Three-eyed Fish and other short notes

It’s a Simpson’s world: Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant.

My Halloween column A Candy Bar for Death is up on the UU World web site.

The Occupy Mordor movement is getting more serious. The Orcs of Mordor have released a statement charging:

The legitimate government of Mordor has allowed itself to be covertly replaced by a “shadow government” comprised of ‘An Eye’ and ‘Nine Mortal Men’, none of whom were elected.

Wonkblog at the Washington Post examines Rick Perry’s “flat” tax plan, concluding that it will collect less revenue and move towards privatizing Social Security.

How it will collect less revenue becomes clear when ThinkProgress computes the Perry tax for Warren Buffett, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, and Perry himself. All are wealthy enough to benefit, but the biggest winner is the richest: Buffett, who might pay as little as two-tenths of a percent of his $62 million income.

Finally Kevin Drum observes that the vaunted simplicity of the system is also only for the rich:

the rich not only pay lower taxes [under Perry’s plan], they also benefit from having simpler taxes. They do so much better under Perry’s plan that they’ll almost all just fill in his postcard without even bothering to calculate how much they might owe under the current regime.

Low and middle-income taxpayers, however, have no such luck. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll do better under the current system, which means they need to fill out Perry’s postcard and fill out a current 1040 to see which one comes out better. No simple taxes for them.

This photo was supposed to be India as seen from space during Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Apparently it isn’t. (Actually it’s an overlay that illustrates India’s increasing brightness from space as its population and prosperity increase.) But it’s still pretty.

Something else that’s pretty: Last Monday’s northern lights, seen across much of the country. This shot was taken near Madison, Wisconsin:

Or you can watch the aurora on video, like this one from Michigan:

Or this one from orbit:

Alabama learned nothing from Georgia’s experience, and so has to repeat the lesson: When you depend on migrant Hispanic workers to harvest your crops, an anti-illegal-immigrant law that motivates even legal Hispanic immigrants to leave your state might not work out for you.

As in Georgia, Alabama’s crops are rotting in the fields. This was entirely predictable, and the logic is simple: First, hand-picking crops really is a skill; you can’t expect a random person off the unemployment rolls to be good at it. So paying by the hour doesn’t work out for the farmers and paying by the box doesn’t work out for the pickers. (An Alabama tomato farmer claimed that inexperienced American replacement pickers who were paid by the box were making $24 a day for back-breaking work. No wonder they quit.)

Second, a skilled American-citizen picker wants more than the no-benefits $8/hour the farmers want to pay. But Alabama produce competes against produce from neighboring states that aren’t hostile to immigrants. So the Alabama farmers can’t just raise prices to pay their workers more.

The week’s stupidest point: Congressman Denny Rehberg argues that a statue of Jesus on public land is not a church-and-state issue because it’s not religious. “Just because it’s maintained and was put up by the Knights of Columbus does not make it a religious statement.”

A Florida high-school teacher breaks the law by helping her students register to vote.

We claim it’s a service economy, so why are we checking out our own groceries? The concept of shadow work.

Jon Stewart: If ClimateGate deserved so much coverage, why doesn’t the final debunking of ClimateGate deserve coverage?

Paul Ryan takes a bold stand for “equality of opportunity” rather than “equality of outcome”. So why does he oppose anything that would actually equalize opportunity? And that point about Americans being more upwardly mobile than Europeans — it ain’t true.

Now Bad Lip Reading has a Herman Cain video:

October 31, 2011 – 12:07 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (3)

Vampires

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. 

— Karl Marx

In this week’s sift:

  • Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don’t know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right’s regressive flat-tax idea doesn’t simplify anything. But there’s an obvious progressive reform that would.
  • Koch-Funded Study: “Global Warming is Real”. Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
  • Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to “man up” and face her rather than go after her staff.
  • Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can’t Republicans be as gracious about President Obama’s successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading’s Mitt Romney video.
  • Last week’s most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Around got the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
  • Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It’s the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you’ve been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.
October 24, 2011 – 12:54 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Eliminate the Work Penalty

Like clockwork every four years, Republican presidential candidates propose to “simplify” the income tax by replacing it with a “flat” tax — an income tax where all income is taxed at the same rate.

As I’ll explain below, a flat tax doesn’t simplify anything, but progressives could respond with a proposal that would: Eliminate the work penalty. Don’t tax dividends and capital gains separately from wages or at a lower maximum rate. Treat all income the same.

Fake simplification. Here’s what’s wrong with the idea that a flat tax is simple. An income tax has two parts:

  1. defining what income is
  2. saying how much tax a person at each income level pays.

If you’ve ever filled out your own tax return, you know that the complicated part is (1). Once you know your taxable income, you just look up your tax on a table.

But a flat tax only changes (2), so it doesn’t make your life simpler at all, and it doesn’t shrink the “three million words of the current tax code” that Rick Perry rails about. It slightly simplifies the formula the IRS uses to compute the tax tables, but that’s about it.

The only purpose a flat tax serves is to cut taxes for rich people and raise them for everyone else. “Simplification” is a just ruse to sell the change to people who aren’t rich.

Deductions. Now, sometimes a flat-tax proposal is coupled with eliminating a bunch of deductions. Depending on how it’s implemented, that could simplify both your tax return and the tax code. And it might or might not be a good idea, depending on which deductions get eliminated and whether or not the corresponding tax expenditures are replaced with subsidies.

But that part has nothing to do with flattening the tax. If getting rid of a bunch of deductions is a good idea, we could do that while continuing to tax the rich at a higher rate than the poor or the middle class. The two ideas are unrelated.

The Work Penalty. However, there is a way progressives can steal the tax-simplification issue, and simultaneously put the plutocrats on defense: We could propose eliminating what Andrew Tobias has aptly called “the work penalty”.

Currently, if your money makes any sizable amount of money for you through dividends and capital gains, you fill out a way-too-complicated worksheet in the instructions for Schedule D. (Check out page D-10.) That’s because we don’t really have one income tax system, we have two: One for people who make money by working, and a different one for people who make money by having money.

Guess which system has the lower rates?

For the last several years, tax rates on wages have started at 10%, jumped to 15% when a single wage-earner’s taxable income got over $8,500, gone up to 25% at $34,500, and kept rising from there to max out at 35%.

Meanwhile, the tax rate on qualifying dividends and capital gains is capped at 15%. So (because of how tax-brackets work) a wage-earner whose taxable income tops $38,750 ends up paying a higher tax rate than an idle billionaire whose income is all dividends and capital gains.

That’s a work penalty. If you work, you pay more than if you had acquired the same amount of money by being idly rich.

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan would make the work penalty bigger by not taxing capital gains at all. Cain would tax dividends at the same rate as wages, but this is mostly a ruse, because corporations would stop paying dividends. Instead, they’d use their excess cash to buy back stock, which raises their stock price and so converts taxable dividends into tax-free capital gains.

Making tax simplification a liberal issue. The work penalty is the reason that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. President Obama has proposed to fix this by adding a new Buffett Rule to the tax code: a higher minimum tax rate for people whose income is higher than $1 million a year, however they acquire it.

But rather than tack on an extra rule, why not go for the heart of the beast? Eliminate the work penalty. Treat all income the same.

If we made this proposal revenue neutral, tax rates on wages could go down. (Whether we need more revenue in general should be debated separately.) The tax booklet would get slimmer. The income tax would get conceptually simpler, and the Schedule D worksheet would go away. Plus, it would eliminate all the games that make astronomical CEO and hedge-fund manager wages look like capital gains. It’s a win all around, unless you make a lot of money off your money and pay somebody else to do your taxes.

And the framing is tremendous. The work penalty captures the part of the Occupy Wall Street message that most resonates with the general public: the feeling that the rich have special privileges. (Robert Reich’s tax proposals address the work penalty, but he buries it at the end of his article, not realizing the power of the idea.)

It also follows the pattern of the marriage penalty, a concept the Right has put a lot of effort into publicizing. (Marriage and work are both traditional American values that don’t deserve to be treated badly by the tax code.) It associates liberals with working people and conservatives with the idle rich. It steals the tax simplification and tax reform memes from conservatives.

And finally, it’s just the right thing to do. Income is income. There’s no moral justification for favoring the idle rich over people with jobs.

October 24, 2011 – 12:43 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Koch-Funded Study: “Global Warming Is Real”

A new study begun by skeptics from outside the climate-science community, funded in part by the climate-change-denying Koch Foundation, has published four papers supporting one of the key global-warming hypotheses.

To put this in context, there are three distinct ways to deny that we should take action on global warming.

  1. Claim the planet is not getting warmer. Rick Perry has taken this approach, claiming that there is in fact a “cooling trend” that scientists have “manipulated data” to cover up.
  2. Claim that the warming trend is a natural fluctuation unrelated to greenhouse gases or fossil fuels. Debunked here.
  3. Claim that possible actions are too expensive. This is the hardest point to resolve, because it depends not just on climate science, but on economic projections, speculation about future technologies, and your tolerance for catastrophic risk. See the discussion here.

Shifting from one form of denial to another (depending on how much the audience knows) is a sure sign of a charlatan. Such speakers will grant that the planet is warming in one discussion, then talk about a cooling trend in the next.

The new research is a devastating blow to type-1 denial. The work was done by the Berkeley Earth Science Temperature Study (BEST), prominent scientists from outside the usual climate-science research circles (the Economist article on this mentions and physicist and an astro-physicist, including a Nobel Prize winner), who were open to the idea that climate scientists were either misguided or dishonest. So they came up with an independent way to process raw temperature readings going back 200 years. Their conclusions matched the orthodox climate-science results (warming one Centigrade degree since the 1950s) within 2%.

As BEST scientist Richard Muller wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.

I think Muller is too optimistic, as shown by the comments WSJ’s climate-denier readership appended to his article. In a rational truth-centered world, we would stop hearing type-1 denial. But in our world type-1 denial will continue, because the new study does not change the relationship between global-warming denial and fossil-fuel-company profits (diagrammed here).

ThinkProgress’ Joe Romm examines the particular case of type-1 denier Anthony Watts. Watts was supportive of the BEST study before he knew what it would say, calling their technique “a better method” and “a novel approach that handles many of the issues that have been raised”. In March Watts pledged: “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”

But now that he’s seen the result, he’s not budging. Right now he’s saying: wait for peer review. In a few months peer review will be in, and I predict he’ll come up with another excuse.

If the public debate does eventually progress to type-2 denial, here’s a handy fact to keep in mind: The hypothesis that greenhouse gases make a planet hotter isn’t some ad hoc thing left-wingers came up with to justify a government takeover of the economy. Originally, it was developed to explain a completely non-political mystery: why Venus is so hot. (I mean: why the planet Venus has a surface temperature over 800 degrees, not why the Roman love goddess is so attractive, which should be obvious. Sorry for the ambiguity.) Only later did people begin to wonder how the same phenomena played out on Earth.

Among astrophysicists, the greenhouse-gas explanation of Venus’ climate is not at all controversial (probably because no corporation owns Venusian oil rights). Given the example of the Earth’s closest cousin in the solar system, type-2 deniers need a stronger argument than mere skepticism. They need to explain why the same processes that make Venus a furnace don’t work here on Earth.

I like the way a commenter on TPM responded to type-2 denier:

Sooooo . . . help me out here. Which part is it that you doubt, the “theory” that CO2 is transparent to visible light but opaque to infrared, the “theory” that the Earth absorbs visible light and reradiates it in the infrared spectrum, or the “theory” that burning fossil carbon emits CO2?

The complete humans-cause-global-warming hypothesis may be hard to test in one experiment, but the pieces of it are simple and well-established.

October 24, 2011 – 12:17 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (3)

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Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral

This Rachel Maddow segment is a classic let’s-take-this-outside challenge to the billionaire Koch brothers.

Some background: First the Maddow show used the Koch brothers as an example of a failure of trickle-down the-rich-are-job-creators economic theory. The Kochs get richer and richer while destroying jobs, as shown here:

Then the show made fun of Koch Industries for touting its 1,240 job openings as if it demonstrated that a government jobs program is unnecessary. (And how many current employees will those 1,240 replace? Less than 1,240 or more?)

Then Koch Industries shot back — not at Rachel directly, but at the staff person who wrote the blog post.

And that brings us to Friday’s segment, in which Rachel refuses to refer to the Kochs as “industrialists” or “businessmen” or any of the other respectful titles they are usually given. Instead, she talks about “Daddy’s company” and “their enormous inherited fortune” before closing with this:

Charles Koch, David Koch, you are trying to intimidate the wrong people. This kind of thing is as pitiful from billionaires as it is from anyone. So I reiterate my many earlier invitations to you: Come sit for an interview. I would love to have you. Come sit for an interview and let’s talk this out. Rather than have Daddy’s company attack my producers one-by-one by name, feel free to man up any time.

Your beef is with me.

This is the point in the Westerns where the bartender ducks behind the bar and the poker players dive under their table. But I bet the Kochs wimp out and the on-air showdown never happens.

Still, when a skinny little female looks you in the eye and tells you to “man up”, that’s gotta hurt. Charles, David — they’ll never admit it to your face, but the fewer-and-fewer people you employ are passing Rachel’s link around and laughing at you.

October 24, 2011 – 12:10 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (1)

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Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes

Reflecting on the Republican response to Muammar Qaddafi’s death, following so soon after the death of Osama bin Laden, The New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote:

If a Republican had been responsible for the foreign-policy markers of the past three years, the Party would be commissioning statues. In Tripoli, Benghazi, and Surt, last week, Obama won words of praise; on Republican debate platforms, there was only mindless posturing.

And, noticing the same phenomenon among the Party’s Congressional leaders, Jon Stewart asked: “Is there no Republican that can be gracious and statesmanlike in this situation?”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Apparently not. But that’s just ordinary partisan politics, right? Democrats who were running against an incumbent Republican president would be the same way. Wouldn’t they?

Well, no. About 30 seconds with the Google led me to what Howard Dean said after Saddam Hussein was captured in December, 2003:

This is a great day of pride in the American military and a great day for the Iraqis and a great day for the American people. President Bush deserves a day of celebration.

So the American war in Iraq is finally going to end on December 31, when our last troops leave.

Juan Cole explains why things turned out this way, even though hawks in the administration and elsewhere clearly wanted to keep thousands of American troops in Iraq indefinitely: When the UN Security Council’s resolution recognizing the US as the occupying power in Iraq expired at the end of 2008, the Bush administration negotiated a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the new Iraqi government. The Iraqis insisted on some deadline, so President Bush accepted 2011, confident that the US could renegotiate later.

When President Obama tried to negotiate an extension, the hang-up was the issue of “extraterritoriality” — American troops’ immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts. It would have been political suicide for the Iraqi government to grant that.

Why? Because all Iraqis remember the Nisoor Square massacre when Blackwater security guards killed 17 Baghdad civilians in a mistaken shooting spree. Extraterritoriality meant that Iraqi courts couldn’t touch them, and then an American court let them go. No Iraqi politician is going to let that happen again.

Personally, I’ll be glad to have our troops out of Iraq. But if you’re not happy, put the blame where it belongs: on Blackwater’s trigger-happy mercenaries.

Meteor Blades objects to wrap-ups that call the Iraq War a mistake.

Planning for invasion, the concoction of evidence, the ignoring of counter-advice, and the lying to Congress, to the United Nations and to the American people were not “mistakes.”

The war, he writes, was a pre-meditated crime, not a mistake. In a just world, the perpetrators “would some time ago have arrived in shackles at The Hague.”

Harold Camping’s prediction of the Rapture last May got a lot of attention, especially when it didn’t happen. (Or maybe it did, and there were just a lot fewer real Christians than everybody thought — and Camping himself wasn’t one of them.) But the Rapture was always just a prelude to the End of the World, kind of like when “last call” is announced before a bar closes. The real EotW was scheduled for last Friday.

Still here? Back to the drawing board.

Can’t decide between living in a forest or in an urban high-rise? Why not move to Milan and do both?

American feminist bra-burning is a historical myth, but Japanese environmentalist bra-burning is happening now. It even sounds like a pretty good idea.

Hunter on Daily Kos explains Occupy Wall Street to pundits who refuse to understand it.

Thom Hartmann explains the way in which OWS has already succeeded: It forced the media to remember the unemployed, who had been almost completely forgotten during the manufactured “debt-ceiling crisis” last summer.

Occupy Wall Street continues to be a great source of visual humor, most of which just adds to the movement.

And some older images are having a revival:

But the funniest thing I saw this week was this piece by Bad Lip Reading:

October 24, 2011 – 12:06 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear

Neal Stephenson’s 1999 essay In the Beginning Was the Command Line defines metaphor shear as the sudden realization “that you’ve been living and thinking inside a metaphor that is essentially bogus.” His example is how word-processing’s “document” metaphor fails to prepare you for a system crash or power failure.

Until the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed.

Our collective political conversation uses a lot of metaphors: the safety net, the left-center-right spectrum, Munich, surgical strikes, and … well, even the idea that we’re having a collective “conversation”. These figures of speech can be useful simplifications, but they also obscure aspects of the current situation that can suddenly become very important.

Bad metaphors are a particularly serious problem in understanding economics. For example, the idea that the government’s budget is like your household budget. (It would be, if your household could print its own currency and get the Chinese to trade you stuff for it.)

Warren Mosler’s Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy (my two-part review was here and here) was one big take-down of the metaphor of money as something solid. If you think that way, the U. S. government could “run out” of money. A more accurate metaphor is frequent-flier miles, which Delta will never run out of.

A related bad metaphor is the idea that saving money is like stock-piling goods. It works that way for an individual — putting aside money to buy a car two years from now works even better than buying an extra car now and storing it for two years. But the same idea doesn’t work for society as a whole. (That’s a composition fallacy, which I explained two weeks ago.)

In an agricultural economy, if everyone decides to can more of their vegetables and store them in the basement, the economy hums along normally and the prospect of a winter famine goes down. But if everyone decides to sell their produce now and save the money to buy food this winter, no food is put aside and they have a recession. Setting aside goods and setting aside money are (in the large scale) completely different.

A lot of these bad metaphors come together when we talk about Social Security. Future generations either will or won’t have the ability and the commitment to produce enough goods and services to care for their elders. The size of the number that represents the Social Security Trust Fund has nothing to do with it.

Mosler’s dismissal of this notion is on target:

Let’s look at it this way: 50 years from now when there is one person left working and 300 million retired people (I exaggerate to make the point), that guy is going to be pretty busy since he’ll have to grow all the food, build and maintain all the buildings, do the laundry, take care of all medical needs, produce the TV shows, etc. etc. etc. What we need to do is make sure that those 300 million retired people have the funds to pay him??? I don’t think so!

October 24, 2011 – 11:58 am Categories: Expand Your Vocabulary | Comments (29)

Manipulations

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

– Eric Hoffer

In this week’s sift:

  • Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us. Last week I talked about how the economic system uses our shame against us. This week I focus on the flip side of that phenomenon: pride.
  • A View From Dewey Square. I visited Occupy Boston the afternoon after the police had dropped by. Too bad we missed each other.
  • Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes. Molly Erdman’s parody captures everything I love about Elizabeth Warren. I couldn’t make myself watch the Republican debate, so I let other people fact-check it. Plus, I whole bunch of other fact-checking and lie-exposing about Occupy Wall Street and the economy.
  • Last week’s most popular post. Turn the Shame Around (5700 views at last count) had the second most popular first week in weeklysift.com history.
  • This week’s challenge. Woody Tasch presents an interesting challenge: What if ordinary people who were doing well enough to have savings stopped investing it all in financial institutions and instead invested in local businesses they can see and use and understand? Especially in local food enterprises: “I’m talking about investing with your friends and neighbors in small organic farms, grain mills, creameries, small slaughterhouses, seed companies, compost companies, restaurants that source locally, butchers and bakers and, sure, a bee’s-wax candlemaker or two. Take 1 percent of your money out of the stock market and put it into food hubs, community kitchens, community markets, school gardens, niche organic brands, makers of sustainable agricultural inputs, and more.” Doing this right is more than a one-week challenge, but how would you start?
October 17, 2011 – 1:05 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us

Last week I talked about the role of shame in maintaining an unjust system: A lot of people are losers in such a system, but who wants to identify with losers? The closer you are to the abyss, the stronger the temptation to deny that you bear any resemblance to the people who have already fallen in.

This week we got to see the slip side of the same phenomenon: how the rich and powerful take advantage of the legitimate pride many struggling people feel in the virtues that keep them afloat.

It started a week ago Wednesday with a cruel joke: Erick Erickson, founder of the right-wing blog Red State and recently a CNN commentator, started the We Are the 53% web site to parody the emotionally powerful We Are the 99% site I linked to last week. He posted a photo of himself disguised in a working-class t-shirt and holding up his story:

I work 3 jobs. I have a house I can’t sell. My family insurance costs are outrageous. But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up, you whiners. I am the 53% subsidizing you so you can hang out on Wall Street and complain.

The “53%” are from a right-wing talking point that is debunked here and in more detail here: 47% of American households pay no net income tax, mostly because they don’t make enough money to qualify. (They pay plenty of other taxes, however, some at a higher percentage of their income than many rich people.) The point of “the 53%” is to evoke an image of a hard-working majority that pulls the weight of everyone else. It is part of the right-wing argument that minimum-wage-earners (and not the rich) should be paying more taxes.

And in Erickson’s case, it is ridiculous. His “jobs” consist of doing what he enjoys, and he could stop any time he wants. The only things he “sucks up” are money and fame, not abuse or anxiety. But one of the talents that puts Erickson firmly in the 1% is his understanding of working-class resentment and how to turn it against the weak rather than the powerful. So people with legitimate stories to tell have followed his example and posted to his site. Like this guy:


I am a former Marine. I work two jobs. I don’t have health insurance.

I worked 60-70 hours a week for 8 years to pay my way through college. I haven’t had 4 consecutive days off in over 4 years.

But I don’t blame Wall Street. Suck it up you whiners. I am the 53%. God bless the USA!

Minus the suck-it-up closing, this could be a 99% posting. This guy is a victim of the economy, but he doesn’t like being a victim, so he identifies with the lords rather than the serfs. Damn those whining serfs, for claiming to be like him.

A similar (if less in-your-face) story has been forwarded all over Facebook:

Like the ex-Marine, this woman (the fingers and handwriting look female to me) has virtues worth taking pride in: She’s talented enough to get a scholarship, hard-working, and with enough self-control to spend less than she makes. Her version of “Suck it up, you whiners” is less insulting, but just as distancing: “I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.”

Really? I don’t think so. We can all decide not to identify with the people who work more and more for less and less, but we can’t decide not to resemble them.

I picture this student sitting in her cheap apartment, maybe watching somebody’s cast-off picture-tube TV rather than going to the movies with her friends, eating something sensible that she cooked herself, planning to get back to her homework in another few minutes — and identifying with the 1%.

“That’s how it’s supposed to work,” she writes. She’s supposed to “work my @$$ off” for whatever she gets, and hope that she doesn’t get sick, and hope that when she picked her major she didn’t guess wrong about where the jobs would be. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing bounty of this rich planet goes to other people — many of whom aren’t as talented, didn’t scrimp and save, and don’t work their asses off.

That’s how it’s supposed to work?

It’s tempting to pour scorn on these two, but that’s just falling into Erickson’s divide-and-conquer trap. The 99% are supposed to fight each other. The field slaves are supposed to resent the house slaves, and vice versa.

So what is the right response? Max Udargo nailed it in Open Letter to that 53% Guy. It’s absolutely worth reading in its entirety (it has become the most shared post in the history of Daily Kos), but this is the key point:

I understand your pride in what you’ve accomplished, but I want to ask you something.

Do you really want the bar set this high? Do you really want to live in a society where just getting by requires a person to hold down two jobs and work 60 to 70 hours a week? Is that your idea of the American Dream?

… And, believe it or not, there are people out there even tougher than you. Why don’t we let them set the bar, instead of you? Are you ready to work 80 hours a week? 100 hours? Can you hold down four jobs? … And is this really your idea of what life should be like in the greatest country on Earth?

It would be one thing if life was just that hard, if producing enough for everybody to get by required everybody to work 70 hours a week and never make a wrong move. But that’s not true. We know it’s not, because things used to be different. Americans used to have secure 40-hour-a-week jobs that paid well enough to raise a family on one income. Per capita GDP has gone up considerably since then, but the surplus has all accumulated at the top.

That’s not natural; it didn’t happen to nearly the same extent in other countries. It happened here because the very wealthy got control of our political system and ran it for their own benefit. It happened because we changed the rules to reward financial sleight-of-hand over making things and serving people. It happened because we devalued the public sector — the schools, the roads, the parks, the safety net — and let our whole society get split into First Class and Coach.

Fixing that is what the 99% movement is about. It’s not about making talent and hard work and wise choices irrelevant. But how talented, how hard-working, how wise — and how lucky, never forget the role of luck in your success — should a person need to be to have a decent life? How unforgiving do we want to make our society?

If the 99% win and the system changes, the economic race will continue and some people will still outrun the others. Nobody grudges them that. But we don’t have to live in a society where the Devil takes the hindmost. And we can still have empathy for the people we pass. That’s a virtue too.

October 17, 2011 – 1:03 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (14)

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A View from Dewey Square

I doubt the world needs another occupation-protest eye-witness blog post. People much better known than me have already been there: Michael Moore, Chris Hedges, Rick Perlstein, and Jeffrey Sachs, just to name a few. And Pistols At Dawn already did the ordinary-person-checks-out-the-hype thing pretty well.

Still, when I heard there was an Occupy Boston protest at Dewey Square (at the South Station T stop across from the Federal Reserve), I couldn’t resist taking a look. And having been there, I now can’t resist writing about it. But I’ll try to restrain myself from repeating what’s already been said hundreds of times.

Two things struck me about Occupy Boston. First, Dewey Square is tiny. I didn’t do a count, but Salon’s description of a “field … filled with hundreds of tents and tarps” is a vast exaggeration. We’re talking at most a few dozen small tents, and they totally fill the available space but for a walkway. Mayor Menino’s warning “you can’t tie up a city” is similarly absurd. Any occupation confined to Dewey Square isn’t even a mosquito bite on a city the size of Boston.

Second, the way conservatives try to make the Occupation movement sound scary is ludicrous. Eric Cantor’s talk about “mobs” and Glenn Beck’s warning that “They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you” — we’re in Fantasyland here. People who say things like this are just hoping you don’t bother to get any genuine information.

I was at Occupy Boston on Tuesday (the same day as The New Yorker; their photo shows about a third of the encampment). Monday the camp had tried to expand to the next park down the Greenway (for obvious reasons; they’re out of space), and police violently ejected them at 1:30 in the morning. The video got national attention, and not in a way that made the police look good. Veterans For Peace positioned itself between the police and the protesters, and the police manhandled them.

So if ever the Occupiers were going to be surly and vengeful, it would have been Tuesday.

But I didn’t run into anybody surly and vengeful. Annoyed, maybe.  Some of them were amazed (in that way educated white people get) to realize that police don’t necessarily act reasonably or even obey the law. But everyone seemed to understand that the Occupation is nonviolent by definition. If they get provoked to violence, they’ve lost the argument.

Two of the people I talked to were white-haired folks who reminisced about the Vietnam War protests of their youth. One had a Santa-Claus beard and was selling anarchist pamphlets, probably for less than it cost him to photo-copy them. (I bought one for 50 cents.) The other was a woman who was trying to figure out how to start an occupation in Cambridge.

A young man wearing a pink wig was holding a sign about police abuse, so I asked him about the previous night’s confrontation. He told the same basic story I eventually heard from just about everyone (each in their own words rather than rehearsed or programmed): The police were violent and the demonstrators peaceful.

The clean-cut 20-something geeks in the media tent told me the most outrageous Monday-night story: Someone had rented a hotel room overlooking the square and were broadcasing a live feed of the police raid, until the police came up and stopped them — on no particular grounds anybody could imagine.

But as in the famous John Gilmore quote, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” The geeks were excitedly processing all the Monday-night video they could get their hands on and posting it to the Web. That seemed to be all the revenge they needed.

The guy at the information table was collecting bail money. At the logistics tent they were hoping for donations of tents to replace the ones the police had thrown in a garbage truck Monday night.

Everybody was careful not to speak for the group. Future strategy was going to be a topic of that evening’s General Assembly, and nobody wanted to prejudge the outcome. (The Occupiers were proud of their democratic process, though they all admitted it was tedious.)

Anger? Not so much. There was stuff to do. Venting or riling each other up wasn’t going to get it done. No one seemed hurried or panicked, but many seemed focused.

Like so many middle-aged people who see an Occupation protest, I can’t resist making a sweeping generalization: I don’t think people my age appreciate the effect a lifetime of computer games has had on the rising generation. They are both more strategic and more relentless than we expect them to be.

So they did not experience Monday’s police raid as some primitive horror; it was just the new challenge that marked the Occupation’s progress to Level 2. It’s something else to overcome, like bad weather. So the Occupiers bail people out, get more tents, and keep going until they can find the door to Level 3.

[I haven’t been to Occupy Wall Street, but the way they met the weekend’s park-cleaning challenge sounded similar. This level has a new obstacle; how do we marshal our resources to overcome it?]

If the authorities think they’re going to get rid of these protests through slow escalation, they’d better think again. They’ll just be training the protesters to reach ever-higher levels of proficiency.

October 17, 2011 – 12:48 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (7)

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