Their "means of escape" was largely the introduction of at least some "laws of competition" in endeavors that had long been the exclusive domain of authoritarian, monopolistic governments. Here's The Economist:
In 1990, 43% of the population of developing countries lived in extreme poverty (then defined as subsisting on $1 a day); the absolute number was 1.9 billion people. By 2000 the proportion was down to a third. By 2010 it was 21% (or 1.2 billion; the poverty line was then $1.25, the average of the 15 poorest countries' own poverty lines in 2005 prices, adjusted for differences in purchasing power). The global poverty rate had been cut in half in 20 years.
The country that cut poverty the most was China, which in 1980 had the largest number of poor people anywhere. China saw a huge increase in income inequality—but even more growth. Between 1981 and 2010 it lifted a stunning 680m people out poverty—more than the entire current population of Latin America. This cut its poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to about 10% now. China alone accounts for around three quarters of the world's total decline in extreme poverty over the past 30 years.
And don't forget Africa and India!
In Africa, inflation-adjusted per capita incomes rose by an astonishing 97 percent between 1999 and 2010. Hunger in India shrank by 90 percent after the country replaced 40 years' worth of socialist stagnation with capitalist reforms in 1991.
To look upon the miracles of this world and lament the lack of "means of escape" is to advertise your own ignorance. To call it a "tyranny" is to do violence to any meaningful sense of that important word (much like Francis's predecessor did with his silly "dictatorship of relativism" crack). And to make such absolutist statements as "everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest" is to admit up front that you are not primarily interested in spreading truth, but rather in exciting popular passions. Which I suppose makes sense.
It's a free world; Pope's gonna Pope & all that. I don't go to the Vatican for global economics, and Catholics probably don't seek out Reason for spiritual guidance. And the new kid in the Vatican actually seems pretty good to my outsider eyes. But prejudice against global capitalism isn't some kind of twee affect coming from the mouth of one of the globe's largest religious institutions. It's an out-and-out attempt to rewrite measurable history to fit theological imperatives. Liberals who congratulate themselves on mocking creationists while co-signing factually laughable claims about the world they actually live in are not exactly demonstrating a consistent adherence to the Scientific Method.
The post Ahistoric, Unscientific Papal Prejudice Is Okay When It's About Capitalism, Anyway! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Government shutdowns are for wimps: Larry Klayman thinks the country needs a revolution. I don't mean revolution as a metaphor. I mean a full-fledged mobs 'n' pitchforks revolt.
Klayman, who used to hang his hat at Judicial Watch and now has a group called Freedom Watch, is a lawyer with a long history of filing suits to make the government open its records; he attracted a lot of attention during the Clinton scandals, and he has continued to take the authorities to court under Bush and Obama. Sometimes these suits have exposed genuinely significant information, and sometimes they have led Klayman into, ah, weirder territories. He's in one of those weird zones now: He appears to have gone full birther, writing not just that "Obama is not a natural born citizen eligible to be president of the United States" but that the president is "a Muslim bent on furthering an Islamic caliphate who seeks to destroy our spirituality and the body politic of our Judeo-Christian roots." To prevent this calamity, Klayman is calling for an uprising:
Having done little to nothing about the growing list of "phony" Obama scandals, ranging from Benghazi-gate, to IRS-gate, to Navy SEAL Team VI-gate, to Fast and Furious-gate, to NSA-gate, to name just a few, it is clear that our elected representatives do not have the will or courage to remove the mullah-in-chief from office….
[D]o not hold your breath that the higher courts will have the courage to do what needs to be done. That is the reason for Freedom Watch's citizens' grand juries, which are indicting and trying political felons like Obama as we speak. In this regard, a conviction is near in the case of the Obama for eligibility fraud.
Once convicted, We the People will have the right to enforce this conviction and demand that Obama surrender himself to the people's system of justice for incarceration. Will he do so voluntarily? Obviously not! His arrogance and disrespect for American law—just look at how his attorney general has flouted it—and his apparent allegiance to Shariah law make this more than unlikely, to put it mildly.
I therefore call upon all American patriots, once we obtain this conviction, which we will shortly, to converge on Washington. Millions should stand in front of the White House and other national treasures and demand that Barack Hussein Obama leave. If the Egyptians can do this with regard to another radical Muslim, former president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, then can't we Americans do it with Obama?
In a follow-up piece, Klayman decries Obama's "Muslim, socialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-white, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-radical gay and lesbian agenda."
The liberal site Talking Points Memo has described this as a call for a "coup," but that's misleading: The word coup suggests a violent action by small group within the elite, but Klayman is clearly imagining a popular surge from below, one where "Tea partiers, bikers, construction workers, police officers, school teachers, farmers, truckers, clergy, housewives, husbands, students, doctors, lawyers and all elements of our society who see our nation slipping away into the abyss" decide to "stand tall and descend on the capital." Nor is he calling for an armed action: He invokes Gandhi, writes "I do not advocate violence," and believes his forces will win "without firing one proverbial shot." The protests against Morsi did pave the way for a coup, of course—and for quite a few shots, both proverbial and real—but Klayman doesn't seem to see the events in Egypt that way. More to the point, he doesn't seem to see the scenario he's suggesting for America that way. He's imagining a burst of birther People Power.
And that's what's interesting about this: not that a conservative gadfly has embraced a revolutionary fantasy, but that he's describing that fantasy in these terms. There's not much in Klayman's bill of particulars that's apt to appeal to anyone on the left—at its core this is a plea aimed at Americans angry about the phantom threat of Shariah law, not drone strikes or NSA surveillance. But he calls his revolution Occupy Washington, an obvious echo of Occupy Wall Street. Similarly, Klayman's issues with Muslims don't prevent him from invoking the protests in Egypt as a model. If the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and the indignados are all elements of a common historical moment, then this strange mutation of the Occupy idea is a part of the moment too: as pure an example as you'll find of ideas leaking out of their original context and being redeployed for new ends. (See also: Alex Jones' Occupy Bilderberg.)
Klayman has scheduled his revolution for November 19. Not to go out on a limb or anything, but I expect it'll fizzle out harmlessly when those hordes of protesters don't show up.
The post Larry Klayman Wants a Revolution. Not the Metaphorical Kind. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On July 1, the rate paid by new recipients of federally subsidized student loans jumped from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Lawmakers knew the agreement setting the lower rate was set to expire but did not act in time to keep it from doubling.
After having missed their due date, members of Congress started pulling all-nighters in an attempt to figure out how to keep offering this expensive giveaway to young voters and their anxious parents. It has not been lost on Democratic lawmakers that student loans were one of the major issues animating the Occupy Wall Street movement.
While the loan debate was heating up on Capitol Hill, the Congressional Budget Office released a report showing that the proposed reforms, which would tie loan student rates more closely to market rates and impose an overall cap, would cost about $22 billion during the next 10 years. The report sent congressional negotiators scrambling for budgetary cover in time to get the deal passed before students started signing up for loans again in August. On July 31, the House fiddled the rates a bit and passed a bill, which the president promised to sign as of press time.
Former students in the U.S. currently carry more than $1 trillion in debt. A full 11 percent of all student loans are at least 90 days overdue, almost twice the rate a decade ago. (Student loan obligations are one of the few types of debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.) But making loans cheaper likely will encourage students to take on more debt, not less.
The post Fixed Rates appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Protesters plan to convene in lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning for a day of marches and rallies. On Sept. 17, 2011, protesters first began camping in Zuccotti Park near the New York Stock Exchange.
The post Occupy Wall Street Protesters Returning For Two Year Anniversary appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Using a combination of federal grants and grants from left-leaning organizations, the Restaurant Opportunity Center, or ROC, is technically a charitable nonprofit and not a union. But their pro-worker messages, anti-employer protests and self-proclaimed goal of organizing service sector employees for the purposes of negotiating higher wages make ROC look and sound much like a labor union.
Some see their tactics as a deliberate attempt to skirt the nation's labor laws. Only unions elected by a majority of a workplace can negotiate with employers on workers' behalf, though ROC seems to be doing so in the absence of any election.
But others, including the head of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group for dozens of labor unions, see ROC and groups like them as the new face of labor organizing in America.
ROC gets bankrolled with taxpayer cash
While the Restaurant Opportunity Center is working to increase wages for some workers, they are getting paid, in part, with federal tax dollars.
According to tax filings for ROC United, the parent organization that has launched the smaller chapters operating in many cities, the group got $180,000 in government grants during 2010 and another $60,000 in similar grants during 2011.
The organization's budget was about $1.72 million in 2010 and $2.65 million in 2011 – meaning taxpayer dollars accounted for a little more than 5 percent of their operating costs.
Other funding for ROC's initiatives comes from the usual left-wing sources, including grants from the Tides Foundation, a group that also gets tax dollars from the federal government, as a previous Watchdog.org investigation uncovered.
Some Republican members of Congress are asking for an investigation into a Department of Labor grant to ROC.
Getting ROC-ed
The group employs disruptive "mic-check" tactics made popular by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Take ROC's July 25 action at the Capital Grille restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
On that day, during the usual lunch rush, a signal was given — and more than a dozen protesters stood at their tables and shouted their concerns to all within earshot. They were calling attention to what they said was an unfair minimum wage law that allows restaurants in New York City to pay their tipped workers only $5 per hour.
"Capital Grille, shame on you. Restaurant workers deserve fair pay too," they chanted as they were escorted from the dining area.
It wasn't only happening in New York.
At the same time, a similar group gathered outside an Olive Garden restaurant in center city Philadelphia.
"If we don't get no justice, you don't get no peace," they chanted in unison.
Across the nation, minimum wage activists rallied outside Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Capital Grille restaurants – all of which are owned by the same parent company, Darden Inc. – to decry corporate lobbying they say puts a lid on the minimum wage for restaurant workers.
But these supposedly grassroots efforts were in fact a well-orchestrated assault launched by ROC and labor union allies in several major cities. Other groups, such as the SEIU-backed Fast Food Forward, are working toward the same goal.
According to the group's website, ROC began targeting Darden restaurants because the company joins with the National Restaurant Association, to lobby Congress in order to keep wages and benefits low.
Darden Restaurants did not return calls seeking comment.
A similar effort targeting a chain of New York restaurants owned by Chef Mario Batalicame to an abrupt halt last year when Batali sought and received a restraining order against ROC.
From humble beginnings to national network
Rather than unionizing a work place and using the collective bargaining process to negotiate with employers, groups like ROC use loud protests designed to attract public and media attention. They threaten lawsuits and disrupt business.
In short, they use techniques that would be illegal if they were an actual union, said Stefan Marculewicz, an attorney who specializes in labor issues.
"Labor organizations by their very existence are supposed to be democratic institutions," Marculewicz said. "A majority of the workers have to sign up, or they have the option to not sign up."
But ROC is not a union. And because they do not have to gain support from a majority of employees at a certain business – as a union world before it could begin negotiating with employers – groups like ROC can make their voices heard and their presence known without officially representing the workers they claim to support.
Maria Myotte, communications director for ROC, did not return calls and emails seeking comment on the organization's strategy. But in a 2007 interview with the New York Post, one of ROC's top officials described the practice as "minority unionism."
"While a union has to go in and organize the majority of a shop to get some kind of collective bargaining agreement, in our case we'll have a group of workers come in … a small number from a restaurant, and we will 'organize' them to create a demand letter, eventually file litigation, protest in front of the restaurant and get press," said Saru Jayaraman, a co-founder of ROC.
ROC started in New York City to provide community support to the families of restaurant workers killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now, they claim their goals include organizing workers "to create consequences for 'low road' restaurants that employ illegal and other exploitative workplace practices."
There are more than 200 groups like ROC across the country. They have names like Our Walmart, Warehouse Workers for Justice, and the Food Chain Workers Alliance. There are direct affiliates of ROC now operating in almost a dozen major cities.
And the group is attracting attention from some high-profile figures in the labor movement.
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, an umbrella group for dozens of major labor unions, praised Jayaraman and ROC in June during his comments at a gathering of the Labor Research Action Network in Washington, D.C.
"The Restaurant Opportunity Center has built a dynamic and expanding advocacy organization in an industry where 40 percent of the workers earn the minimum wage or less," he said. "Saru is a real pioneer who is demanding answers to the questions that need to be asked about the future of workers."
The AFL-CIO has entered into partnership agreements with several national networks of worker centers and created a procedure under which dozens of worker centers have affiliated with state federations of labor and central labor councils. Trumka said labor unions and work activists should try to "thicken those ties" in coming years.
The post Left-Wing Labor Protesters Funded by Taxpayer Dollars appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Paul Krugman didn't even bother to engage on what "libertarian populism" actually means in his effort at a takedown in a recent column, as Jesse Walker pointed out last week.
Timothy Carney over at the Washington Examiner has been very good at really hitting what the phrase stands for in his regular criticism of federal-level crony capitalism. Today he hits a few goals for libertarian populist economic reforms:
» Break up the big banks, and/or place stricter safety and soundness rules on them: Large banks profit from the presumption of a government bailout and the moat created by regulation. They are creatures of government, and they are insured by government, and so laissez-faire talk here is misplaced.
Free-market types making this argument include Sen. David Vitter in legislation, the Fed's Richard Fisher at CPAC, and many others.
» Cut or eliminate the payroll tax: A tax on your first dollar means you are paying for Warren Buffett's retirement before you even buy groceries for your children. Richer people live longer, and so they're more likely to enjoy Social Security for longer. Also, the tax is capped at about $115,000 in income, meaning it's regressive. Since it's not really funding Social Security or Medicare — on the margin, they're both funded by general revenues now — let's quit pretending and scrap this tax or scale it back.
» End corporate welfare: Republicans are basically the only ones who voted against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. Conservative, free-market lawmakers Mike Lee and Justin Amash have introduced bills to abolish it. The agency puts taxpayer money at risk to subsidize Boeing sales.
Reading his list reminded me of the second season premiere of The Newsroom, which aired last night. I ripped the show last season and watched every episode with revulsion, like a masochist. Aaron Sorkin's worship of progressive technocrat policies, historical revisionism, and dismal attitude that people were just too dumb and uneducated to govern their own lives landed him on our list of 45 "enemies of freedom."
The premiere of the second season approaches the origins of the Occupy movement, so I'm bringing it up in the context of Carney's attitudes on banks and corporate welfare. One of the newsroom staffers finds his way into the early organizing of the Occupy movement (this show takes place two years ago, all the better for Sorkin to game the story to whatever point he wants to make). He hysterically describes the Occupy movement as potentially being America's "Arab Spring," a comparison so misguided and tone deaf that I actually laughed out loud. Even if we consider the Arab Spring an inspiration and account for the idea that the speaker didn't know at the time what would come out of the Occupy movement, the very idea of pushing for political or corporate reform in America can't reasonably be compared to the fight for some very basic freedoms in Middle Eastern countries.
Anyway, at one point the journalist sits down with an early Occupy organizer to talk about their goals and her cynicism of the media. She's already insistent the media is going to get the story wrong (as in, they're not going to say what she wants them to say, which is the same thing). Unfortunately, she speaks fluent Aaron Sorkinese, so at points she was speaking too quickly to grasp everything she was saying. She went on a rant about banks and Wall Street, quickly tossing out "limited government" in an angry tone before mentioning the cozy, crony relationship between banks and the United States, making many of the same points as Carney. It appeared as though she was saying that bank industry conservatives claim to be for "limited government" in order to demand cutbacks while at the same time using their power to push big government policies that benefit themselves. Unfortunately I was not able to determine exactly how nuanced the argument she was making. Given that this is Sorkin, it's possible she didn't understand the relationship and just confused "limited government" with crony capitalism as though the two were inevitably related. It's a very common attitude among progressives, and to be fair, there are certainly plenty of examples to point to.
I am holding out a slight bit of hope that Sorkin knows the difference and will ultimately recognize that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are both very much interested in some of the exact same issues, but are coming to the same place from different directions. I won't hold my breath, though, given that he spent the first season trying to portray Tea Party members as mean-spirited, petty rubes being manipulated by sinister corporate masters while these new Occupy folks are well-meaning idealists.
The post <em>The Newsroom</em> Approaches the Occupy Movement. Maybe it Will Stumble Upon Libertarian Populism. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Occupy Wall Street had brought the suit against the city over the destruction of the People's Library, a collection of about 5,500 donated books that formed a central part of the community that sprung up for two months in the park. In the eviction, many of the books were completely destroyed, and others were so badly damaged as to be unusable. Occupy Wall Street claimed $47,000 in damages, all of which the city agreed to pay today.
The post NYC to Pay $365k For NYPD Destruction of Occupy Wall Street Library appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Electra has been creating economics-themed music videos since her high school senior thesis spawned the YouTube hit I'm in Love with Friedrich Hayek. Her latest video, Fa$t Ca$h, seeks to explain the boom and busts created by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program.
Reason TV's Nick Gillespie caught up with Electra at the 2013 International Students for Liberty Conference to discuss her love of Austrian economists, how she discovered libertarianism, and her most recent music project, Party Milk.
About 5 minutes.
Shot by Amanda Winkler and Joshua Swain. Edited by Swain.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
The post Loving Hayek and Partying with Milk: Q&A with Dorian Electra appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Non-Hispanic whites constituted 62 percent of all respondents, though they make up only 33 percent of New York City residents. While only about a third of Americans hold bachelors' degrees, 76 percent of respondents who had completed their education had a four-year college degree and 39 percent had graduate degrees. Among college graduates, more than a quarter went to top-ranked schools, which might help explain why the majority of graduates under 30 had some student debt. While 10 percent of participants were unemployed, 71 percent were employed in professional occupations. Eight percent were "blue collar."
The post Study Shows Occupy Wall Street Protesters Largely Rich, White Guys appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The documents — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the progressive Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) — reveal that the FBI coordinated at length with local law enforcement, private financial institutions and other government agencies in their monitoring efforts of the Occupy movement's activities.
The post Federal Reserve Worked with FBI to Monitor Occupy Wall Street appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>According to the PCJF, the 112 pages of documents show the government communicated throughout the crackdown effort with financial institutions through the Domestic Security Alliance Council, an entity created by the FBI in 2005 that "enhances communications and promotes the timely and bidirectional effective exchange of information keeping the nation's critical infrastructure safe, secure and resilient."
The post FOIA Documents Reveal Occupy Crackdowns May Have Been Coordinated by Feds, Banks appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, "The Terrorist Encyclopedia," sources told The Post yesterday.
People who know Greene say his political views are "extreme," the sources said.
The post Occupy Activists Busted With Bomb-Making Materials appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The heavily redacted documents indicate that FBI counterterrorism agents were in close communication with law enforcement agencies, businesses, universities and other organizations across the country about the Occupy Wall Street movement, even before Occupy Wall Street set up a camp in New York's Zuccotti Park in September 2011.
The post Documents: FBI Treated Occupy Movement Like Terrorist Threat appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Ron Paul a Key Inspiration to Occupy Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There's an odd moment in Salon's post-Sandy interview with the SUNY historian Jacob Remes, author of the forthcoming book Disaster Citizenship.
The conversation starts off fine. When the interviewer asks whether Hurricane Sandy makes the case for big government or for big business, Remes replies that it's mistake to think those are our alternatives: "The best disaster relief is offered through solidarity, horizontally, through organizations that people are already members of. Sometimes that's government. Often it's not." That's basically true. As examples of these organizations, he mentions unions, fraternal orders, churches ("I might sound like a family-values Republican here"), and Occupy's networks, which have been doing much-needed relief work under the "Occupy Sandy" monicker. Also true. He goes on to claim that such intermediary institutions are in decline and that Americans are "increasingly isolated." I disagree, but at least we're on the same page about what's needed.
But then, asked to reply to Iain Murray's argument that regulation can hamper disaster recovery, Remes says this:
Without government there is no flood insurance. People who live in flood plains get flooded regularly, so you can't have a normal insurance market, because insurance markets depend on people who buy insurance and never use it. You can make an argument that people shouldn't be living in Atlantic City, or New York City, or New Orleans, but then everyone's going to living in Phoenix, which has its own problems.
The thing about these environmental regulations is that, left unchecked, what capitalism is going to do is build in places and ways that make short-term profits. You fill in wetlands. You build private sea walls that redirect surf and make it worse somewhere else. Government regulation puts a brake on that desire for short-term profits.
See if you can find the tension between those two paragraphs. If you're stumped, read this paper [pdf] from the Institute for Policy Integrity at NYU, which explains how "the flood insurance program encourages private development at a rate that is inefficient and unsupported from a social perspective that more fully considers the ecological and financial risks." It also makes a good case that the system disproportionately benefits the wealthy. It does not argue that we should all move to Phoenix: Ecologically fraught beachfront development is one thing, but Atlantic City, New York, and New Orleans managed to exist before the National Flood Insurance Program was created in 1968.
Bonus links: Coverage of Occupy Sandy from The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Nation. Here's an interesting passage from the latter:
"The National Guard came to us and said you guys are way more organized than we are. They're giving us stuff to hand out. We got over six hubs or collectives. Every twenty blocks, we have a new spot that we're trying to engage with the community at. We're not the Red Cross. We're not FEMA, so it's different. It's grassroots. It's guerilla-style. It's a different kind of struggle, but we're trying," said [Occupy Sandy volunteer Diego] Ibanez.
Muriente also reported seeing Homeland Security patrolling neighborhoods, and told me she witnessed armed Homeland Security personnel in military gear, bulletproof vests and holding long rifles, pull over three young black men in the middle of the dark Rockaway as they walked down the street.
"They basically pulled a stop-and-frisk in the middle of blackout, made them put their hands up, started patting them down, pulling out flashlights from their pockets, and when we confronted them about it, [Homeland Security personnel] said there had been looting," she said. "That's the only time I've seen a government official outside of a vehicle that whole day."
The post Thank Goodness the Feds Are Subsidizing the Development That We Need the Feds to Protect Us From appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When I blogged Tom Frank's essay on Occupy Wall Street last week, I had a feeling I might regret my description of the movement as "pretty much over." Sure enough, I must tip my hat to the Zuccotti Park veterans who started Occupy Sandy, a post-hurricane grassroots relief effort that by every account I've seen is doing excellent work. And now some Occupiers are launching the Rolling Jubilee, a voluntary effort buy up people's debt and forgive it. We have yet to see if that one takes off as much as Occupy Sandy has, but it is attracting a fair amount of attention and it'll be holding a charity telethon (er, streamathon) next week. Apparently you don't need an encampment to keep a movement going.
The post Occupiers Battle Hurricane, Debt appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>There always was a tension at the heart of the Occupy movement, a rupture-in-waiting between the anarchists and the social democrats. The fact that Occupy is pretty much over hasn't changed that; it's just moved the sniping over to the retrospectives. Thomas Frank, occupying the pages of The Baffler, has now joined the hostilities, with a 5900-word salvo on behalf of Team Social Democrat.
Credit where it's due: Frank scores some points, as with this reaction to a Noam Chomsky pensée:
he tells us that "one of the main achievements" of the movement "has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange," et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans "tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone." How building such "communities" helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky's implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students.
I also enjoyed some of his barbs against the grad-school wing of the movement. Frank complains that Occupy's "ranks weren't just filled with professionals and professionals-to-be; far too often the campaign itself appeared to be an arena for professional credentialing." More specifically: "dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory?"
But of course the force of essay comes down to the rivalry between the anarchists and the social democrats. Frank thinks it self-evident that "it was the bankers' own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life." (This statement comes just 63 words after the phrase "the bailouts," so now we know precisely how long it takes Frank to forget the state's role in the corporate state.) That leads in to Frank's social vision: "You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy." (The implicit identification of "the labor movement" with "bureaucracy" is an interesting touch, if a little ill-timed. The essay arrives just as Walmart wildcatters are rediscovering the power of pre-Wagner Act organizing.)
Frank's crowning argument is that Occupy resembles that bête noire of all right-thinking Blue Teamers, the Tea Party movement:
both are almost obsessively concerned with the bailouts of 2008, correctly understanding them as the departure point in public attitudes toward business and government. Participants in both describe the bailouts as "crony capitalism." Both make their displeasure known by occupying public spaces, and both forms of protest cherish stories about the lengths to which their cadres have gone to keep those public spaces clean. Both Tea and Occupy gave Ron Paul followers prominent roles, and you could hear calls to "End the Fed" in Zuccotti Park as well as at the big Glenn Beck rallies. Then there were those Guy Fawkes masks, popular with both groups (Grover Norquist displays his prominently on his desk), which commemorate not the 99 percent or some red-state ur-American, but a comic-book loner who wages a righteous, one-man war against a tyrannical government.
The movement cultures are similar, too. Tea Partiers as well as Occupiers deliberately kept their demands vague, the better to rope in a wide cross section of the discontented….Leaderlessness is another virtue claimed by indignados on the right as well as left….
"This is not a political party," [Tea Partier Matt Kibbe] insists; "it is a social gathering." Tea Party events don't have drum circles, as far as I know, but Kibbe nevertheless says he is "reminded of the sense of community you used to experience in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert: peaceful, connected, smiling, gathered in common purpose." It is "a revolt from the bottom up," he declares. It is "a community in the fullest sense of the word."
This goes on, eventually including an analysis of Atlas Shrugged that finds parallels between Zuccotti Park and Galt's Gulch. That part of the argument makes sense, by the way. I mean, I haven't read Atlas Shrugged, but I've absorbed its plot by osmosis, the same way I have a vague sense of what's been happening on Mad Men without ever actually watching it; and Frank's remark that Rand's strikers change the world by "building a model community in the shell of the old, exactly as Occupy intended to do," doesn't seem off-the-wall to me.
And those Occupy/Tea Party parallels are obviously there. It's just that Frank sees them as a sign that the left's latest revival movement went off course, whereas I think they're a sign that decentralized, networked protest is on the rise even as particular protest movements come and go. Granted, the protesters haven't entirely figured out how to avoid being coopted like the Tea Partiers or marginalized like the Occupiers. But maybe the next surge, from whichever direction it comes, will move a little farther along the learning curve.
Bonus reading: I reviewed Frank's 2008 book The Wrecking Crew here and his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas here. I got aggravated at a couple of his Wall Street Journal columns here and here. And I grumbled at him a little more here.
The post What's the Matter with Anarchists? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Here's a new video from The Fund for American Studies.
The group's writeup:
Oct 17, 2012 by TFASvideo
Ever wonder what life would be like without capitalism? Join The Fund for American Studies on a journey to an alternate universe—one where capitalism no longer exists. You may find it's not quite what you expected. For more information, visit http://www.LifeWithoutCapitalism.org.
Credits:
Presented by The Fund for American Studies
Starring John Crowley and Steve Andrus
Also Starring Erin Brett and Seth Goldin
Written and Produced by Steve Andrus
The post It's a Wonderful Life (With Capitalism) appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At Occupy Wall Street encampments around the nation last fall, most of the activists rallied against modern American capitalism and in favor of government aid to the now-famous 99 percent. But from New York to Philadelphia, from Seattle to Los Angeles, Occupiers were joined (or infiltrated, in the eyes of some) by activists talking up the benefits of a truly freed market, without government giveaways to favored interests or central bank manipulations of the economy. This minority took its inspiration from Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. The confluence between libertarian and progressive activism surprised many, including Paul himself. But it was the strongest indicator yet that the Ron Paul uprising poses a unique challenge—and potential attraction—to the American left.
Paul vs. Obama
During Paul's latest bid for the Republican Party presidential nomination, his policies were to the left of the Democratic Party and President Barack Obama in many areas. Obama has expanded almost every aspect of the war on drugs, including federal raids on state-legal medical marijuana operations. Paul thinks it's inherently illegitimate to arrest people for actions that harm only themselves. The Obama administration has deported a record number of illegal immigrants. Paul mocks border walls as essentially un-American. Obama presided over enormous bailouts of the nation's largest financial institutions, and his economic planning team has been largely run by Wall Street insiders. Ron Paul is opposed to what both he and the Occupiers call "crony capitalism." Even the president's signature legislative accomplishment, ObamaCare (which Paul opposed), forces millions of people to buy health insurance from the very corporations progressives claim to despise.
Civil liberties and peace are the issues that first made some leftist hearts beat faster when contemplating this curious Old Right congressman. Obama has started new wars unauthorized by Congress and greatly expanded a civilian-killing drone program. Paul opposes drones, calls for an immediate end to all our overseas wars, and wants the U.S. military to withdraw from the world. By taking these positions, Paul has done more than even leftist icon Noam Chomsky to normalize discussion of U.S. foreign policy as the behavior of a criminal empire rather than that of the world's great defender of liberty.
Obama has strengthened the PATRIOT Act and prosecuted whistleblowers; Paul opposes both actions and has defended accused WikiLeaker (and progressive cause célèbre) Bradley Manning. Obama has expanded the commander in chief's powers to unilaterally imprison and even kill American citizens, aggrandizing the executive branch beyond even what the hated George W. Bush managed. Paul inspires thousands of students to boo any mention of Obama's alarming yet largely unknown National Defense Authorization Act, which gives legal cover to the president's power of indefinite detention.
On a wide range of issues involving individual liberty and protecting people from oppressive concentrations of power, Paul has been more progressive than Obama. Paul's fans knew this, and many led campaigns to capitalize on it during the 2012 primaries—from talking with the more socialist Occupiers to calling on Democratic voters to re-register as Republicans in a movement dubbed "Blue Republican."
Peace and civil liberties, however, do not comprise everything in the progressive-left worldview. The first thing many on the left think when they hear the name Ron Paul is not free markets or imperial withdrawal but abortion. The obstetrician's belief that abortion is murder and thus prohibitable at the state level (though not federally) is a deal breaker for many liberals. His position on marriage equality—that it would be solved if the government got out of the marriage-recognition business—is not a lefty crowd pleaser either.
Perhaps above all, progressives love income redistribution, and Paul does not. For many Democrats, using government to elevate the downtrodden and restrain the wealthy trumps all other ideological commitments.
Paul has sidestepped some of the inevitable flak from this important philosophical difference by soft-pedaling the more blatant "other"-baiting that Republicans usually engage in when it comes to Democrats. So while Paul is opposed in principle to government funding for National Public Radio and even medical care for the poor, he mocks fellow Republicans who act like such programs are where austerity must begin—in the former case because it is statistically insignificant red meat, in the latter because it feeds an ugly strain of hostility toward welfare recipients that plays no part in how Paul campaigns.
As Paul told the leftist magazine Mother Jones in a March 2011 interview, "As a libertarian, I don't endorse philosophically the many domestic programs, and I'm willing to work on a transition. So I say: Let's cut the unnecessary wars. Let's cut the foreign aid. Let's cut all the empire building, which costs trillions of dollars, and maybe we could tide ourselves over. But for some conservatives to start tinkering with the budget with health care or education for the poor, that doesn't make any political sense to me."
On the campaign trail in 2011–12, Paul even spoke (perhaps disingenuously, given his long-established views on the constitutionally limited role for government spending) about how we could take the "savings" from ending our overseas imperial adventures and "spend that money here at home." Perhaps he was referring to spending by the individual taxpayers from whom the money is currently taken. But to certain willing ears, it must have sounded like a call for a more generous welfare state.
That Paul eschews right-wing attacks on destitute beneficiaries of state largess may seem like a minor point when most leftists contemplate him in full. Occupiers often interpret Paul's belief in unfettered free markets as a Trojan horse for unleashing sinister corporate power on the poorer classes. Noam Chomsky, even while crediting Paul for wanting to withdraw from Afghanistan, made sure to tell his impressionable fans in a lecture at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania in November 2011 that Dr. No's ideas regarding health care were "just savagery." Having churches and charity hospitals care for the poor is apparently nothing short of barbaric compared to the virtue of forcing all Americans to buy health insurance.
Yet even Chomsky, perhaps unwittingly, illustrated the contradictions in labeling Paul both a corporate enabler and a free marketeer. Paul's platform, Chomsky said, was "a call for corporate tyranny." A mere 30 seconds later, he claimed "the business world would never permit it to happen" because "they can't live without a powerful nanny state and they know it."
Occupy Paul Street?
Ron Paul was the only prominent candidate who dared say anything good about the Occupy movement during the Republican primary season. Paul told me he agreed with the protesters that bailing out the well-to-do at everyone else's expense was worth protesting, even if he didn't agree with most of the Occupiers' proposed solutions. "If they were demonstrating peacefully, and making a point, and arguing our case [against crony capitalism] and drawing attention to the Fed—I would say, good!" he said to an impromptu press scrum outside a speech in New Hampshire in October 2011. Paul choose not to engage in the Newt Gingrich strategy of merely telling the protesters to "go get a job right after you take a bath" or the Mitt Romney habit of suggesting that they prefer communism to freedom.
The Occupy respect was tentatively mutual. Jay Stuart, a Seattle-based chef and Paul fan who spent some time with his local Occupiers in fall 2011, said he found common ground on defense and civil liberties, and was able to talk easily about how corporations should not be receiving bailouts or special favors. Income redistribution, however, was a sticking point.
"A lot [of the Occupiers] feel they are entitled to things," Stuart says. "Education was one of the biggest I heard, and they think health care is a right for sure. They think it's very unfair they went to school for four to six years and don't have a job at the end. I'd try to explain a little bit of why that might be, about the Federal Reserve's role in the bust, how taxation hurts. At least one guy I talked to got really upset—not quite to violence, but very upset."
Stuart wasn't alone. In New York, where the Occupy protest began, Paul-influenced investment adviser and radio host Peter Schiff marched into Zuccotti Park to try to school Occupiers in his Austrian-economics perspective (for footage of the encounter, go to reason.com). At Occupy sites across the country, Ron Paul fans set up their own tables and tents to distribute market-based literature and give talks against bailing out the rich. In October 2011 I sat through a (painfully tedious) committee meeting at Occupy Los Angeles in which Paulites' complaints about the Federal Reserve and crony capitalism were taken seriously as the group drew up its official list of demands.
Still, many voices on online Occupy discussion boards and in real life painted Paul people as ideological carpetbaggers, grabbing for mental space and street cred that they didn't deserve. The disagreement was mostly civil, although in October 2011 an Occupy intruder in Philadelphia broke into an unoccupied Paul booth in the middle of the night, stole literature and DVDs, and defecated in the middle of the Paulites' space. In July 2012 a group of New Hampshire Occupiers chose to officially boot out anyone involved with the libertarian Free State Project from their coalition.
Paul's radicalism on war and empire has provoked some vigorous debate on the left. In the week before the Iowa caucuses in early January a pair of anti-war activists, John Walsh and Coleen Rowley, wrote an op-ed piece for The Des Moines Register calling on leftists to realize Paul was the best candidate for them because of his seriousness and strength on peace and civil liberties. Walsh, a peace activist and single-payer health care supporter, is one of the leaders of a left-right alliance called Come Home America. Progressives, Walsh says, are more reluctant to join his group than libertarians or paleoconservatives, because they insist on having nearly complete agreement on all issues even with tactical allies.
The first complaint about Paul, Walsh found, was the controversy over newsletters that went out under his name in the 1980s and early '90s with contemptuous comments about blacks and gays. Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi, famous for crusading against crony capitalism, has written that the newsletter controversy precludes him from supporting Paul, despite agreeing with him on such issues as civil liberties, war, and bailouts.
(Article continues below video.)
Other liberal commentators were able to overcome such qualms, although they were immediately attacked for heresy. Last December at Truthdig, longtime left-leaning journalist and commentator Robert Scheer said it was disgraceful that The New York Times and other leading media outlets refused to "seriously engag[e] the substance of Paul's current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender." Katha Pollitt in The Nation mocked Scheer and other progressive Paul admirers, including Ralph Nader and then-Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, for their "progressive mancrushes on right-wing Republicans," averring that "supporting Ron Paul is just a gesture of frivolity—or despair." Other leftist sites from Mother Jones to the Web home of the hipster pinup queens Suicide Girls felt it necessary to run anti-Paul articles warning progressives why they must resist the blandishments of this seemingly cool old Republican.
Scheer is still sure he was right. "In the current election, among both the Republicans and the Democratic Party, the only person who brought up a significant challenge to the banks as far as the Federal Reserve and crony capitalism go was Ron Paul," he says. "Paul also had the only principled critique of our imperial ventures and attacks on civil liberties." Scheer adds that "I tried to vote for him" but didn't manage to re-register as a Republican in time. Scheer says he believes all this about Paul while remaining "not a libertarian by any means, but a bleeding-heart liberal of the leftist variety."
Radical outsiders are often attracted to radical outsiders, united in opposition beyond the specifics of proposed solutions. Such a dynamic helped men of the left from Jesse Jackson to the late Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn get excited about Paul's presence in the 2012 campaign. People on the right also noticed—and decried—Paul's countercultural appeal, based not only on the specifics of his politics but his frequent stump-speech shoutouts to such peculiar individualist concerns as homeschooling, raw milk, and nutritional supplements. Former Arkansas governor and 2008 GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee delivered one of the milder of such critiques, quipping to Jay Leno in May 2011 that Paul events were like a "combination gun show and Grateful Dead concert."
Some of the left's Paul sympathizers defended their enthusiasm by pointing out that a President Paul wouldn't have the final word on government policy. On the radical left site CounterPunch, Charles Davis, who prefers Paul over most Democrats on war issues, noted that even "if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments—and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion—from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing."
Similarly, Democratic Party outlier Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio representative who lost his own primary this year and is leaving Congress, says he loves working with Paul despite sharp disagreements over income redistribution. Kucinich admires Paul so much on civil liberties, war, and the Federal Reserve (three key areas where political and media elites like to treat the cross-party mavericks as irresponsible kooks) that he has mentioned Paul as a potential vice president in a fantasized Kucinich administration. "If we had real change in monetary policy," Kucinich says, "these policy issues of redistribution would not be as compelling. If we could put the Federal Reserve back under control of the Treasury [Department], this would be a whole different world."
Unfortunately for Kucinich, he has not been able to duplicate Paul's political success. While Kucinich believes that the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), with whom he works, could function as a Ron Paul-style revolution from the left within his own party, John Walsh, the anti-war activist, is no fan of PDA. "In contrast to Ron Paul," he says, "their loyalty is to the party over principles." No one has arisen within the Democratic Party to challenge Obama from the left.
Bleeding Heart Libertarianism
Ron Paul has not been the only libertarian making a concerted effort to sell progressives on the idea that their economic goals can be met through nonstatist means. In the rarefied world of academic philosophy, a group of libertarian political thinkers operating under the rubric "bleeding heart libertarians" has been toiling on the same project.
While most bleeding heart libertarians seem reluctant to embrace or support Ron Paul specifically, they are fighting for the same mental ground as Paul, on a distinctly nonpolitical battlefield. John Tomasi, a bleeding heart libertarian who teaches political science at Brown University, recently published Free Market Fairness (Princeton University Press), which argues that modern liberals who want to maximize the well-being of the poor should embrace free markets more than they do. Tomasi preaches to the left that respect for economic liberties is a key part of respecting individual autonomy and that a properly freed market generates enough wealth to benefit the least well off. Paul, in his more folksy and Constitution-anchored style, has been saying largely the same thing.
Robin Koerner, a Brit who launched the "Blue Republican" idea in a Huffington Post column, suggests that libertarians offer progressives who "believe we will all die" without the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a deal like this: "OK, but how about we agree we will have that argument in a world where we still have a Bill of Rights and don't kill people as a default international relations tool? Where we don't have crony corporate capitalism? Can we agree if we got there, you as someone who leans left will have a world so much more like you want and I as a classical liberal will have a world so much more like I want, and in that world let's argue about the EPA and FDA."
Despite the common ground Paul has unearthed between libertarianism and the left, the Paul political machine has linked itself to the Republican Party for two election cycles now. His intended political heir, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), endorsed Mitt Romney for president in June, when many of his father's fans still believed Ron Paul still had a distant shot at the nomination. Progressives are not likely to get into bed with the modern GOP, no matter how simpatico a particular Republican seems.
Did inertia and partisan stubbornness keep progressives from embracing a promising champion of their cause? Or do they care more about abortion and income redistribution than the war and civil liberties issues they emphasized during the presidency of George W. Bush? Either way, it's too late now. Paul is on the verge of retirement with no obvious successor. Progressives probably won't see his like again anytime soon.
The post Ron Paul: Man of the Left appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The anti-austerity protest in Madrid, named "Occupy Congress", has descended into a something of a brawl. Some protesters tried to tear down barriers in front of parliament and were met with baton charges and rubber bullets. At the time of writing there have been thirty-two injuries and twenty-three arrests reported.
The protestors (or Indignants, as they are known) are demonstrating against what they call the "kidnapping of democracy." Much of the anger is directed against the bailout the Spanish government is currently considering. From the BBC:
Pablo Mendez, an activist from the 15M Indignants movement, told the Associated Press: "This is just a powerful signal that we are sending to politicians to let them know that the Spanish bailout is suicide and we don't agree with it, and we will try to prevent it happening."
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is under pressure to secure austerity reforms and negotiate a 2013 budget:
With this year's budget deficit target looking untenable, the conservative government is now looking at such things as cuts in inflation-linked pensions, taxes on stock transactions, "green taxes" on emissions or eliminating tax breaks.
The 2013 budget is the second one conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has had to pass since he took office in December. Spain must persuade its European partners that it can cut the budget shortfall by more than 60 billion euros by 2014.
Rajoy has already passed spending cuts and tax hikes worth slightly more than that over the next two years, but half-year figures show the 2012 deficit target slipping from view as tax income forecasts will not be hit due to economic contraction.
Elsewhere in Spain it was announced that Catalonia will hold its elections early. The president of the province, Artur Mas, has pledged to fight for independence. The dire fiscal situation of many of Spain's constituent provinces is an added concern for the central government, which is struggling with its own budget and reforms.
The post Protesters Clash With Police Outside Spanish Parliament Ahead of Budget Announcement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The overall impression left by the information in this data-extraction is that the federal government conducts surveillance operations just because it can, as a matter of reflex, and I went on RT to discuss just that.
I apologize for the deteriorating video quality as the segment progresses. Internet connections in my part of Arizona are mule-powered, and they were a bit tuckered out.
The post J.D. Tuccille, on RT, Discusses FBI Surveillance of the Occupy Movement appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Drums, Puppets, & Dissing Libertarians: What We Saw at the Occupy Anniversary Protest in NYC" is the latest offering from Reason TV.
Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.
The post Video: Drums, Puppets, & Dissing Libertarians: What We Saw at the Occupy Anniversary Protest in NYC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Monday, September 17, 2012—the one-year anniversary of the original encampment in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park—Occupiers staged a day of civil disobedience and attempted to block access to the New York Stock Exchange. They were met by pre-emptive barricades from the New York Police Department, who wouldn't allow anyone into the immediate vicinity of the exchange without photo ID and proof of employment.
Reason TV's Kennedy was on the scene to ask the demonstrators what they've accomplished so far, whether President Obama supports them, their opinion of libertarians, and much more.
About 3.20 minutes.
Produced by Anthony L. Fisher, with help from Jim Epstein.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notifications when new material goes live.
The post Drums, Puppets, & Dissing Libertarians: What We Saw at the Occupy Anniversary Protest in NYC appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"It's an inconvenience," said one man who worked at One Battery Park Plaza as he watched the protesters go by on a cigarette break. He wouldn't give his name. "They're always walking through — they should get jobs."
The movement has settled into a routine, and a core group of activists turn up every few weeks and have become something of a fixture of life in New York.
The post After a Year, Occupy Movement Protests Become Routine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Demonstrators had planned to converge from several directions to form a "human wall" around the stock exchange to protest what they said was an unfair economic system that benefited the rich and corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.
The post Arrests Top 100 Outside New York Stock Exchange appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hundreds of protesters scattered into Manhattan's financial district, decked out in costumes including Uncle Pennybags and an enormous marionette Statue of Liberty.
The post Police Outnumber Protesters at OWS One Year Anniversary appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Nearly 200 scruffy anti-capitalists swarmed Washington Square Park on Saturday in a warmup for Monday morning, when the activists will march on Wall Street and attempt to disrupt rush-hour traffic.
By late afternoon, tensions between activists and cops led to arrests, as a procession of protesters chanting "F— the police!" marched down Broadway bound for Zuccotti Park, the movement's old base.
The post NYC Occupy Protest Results in 25 Arrests appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It won't be a surprise to read conservatives lambasting this as unconventional monetary policy meant to help re-elect President Obama. And inflation hawks have already started screeching. But the loudest cry of "for shame" should be coming from the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Quantitative easing—a fancy term for the Federal Reserve buying securities from predefined financial institutions, such as their investments in federal debt or mortgages—is fundamentally a regressive redistribution program that has been boosting wealth for those already engaged in the financial sector or those who already own homes, but passing little along to the rest of the economy. It is a primary driver of income inequality formed by crony capitalism. And it is hurting prospects for economic growth down the road by promoting malinvestments in the economy.
How is the Federal Reserve contributing to regressive redistribution, income inequality, and manipulated markets? Let's flesh this out a bit.
Last month, Bernanke said that quantitative easing had contributed to the rebound in stock prices over the past few years, and suggested this was a positive outcome. "This effect is potentially important, because stock values affect both consumption and investment decisions," he argued, apparently under the belief that the Fed has a third mandate to support rising stock prices.
This is ironically a trickle down monetary policy theory, where rising stock prices mean more wealth and more consumption that trickles down the economic ladder. One problem with this idea is that there is a gigantic mountain of household debt—about $12 trillion worth—that is diverting away any trickle down. An even worse assumption is that the stock market really reflects what is going on in the real economy.
Where the Occupy movement should really be teed off is when you consider that most equity shares in America are owned by the wealthiest 10 percent. That is not inherently a problem—wealthier individuals with more disposable income will have more ability take ownership stakes in companies than those in lower income brackets. And it is not a call for class warfare. However, it does mean that when the Fed engages in quantitative easing it is providing a benefit to a very narrow segment of society at the expense of others (either through future inflation or through the cost of raising taxes to pay for increased federal debts). That is the definition of crony capitalism.
At the same time, all Americans have seen the prices of basic goods increase over the past few years in large part due to rising commodities prices. The whole idea of QE is to drive investors out of lower risk investments like mortgage backed securities and government debt and get them to put that money in "more productive" use—lend it, build skyscrapers, invest in technology, etc. Since there is little confidence about the future of the economy, many investors have crowded into the stock market with their money, and still others have invested in commodities.
The problem is that investing in commodities can push up prices on things like gas, meat (because of feed corn prices), bread (because of wheat prices), and even orange juice. There certainly have been other contributors to commodities prices going up, but if the Fed has boosted stocks, they've boosted commodities too. So not only are the cronies gaining from quantitative easing, there is a negative wealth effect too.
The cronyism doesn't end there. In a Dallas Fed paper released in August, OPEC chief economist William White points out that easy monetary policy favors "senior management of banks in particular." And even Bernanke himself suggested (as if it was a good thing) that quantitative easing purchases "have been found to be associated with significant declines in the yields on both corporate bonds and MBS." Translation: the Federal Reserve has made it artificially cheaper for corporations to borrow money and has pushed up the prices of houses (benefiting homeowners but hurting homebuyers).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought cheap loans allowing businesses to leverage up and juiced housing prices were key parts of what got us into this mess?
All of this might be acceptable to some if quantitative easing was helping the American economy recover. The reality is that quantitative easing has made it cheaper for the government to borrow, has artificially propped up the housing market (making it take longer to recover), and has dramatically manipulated the distribution of capital in financial markets. And the economy has not been in recovery.
The plans announced today will exacerbate pre-existing malinvestment and income inequality. What is this continuous round of purchases going to do? It won't get banks lending any more than they already are. And even if it did, households and small business still have a lot of debt that will keep them in a deleveraging state for a while. It won't help the housing market bottom out, clear away toxic debt, and end the wave of foreclosures that need to process. It is not going to push up incomes, create new jobs, or change the technological revolution that is altering the face of employment in America.
To put it simply: More quantitative easing is not going to move the dial much on the growth meter.
Taken together, the crony capitalism and negative wealth effects of quantitative easing should clearly give pause. The fact that QE promotes activities that led to the housing bubble should have stopped its progression as an idea a long time ago, especially since these problems are greater than any gain that would come from this now perpetual pace of money creation.
If there is a time to head down to Zuccotti Park and raise some cardboard in opposition to the continuation of such a devastatingly failed policy, it is now.
The post How Quantitative Easing Helps the Rich and Soaks the Rest of Us appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An appeals court in New York said Twitter cannot stall a criminal case against Malcolm Harris, a protester arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last October, while the company appeals a judge's order for the release of tweets related to the case.
The post NYC Judge Rules Twitter Must Hand Over Deleted Tweets of OWS Activist appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Unarmed officers began clearing around a dozen protesters from their camp on the ground floor plaza of the bank's office tower, which has been occupied since October last year.
Some of the defiant demonstrators were carried out but others remained despite remonstrations from the court-appointed officers.
The post Hong Kong Evicting Occupy Protesters appeared first on Reason.com.
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