Lift Every Voice

Sitthixay Ditthavong/AP

Rick Perlstein on the Chicago Teachers' Union strike (and in a Sam Seder/Majority Report interview). Perlstein finds the strike the third milestone in events that began with the Spring 2011 Wisconsin statehouse demonstrations, then followed by the Occupy actions starting last September 17. In the MR interview, Perlstein notes the CTU did important groundwork with parents before the strike, and has strong support for its stance against "reform" focused on standardized tests and eliminating "frills," like art, libraries, and physical ed.

Along with the "liberal" political establishment's endorsement of corporation-enriching "reform," there's the "greedy teachers" narrative, and digby notes the media's current promotion of this story line. But that's business as usual, just as most national coverage chose to make Wisconsin only about unions, and to present Occupy as a freak show.

The strike also raises a number of class issues, and digby included this essay from Corey Robin. He writes of his experience attending excellent schools in upper-class professional Chappaqua, NY, schools that introduced him to and encouraged him in the multiple interests that ultimately led to his academic career. Families relocated to the town for schools of this quality, writes Robin, yet many parents looked down on teachers as losers for accepting a low-paid career, and they communicated that attitude to their children. Robin finds in this class snobbery a source of current anti-teacher sentiment.

That may well be a factor prompting elite reaction, including that of the "liberal" elite. In the Majority Report segment, Perlstein notes CTU president Karen Lewis' claim that Mayor Emanuel told her privately that "25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and that he was never going to throw money at them." Why, after all, should 25 percent of children of people not Our Kind matter?

Along the same lines, MR followed the Perlstein interview with audio of this powerful appearance by Matt Farmer. It's natural for billionaire Penny Pritzker to think music and art are for mine but not thine, when thine need only be educated enough to become the help.

During the decades of war on public education since I was a kid, I've come to see that what I once thought of as middling schools were much closer to an elite education. Imperfect as they were, those schools sometimes suggested possibilities beyond training the young to become a suitably unquestioning drones. Sure, there were mediocre teachers, but there also were those who opened new horizons.

One of the latter was a U.S. history teacher who'd grown up in a coal mining town, worked construction jobs in the summers, and was a civil rights activist in the ongoing work in the '60s for the most basic legal protections. He introduced us to current struggles, and to labor history and the battles lost and hard-won: the history missing from or glossed over in textbooks.

There were other teachers who were influential, but something that's always stayed with me was my experience in H.S. choir—and with a teacher I wasn't all that crazy about. (He wasn't exactly sophisticated in non-musical matters; I remember his referring to a synagogue as "the Jewish church...)

But he gave us the ambitious assignment of learning the choruses of the J.S. Bach "Magnificat," for a concert with professional soloists. It was a revelation to learn our individual sections' choral parts, which were stunning in themselves, and then to hear how the parts transformed into something even greater, when all were combined.

While kids generally were listening to whatever was Top 40 c. 1967, everyone became pretty awed by this process. I remember walking past the gym after a rehearsal, when someone burst into a choral part, then others joined in as we strode (seemingly bounced!) through the empty hall. There was something important we all felt, regardless of musical background (which was limited, for most). It was the combination of a powerful esthetic experience along with the act of individual voices joining to form something greater than the parts, and we responded strongly. Well, there might also be a metaphor in that, about teachers, students, community...

At the very least, the impression this kind of experience made on me also makes it impossible to forget that kids respond to what they are exposed to. Limiting the "finer things" to those with moneyed parents is a form of child abuse that's been pushed to respectability, but needs to be seen for what it really is.

Anniversaries

Year ten, and still counting: this from Dalia Lithwick, on the of sight/out of mind legal limbo to which we've relegated "enemy combatants."

In Digby's post on the newest "bad apples" video to get out, some suggested context to that January 11 Guantanamo anniversary—

We are a nation of prisons. I just don't think most Americans find it all that remarkable that a particular group of prisoners are caught in some kind of legal limbo. It happens every day to one extent or another...

Just as those marines are so used to killing that they can't see they've lost their humanity, the American public is so used to innocent people in prison that they can't get worked up about a bunch of innocent foreigners caught in a Catch-22.

January 11 also marked a 100th anniversary: the start of the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills. On January 1 of that year a new state law went into effect, reducing the maxiumum weekly work hours for women and children from 56 to 54. From the centennial site's history—

On January 11, workers discovered their employers had reduced their weekly pay to match the reduction in their hours. That difference in wages amounted to several loaves of bread a week.

Bruce Watson in Bread and Roses quotes a mill overseer who stated "the strike began like a spark of electricity." On January 11, Polish women weavers at Everett Cotton Mills realized that their employer had reduced their pay by 32¢ and stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" (Watson, Bread and Roses, p. 11). Workers from other mills joined the next day; within a week 25,000 workers were on strike.

Robert Forrant on Majority Report, about the strike and its resonance today, in the context of ongoing Occupy actions.

Among the issues Forrant notes: the dire conditions that led workers to strike, and the role of women, many of them immigrants from diverse cultures who nonetheless recognized their common interest. There was the IWW's organizing workers disdained by the AFL. The National Guard called against strikers drew heavily from the classrooms of Harvard—an institution benefiting from the wealth of mill-owning donors. To complicate class issues further, many of the Harvard men had sisters actively involved in supporting the strikers.

New York City, 1912: parade of Lawrence children sent to foster families during the strike

More history and photos at the Bread and Roses Centennial Exhibit.

One hundred years ago, the Lawrence strikers won—briefly. Employers would later fire union organizers, hire spies, and chip away at the workers' gains.

Decades later, after New Deal legal protections and post-World War II recovery, large numbers of workers would begin approaching middle-class status, for a brief window of time.

The protections are essentially gone, and in a climate of "shut up and be grateful if you have a job," the Occupy/99% movement is the first thing in a long, long time that's reminiscent of those young women with the vision to demand bread, without forgetting the need for "roses."

Today would have been the 83rd birthday Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the holiday named for him comes only once a year it's still a potential reminder of how much of King's pro-economic justice and anti-war record is airbrushed from the usual commemorations.

We may be even farther now than in Dr. King's lifetime from the ideal of turning military spending abroad toward social justice at home. And with the military now our only jobs (and benefits) program, more "apples" can be expected to turn out "bad," in a society dehumanized in ways that Dr. King feared.

Another January 15—with renewed threats to the basic voting rights that people fought and died for—here's Charles Pierce: On Our National Holiday, America's Everlasting War.

Something's Got To Give?

Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters An Occupy Wall Street tape hangs across the door of an abandoned foreclosed upon property where demonstrators protested in the East New York section of Brooklyn in New York City, December 6, 2011.
(via Bag News Notes)

So it's back to work, and I'm back to distracting myself from clock-watching—by audio-listening.

Despite the long hours at the office, there's so much excellent stuff available that I can't keep up. But I try, so I'm still getting to year-end material, like the December 29 Majority Report.

This starts with a two hour review of the show's reporting on Occupy Wall Street: extensive, and beginning with the pre-September 17 planning, because Sam Seder saw the significance from the start.

An interview with Fran Lebowitz starts after the 2:00 mark. Regarding OWS, Lebowitz points to the original site itself being "about real estate: no New Yorker ever heard of Zucotti Park." Only because the developer had made a deal with the city years before, a small green space was open to the public when protest got underway in September.

The interview ranges over a lot of thought-provoking material, particularly about the three-decade or so ascendancy of money over all other values. There are no longer sane points of reference, says Lebowitz: "I hear 'earn' before the word 'billion'; you don't 'earn' a billion, you steal it!"

She notes that when Obama ran for president, she knew he was to her right on economic issues, simply because he's ten years younger. It makes him

from the generation of people who believe there is such a thing as clean money... like "clean coal"... "public-private partnerships"
... Words that starting being used about 20 yrs ago: "vision" ... business has only one goal, to make profit, which is fine, but when you mix things..."

you wind up with horrors like Liebowitz's example of private prisons.

Her comments about spurious consumer choice—and the landmark reached "when people started to not mind being called 'consumers' instead of 'citizens'"—harken back to Thomas Frank's take on "market populism" in One Market Under God. There, Frank chronicles the foisting of the post-80s narrative: CEOs are heroic, unions are run by "bosses," and "consumer choice" is the highest form of human freedom.

So much of our sinking ship condition comes from decades of a management consensus used to destroy institutions in the name of remaking them. On the macro level, is the political/corporate agenda behind, say, destroying the Post Office.

On the local level (or in the workplace), it can be painfully easy to see what is sacrificed to bolster individual resumes. This is at work in the case of libraries being stripped of books in pursuit of the next big thing. And, since overseeing a major capital project looks trememendous on a director's resume, functioning buildings are torn down and replaced by empty media spaces.

Lebowitz notes that the "middle-class" was mainly a myth, because people buy on time. And the people who actually were middle-class didn't care when the lower-class jobs began being shipped overseas, since it didn't affect them. Without working-class identification, Americans have been unorganized and have "identified up," with the moneyed class.

With the "Work" part disappearing from the Work-Buy-Consume-Die American way of life, it seems a constructive cultural shift would be the best we can hope for.

Whether of not they come out of Occupy Wall Street, Lebowitz says we will have to find values to compete with the power of money, because "there's no money left: they stole it all!"

Eclipse of the Sun, George Grosz, 1926

Everything Old Is New

Summer 1932 (photo source unknown)

November 2011
Photo: Scoboco/Flickr, via Gothamist.

Old is new—or maybe vice versa—with a heaping helping of technology mixed in.

Prostesters camping out, much like in the old days, but this time the word is spread—and the serious news reported—by tweets, cell phone pictures, and Bat signals.

The phase of occupying city parks may be over, but the movement is not; in the year ahead it will be very interesting to see what happens next.

Following the 99 percent movement—and earlier, Wisconsin's dramatic reaction to its state government takeover—were last year's bright spots in news.

Grassroots action could inject some reality into this election year, despite what the major media choose to cover.

Most reporting of the recent death of Vaclav Havel was predictable, quoting world leaders on loss of one of their own, and of course noting the end of communism in the former Soviet bloc.

Havel was a writer instrumental in launching public challenges to the Czechoslovak communist regime, beginning in 1977 and succeeding in 1989. His example is a reminder of what is possible if people decide to use (in Havel's phrase) "the power of the powerless" and stand up to tyrants.

A remembrance of Havel by Timothy Garton Ash.

For me, 2012 will be a year of trying to keep up with the Wisconsin recall and with how OWS develops—possible sources of good news to look forward to.

And I'll try to do some reading up on our nearly forgotten history.

Senator George Norris, co-sponsor 1932 Norris-LaGuardia Labor Act (photo source unknown)

After all, in a time when most workers are left behind in one way or another—unemployed, or doing the work of three for the pay of one—some of the old, suppressed ideas are still the best.

IWW "silent agitator" sticker
Image: Rebel Voices

A Gift For All Seasons

Mr. Charles P. Pierce: not only is he blogging regularly as of late, but he seems to be doing it quite continuously.

This—on Scott Walker and the Wisconsin recall drive—really needs to be read in whole, not quoted.

...But it's too hard to resist a sample; on December 2—

There were new rules in the state capitol that morning. There are new rules in the state capitol of Wisconsin on almost every morning these days. You see, ever since last winter, when Walker rammed through his assault on the state's public workers, touching off a general uprising all over the state, and a specific one outside on his front lawn, many of his fellow citizens have taken to expressing in imaginative ways how much of a walking pustulation they believe their governor is, both inside and outside the capitol building. So, in the interest of not being told to his face what a walking pustulation he is, Walker and his Department of Administration have concocted a veritable symphony of pettiness to drown out the noise....

And this, on Obama's pretty words in Kansas vs. the reality of the 99%—

...In the middle of his lucid exposition of how we of how we got into this mess — and, more important, who got us into this mess — Obama felt obligated to say...

"I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules. These aren't Democratic values or Republican values. These aren't 1% values or 99% values. They're American values."

Because, among all that's wrong with that picture, "The Republican party gave up on these 'values' the first time they let Arthur Laffer into their corridors of power without handing him a mop and a bucket," Pierce continues—

I regret to inform the president that these actions are necessary specifically because the Republicans — and, alas, too goddamn many Democrats — do not accept the fact that "this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, when everyone plays by the same rules." I regret to inform the president that, up until recently, not enough Americans believed in those "American values" to get their sorry asses to the polls and elect enough people put those "American values" into action. The people most clearly doing the latter are the people doing it in the streets today.

Keeping Folks Occupied...

That they do, the representatives of the one percent.

They provide opportunities for camping out in a patriotic manner—

(NYT "Black Friday" coverage, via Bag News Notes.)

Meanwhile, they're also busy having the wrong kind of campers evicted... Nearly three hundred arrests after midnight yesterday, as LA police broke up the Occupy site at City Hall.

Bag News again—on the LAPD's bringing in "embedded media" to cover the action—while keeping out independent reporting.

Writer Tina Dupuy was on the scene. Talking today with Sam Seder (segment starting at 33:00), she had a lot to say about the media who were let in, and about the meme that the encampment was dangerous and unsanitary—the story line used by authorities around the country as the for-public-consumption reason to break up Occupy camps.

Touching on actual threats to public safety is Joshua Holland—on the connections among OWS, the gutting of social services, and militarized police forces.

In Britain today, public sector workers took to the streets, in protest against the austerity scam their government has created.

So much happening; now, if only we had a news media...

Though, after suing the Fed for access to its records, Bloomberg News reports how Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress.

It sure would be nice to see a bit of media (and prosecutorial) interest in an insider scam on a very grand scale—for the benefit of insiders so grand, they can only be a micro-percent, next to whom others of the One Percent are mere hoi polloi.

It would also be nice to see interest in the "sideshow created to distract everyone from what the Fed was up to."

Golden Calf: My, How You've Grown

Water Tiger: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image..."

She also observes—

So nice to know that the safety of this statue is more important than the safety of First Amendment rights.

Note handed to Obama—just in case he might care that "Banks got bailed out. We got sold out."

The note math has Occupy arrests at 4000.

Which leaves out mention of the level of police reaction in scenes like this.

Or this...

Any sound from the fetus lovers will be to condemn a pregnant woman for being in a place where out of control authority could decide to assault her.

Setting Examples

Portland— Natalie Behring/Getty Images
caption: Police in riot gear work to remove remaining protesters from the streets around the Occupy Portland encampment November 13, 2011 in Portland, Oregon. Portland police have reclaimed the two parks in which occupiers have been camping after a night of brinksmanship with protesting crowds of several thousands.

Not Portland—another image from Bag News Notes, where Michael Shaw compares the two— Khalil Hamra/AP
caption: Egyptian riot police beat a protester during clashes in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011. Thousands of police clashed with protesters for control of downtown Cairo's Tahrir Square on Saturday after security forces tried to stop activists from staging a long-term sit-in there. The violence took place just nine days before Egypt's first elections since the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February.

Word is out today; here via David Atkins—

Two people were killed in Cairo and Alexandria this weekend as Egyptian activists took the streets to protest the military's attempts to maintain its grip on power. And guess how the state is justifying its deadly crackdown.

"We saw the firm stance the US took against OWS people & the German govt against green protesters to secure the state," an Egyptian state television anchor said yesterday...

And why would they not draw that conclusion? Stopping the lower orders by whatever means is the goal of the owners everywhere, so the message is dutifully promoted by their media servants.

Our superstar versions of the latter are so very well cared for: defaming activists is all in a day's fabulously overpaid work for them, as they ignore or excuse police brutality and use of "pain compliance" against peaceful protestors. Demonizing protest applies to US streets, at least; similar demonstrations abroad may get better PR, depending on a regime's current branding by the owners.

Yet world-wide austerity for the 99% is a sacred cow of the pundit class.

Again: why not? It's a mere abstraction, this drive to destroy what little is left of a safety net not needed by anyone they will ever have to know.

99% Reason For Thanks

Some reasons to be thankful, right now: Scott Olsen's continued improvement, since the October 25 police attack on Oakland occupiers.

And for the many committed and ingenious participants who have brought OWS this far.

That's in only two months, and in the face of stepped-up brutality around the country, as the owners and their "public servants" lose patience with the movement's continued growth.

Matt Taibbi hits a few key points about the powerful motives for OWS, despite demonstrators' alleged lack of focus on issues—

... Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

...

What both sides missed is that OWS is tired of all of this. They don't care what we think they're about, or should be about. They just want something different.

We're all born wanting the freedom to imagine a better and more beautiful future. But modern America has become a place so drearily confining and predictable that it chokes the life out of that built-in desire. Everything from our pop culture to our economy to our politics feels oppressive and unresponsive. We see 10 million commercials a day, and every day is the same life-killing chase for money, money and more money; the only thing that changes from minute to minute is that every tick of the clock brings with it another space-age vendor dreaming up some new way to try to sell you something or reach into your pocket. The relentless sameness of the two-party political system is beginning to feel like a Jacob's Ladder nightmare with no end; we're entering another turn on the four-year merry-go-round, and the thought of having to try to get excited about yet another minor quadrennial shift in the direction of one or the other pole of alienating corporate full-of-shitness is enough to make anyone want to smash his own hand flat with a hammer.

...

There was a lot of snickering in media circles, even by me, when I heard the protesters talking about how Liberty Square was offering a model for a new society, with free food and health care and so on. Obviously, a bunch of kids taking donations and giving away free food is not a long-term model for a new economic system.

But now, I get it. People want to go someplace for at least five minutes where no one is trying to bleed you or sell you something. It may not be a real model for anything, but it's at least a place where people are free to dream of some other way for human beings to get along, beyond auctioned "democracy," tyrannical commerce and the bottom line.

Photo: Sarah Seltzer, Alternet

Taibbi's piece in the new Rolling Stone was online a week or two ago; it was before the heightened police violence of November 17 that Taibbi wrote—

And here's one more thing I was wrong about: I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off.

Photo: sirmitchell

Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images, via Bag News Notes

Same as it ever was—

The Feast of Pure Reason (193?)
Jack Levine
NYT: November 2010 obit and slide show

The Day After

New York, yesterday:

Last night:
"99%" was among the slogans projected on the side of the Verizon building. Boing Boing has stunning pictures accompanying an interview on how it was pulled off; including this background—

Opposite the Verizon building, there is a bunch of city housing. Subsidized, rent-controlled. There's a lack of services, lights are out in the hallways, the housing feels like jails, like prisons. I walked around, and put up signs in there offering money to rent out an apartment for a few hours. I didn't say much more. I received surprisingly few calls, and most of them seemed not quite fully "there." But then I got a call from a person who sounded pretty sane. Her name was Denise Vega. She lived on the 16th floor. Single, working mom, mother of three.

I spoke with her on the phone, and a few days later went over and met her.

I told her what I wanted to do, and she was enthused. The more I described, the more excited she got.

Her parting words were, "let's do this."

She wouldn't take my money. That was the day of the eviction of Zuccotti, the same day. And she'd been listening to the news all day, she saw everything that had happened.

"I can't charge you money, this is for the people," she said.

She was born in the projects. She opened up her home to us.

She was in there tonight with her 3 daughters, 2 sisters. The NYPD started snooping around down on the ground while the projections were up, it was clear where we were projecting from, and inside it was festive.

"If they want to come up they're gonna need a warrant!," her family was saying. "If they ask us, well, we don't know what they are talking about!" They were really brave and cool.

Alternet has reports and crowd estimates (Foley Square last night at over 30,000). Coverage of police actions includes this—

One protester, however, had a hard time getting the NYPD to take him into custody. Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis, in full dress uniform, was almost begging to be arrested -- kneeling in front of a line of cops, with his hands behind his back at the southwest corner of Nassau and Pine --as he decried corporate exploitation. The police made feints at arresting him for a time, almost toying with the retired cop, but wouldn't actually do it -- at first. After he moved back through the crowd and up toward Broadway, they pounced, turning Lewis into a full-fledged OWS folk hero. Walking ramrod straight with his hands behind his back, the retired police captain was led by two NYPD officers through the intersection to the whoops, whistles and applause of the crowd.

Lewis definitely is a new hero of mine; along with Denise Vega, and thousands of people whose names I don't know.

Michael Shaw presents these juxtapositions: pretty Madison Avenue imagery versus the brutality of our militarized police forces.

In all the rush of events, we can't forget about the political shell game being played by the servants to the 1%.

As Digby offered in this morning's entry in her pretty much daily posts on the subject: "Super Committee"; Super Trouble

99%; Devotion, 100%

Via Digby—

"100% American," those Three Rs might sound.

But they inspire the kind of response the authorities never deem necessary for a crowd like those 2009 tea partiers who threatened Democratic congress members' town halls.

This posted by Michael Shaw yesterday—

photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images.
caption: Retired Philadelphia Police Department Captain Ray Lewis (L) stands outside Zuccotti Park after police removed the Occupy Wall Street protesters from the park early in the morning on November 15, 2011 in New York City. Hundreds of protesters, who rallied against inequality in America, have slept in tents and under tarps since September 17 in Zuccotti Park, which has since become the epicenter of the global Occupy movement. The raid in New York City follows recent similar moves in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon.

More on Ray Lewis' participation in OWS.

Today—Ray Lewis Arrested—

"All the cops are just workers for the one percent, and they don't even realize they’re being exploited," Mr. Lewis said. "As soon as I’m let out of jail, I'll be right back here and they'll have to arrest me again."

Picture here.

Collective Actions

Even without the help of DHS or the FBI, a thorough 1932 job—

Soldiers guard leveled veterans' bonus march camp

David Atkins yesterday, on the NYPD clearance and media blackout—

Watching it unfold has had the same surreal feel as watching the early days of Tahrir Square. As big as the story of the clearing of the park is, one of the interesting side stories is also that all the major news networks, cable and otherwise, were silent...And as with Egypt, by far the best way to learn about events happening on the ground was via Twitter.

...

Media blackout? Check. Transportation shutdown? Check. Needless police brutality? Check. Mayor Mubarak is evidently in control of New York City, and pulled off this entire operation in early morning cover of darkness.

The reporting ban was eluded for a while by Josh Harkinson, who entered the park and reported for Mother Jones via twitter and video here and here.

With evictions going on in cities around the country, Digby quotes this, on Oakland mayor Jean Quan's apparent spilling the beans that city governments and federal authorities coordinated the bust-ups—

...Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC ...casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country.

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

Digby notes—

I don't have the answers. But I do know that the Federal, state and local police agencies have a tremendous amount of capability and I have no doubt they have been clamoring for the chance to use it.

Later updates from Digby: more on apparent DHS and FBI involvement.

Lynn Parramore lays out six questions about that involvement.

Michael Shaw at Bag News Notes posts this—

Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Shaw writes of this photo versus images from CNN—

Leading off this rough edit is last night's iconic photo of the White Shirts manhandling Occupier youth as Zuccotti was taken, along with eviction stills from CNN...

What we have here is a massive PR war — the battle for hearts and minds (and noses) —playing out between the protesters and the city in front of the media. So the question, when we get to the end of this 24-hour media cycle, will the Reuters photo win the action for Occupy? or, will the Mayor's gambit pay off? In other words, will more people sympathize with Bloomberg and the police action based on floods of grimy shots of NYC's sanitation force cleaning up the remains?

More Digby, about the role of the "culture war" media setup in deflating public approval of OWS—

...the "controversy" is a direct result of right wing lizard brain propaganda about Occupiers being sub-human beasts. The drumbeat has been loud and constant, particularly on local news, and it was almost inevitable that the notion would take hold among some people. Add to that the sight of heavily armed Robo Cops swarming all over our cities as if they were staging an assault on Falluja and people get nervous. That's not an accident either.

...this thing was bound to run along America's cultural fault line whether it set out to or not and in the end it will likely fall on one side of it... That doesn't mean it won't have the impact everyone seeks. It's just that the idea of the 99% vs the 1% is a great slogan and its certainly valid. But in our culture, we just don't divide that way. ...

N(ice) P(olite) R(epublicans)

The revolution will not be, etc.—NPR, home of Cokie and the like, axes this host, for the wrong kind of political activity—

The problem, says Simeone, is, "I'm not an NPR journalist. I am not paid by NPR. I don't do news. I don't do analysis. And I have never talked about the occupation movement on the air. I do this entirely in my free time."

...

"I've never hid my views and my opinions have never leeched into what I do on NPR. People can listen to all my shows. When I was talking about 'Tosca,' I could have talked about the relevance today of Cavaradossi, the tenor who is a political prisoner and who is tortured. I didn't mention it. It's a show about opera, for God's sake."

And a freelance web producer of a WNYC show gets the same treatment.

Yes, NPR's coverage continues to comfort the comfortable.

And there are credulous fans who fall for the branding.

Nevertheless, I caught a couple of Morning Edition segments this week where I almost enjoyed the lameness of pandering, considering the way reality is being leaked by other means, these days.

One was from the always irritating Eleanor Beardsley. I've heard her in the past when, her voice full of disdain, she "reports" on stories like a French transit workers' strike that not only shut down Paris—the déclassé unionists temporarily deprived her of her nanny's services!

This week, it was a Wednesday segment about Sarkozy's reaction to the Greek referendum. In her patrician, looking down the nose manner—

...opposition figures in France seemed delighted by news of the referendum, calling it a victory for the people. Desperate to beat Sarkozy in the presidential election next May, they hailed Greek resistance to its European managers.

"They've only been thinking about taking care of the euro and not the Greek people — so they're getting what they paid for," said Jean-Luc Melenchon, head of a coalition of far-left parties.

The far right also spun the news to fit its views.

I don't know the background of the "coalition of far-left parties," but it's is the usual hack punditry that attributes any position to "just politics," while presenting left and right as equally cynical.

On Thursday, there was this: "Harvard Economics Students Protest Perceived Bias." Students walked out on poor Greg Mankiw, former Bush advisor, now advising Romney...

I don't think I imagined an ill-concealed panic in Mankiw's voice, as he raced through his academic name-dropping and his talking points. The latter included the usual "we haven't been producing enough educated people to keep up with the increasing demand for high skilled workers."

So, what are all those unemployed indebted advanced degree holders posting "I am the 99 percent" photos, and camping around the country—chopped liver?

Mankiw claims, amusingly, that "some of the evidence that we've seen suggest that incomes at the top have fallen disproportionately relative to the middle."

Also, that "rising inequality is really a long-term...like a 40-year trend since the 1970s." [Trans: Jimmy Carter's to blame.]

If victories are possible over those who fund the blathering mouthpieces of academia and media, those will be hard-won.

But I think this from Thomas Ferguson, speaking at Occupy Boston, is on the mark—

You are powerfully influencing American politics just by directing attention to the 1% and big money's hold on American politics. It is a message that makes the establishments of both political parties and the mass media tremble, lest it transmit to the rest the citizenry, which is well aware that something is rotten, but not always sure exactly what is causing it.

...in its short existence, Occupy Wall Street has highlighted the problems of money and politics in a way no other force in American society has. You have put your finger on the pivotal issue of our time, which is whether democracy in America can survive.

Class-War Zones

Then—Washington, DC, 1932: Bonus Army marchers' shacks burn after attack by military.

October 25, 2011: violent pre-dawn police raid on Occupy Oakland camp.
photo: Jay Finneburgh/Reuters
caption: Occupy Oakland protester Scott Olsen, a former U.S. Marine and Iraq war veteran, is carried away after being injured during a demonstration in Oakland, California October 25, 2011.
Bag News Notes

This was a vet who had survived two tours in Iraq that sustained head injury from a police projectile. (Scott Olsen's condition has since been upgraded, from "critical" to "fair.")

A Majority Report listener called the 26th, to share her own experience—

"Woman arrested in OccupyOakland: tear gas came first, cop withheld medicine."

Medicine to treat her MS, that is.

Interesting that a major rationale for breaking up the encampment was concern over "sanitation": this slide show reveals the debris created by police on the site, which occupiers had been maintaining by their own organizational effort.

New arrests around the country, this weekend.

And weather happens: NYC occupiers camp out in snow, after having their power generators confiscated.

No matter how things play out with occupations themselves, the movement has been brilliant in forcing attention—and in highlighting the 99 Percent theme.

Majority Report has been invaluable at covering events, with Sam Seder's trips to Zuccotti Park, reports from listeners, and daily interviews. Weeks ago Sam's take was that this is a real turning point: a movement where participants' sense of having nothing to lose is so strong that they would commit to living outdoors, without basics of survival.

And the ingenuity with which the movement has developed strategies outside the official media is something Sam continues to cover extensively. And spotlighting the creativity of responses to the occupations' themes, have been interviews like one with "Fake Fox News Guy," artist Chris Cobb.

The word has been getting out, to more and more of the 99 Percent.

And there was a stunning performance in Congress.

Not by Congress—or it's execrable Super Committee.

But hearings before the latter were interrupted by a citizen, calmly and brilliantly speaking truth.

A Promise

Occupying Wall Street: not only for hippies, and only just beginning—

New York MTA worker; more photos here.

Dollars and Percents

The bottom tier is not going away.Photo: Scott Lynch, Scoboco's flickr set

Despite the usual media neglect or mockery, here's the latest update from digby. Reliable as ever, she has been covering the neglect and mockery throughout the protest, noting—

I can't help but recollect the slightly different coverage of our most recent protest movement when it first burst forth on "tax day" in 2009. Of course, it was corporate sponsored, so I guess that makes it much more serious.

Digby's ongoing coverage of the protests has included this, on photojournalist Alan Chin's images, and his observation that—

Many pundits have thus noted that the lack of greater protest is an interesting, if not surprising, aspect of our current moment. They would be well served by visiting the encampment in Lower Manhattan. The park is kept spotlessly clean, the disparate demonstrators field skeptical inquiries from hecklers and passerby with humor and patience, and their low numbers are steadily supplemented by people that join them for an hour or two at a time.

Since the impressive job done by Occupy Wall Street's organizers, unions are beginning to join the protestors; as it happens, soon after this was reported.

Also in the past week or so, this—from an interview with "the last honest man on Wall Street"—

"For most traders...we don't really care that much about how they're going to fix the economy, how they're going to fix the whole situation," Rastani said. "Our job is to make money from it."

Finding optimism in a grim situation, Rastani said he's been "dreaming" of this moment for years.

"I go to bed every night, I dream of another recession," he said.

Then, there are the other 99% of the country.

The faces and stories are full of heartbreakers: the disabled scrimping on medication and food to send the kids to college; returning vets, in debt and out of work. With so many here in their 20s, there's a lot of focus on heavy school loan debt and dismal job prospects.

As things stand now, so many face futures that can be predicted to be grim; what's unpredictable are the details of the potential "rewards" that lie ahead.