Arab Spring on Wall Street?

Best to wait and see how things develop before engaging in hyperbole. A robin does not make a spring and a protest does not make an Arab Spring. :)

That and wait till the weather really breaks... winter in New York City is harsh to say the least.

maybe the protesters will be camping inside the toasty halls of power by then...

Beyond expressing their frustration at the 1%, what do the protestors envisage as their endgame?

Bec.De.Corbin wrote:

That and wait till the weather really breaks... winter in New York City is harsh to say the least.

The poor seem to live on the streets all year round in NYC although the weather has killed homeless people in past winters. 

Northern Shoveler wrote:

Bec.De.Corbin wrote:

That and wait till the weather really breaks... winter in New York City is harsh to say the least.

The poor seem to live on the streets all year round in NYC although the weather has killed homeless people in past winters. 

True but they mostly use NGO shelters at night and when the weather is really bad; or heat vents on the streets; is it fair they would have to compete for space with a bunch of privileged white kids who could be someplace else if they wanted to?

howeird beale wrote:

There's just so many presumptions wrapped up in it. Not that your heart might not be in the right place.  You assume that none of the homeless street kids in NYC have joined in, and maybe are getting fed a little better, getting a new sleeping bag, getting a decent night or two of sleep in a temporary no-go zone for the cops, etc. Maybe also getting into the organizing, maybe getting a sense of achievement, self-worth etc. Who cares if its Sean Penn's money or grampa who went to Berkeley's that pays for a little food and warmth?

What I'm trying to say is they will not be able to camp out in tents in the dead of winter without great difficulty and requiring allot of logistical support... even more than they have now. 

The type of tents they would need would have to be some kind of heavy duty military grade type tents with stoves in them. I doubt the cops would let them set those types of tents up... they are like temporary buildings and I'm sure there's some ordnance that the police will use against them to shut them down.

That is not to say they can't gear it down for winter and then ramp it back up in the spring.

Very good financial journalist Michael Lewis on protests:

--"could be a big deal"

--"horrible unfairness out there"

--"socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else"

Michael Lewis short video interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC-sGm9cEl4

Glen Greenwald on the corporate media dismissive anti-protest angles:
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/04/andrew_ross_sorkins_assignment_edit...

And the Globe and Mail finally broke down an gave a noncommital but full accounting of events on the last page of the front section, including its Canadian origin in Vancouber's Adbusters. Big things planned out there for the 15th.

Like the 'Arab Spring', watch out -  this 'American Spring' could be 'Spring'-loaded...

  co-option, infiltration and 'steering' should be assumed and due diligence exercised...

A look at why there is so much hysteria over the Wall Street protests. I have to disable the rich-text and it's not linking for me. I'll have to ask my daughter....:)

October 9, 2011

Panic of the Plutocrats

By PAUL KRUGMAN

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.

Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.

And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”

The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

Thanks for posting that NS. Hedges is the best.

But no, Canada's Fox is being built by Pierre Karl Peladeau and you ain't seen nothin' yet. He would not let Hedges near a Quebecor audience. Neither would CTV. The CBC led with its chin, and O'leary is just a disgustingly greedy bastard. Can't imagine how Amanda can work with him.

And the dizzy bastards at CBC have lost Hedges. I wonder if they'll interview John Ralston Saul who, as Hedges said, has spelled it all out. He did an amazing piece in Harper's a few years back, predicting the end of Globalization.