Socialismo esporte brasileiro chama de 1 milhão às ruas

(I love Google Translate).

A million protesters in the streets in more than 80 cites -- wow!  If only apathetic Americans could get off their asses like that!

It just goes to show that sports socialism and the corrupt cronyism that goes with it are not only American phenomena.  Just like in the U.S., the same governments that can't find money to fund public schools and infrastructure somehow manage to find all kinds of creative ways to build shining new stadiums that sit empty in prime urban real estate most of the year, whether it's through tax hikes, fee hikes, cuts to municipal services, municipal bonds, or public-private partnerships where businesses make off with public goods.  

UPDATE (06.26.2013):  Some guy named Marty Kaplan at HuffPo shares my envy of Brazil's protests: "Let's Be Brazil."  

Brazil's protests raise fears for World Cup as a million take to the streets

By Jonathan Watts

June 21, 2013  | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3gn7n

I gotta post this right-wing forward

I usually delete these right wing e-mail forwards as soon as I get them. Sometimes I read them, sometimes I don't.  Some return to me again and again, like strange old acquaintances.

But this forward that originated after the 2012 election is so over the top, it reads like a liberal trying to mimic the oldest, grumpiest, whitest Tea Paryter you could find.  I couldn't have done a better job stereotyping "the other side" if I tried.  So I have to forward this one myself... with a few of my sarcastic comments inserted in brackets, for fun.

Some versions of this forward say it's from a USMC vet, others don't.  Some conclude, "John Galt has left the building," this one doesn't.  That's typical of right-wing forwards: they tweak the authors and insert made-up quotes, hoping it will make the message more convincing. This is one reason why I always say that conservatives form their political views from anecdotes and personal experience; to them the messenger is just as important as the message.

You can find a version of this archived at MyRightWingDad.net, which leads to a tip for you right-wing serial e-mail forwarders: just go to this site, copy and send all these mails yourself and be the first, instead of waiting months for your buddies to forward them to you. You'll be the coolest guy on your conservative e-mail list, and a veritable Klondike of right-wing crapolla!)

So here 'tis. Enjoy:

Written by a USMC Vet

[Who appears to be sleeping on the beach. That's an angry, fed-up pose if I've ever seen one! - J]

( I can't argue with any of it. Passing it along as it was received. )

He wrote:

The American Dream ended (on November 6th) in Ohio. The second term of Barack Obama will be the final nail in the coffin for the legacy of the white Christian males who discovered, explored, pioneered, settled and developed the greatest Republic in the history of mankind.

[White Christian women, take no offense. You were just sitting on the ship/wagon/horse behind the men, so technically you did not discover or pioneer anything. - J]

A coalition of Blacks, Latinos, Feminists, Gays, Government Workers, Union Members, Environmental Extremists, the Media, Hollywood, uninformed young people, the "forever needy," the chronically unemployed, illegal aliens and other "fellow travelers" have ended Norman Rockwell's America.

[You gotta hand it to us liberals though, that's a pretty big coalition. But he forgot to include Academics, Artists, the Fashion Industry, Professional Athletes and Muslims.

And about Norman Rockwell's America... let me remind you what it was with a few illustrations...

   

    

[... that show even Norman Rockwell wasn't white enough for some people. - J]

The Cocker Spaniel is off the front porch... The Pit Bull is in the back yard.

[At least the Pit Bull is not on the front porch!  ... But all that will change after Hillary is elected. - J]

The American Constitution has been replaced with Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" and Chicago shyster, David Axelrod, along with international Socialist George Soros will be pulling the strings on their beige puppet to Bring us Act 2 of the New World Order.

[My conservative friends don't believe me, but I keep telling them that no liberal outside Chicago knew who Saul Alinsky was until Glenn Beck, et al, discovered him.  So even if they are right, and liberals love Alinsky's ideas, what they have done for Alinsky's fame is like those guys who brought ebola out of the jungle. They should shut up and stop mentioning him or I swear, one of these days I'm actually going to read "Rules for Radicals"...!

David Axelrod is now gone from the White House, by the way. And George Soros is the richest socialist forex trader you will ever see. - J]

Our side ran two candidates who couldn't even win their own home states, and the circus fattster Chris Christie helped Obama over the top with a glowing 

"post Sandy" tribute that elevated the "Commander-in-Chief" to Mother Teresa status. (Aside: with the way the polls were run, he didn't need any help!)

[Lay off Christie's weight already!  Why don't Republicans make any fat jokes about Rush Limbaugh? He's been publicly fat way longer. Anyway, Christie looks like your average American. In a few decades, at the rate we're growing, we'll be making fun of slim politicians like Obama.... - J]

People like me are completely politically irrelevant, and I will never again comment on or concern myself with the aforementioned coalition which has surrendered our culture, our heritage and our traditions without a shot being fired.  

[Aw, come on, cheer up!  You white Tea Partyers are not "completely politically irrelevant."  You can still affect Republican primaries.  You can still rock a town hall meeting on the latest city zoning plans.  A.M. radio is still your uncontested political playground.  And you can still move the markets for chicken sandwiches and gold coins in response to political events. - J]  

You will never again out vote these people. It will take individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience to get back the rights we have allowed them to take away. It will take Zealots, not moderates--not reach-across-the-aisle RINOs to right this ship and restore our beloved country to its former status. 

[Acts like sending threatening letters laced with ricin to President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg? 

[And I don't know about you, but I haven't noticed any RINOs reachin' across the aisle the past few years. - J]

Those who come after us will have to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to bring back the Republic that this generation has timidly frittered away due to "white guilt" and political correctness..... I'm done.  

[Here's a suggestion: Viagra.  I mean, while you still can, with a little help from modern pharmacology, go out and find a white, Christian woman and make some more white Christian babies.  And you old white guys have all the money so you can definitely afford to raise them.  (OK, granted, there's a 10 percent chance those kids will be gay no matter what you do, but 9 out of 10 ain't bad).  

In politics and war, birthrate wins -- not "individual acts of defiance and massive displays of civil disobedience." - J]

It wasn't Bush or neocons who pushed us into Iraq

Let us not forget that it wasn't just Bushites, talk radio, FOX and neocons who hawked the Iraq war and ridiculed into intellectual or unpatriotic isolation those who opposed the Iraq war:

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again.

Let us also not forget just how many Americans -- and people throughout the world -- protested the Iraq war before it even started. The invasion of Iraq was a slow-motion train wreck that all of us could see coming months and miles away.

Here's a pretty good description of a real intellectual:

Julien Benda argued in his 1927 book “The Treason of Intellectuals”—“La Trahison des Clercs”—that it is only when we are not in pursuit of practical aims or material advantages that we can serve as a conscience and a corrective. Those who transfer their allegiance to the practical aims of power and material advantage emasculate themselves intellectually and morally. Benda wrote that intellectuals were once supposed to be indifferent to popular passions. They “set an example of attachment to the purely disinterested activity of the mind and created a belief in the supreme value of this form of existence.” They looked “as moralists upon the conflict of human egotisms.” They “preached, in the name of humanity or justice, the adoption of an abstract principle superior to and directly opposed to these passions.” 

The Treason of the Intellectuals

By Chris Hedges

March 31, 2013 | Truthdig

URL: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_treason_of_the_intellectuals_20130331/

Wisdom, not weakness

I hate to direct anybody to V.D. Hanson's stupid commentary on U.S. foreign policy, yet he represents the highest grade of right-wing garbage out there, so I might as well take him down.

It's hard to understand what he is criticizing Obama for, exactly.  For being too soft, certainly.  But on whom?  On Qaddafi?  Oops.  On Syria's Bashar Assad?  Well, they won't come out and say we should start a war with Syria, so what then?  Arm Assad's opponents?  Oops: blowback from angry students is one thing; blowback from armed militants is another.  So that leave us only with more finger-wagging in Assad's general direction.

Or is Obama being too soft on mobs of Arab street protesters?  If so, how could he "get tough" on them?  By bombing them?  By infiltrating them with our spies?  By arming police with tear gas and riot gear?  I'm sure that would calm them down; no blowback potential there, oops.  Then what should Obama do?  More finger-wagging again?

Or, take the recent brutal murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya.  Obama said he would track down the killers and bring them to justice, which sounds pretty tough to me.  (And this President actually tracks down killers.)  Hanson and others criticize Obama for an "absence of adequate military security" in Benghazi.  Fair enough.  But isn't that a technical, not a policy, issue?  The U.S. had no diplomatic presence in Libya for years, and so our embassy outposts there have not yet been well-developed.  Moreover, being a diplomat in a war-torn country is a dangerous job; that's what they signed up for. Just like serving in Afghanistan and Iraq is a dangerous job, to which 6,611 U.S. military fatalities there to-date somberly attest.  (V.D. Hanson can claim his share of intellectual credit for putting them there.)

Here's how Obama explained, before the UN on September 25, why he did what he did:

We intervened in Libya alongside a broad coalition and with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council, because we had the ability to stop the slaughter of innocents and because we believed that the aspirations of the people were more powerful than a tyrant. 

And as we meet here, we again declare that the regime of Bashar al-Assad must come to an end so that the suffering of the Syrian people can stop and a new dawn can begin. 

We have taken these positions because we believe that freedom and self-determination are not unique to one culture. 

These are not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values. 

American values?  That kind of talk drives blood-and-guts neocons like Hanson to tears.  Values never gave anybody a hard-on.  

This is all child's play relative to deadly-serious nuclear tensions between the U.S. and Iran, yet Hanson and the Right's criticism of Obama is pretty much the same: Obama is too soft.  OK, what should Obama do then?  Start a third preemptive war in 10 years that would suck in the entire Middle East and send the price of gas sky-high?  Don't like that, you say?  OK, what then?  Yet more finger-wagging?  Oops, it sounds like Obama just did that at the UN:  

Make no mistake:  A nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained.  It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy.  It risks triggering a nuclear arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 

The simple truth is that Hanson and his fellow disgraced neocons have no new ideas, they blew their load in Iraq, and now they long for the good ole' days when our President was a gullible gorilla who liked to grunt and beat his chest, and who would ape whatever they whispered in his ear.  The days when a few craven and dependent dictators like Qaddafi and Mubarak might pay attention.

You see, America's super-muscular military might is only effective against regimes, not against oppressed people who have nothing to lose, and already live in privation and terror. U.S. military power cannot secure their health, their dignity, or a job.  Therefore, neocons like Hanson want America to maintain friendly but autocratic foreign regimes.  Without regimes to threaten or pay off, Hanson and Co. have nothing to offer. 

The more difficult truth is that there is nothing "weak" about America's reading the writing on the wall and adjusting.  Sooner or later, Qaddafi and Mubarak were going down.  Sooner or later, Assad will too.  Yes, these Devils We Knew provided some comfort and stability to us in a region we don't understand and don't really care to.  But as these devils come under attack by their own oppressed people, it would be stupid and pointless -- and contrary to our stated values -- for us to stand alone against a tide of self-determination.  Obama should be applauded for not standing behind dictators who were about to fall, vainly propping them up a bit longer.  That was not weakness on his part, it was wisdom.

Finally, the most difficult truth for some Americans is that we cannot direct world events like pieces on a chess board, especially and increasingly not by military means.  We can't (and don't want to, I hope) stop some moron for posting an amateurish film on YouTube; just like we can't stop street protests in more than 20 countries as a result of it.  We shouldn't try.  And we shouldn't wring our hands over our "powerlessness."  Only when all people enjoy liberty will the real work of U.S. diplomacy begin: then they, not their oppressors, will decide whether they stand with the United States.  Meanwhile, we must have faith that our cherished values will prevail, and speak with confidence and consistency about them to the ignorant and the skeptical.  The alternative has been tried... and failed.

President Ethelred 

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 25, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328332/president-ethelred-victor-davis-hanson

Zakaria: It's about them, not us

Concludes Zakaria:

There is a kind of bipartisan arrogance that is often at work in Washington, where both sides believe that everything happening in the world is a consequence of American power and policy. If only we had made a different speech or implemented a different policy, or sent out a different tweet. But the truth is, what is happening in the Arab world is not about us – it is really about them.

It's About Them, Not Us
By Fareed Zakaria
September 24, 2012 | CNN

URL:  http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/24/its-about-them-not-us/

Max Blumenthal: Israel's 'fear society' criminalizes facts

The good news is that there are thoughtful, tolerant and informed liberal everywhere, including Israel.

The bad news is that liberal political speech that is dangerous to the powers that be almost everywhere, whether it's in Tel Aviv or Los Angeles, is easily quelled in so-called democratic, free-speech countries.  All police have to do is cite "potential to disturb the peace" to silence peaceful malcontents.  

FYI, the Nakba is the Palestinian name for the ethnic cleansing of formerly Palestinian lands in today's Israel of some 700,000 Palestinians in 1947-48.  So-called democratic Israel passed in 2009 a law banning discussion of the Nakba in its schools.  The Nakba is commemorated on May 15, the day after Israel's independence.  (It reminds me of another mass deportation of a Muslim people that occurred 4 years earlier and is commemorated on May 18....)

And FYI, the journalist behind this story, Max Blumenthal is an American Jew who usually writes very cutting and daring stories about the negative influence of money and religion on U.S. politics.

In a fear society, where some facts are crimes

By Max Blumenthal

May 11, 2012 | Maxblumenthal.com

URL:  http://maxblumenthal.com/2012/04/in-a-fear-society-where-some-facts-are-crimes/

Journalists suddenly disorderly at OWS, must be arrested for their own safety

I know the right wing has been trying, with some success, to portray OWS protestors as violent and disruptive, but since when did so many U.S. journalists turn disorderly?!

Journalists have been arrested on flimsy pretexts not only in New York, LA, Chicago and DC, but also in places like Boston, Nashville, Rochester, Richmond, Milwaukee, Oakland, Atlanta and Chapel Hill. Many say they were only taking photos or interviews, and their press passes were visible. (You can read many of their stories here.)

Police actions at OWS protests against journalists are like something out of Russia or the Arab Spring uprisings, where police -- and their political bosses -- simply do not want any record of their violent crackdowns in the media.

Anyway, all you "strict constitutionalists" and Framer-lovers out there should be concerned with how protesters and journalists have been treated at OWS, even if you don't agree with their politics. Otherwise you are hypocrites and opportunists. This baloney about arresting people who are on public spaces in order to protect them from "unsanitary" or "unsafe" conditions, or to encourage commerce in the area, is absurd, esp. when our "protectors" are blasting them with pepper spray, and denying them food, water, or toilets while they are locked up for hours in cages and paddy wagons.

There is nothing in the The First Amendment which allows government to abridge "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" because they are smelly, offensive to your sensibilities, or discourage somebody from shopping nearby. A protest by definition is not a cuddle fest; it's supposed to make somebody in power uncomfortable.

Tracking Journalist Arrests at Occupy Protests Around the Country

By Josh Stearns

December 2, 2011 | Storify

URL: http://storify.com/jcstearns/tracking-journalist-arrests-during-the-occupy-prot

Ames reveals amazing UC Davis-Greece connection

Mark Ames is on a roll. Lately he's been digging up some unbelievable connections -- and not the "six degrees of separation" kind of connections on GB's lunatic chalk board either.

This is too amazing not to read.

How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back to Greece's Universities

By Mark Ames

November 22, 2011 | The Exiled

URL: http://exiledonline.com/how-uc-davis-chancellor-linda-katehi-brought-oppression-back-to-greeces-universities/

Taibbi: Now I Love the OWS Protests

Although I do wish the OWS protests would "get specific" and really go after corrupt Wall Street banks as their name suggests, it's their prerogative to focus on some issues or none at all, because it's their protests. I'm not out there camping with them, that's for sure.

Also, as I said before, it's not really fair or realistic to expect this mass of mostly young people to have all the answers. They've done America quite a service, in fact, simply by saying, "This is f***ed up." As in, the system is fundamentally corrupt, money-driven and undemocratic. Their job is to beat that drum until enough people -- liberals included -- really get the message. They are right that an election or "issues campaign" won't solve anything.

They've done us a great favor by diagnosing America with terminal cancer. Collectively, it's up to us to find the cure.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

Much more than a movement against big banks, they're a rejection of what our society has become.

By Matt Taibbi

November 10, 2011 | Rolling Stone

I have a confession to make. At first, I misunderstood Occupy Wall Street.

The first few times I went down to Zuccotti Park, I came away with mixed feelings. I loved the energy and was amazed by the obvious organic appeal of the movement, the way it was growing on its own. But my initial impression was that it would not be taken very seriously by the Citibanks and Goldman Sachs of the world. You could put 50,000 angry protesters on Wall Street, 100,000 even, and Lloyd Blankfein is probably not going to break a sweat. He knows he's not going to wake up tomorrow and see Cornel West or Richard Trumka running the Federal Reserve. He knows modern finance is a giant mechanical parasite that only an expert surgeon can remove. Yell and scream all you want, but he and his fellow financial Frankensteins are the only ones who know how to turn the machine off.

That's what I was thinking during the first few weeks of the protests. But I'm beginning to see another angle. 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.

The right-wing media wasted no time in cannon-blasting the movement with its usual idiotic clichés, casting Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty hippies who should get a job and stop chewing up Mike Bloomberg's police overtime budget with their urban sleepovers. Just like they did a half-century ago, when the debate over the Vietnam War somehow stopped being about why we were brutally murdering millions of innocent Indochinese civilians and instead became a referendum on bralessness and long hair and flower-child rhetoric, the depraved flacks of the right-wing media have breezily blown off a generation of fraud and corruption and market-perverting bailouts, making the whole debate about the protesters themselves – their hygiene, their "envy" of the rich, their "hypocrisy."

The protesters, chirped Supreme Reichskank Ann Coulter, needed three things: "showers, jobs and a point." Her colleague Charles Krauthammer went so far as to label the protesters hypocrites for having iPhones. OWS, he said, is "Starbucks-sipping, Levi's-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters [denouncing] corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over." Apparently, because Goldman and Citibank are corporations, no protester can ever consume a corporate product – not jeans, not cellphones and definitely not coffee – if he also wants to complain about tax money going to pay off some billionaire banker's bets against his own crappy mortgages.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the political spectrum, there were scads of progressive pundits like me who wrung our hands with worry that OWS was playing right into the hands of assholes like Krauthammer. Don't give them any ammunition! we counseled. Stay on message! Be specific! We were all playing the Rorschach-test game with OWS, trying to squint at it and see what we wanted to see in the movement. Viewed through the prism of our desire to make near-term, within-the-system changes, it was hard to see how skirmishing with cops in New York would help foreclosed-upon middle-class families in Jacksonville and San Diego.

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.

If you think of it this way, Occupy Wall Street takes on another meaning. There's no better symbol of the gloom and psychological repression of modern America than the banking system, a huge heartless machine that attaches itself to you at an early age, and from which there is no escape. You fail to receive a few past-due notices about a $19 payment you missed on that TV you bought at Circuit City, and next thing you know a collector has filed a judgment against you for $3,000 in fees and interest. Or maybe you wake up one morning and your car is gone, legally repossessed by Vulture Inc., the debt-buying firm that bought your loan on the Internet from Chase for two cents on the dollar. This is why people hate Wall Street. They hate it because the banks have made life for ordinary people a vicious tightrope act; you slip anywhere along the way, it's 10,000 feet down into a vat of razor blades that you can never climb out of.

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don't know exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing: FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with different values, or at least a chance at different values.

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.

We're a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO. Even if 40 million Californians vote tomorrow to allow themselves to smoke a joint, the federal government will never permit it. And the economy is run almost entirely by an unaccountable oligarchy in Lower Manhattan that absolutely will not sanction any innovations in banking or debt forgiveness or anything else that might lessen its predatory influence.

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.

People want out of this fiendish system, rigged to inexorably circumvent every hope we have for a more balanced world. They want major changes. I think I understand now that this is what the Occupy movement is all about. It's about dropping out, if only for a moment, and trying something new, the same way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s strived to create a "beloved community" free of racial segregation. Eventually the Occupy movement will need to be specific about how it wants to change the world. But for right now, it just needs to grow. And if it wants to sleep on the streets for a while and not structure itself into a traditional campaign of grassroots organizing, it should. It doesn't need to tell the world what it wants. It is succeeding, for now, just by being something different.

Ben Stein, a snarky, greedy old shill for Wall Street, posts something

I'm reserving judgment about the effectiveness of the Occupy Wall Street protestors' methods, but not their decision to protest, or the selection of their target -- they're right on.

Nevertheless this smug little missive from droning Hollywood nerd Ben Stein rubbed me the wrong way, and really illustrated several common fallacies:

1) "Greed is human nature." (Thus it's unavoidable, thus it's OK.) Look, human nature covers absolutely everything that any human being has ever done. It's also human nature for humans to give away millions of dollars, to volunteer for worthy causes, to sacrifice their own life and limbs, etc. The human nature argument thus is a throw-away unless you can prove the opposite isn't also true.

2) "Wall Street was stupid (not just greedy)." This one really gets me. Sometimes it's used by bailout proponents who argue that Wall Street wasn't greedy at all, just dopey. (And their stupidity is supposed to make us feel better about handing them all that bailout cash how??) Yeah, right. I'm sure Hank Paulson, Larry Summers, and Bob Rubin think of themselves as dufuses who messed up real bad -- and they're gonna confess to their stupidity any day now.

Anyway, let me get this straight: we had to bail out the banks because they were so stupid, yet homeowners who bought the line from mortgage bankers and realtors that home prices only go up forever were stupid therefore they need to "learn their lesson" and "take their medicine"?? Indeed help for normal people, not just banks, is one of the protesters' demands, and this demand seems to have been intentionally dismissed by our politicians because it might interfere with the blessed bank bailouts.

3) "Conventional wisdom = liberalism = whatever the status quo is." This makes no sense. The status quo is that Wall Street banks are enjoying trillion-dollar bailouts to fund their huge salaries and bonuses while normal Americans continue sink into debt and poverty and can't drive our consumption-driven economy back to health. And it's supported by both parties, not just Democrats. This is the outcome which "conventional wisdom" in America has supported, from Obama to Boehner to the editorial pages of all the major newspapers. So let's not confuse the status quo with liberalism, certainly not with progressive politics. Progressives never supported the bailouts; and they have always called for bigger fiscal stimulus, real mortgage relief for homeowners and Main Street businesses, and prosecution of Wall St.'s fraud and financial crimes -- to no avail.

4) "Young protesters want government to take care of them, like Mommy and Daddy do." Really? Are you sure that's what they're out there demanding? I never heard that. Since when do Americans not want to work, especially those who spent 4+ years in college studying and taking out debt in the hopes of landing a job to pay it back? If this is what's really going on, then America is sick indeed. But I don't buy it. You'll have to prove this one to me, because that's not the America I know, or any of the Americans whom I know. 99% of Americans wants a good job and the independence, gratification, and social acceptance that comes with it.

5) "Some on Wall Street are crooks and some are fools." Stop right there. Last time I checked, crooks are supposed to be arrested and get fined and/or go to jail. How many bank CEOs have gone to prison or faced any prosecution for causing the financial crisis? [Crickets chirping]. That's right. And what about the potential hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements to benefit ordinary people who were fleeced by Wall St., settlements that may be pre-emptively shelved without due process or any kind of vote due to political pressure by a bipartisan consensus including President Obama himself?

6) "Shut up and get to work." Who says they're not working now? They're out there defending all of us! We should be thanking them. And the hard-working Tea Parties should be out there with them. --> By the way, last time I checked Herman Cain wasn't working either. Get a job, deadbeat!

Go Occupy Yourselves, My Darlings

By Ben Stein

October 7, 2011 | American Spectator

[...]

On the radio, they played a story about the demonstrators on Wall Street demonstrating –literally -- against human nature -- greed and stupidity. Literally. Many of them were -- so we were told --recent college graduates who could not get employment.

Various leftists came on and said how cruel Wall Street was and how they should be blamed for those poor unemployed college kids' problems.

Then came Herman Cain. He said, very simply, "If you are a college graduate and you can't get a job, you shouldn't blame Wall Street. You shouldn't blame the banks. You should blame yourself."

A Daniel come to judgment. The sun suddenly came out.

The next step, I am sure, by the way, for the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd is for Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart, the trifecta of conventional wisdom's failed liberalism, to come down to Wall Street and join the masses in demanding more of our tax money so they can all be supported as novelists and movie directors.

You poor kids. You are basically asking to be supported and taken care of by Mommy and Daddy. Wake up, kids. Wall Street is you, with all of your wants and needs and wishes, only they have the balls to go out and work for it. Sometimes they are crooks and sometimes they are fools -- but you know what? So are all of us.

Listen to Mr. Cain. Shut up and get to work.

Jones: We don't know how to protest

Some of you may recall -- who am I kidding? of course you don't remember -- how back in Jan. 2007 I criticized the way liberals do protest rallies. Lame and disorganized.

And I was not a fan in any way of the Rally to Restore Lameness organized by Jon Stewart. If Seinfeld was a show about nothing, then that was a protest rally about nothing. Likewise it was supposed to be funny. But the joke was on liberal losers for being so lame and self-conscious and afraid to commit to anything that could possibly be labelled extreme or uncool in retrospect.

An effective protest should be explicitly threatening. (Yeah, I know, I could end up on Glenn Beck's chalkboard 20 years from now for talking wild-eyed anarchist lunacy like that.) The threat could be of violence. Or it could be of massive work disruptions or civil disobedience. A threat not to vote for somebody is usually a lame threat, because in most cases the voters protesting are written off by the other side's politicians as unwinnable, just like the public sector unions protesting now are written off by Republicans, who don't seek to win them over, but rather destroy them as an organized group.

(Actually Jones argues that conservatives don't know how to protest either. But I don't think it's in their nature to threaten the existing order from the street. If they're p.o.'d about the country then they start forming an escape plan, or organizing militias and hoarding guns and supplies....)

Wanted: More and Better Protesters

By Eileen Jones
February 27, 2011 | The eXiled

URL: http://exiledonline.com/wanted-more-and-better-protesters/#more-29132

Chomsky on Wis. uprising, Obama's history of union betrayal

Here's Noam Chomsky's take on the uprising in Wisconsin, and Obama and the Democratic Congress's true allegiance to the rich over unions:

"... The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut. And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax cut for the very rich? The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think about two to one. There wasn't even a discussion of it, they just gave it away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn't called a "tax increase"; it's called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers. And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically declared an increase in taxes for federal workers at the same time that there's a tax decrease for the very rich.

"And there's been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. There's a—to switch attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire."

Chomsky: Uprising in the USA?

World-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses the protests in defense of public sector employees and unions in Wisconsin.

February 18, 2011 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/149953/chomsky:_uprising_in_the_usa/?page=1

Limbaugh defines an unacceptable protest

If you have any doubts about what Rush and his ilk consider an acceptable protest, read this:

"I don't want to call it a mob, the protester bunch. And, folks, they're all leftists. They're feminists. They're avowed socialist, leftist, communists, environmentalists. I don't believe that this is just spontaneity. I think this is classic. This is rent-a-mob. I don't doubt that there are genuine grievances felt by some of the people in this group, but this is not a spontaneous, gee, nobody knew this was coming moment. This is the result of organizing. This is just classic community organizing in Egypt."

See, it had to be "spontaneous" to be genuine, meaning: every protester had to come independently and simultaneously to the conclusion that he needed to be out there risking his life and livelihood, fighting a corrupt and oppressive regime. Anything even slightly more collective than that is "community organizing," which as we all know is the 8th deadly sin.

"This is rent-a-mob," he said! Who rented them? How much did more than a million people cost to rent for 18 days, and were they paid in dollars or Egyptian pounds, and where did they pick up their money? Did they earn extra for getting hit with tear gas or pummeled with batons? I really wish Rush would elaborate on this shocking conspiracy.

Back to reality.... If we let these far-right bozos talk for 3 hours a day 5 days a week, eventually they can't contain themselves and reveal their true elitist feelings. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, et al despise normal people and democracy, that's all there is to it.

Media Jubilant Over Egypt Coup

February 11, 2011 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_021111/content/01125106.guest.html

Why Egypt won't be another Iran

I boiled this analysis down to its key points for you all:

"...the Iranian regime led by Khomeini murderously repressed and sold down the river many in the opposition who supported the uprising in the 1970s. 'The specter of that is very frightening to many Egyptians. Egyptians are very nervous about repeating what happened in Iran.'"

"'No representative system can take root in Egypt without the Brotherhood's participation. But, after spending the last half century battling Islamist political forces, the military leadership will have trouble overcoming its deep disdain for the Brotherhood.'"

"Iran has a lot of oil, and it can afford to be 'more reactionary and revolutionary.' Egypt is dependent on tourism, shipping through the Suez Canal and trade with neighboring countries. 'These types of things bind it to more moderate policies.'"


Could unrest in Egypt produce an Iranian-style regime?
By Joe Sterling
February 4, 2011 CNN

URL: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/04/egypt.protests.iran.parallel/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Chomsky: Egypt uprising and the U.S. 'usual playbook'

Great interview. This point by Chomsky provides the best perspective on the current "debate" in the West whether any democracy which would allow the Muslim Brotherhood to come to power would be a good or a bad thing "for the region," meaning, for Isreal and the U.S.:

"Saudi Arabia—the king of Saudi Arabia has been, along with Israel, the strongest supporter, most outspoken supporter of Mubarak. And the Saudi Arabian case should remind us of something about the regular commentary on this issue. The standard line and commentary is that, of course, we love democracy, but for pragmatic reasons we must sometimes reluctantly oppose it, in this case because of the threat of radical Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood. Well, you know, there's maybe some—whatever one thinks of that. Take a look at Saudi Arabia. That's the leading center of radical Islamist ideology. That's been the source of it for years. The United States has—it's also the support of Islamic terror, the source for Islamic terror or the ideology that supports it. That's the leading U.S. ally, and has been for a long, long time."

He goes on to say basically the same thing about Pakistan, another U.S. "ally" going back to Reagan, whose people hate us and make terror plots against us:

"The population [of Pakistan] is passionately anti-American, increasingly so, largely, as she [the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan in leaked WikiLeaks cables] points out, as a result of U.S. actions in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the pressure on the Pakistani military to invade the tribal zones, the drone attacks and so on. And she goes on to say that this may even lead to the—what is in fact the ultimate nightmare, that Pakistan's enormous nuclear facilities, which incidentally are being increased faster than anywhere else in the world, that these—there might be leakage of fissile materials into the hands of the radical Islamists, who are growing in strength and gaining popular support as a result of—in part, as a result of actions that we're taking.

"Well, this goes back to—this didn't happen overnight. The major factor behind this is the rule of the dictator Zia-ul-Haq back in the 1980s. He was the one who carried out radical Islamization of Pakistan, with Saudi funding. He set up these extremist madrassas. The young lawyers who were in the streets recently shouting their support for the assassin of the political figure who opposed the blasphemy laws, they're a product of those madrassas. Who supported him? Ronald Reagan. He was Reagan's favorite dictator in the region. Well, you know, events have consequences. You support radical Islamization, and there are consequences. But the talk about concern about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, whatever its reality, is a little bit ironic, when you observe that the U.S. and, I should say, Britain, as well, have traditionally supported radical Islam, in part, sometimes as a barrier to secular nationalism."


Chomsky: Why the Mideast Turmoil Is a Direct Threat to the American Empire
An interview with Noam Chomsky about what this means for the future of the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy in the region.
By Amy Goodman
February 3, 2011 Democracy Now

URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/149786/chomsky:_why_the_mideast_turmoil_is_a_direct_threat_to_the_american_empire?page=1

Egypt's problem isn't 'socialism'

Contrary to what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other wingnuts are saying about Egypt's unrest, the cause is definitely not "socialism:"

"The Arab world has largely transitioned in recent decades from socialist economies to ones that recognize the so-called Washington Consensus that free market policies work best.

"'There was a slow trend in Arab countries in doing away with subsidies across the board and trying to create better-crafted safety nets,' says Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Ottaway says that Arab states are not going to return to socialism or nationalization of industries but may once again promise that they can provide basic goods and help control their prices."


Job Security For Arab Leaders: A 3-Step Process
By Alan Greenblatt
February 2, 2011 | NPR

URL: http://www.npr.org/133410263

'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Egypt'

So how do American pundits who don't know or care anything about Egypt analyze events there? Through the prism of their own parochial, ideological idiotism, of course.

Enjoy all these way-out explanations and warnings of what's happening there!

Just more proof that in America, "getting informed" = getting dumber.

UPDATE (02.06.2011): A friend criticized me for caricaturing Americans as ignorant, parochial knuckle-draggers with this post. To clarify, I was criticizing the media which gives them half-assed analysis and ideological color instead of real information about world events. I'm sorry that the richest country in the world can't do a better job informing its public; in fact, it does a pretty good job of disinforming them. That was my point. We can debate another day whether and why Americans are ignorant, parochial knuckle-draggers....


The Right-Wing Nut's Guide to Egypt
By Max Read
February 2, 2011 Gawker

URL: http://gawker.com/5749601/the-right+wing-nuts-guide-to-egypt

Rally to Affirm Irrelevance signs

OK, I get it. A lot of these Rally to Restore Sanity signs were clever. I even enjoyed reading them.

But what was the point?!?

Come on, lib'ruls, let's think Marketing 101 here. What's your call to action here? This rally was the equivalent of a redneck with a "Honk If You Like Beer" bumper sticker. Yes, you have reached a large like-minded demographic, but what of it? You got a nice feeling when Bubba honked at you, but after that?.... Exactly. Nothing.

Jon Stewart proved he could write a note on a napkin and attract 200,000+ people to Washington, DC and out-rally Glenn Beck. Good for him. But what have you participants proven? That you can make clever signs that don't mean anything? Good for you, you irrelevant overeducated weenies! Now move to the back of democracy's line.

The aphorism is incorrectly stated as: "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything." It is correctly stated as: "You better stop believing you're so freaking clever and fight for your liberal ideals with everything you've got before Bubba Twelve-Guage and Grandpa No-Gubument-Medicare shove their insane worldview down your smug throats."

It's past time that we Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers realized that politics is a no-rules brawl, not a fashion show. We're not showing up with a knife at a gun fight, we're showing up to a war with a copy of our senior thesis. Until we learn from Republicans and get mean, angry, and settle for nothing less than victory, we liberals deserve to get our asses kicked.

Sanest Of The Sane? Top 25 Signs From The Stewart/Colbert Rally

By Ryan J. Reilly

October 31, 2010 | Talking Points Memo

URL: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/gallery/2010/11/sanest-of-the-sane-top-25-signs-from-the-stewartcolbert-rally.php?img=1&ref=fpb

Jon Stewart's rally bad for America, liberal activism

Just in case some of you think I take my marching orders from Jon Stewart, here are two very strong criticisms of his silly Rally to Restore Sanity yesterday.

First, mean-spirited, angry liberal journalist Mark Ames, who attended the rally for a short while before he had to bail, argued that the rally is emblematic of his generation's prime directives to 1) never risk looking stupid, no matter what is at stake, and 2) always preserve one's ironic detachment from events, even from oneself. That kind of cool pose is great and everything at parties, but not when the general welfare of the nation is at stake. Concluded Ames:

You see, this is why so many cool Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers were so jazzed up about going to the Stewart rally – by definition, they were guaranteed not to look stupid by going to it, because it's not really a rally. They're not putting anything on the line. They're just going to chant the equivalent of that annoying Saturday Night Live Update skit 'Really?' No generation ever looked so cool so late in their lives as my generation. We did it! We achieved our dream! We don't look as stupid as the hippies did when they were in their 40s! Woo-hoo! We still mock ourselves and we're still self-aware, but best of all, we don't look stupid by devoting ourselves to ideas or movements that other people might one day laugh at. We won! We won the least-stupid-looking-generation competition! Let's gather together in an ironic, self-aware way, and celebrate how we're not really rallying or laying anything on the line–not even now, not even when the whole fucking country is collapsing. What's our prize, Don?
Meanwhile, behind Door Number 1, the country is in two losing wars and the worst economic crisis in 80 years, behind Door Number 2, over 40 million Americans are on fucking food stamps, behind Door Number 3, millions are being land-transfered out of their property like landless peasants in a banana republic–yeah, it's bad, whatever dude, it's always been bad, nothing ever changes much, don't have a cow, deal with it….

Second, founder of the anti-war group CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin, made a similar although more focused criticism prior to the event, saying Stewart's "slacktivism" celebrates those people who are too "sane" to rally against insane wars, Wall Street bailouts, and other unjust government policies. She also noted how Stewart's Daily Show spent two hours taping her, along with an anarchist and a teabagger, lumping them all together as protesting nutjobs. As if any loud and angry protest by definition is crazy. She concluded:

So let's celebrate the people who walk the talk. Slacktivism did not end slavery, activism did. Slacktivism did not get women our rights. Activism did. Slacktivism won't end war or global warming. But activism just might.

I've said it before: my generation's children and grandchildren are not going to be proud of us because we were so cool and avoided saying stupid things; they're going to blame us for sitting on the sidelines in ironical detachment while our country went to shit. If we don't stand up and stand for something -- and that something should be liberal-progressive ideals which have saved us in the past and can do so again -- then we are irrelevant.

That said, Jon Stewart is funny. That's his job. It's not his job to organize and lead us. We are not like those atomized zombies of the Right looking for a TV preacher like Glenn Beck to tell us where to gather and what to say and do.

YouTube: HC protestors mock old man with Parkinsons

I think it's just swell and not at all hypocritical that most of the old folks protesting HC reform in this video benefit from Medicare (aka socialized medicine).

This video has gone viral though because of the heartless d***heads who tell an old man with Parkinson's that "there's nothing for free over here, you have to work for everything you get," and then mock him by throwing money at him, presumably to pay for his lifetime medical bills, as he sits silently, passively on the pavement. I guess trashing Michael J. Fox wasn't low-down enough for their side.

UPDATE 03.24.10: The guy who threw the dollar bills and heckled the old man has been identified as Chris Reichert, a registered Republican in the Columbus, OH area. Now Reichert is scared, apologetic, and planning never to go to another political rally again. Too bad. I really wanted this heckler to be an unapologetic, mean-spirited Republican who'd reply, "Yeah, I heckled that cripple, so what? Now get off my lawn before I shoot you in the face!" Chalk up another victim of the Cult of PC, who couldn't withstand his overwhelming desire not to be viewed as a complete a**hole by the entire world for saying what he actually believed.

What a sad day for free speech.

Mocking man with Parkinsons over health care
March 16, 2010 | YouTube

URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmaKRwUoAIU