Very Much Alive and Growing: Day 14 of Occupy Wall Street

• The testimonials on http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ keep coming, and they are downright heart-breaking.

• There is a new central hub for all the protests springing up in each state, here: http://www.occupytogether.org/

• From a great article in The Guardian:

But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"

It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.

Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".

The form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged....

• Last but not least, check out the dedicated You-Tube channel

Solidarity.

Will the wave of democracy in the Middle East ever reach US shores?

Obama today, quoted from DailyKos:

So Brenda and her husband know what they can do without. But they also know what investments are too important to sacrifice. Their daughter, Rachel, is a sophomore in college with a 4.0 grade point average. The tuition is a big expense. But it’s worth it, because it will give her the chance to achieve her dreams. In fact, Brenda is looking for a second job to ensure, as she told me, “the money is there to help Rachel with her future.”

Really? This is where we've landed? In a place where a special-ed teacher from Missouri, with a husband on a half-pay pension, is considering taking on a second job to pay for the tuition of her 4.0 GPA daughter? And the president of the United States is holding this up as a good model? [link added]

Where is the federal student aid for a family like this?

Why isn't investing in our young people up there with investing in all the broadband, clean energy and research? In fact, how can you be investing in research for the future without investing in educating future researchers?

Still, this address today will probably score well with most audiences. Families are struggling, and belt-tightening by government will be welcomed. And at least the president is continuing to push the investment angle, which is certainly not a message that's going to be trumpeted at CPAC or on Fox News this week.

Bob Herbert today:

When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.

As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, “The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation.” (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)

It’s a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

Egypt's Future

Well, actions will always speak louder than words, but Obama surely deserves as much credit for nurturing the conditions (with one good speech, especially) hospitable to Egypt's inspiring and now genuinely potential democratic revolution as Reagan ever did for tearing down the Berlin Wall. What happens to Suleiman the torturer sort of remains to be seen, but apparently the military is not pleased with him, and clearly he is reviled by most Egyptians who (rightly) equate him with Mubarak or worse (link via)...DemocracyNow has been streaming live all day, and together with the irreplaceable Al Jazeera (now being broadcast, instead of hunted, by the liberated Egyptian state television!) has been covering, amidst incredibly poignant interviews, what appear for the moment to be various encouraging signs that the working class Egyptian military is prevailing in being serious about real and meaningful reform. Mubarak's assets are allegedly frozen by the Swiss, and should they ever find their rightful way back (with interest) to an Egypt working over the next couple of years toward real independence and social democracy, perhaps they would no longer have to force the poverty of structural adjustment and privatization on their people, not to mention the looting of public money or torturing people at the behest of other countries for a living.

Israel's current rulers of course, with their Medieval Fortress Economy, would rather have a friendly dictator back than dare to dream of true democracy, peace or human prosperity.

One probably cannot overstate the significance of the newfound global self-consciousness, universal courage, resolute peacefulness, humanity eloquence and above all pride of the Egyptian people (and throughout the region, and the world). Let's dare to hope not, at least, beyond the end of this historic day.

Parrhesia in Egypt, and How the US should be standing for universal freedom, but isn't

Real patriots of the United States (as opposed to drum-beating nationalists, or realpolitik bloggers/hobbyists with delusions of self-importance, for whom politics is first and foremost a kind of spectacular soap opera), have every reason to be infuriated with the Obama administration's pathetic series of public statements and ongoing policies regarding Egypt.

Here is the man Obama sends to Egypt. Unfortunately for Obama's meticulously-maintained image campaign, Wisner doesn't mince his words and reveals a little bit too much truth of the situation for comfort.

Here is the man the US currently and openly supports to replace Mubarak, and that only once Mubarak steps down more or less at his own pace. Plus ça change...suffice to say, Suleiman is a well-known US-trained torturer reviled in Egypt, a CIA stooge and all-around bad, bad man, no different than Mubarak with the exception that instead of remaining in a self-imposed protected bubble he actually has real blood on his hands(much more here, also here and here).

As always, the real news (and inspiration) is on ground level with the people. (Much more here.)

If only we had governments around the world capable of acting on their behalf in such moments in true democratic fashion, that is to say, willing to take risks for actual democracy (as opposed to being lapdogs to the violent corporate cycles of rape and repression, with a status quo of mass poverty, unemployment and privatized misery dialed up every new and wondrous "technological breakthrough" moment to make even Reagan's former criminal high finance advisers and thieves blush). Is appeasing Israel, and following the crazed and thoroughly discredited ongoing mandates of Bush's "WAR ON TERROR" really that important to Obama (let alone the vast majority of Americans), such that we in the US must throw all our weight behind the only alternative to Mubarak we still trust to torture people for us, and keep the ministers of high finance assured of some working illusion of order?

If the Egyptian people have demonstrated anything over the past two weeks of caring for one another, and in courageous solidarity against both state brutality and World Bank oppression, it is that they deserve better.

Update: via Huffington:


Part 2 and Part 3.



Hell, even Anderson Cooper seems to have woken the fuck up, after some admirable reporting from the streets and in harm's way (where real reporting used to be done and still is, full-time at least by one of the best remaining genuine news organizations on the planet).

Update II: Also some rag called the NYTimes: Mr. Suleiman’s Empty Promises

Pro-Democracy Christian Protesters, Protecting Muslim Prayers in Egypt

• This is an excellent article:

"Revolution is like a love story," said Alaa Al Aswany, the Egyptian novelist whose writings about the hypocrisy of the Egyptian government and the need for free elections have helped inspire the pro-democracy movement. "When you are in love, you become a much better person. And when you are in revolution, you become a much better person."

• More seriously