Occupy Central: Civil disobedience in Hong Kong

by Ingrid Robeyns on September 27, 2014

Important developments in Hong Kong, where students and citizens are protesting to get more democratic reforms. According to various internet reports (various posts at the BBC-website, Hufftington, Bloomberg), college and university students went on strike last Monday to protest Beijing’s decision to not allow open nominations for candidates for the 2017 elections in which the leader of Hong Kong would get elected. Protesters are worried that the closed nominations will mainly draw candidates who follow the Beijing line. From the perspective of an outsider, this seems like a textbook case of elections which will not be democratic if nominations themselves are not democratic.

The civil disobedience movement demanding more democracy is known as Occupy Central: the BBC has a short piece on the movement that helpfully explains their demands and gives some background information. Occupy Central is planning a multiple-day sit-in at Hong-Kong’s financial district starting October 1st.

According to the BBC, “most of China’s state-run media outlets have not commented directly on the student-led protests.” Which makes it all the more urgent and important that people-controled media, such as independent blogs like ours, share the news and talk about it. Consider this an open thread, for sharing views, information, insights and updates.

{ 148 comments }

1

Rakesh 09.27.14 at 6:40 am

wondering whether there are interesting comparisons to be made to the Sunflower student movement in Taiwan?

2

david 09.27.14 at 7:41 am

ceding self-government will lead to demands for independence; Beijing seems to know this. Beijing is also trying to balance between watchers in Xinjiang and Taiwan, not just react to actors in Hong Kong itself. I don’t see it backing down, but unlike Xinjiang, it also lacks nominal authority over domestic security services to intervene directly – if the Hong Kong government itself gives in, I am not sure what Beijing can actually do short of suspending the rule of law and sending the Hong Kong PLA garrison in.

conversely the pro-China government in Hong Kong seems unlikely to give in, short of some particularly unwise move by Beijing or some other trigger for anti-Chinese sentiment – another milk scandal, another anti-Cantonese law, another locusts/dogs online dustup, any of these might set things off. Beijing can hardly guarantee that every single one of its thousands of regular Hong Kong visitors will not let their children pee in the train.

3

5566hh 09.27.14 at 10:05 am

Following Occupy Central’s Twitter account (@OCLPHK) is a good way to keep up to date with developments.

4

5566hh 09.27.14 at 10:12 am

There’s some good detail about Chinese media (non)coverage of the situation here, and relevant mainland media censorship instructions:

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/minitrue-hk-student-federation-boycotts-class/

Also plenty of good links in the above for general info.

5

Ingrid Robeyns 09.27.14 at 10:54 am

Thanks, David and ‘5566hh’.

6

Brett Bellmore 09.27.14 at 12:32 pm

From the perspective of this outsider, this development was utterly inevitable from the moment the British decided to give China not just a few acres of land, but also the UK citizens living there. I mean, is there ANYONE outside a mental ward who took the Chinese assurances about democracy seriously? They were a joke, everybody knew they’d be broken.

The problem for the residents of Hong Kong, is that the Chinese government dare not give them any increment of liberty, for fear of inspiring similar demands elsewhere. In the final analysis, they don’t get enough out of Hong Kong to justify the risk of rebellion stirring all across their empire.

They’re better off devoting their efforts to escape.

7

Abbe Faria 09.27.14 at 12:36 pm

Good on them for trying. It’s interesting they’re basing the protest on the Occupy Movement – is it me, or is that very weird?

Occupy notorious failed to achieve anything in the West, it was deeply anarchist and opposed to democratic politics. OCLP is a little different, they’re actually making demands, calling for more democracy, and are probably less connected to the academic left and fantasies of Paris 68. Still, I can’t help but think adopting Occupy tactics and branding is a bad sign and counter to what they’re trying to achieve.

8

david 09.27.14 at 1:09 pm

it was more plausible in 1997, when Beijing appeared to be serious about courting Taiwan by using Hong Kong as an exemplar of the gentleness of “one country, two (three?) systems”.

and then Chen was elected in 2000, of course

9

PJW 09.27.14 at 1:57 pm

I interviewed a Chinese journalist while he was visiting the United States in 1989. Looks like the same old problems remain. But I’m no expert so maybe things have improved in 25 years.

10

Rich Puchalsky 09.27.14 at 2:02 pm

“Good on them for trying. It’s interesting they’re basing the protest on the Occupy Movement – is it me, or is that very weird?”

It’s you.

Perhaps you could tell us about the left social movement that meets your standards of approval that happened recently.

11

Sancho 09.27.14 at 2:09 pm

They’re not demanding leftism, just democracy, and the movement they identify with for that is Occupy. That should speak volumes about what Occupy was (or is).

12

Ronan(rf) 09.27.14 at 2:10 pm

Is this opposition in Xinjiang and Hong Kong specific to those places, or has opposition increased in the past number of years throughout China (in places without histories of seperatist movements) towards the regime?

13

Ronan(rf) 09.27.14 at 2:16 pm

“They’re better off devoting their efforts to escape.”

This is pretty over the top, Brett. Hong Kong isn’t exactly a penal colony.

14

Anarcissie 09.27.14 at 2:34 pm

Abbe Faria 09.27.14 at 12:36 pm @ 7 —
Some observers believe that the Occupy movement shut down the then active discussion of cutting Social Security and Medicare. If so it was more effective than the entire liberal, progressive, or ‘Democratic’ wing of the Democratic Party, although that was probably not the intent of the instigators, who were mostly anarchists.

15

Brett Bellmore 09.27.14 at 2:42 pm

I suppose anarchy is to democracy as democracy is to totalitarianism.

“Hong Kong isn’t exactly a penal colony.”

Yet. But the point of Chinese fake ‘democracy’ is to deprive the people of Hong Kong of any say in whether that changes. We all know that much.

16

Anarcissie 09.27.14 at 2:49 pm

The problems posed for ruling classes by democratic political forms have mostly been solved in the West; why not in China?

17

Brett Bellmore 09.27.14 at 3:09 pm

I would put it somewhat differently: The problem posed for the ruling classes by democratic political forms are still in the process of being solved in the West. (Which is why elections still sometimes matter here.) China prefers not having them, to finding some way to circumvent them.

18

Watson Ladd 09.27.14 at 3:16 pm

Anarcisse, only someone complete ignorant of Chinese politics and US politics could say that. No one gets sent to a reeducation camp for saying Texas should be independent. No reporter has gone to jail for reporting on the crimes of the central government. When small-town corruption is reported, no one gets transported across the country. As for ballot access, there is really no comparison to the proposed changes in Hong Kong.

19

Layman 09.27.14 at 3:32 pm

“No reporter has gone to jail for reporting on the crimes of the central government.”

Not yet, but I’d say it’s coming. Certainly those who provided reporters with the evidence of crimes have been charged, tried, and convicted. And journalists have been named criminal co-conspirators as a means to secretly monitor their activity. No, we’re not China, but we do have our problems.

20

Rich Puchalsky 09.27.14 at 3:36 pm

“although that was probably not the intent of the instigators”

In an important sense, there wasn’t even one set of instigators. Occupy was the outcome of a pseudo-evolutionary process in which people were trying all sorts of things and one of them took off. I know that I link to this all the time but anything useful I have to say about that is better said here.

One more thing, though, about the reason this is called Occupy Central: there was a line in The Name of The Rose, I think (the novel by Eco) about how a medieval village doesn’t get to choose its heretic. It’s not like they sit down and decide that they want one heretical system over another: someone comes into the village preaching heresy, and they rise up or don’t. Similarly, for the next while, democracy movements and protests that need models are going to be called “Occupy [something]”. Not because they have a close ideological connection with OWS, necessarily, but because OWS was there, and whatever your ideal protest movement is, it wasn’t there.

21

Brett Bellmore 09.27.14 at 3:39 pm

Reporters aren’t going to go to jail for reporting on the crimes of the central government, but I wouldn’t be surprised if reporters who report on the crimes of the central government end up with a remarkably high probability of being found guilty of an utterly unrelated crime. Which won’t be traced back to the NSA, because the local police will engage in parallel construction to conceal how they found out about the crime.

As I have remarked in other places, we are allowing the government to construct all the apparatus of a police state right before our eyes. We’d better put a stop to it before it’s finished.

22

Ze Kraggash 09.27.14 at 4:15 pm

I remember it did seem a bit weird how that guy Scott Ritter would turn out to be a pervert, and not just a pervert but criminally liable. But now I feel he actually does look like a pervert. The power of suggestion.

23

Thornton Hall 09.27.14 at 4:18 pm

At least we won’t be subjected to pundit analysis explaining why “a lack of demands is the whole point.” Telling people exactly what you want–what a concept!

24

Dr. Hilarius 09.27.14 at 5:08 pm

Abe Faria @7: actually Occupy sparked the emergence of income inequality into the mass media. Prior to Occupy the issue got zip coverage on network television news. All of a sudden, inequality became a permissible subject of discourse for pundits, whether the agreed in its existence or not. Not a small thing.

25

Plume 09.27.14 at 5:19 pm

Brett @21,

And who are they erecting this police state for? Capitalists and the capitalist system. It’s being done to protect and defend their “private property” and the system of exploitation that makes it possible.

26

Plume 09.27.14 at 5:30 pm

Occupy notorious failed to achieve anything in the West, it was deeply anarchist and opposed to democratic politics. OCLP is a little different, they’re actually making demands, calling for more democracy, and are probably less connected to the academic left and fantasies of Paris 68. Still, I can’t help but think adopting Occupy tactics and branding is a bad sign and counter to what they’re trying to achieve.

Do you mean big D Democratic politics? Because Occupy was all about democracy and small d democratic politics. That was its foundation.

Another huge thing missed about the movement. Its structure was the main medium for its message. The reason it didn’t make “demands” like other groups is because it tried to live them. It organized itself along horizontal, egalitarian lines of consensus-building. No hierarchies per se. Its real mistake was to expect that enough people would “get that” to matter. The tree falling in the woods without anyone near syndrome, perhaps.

But the people who kept wanting it to blast its demands to the rooftops didn’t understand that it wanted to try a different kind of politics. Not the one of division, isolation and competing demands for divided, isolated, separate spoils. Again, it was an egalitarian movement, deeply committed to ending the spoils system of selective allocation. Making separate demands wouldn’t really fit with that too well and would be rather hypocritical.

Yes, in a lot of ways, it “failed.” But not really within its own definitions.

27

Abbe Faria 09.27.14 at 6:39 pm

Rich Puchalsky; “It’s you. Perhaps you could tell us about the left social movement that meets your standards of approval that happened recently.”

I know this is a deliberately snotty putdown I should dignify with a serious response. But there is one: the Color Revolutions have sucessfully built mass movements and pushed for reform of and engagement with the electoral process. While Occupy style anarchism and abstract hostility to the state have never asked for or achieved any government reform.

So, I think it’s weird because first I’m surprised Occupy is being resurected – I honestly thought it was dead and buried. Second, there is an obvious alternate model yet the one they’ve picked, Occupy, has never been about or ever achieved what they want. The only argument in favour of Occupy I can think of is that it’s non-threatening for the authorities.

Plume; “Do you mean big D Democratic politics? Because Occupy was all about democracy and small d democratic politics.”

While it went to great length to develop communities and a horizontal culture, it just refused to engage with actual government and democracy. I’m also not sure that OWS extreme total-agreement consensus building is actually democratic. As David Graeber claimed, the movement was fundamentally anarchist because of its “refusal to recognise the legitimacy of existing political institutions [and] the existing legal order”. There’s a big difference between OWS style posturing and engagement with government and the state.

28

Rich Puchalsky 09.27.14 at 6:54 pm

“I know this is a deliberately snotty putdown I should dignify with a serious response. ”

Yeah, because your original bit about how Occupy was hostile to democracy and an academic throwback to Paris ’68 was oh so serious. If you don’t want people to respond to you as they do, perhaps you should write differently.

I’m sure that if the protestors in Hong Kong had declared that they were having a Revolution, that wouldn’t have turned public opinion against them at all, right? In actual fact, the Occupy Central movement is a mass movement, using protests, that is directly engaged with electoral politics. Here is it’s manifesto.

29

gianni 09.27.14 at 7:18 pm

@27 – I would imagine that the language of the color revolutions would be a lot more threatening/concerning for members of the Chinese state watching this unfold, compared to the language of occupy. Utilizing that language would also suggest a series of analogies between the situation in HK and certain situations seen in Eastern Europe, and I am not sure that those analogies are apt. I think that the analogy drawn between NYC/Urban America and Chinese HK using the Occupy language is a lot more fitting. Granted, most of my knowledge of HK life/politics is 2nd hand and a few years out of date.

30

Plume 09.27.14 at 7:20 pm

Abbe,

The only argument in favour of Occupy I can think of is that it’s non-threatening for the authorities.

Obviously, that was not the case and the authorities felt quite threatened. They mounted a huge police-state counter-offensive, bashing in (OWS) heads, kicking them off public spaces, spraying them with pepper-spray as they sat on the ground, peacefully. If they had not been a threat, the police would have just let them be, and the media would not have done the corporatocracy’s bidding by demonizing them at every turn.

To me, it’s more than self-evident that the Establishment felt threatened by the movement, and this included Obama.

Contrast this with the tea party movement. Even when its members came armed with semi-automatic weapons, there was no major police pushback. The OWS movement, OTOH, was unarmed and non-violent, but it provoked a violent reaction by the State, which included FBI surveillance and infiltration, along with police forces across the country doing the same. We know of no such counter to the tea party, etc.

The message and the solidarity were a threat, duly noted by the powers that be. They sent their shock troops in response to that threat.

31

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 09.27.14 at 7:34 pm

Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document – reproduced here in an easily searchable format – shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council.

Thank GOD we have FREEDOMâ„¢ in the U.S. of A.!
~

32

hix 09.27.14 at 7:43 pm

That looks all like a very hopeless endavour to me. Anybody more optimistic they will achieve anything?

33

Ze Kraggash 09.27.14 at 7:56 pm

But the Color Revolutions are DoS/CIA projects. They take years to construct, with billions of dollars in budget each. No wonder they are well-organized and effective.

34

shah8 09.27.14 at 8:11 pm

Understated:

Much of this angst is effectively about the lock down and exploitative aspects of Hong Kong’s leading families as they rule Hong Kong. That these individuals look to Beijing to supplement their control of the island aggravate the class issues. That makes for a very different dynamic to the climate of democratic agitation in roughly comparable Singapore, where the leadership is fundamentally more engaged in negotiating with different factions of Singapore society. There is no source of supplemental authority. Contrast again, with Taiwan and Ma being shoved away from a mutually beneficial relationship between Taiwanese business elites and Beijing because of mass public opinion.

35

Anarcissie 09.28.14 at 12:03 am

Watson Ladd 09.27.14 at 3:16 pm @ 18 —
‘Anarcisse, only someone complete ignorant of Chinese politics and US politics could say that….’

Well, I may be completely ignorant of Chinese politics, but I probably know something about US politics, since I live there. I agree that (from what I read) conditions are very different in China than in the US, there are important differences of culture and history, etc. etc. etc. Yet human beings are probably not that terribly different from one another, and if the US ruling class can successfully manage formally democratic procedures and institutions in the US — without really breathing hard — I would think the Chinese r.c. could do the same thing in China by similar means. And then everyone would be happy.

36

Andrew F. 09.28.14 at 12:25 am

Surely the PRC must be aware of how much damage it is doing to its goal of reunification with Taiwan by denying the desire of Hong Kong for free elections.

Surely it must know that Hong Kong is a stable society with strong institutions, and therefore that allowing such additional freedom will bring about neither anarchy nor secession.

These protests present the PRC with an opportunity to demonstrate flexibility and accommodation in response to popular aspirations. Acceding to the protesters will enhance the PRC’s credibility with the population of Taiwan, and cause other governments to view key leadership in the PRC in a more favorable light.

This is also an opportunity to provide a marked and positive contrast to another occasion in which the PRC confronted student protesters – and in dong so, perhaps weaken the symbolic power of that event, long a matter of concern for the PRC.

Internal politics within the PRC, and the cognitive commitments of key persons, will of course likely prevent the PRC from seeing the opportunity that it has before it to make progress towards reunification, to enhance internal stability, and to improve its international position.

37

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 12:44 am

Indeed, Plume, contrast the Occupy and Tea party movements. One moved into public spaces, and denied their use to the public. The other routinely got parade permits. One was made a mess of things. The other left the sites of their protests cleaner than when they arrived.

One violated the rules, the other worked within them. Which would you expect the people in charge of enforcing the rules to go after?

38

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 12:49 am

Andrew, the PRC isn’t concerned about the consequences of Hong Kong democracy in Hong Kong. They’re concerned with the consequences of permitting Hong Kong democracy *outside* Hong Kong: Everybody else in China thinking they were entitled to it.

They’re not a federation, they’re an empire. They’d fall apart if everybody who wants out tried to get out at the same time. So they can’t show weakness, they can’t let people think that if they protest, they’ll get anything out of it but run over by tanks.

They’re not trying to get Taiwan to surrender by convincing them they’d remain free if China took over, nobody there is stupid enough to buy that line. So leaning on Hong Kong doesn’t hurt them with Taiwan.

39

Palindrome 09.28.14 at 1:48 am

@38: This is spot on. A lot of people in the West seem to think that political liberalization would improve things in China, and for some issues it might. But an inevitable result of real democracy coming to China is that large geographic areas of the country would split off. There is just no way that Tibet and Xinjiang would elect to stay part of China if anyone asked them. Even Inner Mongolia might hive off and join their brethren across the border. And everyone knows this! Certainly the CCP knows it. Thus, one alternative is that the hypothetical future democratic society inherits a Chinese rump state, perhaps not unlike Russia after the breakup of the USSR and just as resentful and unhappy about it. Or else Chinese “democracy” is actually an apartheid government where only Han get to vote and everyone else gets clubbed in the head if they have a problem with that. (Han are over 90% of the population, so the math works pretty well.)

And those are the best possible outcomes! Far more likely is that the transition process spins out of control and coups and plots topple any government that even attempts such a liberalization process. So if you are sitting in Zhongnanhai, what do you do? Do you allow Hong Kong to run their own election? Not if you want the country to a) maintain its current borders, and b) avoid massive amounts of unrest on the mainland. I think the CCP is trying to be patient in the hopes that these protests will burn themselves out. But if not, they will come down on the protesters like a ton of bricks. The stakes are just too high.

40

John Holbo 09.28.14 at 2:27 am

There was an interesting bloggingheads discussion a week or so ago between Robert Wright and a Hong Kong financial journalist, Edward C. K. Chin.

http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/30843

The situation seems bleak.

41

Amanda in the South Bay 09.28.14 at 2:32 am

@ Palindrome: The way demographics are going in Xinjiang, a democratic referendum on staying in Beijing’s orbit might not go the way you want. Its not as if the Han Chinese aren’t wiping out the native Turks…

42

Plume 09.28.14 at 2:48 am

Brett @37,

There is no evidence that Occupy denied public space to others, and none that it ever made a mess of things. There is also no evidence outside the right-wing bubble that the tea party crowd behaved like boyscouts and left things better than when they arrived. Wishful thinking, but no evidence exists of that virtuous behavior. We do, however, have tons of video footage of tea party bullies shouting down speakers on the podium and in the crowd, displaying their supreme ignorance in the bargain. And anyone who goes to a political rally carrying an assault rifle — or your choice of gun jargon for the weapons on display — is nothing but a thug and a person trying to intimidate others into silence.

The Establishment didn’t go after the tea party crowd because the tea party crowd is in sync with the Establishment. It wants the same things. It wants the reign of capitalism and plutocracy to continue, with even fewer checks on its power than it has now — which is saying a lot because they’re woefully lacking currently. Occupy, OTOH, was a threat because it called for an end to plutocracy and oligarchy, replaced by an egalitarian system of full democracy, social justice, with equal access and opportunity for all.

The Establishment said let them eat cake, and proceeded to bash their heads in, while the tea party laughed or egged it on or demonized the OWS crowd.

43

Ze Kraggash 09.28.14 at 7:54 am

“I would think the Chinese r.c. could do the same thing in China by similar means”

Someone should tell them about ‘designated free-speech zones’. And absolutely no mercy to the terrorists who defy The Rule of Law by coming out of the designated free-speech zones. A-la 1999 Seattle.

44

Palindrome 09.28.14 at 9:48 am

@41: “Its not as if the Han Chinese aren’t wiping out the native Turks…”

Well, the Han Chinese aren’t wiping out the Uighurs. That rather seems to imply a genocide of North American proportions. The Han are just migrating to Xinjiang in sufficient magnitude that that they will outnumber Uighurs in the territory within a generation, if not sooner. Han already constitute a majority in Lhasa. However, my point stands – democratization in China could only result in either China becoming an apartheid state or reconciling itself to abandoning its imperial project. If the CCP can last another generation or so, Xinjiang may be as completely colonized by China as Hawai’i is by the USA. But that’s a big if.

45

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 10:39 am

“There is no evidence that Occupy denied public space to others, and none that it ever made a mess of things.”

That’s called “denial”. You want to believe the police had no reason to shut down the camps, so you just ignore all the evidence that the camps were keeping other people from using public areas, and were turning into ugly ghettos.

I suggest you do a google image search, or just look up the meaning of the word, “occupy”. Could you walk your dog, or play a game of Frisbee, in this? No, the public was denied use of the places the Occupy movement occupied, and that was the point of their doing it, much as protesters chain themselves across doors, not next to them, because they mean to obstruct the door.

The occupy movement took public spaces, and seized them long term for their private use. You can’t expect the police to ignore that forever, even if they did let it go on far longer than they should have. Or, rather, YOU can expect that, but you must routinely have such expectations shattered.

46

J Thomas 09.28.14 at 12:26 pm

Apart from the details, the authorities considered OWS a threat. It looked basicly like a communist movement. But they consider Tea Party as at worst harmless.

We’ll have to see whether Tea Party is harmless. The German aristocracy thought that about Hitler’s Brown Shirts and considered them a useful balance against the communists, but then things got out of hand. We’ll see, eventually.

47

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 12:34 pm

I don’t think it’s so much that they think the Tea Party “harmless”, or else the IRS scandal would never have happened. Rather, right wing organizations are usually careful to avoid giving the authorities any excuse to physically attack them, while left wing organizations go out of their way to provoke attacks.

Partly this is a difference in strategy; The left wants to discredit the powers that be, by persuading the public that those in authority are violent maniacs, and provoking them to attack helps with this.

The right are being portrayed as violent maniacs, and need to fight that portrayal by avoiding anything that would provide the media with an opportunity to reinforce that narrative.

Partly it’s a difference in media environment; The left knows they will get somewhat sympathetic coverage, the right knows they’ll be portrayed negatively. Partly it’s chosen strategy. But there are reasons that right wing groups behave themselves in public, and left wing groups do not, and they have to do with the groups, not the police.

48

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© 09.28.14 at 12:56 pm

I don’t think it’s so much that they think the Tea Party “harmless”, or else the IRS scandal would never have happened.

Hilarious. Brett Bellmore, reporting live from FAUX Nooze.
~

49

Abbe Faria 09.28.14 at 1:07 pm

“Obviously, that was not the case and the authorities felt quite threatened. They mounted a huge police-state counter-offensive, bashing in (OWS) heads…”

Occupy was a global movement active in fifty odd countries. The US authorities violently supressed OWS, and I can how you can interpret that as a threat to the system that was destroyed. But almost everywhere else there was a hands off security approach, and the movement still didn’t achieve anything, and still petered out and collapsed because of its own internal problems in a similar manner.

So I think widespread non-achievement in the face of indifference from the authorities indicates there was no actual threat and the US response was an localised overreaction.

50

Peter K. 09.28.14 at 1:56 pm

“Occupy notorious failed to achieve anything in the West,”

” But there is one: the Color Revolutions have sucessfully [sic] built mass movements and pushed for reform of and engagement with the electoral process.”

I see them as similar. Both got their heads bashed in and didn’t accomplish anything lasting but at least they expressed a popular unhappiness with the authorities which is something. Or it’s not nothing. Like the Scottish Referendum. I see the Tea Party as mostly astroturf and funded by rightwing billionaires and millionaires. Money gets things done in electoral politics.

51

Steve Williams 09.28.14 at 2:16 pm

Brett@47

‘Partly it’s a difference in media environment; The left knows they will get somewhat sympathetic coverage, the right knows they’ll be portrayed negatively.’

I would be fascinated if you could provide any evidence, from a fairly impartial source, that shows the Occupy movements received more favourable coverage than the Tea Party protests. It certainly didn’t seem that way to me at the time, but as I say, I’m open to persuasion if you can demonstrate it.

52

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 2:55 pm

Steve: I would note that it would be difficult for the Tea Party to be attacked in the media for taking over public parks and trashing them, specifically because the Tea Party movement is careful not to do anything remotely like that.

But I’ve been at right-wing gatherings that were reported as lily white, and watched the media chose their camera angles to avoid taking photos of the blacks attending. I’ve seen them pass the clean cut family people to interview the one inevitable loon. I’ve seen liberals show up to act like racist loons, happens often enough people come prepared with “he’s not one of us” signs to point at the infiltrator.

Remember that fuss about the Congressman who supposedly got spat on by tea partiers? The racial epithets that magically didn’t appear on recordings?

The media play that sort of thing up, regularly.

Yeah, Occupy got bad press. But they got better press than they earned, IMO. And I know the right gets worse than their behavior merits, because I’ve seen it first hand.

53

Andrew F. 09.28.14 at 3:01 pm

Brett @38 – the PRC isn’t concerned about the consequences of Hong Kong democracy in Hong Kong. They’re concerned with the consequences of permitting Hong Kong democracy *outside* Hong Kong: Everybody else in China thinking they were entitled to it.

Which is a mistake on the part of the PRC. Residents of Hong Kong already enjoy far greater rights than do residents in other regions of China. The additional measure at issue is hardly one that would spark unrest elsewhere.

Moreover, by acting with flexibility and foresight here, the PRC can actually enhance its legitimacy elsewhere in China by demonstrating good judgment and responsiveness.

They’re not a federation, they’re an empire. They’d fall apart if everybody who wants out tried to get out at the same time. So they can’t show weakness, they can’t let people think that if they protest, they’ll get anything out of it but run over by tanks.

The issue here is not whether Hong Kong is to secede from China. Were it to attempt to do so, there is no doubt that the PRC would respond with force. So it’s not a matter of showing weakness at this stage.

They’re not trying to get Taiwan to surrender by convincing them they’d remain free if China took over, nobody there is stupid enough to buy that line. So leaning on Hong Kong doesn’t hurt them with Taiwan.

Realistically, the PRC needs the acquiescence of the Taiwanese people to effect a reunification, and to a large extent this will require persuading them that a reunification can occur without drastically changing those aspects of Taiwan’s law and culture that are viewed positively. Anything that causes additional resistance to the idea is, all else being equal, not in the interests of the PRC.

The worst-case scenario for reunification, from the PRC’s vantage, would be one which required a full invasion and then continuing suppression of an unwilling population. Such a scenario has the greatest chance of causing external intervention, with all the attendant dangers of escalation. In this scenario PRC success is far from assured, and is one that the PRC would prefer to avoid.

54

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 3:02 pm

Anyway, the protesters got what I expected they’d get:

Hong Kong Police use Tear Gas on Protesters

Like I said, I think the smarter move, if you live in Hong Kong, and want to live in a democracy, is to find a way to escape. There’s no way the PRC is going to let them have a functioning democracy.

55

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 3:05 pm

Andrew, I think the Chinese plan for “reunification”, (AKA, “conquest”) is to persuade the rest of the world to treat Taiwan as already part of China, and keep ramping the pressure up until permitting the Chinese to take over looks like the less bad of a nasty set of options. But China would have to change greatly for anybody in Taiwan to be stupid enough to trust promises of partial independence, and China isn’t yet willing to change in that way.

56

Anarcissie 09.28.14 at 3:44 pm

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 10:39 am @ 45 —
‘“There is no evidence that Occupy denied public space to others, and none that it ever made a mess of things.”
That’s called “denial”. You want to believe the police had no reason to shut down the camps, so you just ignore all the evidence that the camps were keeping other people from using public areas, and were turning into ugly ghettos. …’

The issue of space is interesting. Here’s something I wrote about Occupy right in the midst of things: ‘Occupy Wall Street
and the Abolition of Public Space’
, which may amuse some of you even if it wasn’t written for the CT sort of audience.

57

Plume 09.28.14 at 3:54 pm

Brett,

There is just so much wrong with what you say, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s like a greatest hits of right-wing misinformation — the last word being chosen out of a sense of decorum.

First, I attended Occupy rallies, and they were nothing like they were portrayed in the media. Second, I followed them on live-streaming when I could. Again, actual observation tells us they were nothing like media representations, especially of the Fox News variety.

Third . . . the right has been whining about their own media coverage for fifty years at least, and for the last forty plus years, it’s been like a certain college basketball coach who plays the refs like a violin. For several decades he’s managed to get the vast, vast majority of calls to go his way, in game after game, and his usual method is to claim they never do. A classic passive-aggressive success story. Conservatives owned the media even when there were a few “liberals” reporting it. Now, while they’ve consolidated their ownership and their hold on media many times over, those few liberals have disappeared even from the ranks of reporter. America media decidedly tilts to the right. It has for several decades now.

58

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 3:59 pm

I just think the notion that the Occupy movement weren’t making the places they ‘occupied’, the public places they occupied, unusable for others, is both absurd and paradoxical.

Look, a common thread of today’s version of civil disobedience, is to set up someplace and deliberately inconvenience everybody, so that your cause can’t be ignored, and you can get headlines when the police show up to stop you from obstructing everybody else’s passage. As I wrote above, people do not chain themselves next to gates and doorways, they chain themselves across them, because inconveniencing everybody, and forcing the police to be violent, is a part of the theater.

That’s what Occupy was about, and of course they were getting in everybody else’s way, and monopolizing a public space. And, of course the police eventually moved in to evict them. They’d have been disappointed if that hadn’t happened.

59

Plume 09.28.14 at 4:06 pm

Oh, and that supposed IRS scandal?

The IRS scrutinized the applications for 501C from all political groups. They targeted everyone, left, right and center, as was their job. The law actually says these groups must engage exclusively in “social welfare” activities, which mean none of them should have qualified for the tax exemption. But the IRS hasn’t gone by the letter of that law for some time, and granted pretty much every applicant the status. Left, right and center. The tea party wasn’t targeted. That’s just their persecution mania coming to the fore.

But that part of the non-scandal wasn’t even the most absurd part. The surreal aspect of the whole thing was to assume a president would bother trying to hassle these groups via that method at all. As if the risk/reward dynamic would naturally make that happen. That dynamic being, on a scale from 1 to 10, a 10 for risk and a zero for reward. There is no political advantage garnered from making these groups jump through normal hoops and then granting them exemptions anyway. No political group needs (or deserves) those exemptions in order to participate in the political process . . . yet I heard or read countless conservatives screaming to the rooftops that this was a purposeful strategy to steal the election. But if one needed a tax-free status before engaging in our politics, then we’d have just thousands of people involved, rather than millions.

It was the same kind of invented faux-scandal as Benghazi, Birthgate, Lattegate, Lapelpingate, Solyndra, Fast and Furious and any of the other nonsense that rises from the fever swamps of the right.

60

Plume 09.28.14 at 4:12 pm

Brett,

Occupy generally gathered in little used public space. All across the country. They didn’t pick places that were teeming with activity. They had no intention of inconveniencing the average citizen. Their movement was for and by and about the average citizen. If they were trying to “inconvenience” anyone, it was Wall Street and the banksters and people who probably wouldn’t be caught dead going to places like Zuccotti Park.

Oh, and they never had any intention to “provoke” police. They wanted to provoke a debate about our economic system. The people in Occupy new that provoking the police would likely result in their movement being crushed, violently, which is what happened. If you think they actually wanted their heads bashed in, or to be pepper-sprayed as they sat peacefully on sidewalks in their own universities, or dragged by the hair from their lines of resistance, you’re truly crazy.

Oh, and when they sat down on those sidewalks, they clearly weren’t blocking passage. The police who pepper-sprayed them clearly had an easy time going around them and past them, as did all the bystanders.

Your incredible bias and ignorance on the issue is just flying off the page, Brett.

61

Plume 09.28.14 at 4:13 pm

“knew.”

62

Rich Puchalsky 09.28.14 at 4:20 pm

Plume, it’s not worth it. The thread’s about Hong Kong Occupy Central, and it was worth saying some things about e.g. why new groups in countries around the world might use the Occupy name with or without Occupy’s commitment to consensus and rejection of electoral politics. But it’s not worth having BB rehash his old talking points.

He’s an authoritarian, and like almost all Tea Party types he doesn’t really believe that people who he disagrees with still have a right to protest and petition the government for a redress of grievances. No amount of pointing out that Occupy purposefully used public/private spaces specifically because there were no rules against what they were doing will keep Brett from writing “You can’t expect the police to ignore that forever, even if they did let it go on far longer than they should have.” Right wingers talk about resistance to the state sometimes, but it’s only because they want an even more oppressive state.

Meanwhile, I see that Andrew F loves democracy as long as it’s far away.

63

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 4:28 pm

“The IRS scrutinized the applications for 501C from all political groups. They targeted everyone, left, right and center, as was their job. ”

Not to make this about the US, instead of Hong Kong, (Where the PRC have begun the crackdown I anticipated.) but that’s just a total BS talking point, contradicted by the reality that the liberal groups that got ‘targeted’ were treated much differently than the targeted conservative groups.

If you tell the doorman, “Call the police if Bob shows up, and escort Tom right up”, one could say they were both ‘targeted’. If one were an idiot.

64

Plume 09.28.14 at 4:41 pm

Rich,

True. It’s hopeless. He lives in his own little fact-free world.

And, yes, the OP is about Hong Kong. So I shouldn’t get sidetracked. But a quick note on the irony of the supposed conservative stance against authority, which is a fiction. Not that this or any other test is authoritative or definitive, but it’s at least a marker along the way. So I point conservatives to this when I can, especially after they’ve accused me of being a Stalinist for advocating full democracy, egalitarianism and socialism, etc. etc.

Ironic because I score quite nearly the maximum for anti-authoritarian, while they, if they admit their scores, are generally very weak in that regard. Which makes sense.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

65

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 4:57 pm

“and like almost all Tea Party types he doesn’t really believe that people who he disagrees with still have a right to protest and petition the government for a redress of grievances. ”

I absolutely believe they do. Like most on the right, I don’t believe they have a right to do it by taking over a public park, or invading somebody else’s property. But I’ve taken part in plenty of protests of the right-wing sort, where we didn’t deliberately screw with people to get on the evening news being arrested.

Now, back to Hong Kong, where I will maintain that, if you live in Hong Kong, and want democracy, your best bet is to find a way to get out of Hong Kong. Because there’s no way, no how, the PRC is going to permit it.

Though I have nothing but respect for the people who are willing to force the PRC to actually get vicious, rather than knuckling under to the threat.

66

Peter K. 09.28.14 at 5:02 pm

Vox has some photos:

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6856663/hong-kong-democracy-protests-photos

Conservatives and Republicans worship authority, except in the case where Obama, Socialists, or Commies are in charge.

67

Layman 09.28.14 at 5:07 pm

“Like most on the right, I don’t believe they have a right to do it by taking over a public park, or invading somebody else’s property.”

Surely this is just a consequence of your disagreement with their aims. A public park is, after all, public, and members of the public have a right to assemble there. I’m not aware that Occupy took any steps to prevent others from using the places they assembled, other than to assemble there themselves and by occupying space prevent others from occupying the same space. If this is ‘taking over’, then millions do it in subways every day.

Once you start down the path of granting licenses for assembly, you’re asserting the power to withhold such licenses, and by so doing you’re choosing who can and who can’t assemble.

68

Anarcissie 09.28.14 at 5:12 pm

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 4:57 pm @ 65 —
‘I absolutely believe they do. Like most on the right, I don’t believe they have a right to do it by taking over a public park, or invading somebody else’s property.’

In other words, they have a right, as long as they don’t exercise it in space and time. This sort of mental trick is what inspires me to think that the Chinese ruling class would do well to look and see how the U.S. ruling class does its thing.

69

Plume 09.28.14 at 5:20 pm

In other words, they have a right, as long as they don’t exercise it in space and time. This sort of mental trick is what inspires me to think that the Chinese ruling class would do well to look and see how the U.S. ruling class does its thing.

Well said. But I imagine they have done just that. They’ve learned a great deal about how we once practiced capitalism before leftist activists managed to get a few checks put on their virtually unlimited power. America (and Europe) once ran things quite a bit like China’s Foxconn, until they weren’t allowed to any longer. And now American capitalists (and Europeans) get the benefits of their own legacy being instituted by the Chinese and elsewhere overseas. The horror never goes away. It’s just relocated.

Ironically, our activists also learned from the Chinese in Tienanmen square, and it looks like our government learned from the Chinese on how to counter that.

70

Plume 09.28.14 at 5:23 pm

Peter K,

Thank you for the photo link. Those are stunning pictures. All of them. Number 7 reminds me of the guy in front of the tanks in Tienanmen.

71

Brett Bellmore 09.28.14 at 6:58 pm

“I’’m not aware that Occupy took any steps to prevent others from using the places they assembled, other than” occupying those places for weeks on end. But I suppose you genuinely can’t tell the difference between visiting the park for an afternoon, and setting up a tent there and living there.

72

Ingrid Robeyns 09.28.14 at 7:00 pm

Peter K. @66 – thanks for the links – very powerful photo’s.

Friends who have friends who are involved ask us to spread the information and news as much as possible.

Anyone with a Twitter account: @OCLPHK has 9,000 followers – Crooked Timber has about 12,000 visitors a day, so we should be able to increase that number significantly.

73

Plume 09.28.14 at 7:19 pm

Brett,

First of all, they weren’t allowed to occupy parks for weeks on end. The police, in most cases, very quickly shut them down and kicked them out of public spaces. Again, notice the word “public.” And they were all unarmed, btw, while the police came revved up in their SWAT gear.

Now, contrast that with the open carry brown shirts (and likely tea party members or supporters), who parade their ignorance and intimidation tactics in front of schools, inside restaurants, in bars, at political rallies, while the police do nothing.

Unarmed (OWS) kids get their heads bashed in and pepper-sprayed, dragged by the hair out of their protest lines . . . while armed thugs are left alone.

You have no business complaining about the difference in treatment, as it so obviously tilts in your favor. Police and media-wise.

74

Layman 09.28.14 at 7:52 pm

Shorter Brett Bellmore: “Public places are for the public I like!”

75

Tom Slee 09.28.14 at 8:56 pm

Jamie K. now has a post about the role of Occupy and others in HK at Blood & Treasure.

76

gianni 09.28.14 at 9:00 pm

Scenes of tear gas and riot gear’ed thugs will only strengthen this movement. HK citizens have a lot of pride for their city and its public spaces. Initially, this inclination pushed against the protesters’ tactics. But the cops turning the city streets into a battleground should reverse that quite rapidly.

Had there been little to no official response, I could easily see this movement petering out as the demands of regular life overtook the political momentum. I do not understand the mindframe of these officials who order police crackdowns on public protests. State repression in the name of order, unless taken to its bloody extreme, very quickly undermines itself.

77

cassander 09.29.14 at 1:00 am

@plume

>The IRS scrutinized the applications for 501C from all political groups. They targeted everyone, left, right and center, as was their job.

the IRS has repeatedly admitted , that it disproportionately investigated right wing groups. If persecution mania is making this claim, then that mania seems to have infested the IRS.

>But that part of the non-scandal wasn’t even the most absurd part. The surreal aspect of the whole thing was to assume a president would bother trying to hassle these groups via that method at all.

No one who knows anything about the government thinks that there is a presidential memo in a desk somewhere ordering the IRS to persecute tea party groups. It would actually be more comforting if such a memo did exist, because the reality is much worse. What we have a system that can be counted on to discriminate against one political party and not the other without anyone having to order them to do it. our supposedly apolitical civil service is anything but, and that is extremely dangerous.

78

Plume 09.29.14 at 2:02 am

Cassander,

The IRS repeatedly denied that it had targeted anyone, including right wing groups. It also repeatedly said it flagged progressive groups as well as conservative for close scrutiny, which is its job. Left, right and center. It flagged them because they applied for something they had no business receiving. None of them should have received the exemption — left, right or center. Because the law says they must be “exclusively” engaged in social welfare activities, and few of these groups could accurately claim they were engaged in any social welfare activities.

Btw, there was zero “persecution” involved. Unless by “persecution,” you mean asking these groups to fill out legal forms, detailing information about their political activities, their donors, etc. As in, information totally germane to their application to cheat on their taxes. To tea partiers, who think taxation is persecution and tyranny already, it’s a bridge too far to be asked to prove you should gain a tax exemption.

And the absurdity and surreality involved has nothing to do with the lack of memos or some unwritten rules of indirect political gamesmanship. The absurdity and surreality is to think that what the IRS did could possibly harm the tea party or conservative politics in the first place.

If it had been such an awesome Machiavellian idea, why did Republicans raise and spend far more outside money — the kind covered under those exemptions? Thanks to Citizens United, the total in the 2012 election for SuperPacs and non-profits more generally was nearly 900 million (that we know of), with Republicans raising and spending 577 million to the Dems’ 237 million. One would think the dastardly deeds of the IRS would have shifted the balance.

79

Rich Puchalsky 09.29.14 at 2:36 am

“I do not understand the mindframe of these officials who order police crackdowns on public protests.”

History shows that it works. As in the U.S., authorities are not willing to tolerate long-term mass protests that don’t go away on their own. And, as in the U.S., there really is no long-term penalty for using force.

I highly recommend sociologist Randall Collin’s blog post TIPPING POINT REVOLUTIONS AND STATE BREAKDOWN REVOLUTIONS: WHY REVOLUTIONS SUCCEED OR FAIL. A quote:

We like to believe that any government that uses force against its own citizens is so marred by the atrocity that it loses all legitimacy. Yet the 1990s and the early 2000s were a time of increasing Chinese prestige. The market version of communist political control became a great economic success; international economic ties expanded and exacted no penalty for the deaths in June 1989; domestically Chinese poured their energies into economic opportunities. Protest movements revived within a decade, but the regime has been quick to clamp down on them. Even the new means of mobilization through the internet has proven to be vulnerable to a resolute authoritarian apparatus, which monitors activists to head off any possible Tiananmen-style assemblies before they start.

80

Palindrome 09.29.14 at 2:47 am

@53 Andrew F: “Which is a mistake on the part of the PRC. Residents of Hong Kong already enjoy far greater rights than do residents in other regions of China. The additional measure at issue is hardly one that would spark unrest elsewhere.”

With respect, I think the CCP understands Chinese domestic politics a little better than you give them credit for. As you say, HK residents enjoy far greater freedoms than do mainlanders. As an obvious example, the very protests we are discussing would never have been permitted to go on so long in any other Chinese city. And in no other Chinese city can the residents select their leaders, not even from a slate of candidates pre-screened by the central government – as is currently the plan in HK. This is ‘one country, two systems’ at work.

But you are wrong if you think that citizens of the mainland would not increasingly agitate for diffusion of the rights enjoyed by HK to the rest of the country. The dream of many liberal Chinese is that as the country becomes wealthier, ‘one country, two systems’ will fade away, and the entire nation will be able to enjoy the same rights as HK-ers. The CCP knows and fears this. That’s why the CCP’s goal is to push it the other direction: instead of all of China becoming like HK, HK must become like the rest of China. One country, one system. Because the other path would lead to the fall of the CCP, and perhaps even the breakup of the country.

81

cassander 09.29.14 at 3:06 am

@plume

>The IRS repeatedly denied that it had targeted anyone, including right wing groups.

I just linked you to two statements by the IRS that say exactly the opposite. to quote directly from louis lerner:

However, in these cases, the way they did the centralization was not so fine. Instead of referring to the cases as advocacy cases, they actually used case names on this list. They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate — that’s not how we go about selecting cases for further review.

>repeatedly said it flagged progressive groups as well as conservative for close scrutiny, which is its job.

It has repeatedly said that while it did flag those groups, it did so at much lower rates. truly you are a monument to the power of denial.

>Unless by “persecution,” you mean asking these groups to fill out legal forms, detailing information about their political activities, their donors, etc.

bullshit. if there were a republican president in office, and the IRS got caught insisting progressive groups fill out extra paper work and give more information, you would absolutely call it persecution. Is it the worst thing in the world? No, but let’s call a spade a spade and drop the double standard.

> The absurdity and surreality is to think that what the IRS did could possibly harm the tea party or conservative politics in the first place.

Well, for one, courts seem to disagree, becuase the IRS has been sued over this, and lost.

> One would think the dastardly deeds of the IRS would have shifted the balance.

it very well might have. had this not happened, the conservatives might have raised even more. the fact that democrats donate money in different patterns than republicans proves nothing.

82

Layman 09.29.14 at 3:08 am

“the IRS has repeatedly admitted , that it disproportionately investigated right wing groups. If persecution mania is making this claim, then that mania seems to have infested the IRS.”

The IRS doesn’t write headlines for the Washington Post.

83

Layman 09.29.14 at 3:16 am

“It has repeatedly said that while it did flag those groups, it did so at much lower rates.”

And

“if there were a republican president in office, and the IRS got caught insisting progressive groups fill out extra paper work and give more information”

I’m confused. In the first sentence, you admit that the IRS targeted both sets of groups; while in the second, you imply they singled out one rather than the other. Both can’t be true.

As for ‘lower rates’, what is it you think they mean? That numerically fewer progressive groups were subjected to extra scrutiny, or that proportionally fewer progressive groups were subjected to extra scrutiny? I’m guessing you have no idea.

84

Plume 09.29.14 at 3:41 am

Cassander,

The post summarized a Republican head of the IRS, a Republican IG, and the Republican Lois Lerner. But even they never said any group was “targeted.” They denied it when asked if that had happened, instead, saying that they had used the wrong “criteria” to judge who should receive added scrutiny. As Layman mentioned, the Post used the word “targeted,” not those Republican officials.

And, as we learned later, no thanks to Issa, Issa asked that Republican IG to pursue the complaints from conservative groups only. Just them. No one else. And who is more likely to complain about being taxed in the first place? Progressive groups or tea party, “patriot” and Beck’s 9/12 groups?

The latter, obviously.

There is and never was a there there. There was solely just the usual persecution complex on exhibit from a group of whiny little (rich) babies who endlessly howl about how they’ve been discriminated against, persecuted and tormented, even though they run the show and have run it for well over forty years in official circles . . . and for a good two hundred behind the scenes.

And, again, putting those groups through scrutiny does them no harm. Zero harm. It doesn’t take anything away from their ability to pursue their political objectives or participate in the political process. First of all, because no one needs tax exemptions TO participate. Second, the tax exemption adds zero political benefits when it comes to winning elections or getting your agenda passed. Third, no one has a “right” to a tax exemption, and when filthy rich individuals and their groups take them, they are the epitome of a “moocher,” a word they all too often used to describe the poor, the elderly, the vet, or the college student. You know, the famous 47%.

Given the crackpot ideas and beliefs of tea party folks and the Republican base in general, no sane, intelligent adult is going to pay the slightest attention to yet one more of their whinefests. You guys have already used up your quota of crazy — and long ago.

85

cassander 09.29.14 at 3:58 am

@Plume

Seriously, what part of ” They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate” are you finding difficult. those are the words straight from louis lerner’s mouth.

> even though they run the show and have run it for well over forty years in official circles

if that were the case, you would think the IRS would have gotten caught discriminating against progressive groups, not conservative. that fact that they didn’t tells you everything you need to know about who is running the show. the continued ability of progressives to cast themselves as underdogs despite being in charge for decades will never cease to amaze me.

>And, again, putting those groups through scrutiny does them no harm. Zero harm.

again, the courts disagree, which is why the IRS had to pay damages. but you don’t seem much interested in the facts.

> Second, the tax exemption adds zero political benefits when it comes to winning elections or getting your agenda passed.

if this were true, groups would not be seeking such exemptions. the status is self evidently desireable.

>Third, no one has a “right” to a tax exemption, and when filthy rich individuals and their groups take them, they are the epitome of a “moocher,” a word they all too often used to describe the poor, the elderly, the vet, or the college student. You know, the famous 47%.

So if the republicans passed a law that said that no group that advocates for abortion rights gets TE status, you’d be fine with that? Somehow, I doubt it.

86

Plume 09.29.14 at 4:24 am

Cassander,

First of all, I’m not a progressive or a Dem. I have no horse in the silly race between the two money parties.

Second, Lois Lerner is a Republican. As were the head of the IRS at the time of the supposed scandal and the IG Issa tasked with his witch hunt, I mean, investigation.

The IRS wasn’t caught discriminating against conservative groups. If that had been the case, liberal and progressive groups wouldn’t have been in the mix as well. And they were. Recent findings show progressive groups were scrutinized more than conservative groups, in fact.

Notice the chart:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/

And this excerpt:

The IRS provided the heavily-redacted lists to ThinkProgress, after nearly a year-long search. From the earliest lists through 2012, the “historical” section of the lists encouraged reviewers to watch out for “progressive” groups with names like “blue,” as their requests for 501(c)(3) charitable status might be inappropriate. Their inclusion in this section suggests that the concern predates the initial 2010 list.

Explicit references to “Tea Party,” included in the “emerging issues” section of the lists, also began in August 2010 — but stopped appearing after the May 10, 2011 list. From that point on, the lists instructed agents to flag all political advocacy groups of any stripe. The documents instructed the agents to forward any “organization involved with political, lobbying, or advocacy” applying for 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) status be forwarded to “group 7822″ for additional review. Groups under both categories are limited in the amount of of lobbying and political activity each can undertake.

You said:

if this were true, groups would not be seeking such exemptions. the status is self evidently desireable.

Groups sought tax exemption so they could keep all the money they raised, thus increasing their own lavish salaries, improving their perks and hiding their donors. There is no political advantage to any of that. It is a financial advantage for the people involved. That is the reason why it is desired.

87

Plume 09.29.14 at 4:30 am

You also said:

So if the republicans passed a law that said that no group that advocates for abortion rights gets TE status, you’d be fine with that? Somehow, I doubt it.

If the law were across the board for all political groups, yes. I’d be in favor of it. No exemptions for any of them, left, right or center. However, if it singled out just women’s health and autonomy advocacy, no. I’d be dead set against it. That would actually be a slam dunk example of selective “persecution.” Which reminds me of a recent decision by the Supreme Court involving Hobby Lobby.

88

PatrickinIowa 09.29.14 at 4:35 am

1. Zucotti Park is privately owned. It was cleared by police when the owners asked them to do it.

2. I was there. It was nothing like the media portrayal–it was peaceful, people could move about without being hindered. I suppose you could say that you couldn’t sit on one of patches of grass occupied by a protester, but no one was being prevented from doing anything.

3. One of the most fascinating things about this is that Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Hong Kong are opposed by a group of people that Occupy Wall Street was trying to highlight. The American corporate right sides with Beijing, because the Communist Party of China and the American right are quite similar under the skin: they believe in the acquisition of power and wealth and they believe that people with power and wealth should be obeyed and adored: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/06/30/big-four-accountancy-firms-take-flak-for-anti-occupy-stance/.

If you want to see the world that the Kochs and their ilk want us all to live in, go to Shanghai.

89

ZM 09.29.14 at 5:00 am

There is a demonstration today for Hong Kong outside the State Library of Victoria. The signs I can read say “Hong Kong – Be Safe” , people must be concerned for loved ones there.

90

cassander 09.29.14 at 5:32 am

>Second, Lois Lerner is a Republican

what a preposterous notion. First, she is a female lawyer with a career in government., which would make it extremely unlikely for her to be on the right. Of course, demographics are not proof, but there is ample testimony to her views from people who knew her. now, maybe lerner is a rock ribbed republican and this is all poppycock, but if that’s the case, well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

>Notice the chart:

You seem to be leaving out the “the heavily-redacted lists ” part. as well as the “President Obama and members of both parties in Congress all agree that the IRS acted improperly in singling-out certain groups for more scrutiny than others.” bit. Everyone in the world seems to think that the IRS was doing something wrong, except you.

>. However, if it singled out just women’s health and autonomy advocacy, no. I’d be dead set against it. That would actually be a slam dunk example of selective “persecution.

which is exactly what they did, single out groups with particular names that just happened to be republican.

91

Barry 09.29.14 at 5:46 am

Aside from the fact that they looked at groups from both ends of the political spectrum, your very sentence is funny: “which is exactly what they did, single out groups with particular names that just happened to be republican.”

The whole point is that clearly partisan groups were claiming tax-exempt status.

92

Plume 09.29.14 at 6:05 am

Cassander,

Given that Obama has a proven track record of overreacting (instantly, in most cases) to right wing whining, that’s not telling us anything. He threw Van Jones under the bus because of pressure from Glenn Beck’s blackboard. He threw Shirley Sherrod under the bus because of right-wing howling. He had his Homeland secretary retract a report, started by the Bush administration, that detailed the rise of violent right-wing gr0ups, because conservatives howled and whined about the truth. He dropped support for several of his nominees because the right howled and whined. He has shown from 2009 on a marked propensity for caving into right-wing pressure on all things, while consistently throwing his own base under the bus.

That he quickly admitted to IRS mistakes is just one more instance of his overreacting before all the facts were in. Subsequent investigations have proven that the IRS rightfully scrutinized political groups of all persuasions when they sought tax exemption. The only thing the IRS is guilty of, really, is granting those exemptions to political groups. If they followed the letter of the law, they wouldn’t.

Again, according to the letter of the law in question, no tea party group should receive the exemption, and yet every tea party group that applied did. But still conservatives whine and moan about nothing. It’s what they do, and it’s very effective. Obama and others probably just choose to cave so they’ll at least temporarily stop their howling. A mistake, of course, because it just “emboldens the terrorists.”

93

phenomenal cat 09.29.14 at 6:59 am

I would note that it would be difficult for the Tea Party to be attacked in the media for taking over public parks and trashing them, specifically because the Tea Party movement is careful not to do anything remotely like that. –bellmore @52

Come on Bellmore, you know why that’s the case. The tp couldn’t occupy a mall past 5pm because the protesters would need to pick up a few things at Walmart before getting home to watch Hannity. Can’t miss Hannity.

94

Jack Wei 09.29.14 at 8:52 am

It’s waste of time for some chinese people. They cannot make CCP change the rules for them. It’s one country, two systems. So it’s does not mean that occupy central can make a riot in Hong Kong. They should protest in the mainland not on the island because they will get nothing.

95

Brett Bellmore 09.29.14 at 9:49 am

I think the last time I watched Hannity was while changing channels three years ago, and it was for about a half second.

“Subsequent investigations have proven that the IRS rightfully scrutinized political groups of all persuasions when they sought tax exemption. ”

And then put the conservative groups through a couple years of hell, asked illegal questions of them, and passed on their confidential donor lists to liberal groups, while giving the liberal groups a quick pass.

But this can’t have happened, because Lerner is a Republican. A Republican who is registered as a Democrat, has expressed hatred of Republicans in her emails, and is married to a Democratic fund raiser, but still, a Republican. In the alternate universe Plume inhabits.

96

PatrickinIowa 09.29.14 at 11:53 am

1. Obama had nothing to do with the IRS practices, no matter what the IRS actually did. To add some numbers to the fact free discussion: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/06/20/193868881/4-Facts-You-Might-Not-Have-Known-About-The-IRS-Scandal.

2. The right whines. That’s what they do. The ideology is rooted in fear and anxiety. Can you imagine what would happen if they got the kind of governmental scrutiny that the left, including pacifists, does? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/fbi-occupy-wall-street_n_2355883.html. This is particular galling since Clive Bundy’s adherents can aim weapons at federal officers’ heads, and walk free, while a pacifist from the Occupy movement is in federal prison.

If the pro-life movement got the kind of scrutiny anti-capitalist pacifists get, there’d be a ton of conservatives on probation. (It’s too much to hope that right wing criminals go to prison. See, D’Souza, Dinesh.)

3. This is relevant to the OP precisely because Beijing will be characterizing the pro-democracy demonstrators as “terrorists,” and Beijing’s corporate lackeys will be complaining about how they disrupt traffic, take up public space and generally don’t behave like good servants of the rich and powerful. Again, this is what authoritarians, Chinese or American do. Screw them.

97

Ronan(rf) 09.29.14 at 12:12 pm

Andrew F said – “Which is a mistake on the part of the PRC. Residents of Hong Kong already enjoy far greater rights than do residents in other regions of China. The additional measure at issue is hardly one that would spark unrest elsewhere.
Moreover, by acting with flexibility and foresight here, the PRC can actually enhance its legitimacy elsewhere in China by demonstrating good judgment and responsiveness.”

I’m really not sure how you can make a statement like this which such certainty. I mean, it’s a plausible argument that it wouldnt ‘spark unrest elsewhere’, but far from a gaurantee. And if you’re the Chinese elite (taking as given the assumption their *only* concern is with preventing unrest develping elsewhere) why would you risk it ?

98

Rich Puchalsky 09.29.14 at 1:48 pm

“I’m really not sure how you can make a statement like this which such certainty.”

Andrew F. comments as if he’s writing official U.S. government soundbites. He’s certain that this would be good for China in the same sense as he was certain that the NSA wasn’t lying about all of the things that they proved to be lying about. If you’re an honest democracy advocate, then certain people will have you tear gassed in the U.S., but they will be very helpful if it looks like you might destabilize China. Just as the with the above mentioned Color Revolutions.

99

Brett Bellmore 09.29.14 at 2:03 pm

“Obama had nothing to do with the IRS practices, no matter what the IRS actually did. ”

I think that’s entirely possible, and frightening. I would find this being a result of Obama ordering it to actually be reassuring, because the thought that the IRS is so relentlessly partisan that it doesn’t NEED orders to attack conservatives is so much worse.

OTOH, he sure didn’t move Heaven and Earth to punish it. That’s enough to make him retroactively guilty, in my opinion.

100

Rich Puchalsky 09.29.14 at 2:56 pm

“That’s enough to make him retroactively guilty, in my opinion.”

Since this is still going on…

Your complaint is ludicrous. Did you read, and understand, Barry’s comment? “But they were picking out groups with republican names!” because they investigate whether groups have non-profit, tax-exempt status. Do you know what that is?

At the same time, Obama is running a massive, lawless surveillance state. There are *any number* of well-documented abuses of governmental power against political groups and individuals that you could be complaining about. But are you? No, because your ox wasn’t gored in those cases.

Look at the respective criticisms voiced by the left and right about each other’s protests. Ignore all of the defenses of why their side is good and the other bad, like “you’re a commie”, or “you’re racist”. What do you hear again and again? From the left, you hear that right-wingers bring guns to their protests. From the right, it’s that left-wingers occupy public space and make a mess.

I know that you’re incapable of serious self-reflection, but if you were, it would be cause for it. There is no serious way to overcome what you see as abuses of the state because there is no way that the center-right in America can be trusted. The elites will always be able to point to you, as you fulminate about how the police waited too long to tear gas people camping out in a park, and everyone will mumble something about the lesser evil and go back to the status quo.

101

Plume 09.29.14 at 4:11 pm

Brett,

You keep using your false premises as an answer to other points. It’s like you’re a flat-earther, and someone shows you pictures from NASA satellites showing a spherical world. You say, “Those pictures can’t be right because the earth is flat.”

You stick doggedly to your errors in the face of overwhelming evidence against them. And recent science tells us conservatives are especially dogged in this way.

And then put the conservative groups through a couple years of hell, asked illegal questions of them, and passed on their confidential donor lists to liberal groups, while giving the liberal groups a quick pass.

This is you telling us the earth is flat again.

102

Plume 09.29.14 at 4:16 pm

And more flat-earth nonsense:

I think that’s entirely possible, and frightening. I would find this being a result of Obama ordering it to actually be reassuring, because the thought that the IRS is so relentlessly partisan that it doesn’t NEED orders to attack conservatives is so much worse.

“Attack conservatives” by making them prove they should get tax exempt status (they shouldn’t get, according to the law) which makes us all pay more in taxes. Making them fill out paperwork that has long been the norm for these applications. Making them go through the normal, legal process in place for 501Cs. And, then, as if the horrors and the absolute gut-wrenching tyranny of filling out legal forms weren’t enough, the IRS grants them their exemptions. We’ve started revolutions for less!!

103

Brett Bellmore 09.29.14 at 4:39 pm

Plume, it’s actually hilarious, being accused of being a flat earther by folks who can’t even be bothered to look at what the IRS has admitted to doing, and being confirmed to have done. It’s like being called a flat earther by follower of Immanuel Velikovsky.

Here, contaminate your mind with actual facts.

104

Plume 09.29.14 at 5:04 pm

Brett,

I’ve looked at the facts in the case from the beginning. Repeatedly. In depth. There is quite a wide swing in the way they’ve been presented (or invented), depending upon which media outfit does the presentation. Center-right orgs like Politico tend to take what their Republican sources say verbatim, unfiltered by reason, often offering corrections later when caught playing stenographer. The Washington Post is the same way on these issues. It’s a center-right rag, and aside from a few “social” ones, plays high court stenographer for the right. No doubt this will get even worse under the guidance of Bezos and his pick for Editor and Chief, a slobbering Reagan acolyte.

What you seem incapable of understanding is that there is a massive difference between the supposed (rich, privileged, virtually all-white) victim’s view of what the IRS did and what the IRS actually did. And this becomes an especially huge gap when conservatives are the folks claiming victimhood, because no one does the smelling salts routine like a conservative. And few things drive them to greater lengths of hyperbole than taxes and their effects.

Now, for the last time, tell me why you actually believe it’s wrong for the IRS to do its job under statute? One part of it being to allocate tax exempt status based on the law. And why do you see it as “persecution” when the IRS GRANTS tax exemption to these political groups, even though the law says they should not? And why on earth do you think it even matters, given the fact that rich hucksters wound up spending billions anyway, and the Republicans crushed the Dems in the outside money realm?

Tax exempt status is irrelevant when it comes to winning political elections or passing legislation. It is nothing more than a big fat cherry on top for the Karl Roves of this world, so they can bilk even more money from suckers and pad their already lavish lifestyles, doing nothing but collecting “other people’s money.”

105

Plume 09.29.14 at 5:12 pm

Quick addendum to the above.

The reason the victim’s view is important? Because that’s pretty much all we got. That’s all the Republican witch hunt machine presented. And, they narrowed it down still further. They presented zero progressives or other left-leaning groups who were also scrutinized in the process. Their sole focus was on the delicate sensibilities of right-wing millionaires and billionaires, who would have to be put through the Gestapo-like torture of filling out forms in order to legally mooch off the rest of us.

Most media covered all of this from the point of view of those moochers, I mean victims. When they did talk to the IRS, it was generally to those politically whipped higher officials who waiting to fall on their swords. The better organizations dug deeper, and that’s when we learned that Occupy and Green groups, etc. etc. were also scrutinized heavily. They just don’t do the smelling salts thing. Unlike too many conservatives, it would appear they’ve never seen Gloria Swanson in action.

106

Abbe Faria 09.29.14 at 6:47 pm

I’m just amazed there’s some sort of ‘controversy’ and ‘argument’ about the IRS disproportionately investigating organizations named after celebrated tax evasion/resistance movements. How is this not the most immediately sensible and obvious prioritisation activity any semi-competent tax official would perform? Honestly, if you were checking forms would not be extra careful if the return for the Henry Thoreau Fuck the IRS Foundation came across your desk?

107

Plume 09.29.14 at 6:57 pm

Abbe,

But they also “flagged” groups with “Occupy” in the title, or references to the Environment, or to women’s health issues. It wasn’t just the Koch brothers’ useful idiots in the tea party, or Glenn Beck’s useful idiots in his 9/12 movement, or the KKK’s useful idiots in the “patriot” movement.

Left-wing, environmental, Occupy and minority rights groups were flagged, too.

But, yes. Your larger point does make sense. Flagging likely tax resisters does make a lot of sense for the IRS.

108

gianni 09.29.14 at 7:37 pm

Gov responds in state run media

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/884226.shtml

“If the oppositionists continue their Occupy campaign, they will bring more inconvenience to local people, the investment environment will be harmed, and the stock market and foreign exchange market will slip…. it is unlikely the chaos in Hong Kong could turn into a crisis in the mainland… After Hong Kong people see it clearly that the central government will not change its mind, they will recognize the dramas staged by the oppositionists are just making things worse. The tide will turn against the oppositionists.”

109

Rich Puchalsky 09.29.14 at 8:11 pm

I read Brett’s link and found this gem:

“The IRS also asked for transcripts of radio shows where her group had mentioned political candidates by name — a job she figured would have cost her group $25,000. And it asked whether her group had “a close relationship” with any candidates or parties, a question she considered especially vague.”

Huh. Tax-exempt status, in the U.S., can not be given to organizations that support particular political parties or candidates. I wonder why the IRS could conceivably have been interested in this information? Of course, groups need not apply for tax-exempt status in order to exist. They only need to apply for it if they want contributions to the group to be tax deductible.

Imagine what Brett could have said if he’d started with something like “They did this to Occupy groups and environmental groups too! We’re not only saying this for ourselves, these questions about donor lists rise to a level of intrusiveness that affects everyone.” But that wouldn’t let them have the element of victimization that it’s only happening to them, and would require that they actually commit to a worldview in which everyone has the same rights. And it would remove the element of conservative paranoia that says that Occupy and Obama are in it together, along with Alinsky and Clinton — all one big indistinguishable mass, all with the same goals and pulling together.

110

Plume 09.29.14 at 9:16 pm

Rich,

Very good points. If Brett had wanted to actually do something about the IRS, he would have called for broad support. Not try to claim selective persecution which never happened.

As we both have stated, tax exempt status is not necessary at all in order to participate fully in our political system. Receiving it means the executives of those political laundry lists get to keep more of what they collect, and for donors to hose taxpayers by claiming their bribes, I mean, gifts as writeoffs — thus, reducing their tax burdens. This, of course, is primarily utilized by the exceedingly rich.

So the Bretts of this world are fighting for and defending the misuse and abuse of the tax system, which is not supposed to offer tax exempt status to any political group. As usual, he sides with the wealthy against the rest of us. And that is the conservative way.

111

Collin Street 09.29.14 at 9:44 pm

> Not try to claim selective persecution which never happened.

Dragging it a bit closer to the original topic, but it strikes me that a lot of Falun Gong complaints are framed as being about the application of normal-but-horrific measures to them, Falun Gong, rather than the more-general “how dare you do the sorts of things you do to us to anybody”.

[again, empathy problems. And cults [among other groups] are notorious for preying on “weak” or “vulnerable” people, people who want “simple” answers to the “problems of society”…]

112

Alan White 09.29.14 at 10:53 pm

I get the sinking feeling of Tienanmen II, this time abetted by world market forces, instead of those forces merely standing idly by, as in Tienanmen I.

113

Palindrome 09.30.14 at 2:16 am

Interesting article in The Diplomat about a Chinese Central Committee conference this past weekend on how to head-off ethnic tensions in minority regions in the near term:

“The statement emphasized that the ‘theory and direction’ of the Party’s ethnic policies are ‘correct,’ but at the same time listed numerous areas where there is room for improvement. For instance, the conference called for ‘perfecting’ the autonomy of ethnic regions, which would include Xinjiang as well as the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. The main goal for governance in these regions continues to be boosting economic development, which China believes will cure the vast majority of ethnic discontent.”

I doubt the underlying theory is correct, seeing as how no region of China is more economically developed than Hong Kong, yet discontent remains. Still, seems quite apropos.

114

gianni 09.30.14 at 2:27 am

115

Anarcissie 09.30.14 at 3:47 am

Abbe Faria 09.29.14 at 6:47 pm @ 106 —
If I were an IRS ferret, I would go ferreting where I smelled the most money, which I understand is a characteristic of right-wing as opposed to left-wing organizations.

However, there is another curious aspect to this, which is that the Democratic Party organization is thought to like the Tea Party, for obvious reasons, and to dislike insufficiently subservient leftist organizations.

So the IRS apparatchik confessions, abasements, and apologies must be a clever ruse.

116

Plume 09.30.14 at 5:09 am

I bumped into this fascinating lecture (by Kathyrn Olmsted), via bookforum.com — which pointed to this website and the talk. I thought I knew a bit about the beginnings of the surveillance state in America, but I must admit to never having heard about the people discussed in this lecture. Chief attention is given to one General Ralph Van Deman, whose last name seems more than appropriate, and his British counterpart in paranoia and propaganda (aimed at destroying leftists under every bed), British Admiral Reginald “Blinker” Hall .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jld1DrMc3Rk

I find the one-track tenacity among conservatives for these crusades appalling, but it does help to remind us why they should never be ignored. Ignoring them just seems to send them underground, where they continue on with their crusades anyway. So Occupy movements throughout the world are going to get smashed up either by states or by these private campaigns — usually both — unless the left finally gets off its collective duff, stops expending most of its energy on racism and sexism in 19th century novels, and instead focuses on the all-out class war against workers, women, minorities, the masses and the environment right now, in real world 2014.

117

ZM 09.30.14 at 9:44 am

Alan White,

“I get the sinking feeling of Tienanmen II, this time abetted by world market forces, instead of those forces merely standing idly by, as in Tienanmen I.”

I have read the organizers have said the occupation is only expected to continue to national day – and they will develop other following steps for after that. I think this should avoid a Tienanmen I hope.

There was another demonstration of support outside the State Library today – people there said they hope to maintain a supportive presence until national day here too. They were giving out yellow ribbons for hope and a bright future for Hong Kong. I think they were very concerned for safety at home.

I think Hong Kong though wealthy has some issues balancing fitting in with China and maintaining its own ways and community. I have heard that mainlanders go to Hong Kong to avoid the 1 child or 1+1=2 children policies. And I saw a film once called Bird Land about rural immigrant workers going to seek informal work there from the mainland. Also I think maybe Hong Kong has some issues with maintaining agricultural land and nature – but I have heard young people are interested in permaculture and organic farming there.

118

Brett Bellmore 09.30.14 at 10:35 am

“If Brett had wanted to actually do something about the IRS, he would have called for broad support.”

If Brett had wanted to actually do something about the IRS, he would not have commented at Crooked Timber. I am not particularly delusional about the nature of this site, after all, and am perfectly aware that the response of most here to the IRS attacking conservatives is going to occupy the whole range from “It didn’t happen” to “Good for them!” Perhaps both at once.

This is vaguely similar, (With the exception of the mortal peril) to the situation of the protesters in Hong Kong. Justice they’ve got on their side, but that does squat when all the actual power is held by people who don’t care about justice. At the moment, all the real power in our government is held by people who approve of the IRS attacking the Democratic party’s enemies. Perhaps that will change a bit in a few weeks, perhaps not. (And perhaps the election will be followed by every hard drive in the IRS simultaneously seizing up.) But expecting reform while the Obama administration is in a position to block it is like expecting the PRC to extend real democracy to Hong Kong. Delusional.

All credit, as I say, to the protesters in Hong Kong, who are requiring the hob nailed boot of the oppressor to descend and crush them visibly in public, instead of passively submitting at the first threat. It won’t profit them much, but it is a service to the world to remind us all what the PRC really is: A brutal tyranny.

119

Layman 09.30.14 at 11:50 am

“But expecting reform while the Obama administration is in a position to block it is like expecting the PRC to extend real democracy to Hong Kong. ”

First you say the IRS is endemically partisan and neither got nor needed direction from Obama to mistreat conservative groups; then you say that it is Obama who causes the IRS to be partisan, by preventing any other behavior. Doesn’t your head ever hurt?

120

Barry 09.30.14 at 12:14 pm

Brett is very happily not bothered by contradictions within his world, or between his world and the real world.

121

David 09.30.14 at 1:58 pm

Anyone wanna take bets as to how many times Brett has used the name “Barry Soetoro”?

122

Brett Bellmore 09.30.14 at 2:06 pm

“then you say that it is Obama who causes the IRS to be partisan, by preventing any other behavior. ”

I said nothing of the sort. What I say is that the Obama administration refuses to do anything concrete about the problem. This doesn’t, technically, prevent the IRS from spontaneously reforming, it merely spares the IRS any real pressure to reform.

“Anyone wanna take bets as to how many times Brett has used the name “Barry Soetoro”?”

I just used it in a google search to figure out what the heck you meant by that. That makes once.

123

Plume 09.30.14 at 4:18 pm

Brett,

When the events in question occurred, a Republican was in charge of the IRS, and the IG was a Republican, too, appointed by Bush. The events also occurred in the context of the Citizens United decision, which you no doubt approve of. This decision created a tsunami of requests to gain tax exempt status, contrary to the existing law — a fact you keep ignoring. The civil servants at the one IRS location in question reacted to that avalanche of new requests in a very, very logical, non-partisan way:

They flagged obvious political groups for further scrutiny. Again, left, right and center.

If they had wanted to hurt conservative groups, they wouldn’t have used this method, and they wouldn’t have held all obviously political groups, left, right and center, to that scrutiny.

1. It does no one any harm, politically, to fill out paperwork. All of these groups received the exemption anyway.
2. This impacted Occupy groups, “Green” groups, and women’s rights advocates as well. Progressive and liberal political groups were all held to increased scrutiny.
3. Receiving a tax exemption is completely unnecessary when it comes to participating in our political process. It is icing on the cake, and merely helps the people running these organizations keep a bit more of the money collected, while allowing their very rich donors to cut their own taxes — thus cheating the rest of us.

Please, for once, acknowledge that you understand that this exemption is irrelevant. You get that, right? It doesn’t matter when it comes to the political process. It only matters when it comes to helping the very rich cheat the rest of us.

A thought experiment for you, Brett: If you could devise some truly partisan scheme from within the IRS, one that would actually do harm to Republicans and conservatives in general, what would that be? If you respond by saying you’d add some extra paperwork to the process before handing out tax exemptions — all of those groups received it, remember — then you need to turn in your political machinations merit badge. No one will ever hire you to help in a political campaign.

124

Brett Bellmore 09.30.14 at 5:03 pm

“When the events in question occurred, a Republican was in charge of the IRS, ”

Yes, Republicans typically donate to the DNC. I know I do, every year without fail. I’m sure you routinely send money to the RNC, too.

“1. It does no one any harm, politically, to fill out paperwork. All of these groups received the exemption anyway.”

Right, two years, two weeks, makes no difference. All the groups that didn’t give up got the exemption anyway. Here’s a thought experiement for you: What would you say of a prosecutor who racked up only acquittals? Would you say, “Who cares, they got acquitted in the end.”, or, “Why is he only prosecuting innocent people?”

Shouldn’t this process, deliberately picking certain groups out for special evaluation, be producing some denials, if the criteria for singling them out were actually legitimate? I mean, seriously, if your traffic cop is pulling blacks over like mad, and none of them get tickets, do you defend him because, what’s the big deal, they got no tickets? Or ask, why is he pulling so many people over for no reason?

125

MPAVictoria 09.30.14 at 5:24 pm

Forget it Plume, it’s Brett Town.

/He never bothers to read anyone’s comments anyway. He just skims to get the topic and then vomits up right wing talking points.

126

Plume 09.30.14 at 5:28 pm

Brett,

Douglas Shullman was a Republican, nominated by George W. Bush. As was the IG, J. Russell George, who said “he saw the light” in college and joined Dole’s campaign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Shulman

Douglas H. Shulman (born 1967) was the U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue.[1] His appointment by then-president George W. Bush was confirmed by the full U.S. Senate on March 14, 2008[2] and he was sworn in on March 24, 2008[3] and served his full term until November 2012.[4] He formerly served as vice chairman of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) (successor to NASD) and sat on the board at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)[5] and the World Federation of Exchanges. He is currently a Senior Advisor with McKinsey and Company.

As for the denials. If the IRS had just followed the letter of the law, all of these groups, every single one of them, would have been denied. I’m still not sure why you’re not getting that. The law says that they must be “exclusively engaged in social welfare activities” in order to qualify. Why didn’t the criteria produce denials? Because it appears the IRS had been instructed to ignore the law completely, and it has been doing this for a coupla of decades, regardless of the president in the White House.

And, again, please address the fact that these exemptions don’t mean a thing when it comes to elections, one way or another. You and other conservatives have made a big stink over something that has no relevance in political campaigning — even if conservatives had been “targeted,” which is not the case. Even if they had been singled out for extra “abuse,” it doesn’t matter when it comes to the ability to win (or lose) elections. Their ability to participate in the political process remains completely, absolutely, unaffected.

You are complaining about nothing, even if you’re right about the selective, partisan application of the IRS’s scrutiny — and you’re not.

127

Plume 09.30.14 at 5:35 pm

MPAV @125,

I fear you are correct. He keeps ignoring the central point(s).

This is also the case when the discussion turns to things like inequality. I (and others) post all kinds of data showing the obscene concentration of wealth at the top, the percentages, the dollar amounts, and they (conservatives) ignore this entirely. The key facts of the matter are ignored.

It makes political conversations difficult, to say the least.

128

Marc 09.30.14 at 8:53 pm

@125: Years of comments over at Kleimans’ place certainly convinced me. He’s in it to score points, not to have a conversation.

129

Brett Bellmore 09.30.14 at 9:37 pm

“He’s in it to score points, not to have a conversation.”

If by “score points”, you mean keep this place from becoming a total echo chamber, sure.

I’m trying to crack open your epistemic closure. Granted, likely an impossible task, but unless I essay it, I can hardly regard it as your fault that you’re delusional on so many subjects.

130

Barry 09.30.14 at 10:00 pm

“I’m trying to crack open your epistemic closure.”

Facts would be helpful.

131

Brett Bellmore 09.30.14 at 10:12 pm

Facts, like the FACT that the IRS has itself admitted to inappropriately targeting conservative groups? Like the FACT that the IG confirmed they did this? Look, I’m not the one refusing to acknowledge facts in this case.

Plume’s argument seems to be that the IRS could not have targeted conservatives because it was led by a Republican who was donating money to the DNC, which is certain proof that somebody is a hard line conservative in Plume’s world. And conservatives didn’t get treated in a discriminatory manner, because while conservative groups took two years to get approved, liberal groups took a whole two weeks, and we all know that a non-discriminatory policy would have involved the conservatives being taken out and shot, and the liberals being given a parade.

Basically his position is that nothing the IRS did was bad, because it fell short of what he would have done to them.

132

Anarcissie 09.30.14 at 10:33 pm

@131 — Well played, I’d say. CT started out with Occupy this and that and wound up discussing how the Democrats were oppressing poor little old right-wing Republican dissidents.

133

Layman 09.30.14 at 10:40 pm

‘If by “score points”, you mean keep this place from becoming a total echo chamber, sure.’

No, I’m guessing that by ‘score points’ he meant score points. Call me crazy.

134

jgtheok 09.30.14 at 11:40 pm

Err – anyone here discussing events in China?

My impression was that the government of China had larger issues to consider than the possibility that the mainland populace would take to the barricades to support greater civil liberties for the people of Hong Kong. The program seems to be to keep people content via economic progress – if they can postpone democratic reforms for another generation, they might get to keep the empire by simple expedient of a Han majority in every region…

So, not much call for Tiananmen Square Massacre 2 – but is there any plausible path for these demonstrations to lead to a positive result?

135

Brett Bellmore 10.01.14 at 12:03 am

“My impression was that the government of China had larger issues to consider than the possibility that the mainland populace would take to the barricades to support greater civil liberties for the people of Hong Kong.”

Well, yeah: That they might take to the barricades to support greater civil liberties for themselves.

Anyway, thank goodness for modern information technology; In a more opaque era, they’d already have been massacred.

Alas, I don’t think there’s much prospect for a positive result, given that the Chinese rulers saw what happened to the Soviet Union when they had a failure of nerve, and are determined not to go down that path. They know they’ll never be loved, so they’re bound and determined to be feared. The only positive thing I see coming of this is the scales being lifted off a few peoples’ eyes, the illusion that the Chinese government isn’t a tyranny shattered yet again.

136

gianni 10.01.14 at 12:10 am

@134

Heard a theory today that there is a faction within the PRC who is trying to instigate a Tienanmen style incident as a way of upsetting/disrupting Xi’s consolidation of power. Zhang Dejiang, who is one of the higher members of the ruling committee, is in charge of domestic security and could stand to benefit from an incident. They have already sent 6 or so tanks into the city.

Not sure why this IRS thing above is still relevant. People need to get over the contrived outrage manufactured to fill time on a slow news day many months past.

137

gianni 10.01.14 at 12:12 am

Also worth noting: right now it is the morning of October 1st in HK, China’s ‘birthday’ so to speak. So stay tuned.

138

Plume 10.01.14 at 1:03 am

Brett,

I keep saying it’s wrong for any political group to receive the exemption. Not sure why you keep missing that. No political group, left, right or center should get the tax exemption.

Now, if you really want to see how one political party can hurt another in ways that truly matter, look no further than the recent decision by the five conservative judges to block early voting in Ohio. Republicans, all over the country, when they have gotten the chance, have made it as hard as possible for likely Democratic voters to vote — or tried to. Now that is clearly a concerted effort to hurt your “political enemies.”

Getting all political groups that seek tax-free status to fill out extra paperwork? That can’t hurt either political party. It has zero impact on elections. None. Nada. Zilch. No group needs a tax-free designation in order to participate fully in the process.

Blocking likely voters from the polls, OTOH, has obvious detrimental effects.

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Andrew F. 10.01.14 at 1:04 am

Palindrome @80: But you are wrong if you think that citizens of the mainland would not increasingly agitate for diffusion of the rights enjoyed by HK to the rest of the country. The dream of many liberal Chinese is that as the country becomes wealthier, ‘one country, two systems’ will fade away, and the entire nation will be able to enjoy the same rights as HK-ers. The CCP knows and fears this. That’s why the CCP’s goal is to push it the other direction: instead of all of China becoming like HK, HK must become like the rest of China. One country, one system. Because the other path would lead to the fall of the CCP, and perhaps even the breakup of the country.

But HK isn’t the driving force behind any unrest, or any democratic aspirations, elsewhere in the PRC. HK could turn into just another region tomorrow without affecting the ethnic/nationalist unrest in Xinjiang or Tibet nor the democratic aspirations of persons across China.

To address that unrest, and those aspiration, the PRC will need to deal with the source of the problem. From their perspective, that means addressing lack of economic development and it means addressing corruption – but to gain the trust of the people, their cooperation, and their understanding as measures aimed at economic development and anti-corruption unfold, the PRC will need to show itself to be responsive, credible, trustworthy, and willing to act with respect towards the desires, needs, and expressions, of the people.

Making a concession here – provided they do so with the appearance of having consulted with, and listened to, the leadership figures among the protesters – would greatly improve the PRC’s reputation with the people.

It would moreover, perhaps, begin to neutralize the potent symbol of another encounter between the PRC and student protesters.

Now, as you say, the CCP undoubtedly knows more than I do about Chinese politics. But not being a member of the CCP can provide its own advantages of insight when viewing China.

The bold move, but the correct move, is for the PRC to show that it is a credible and true partner of the Chinese people, able to listen and make concessions where they are prudent and in the best interests, whether that be voting in Hong Kong or less corrupt local government in Chongquing.

To grip tightly to control here is to ignore the long game, and the need to address the causes of social unrest, rather than merely attempting to suppress the symptoms.

I fear that the leadership will fail to see through the fog of present trivialities and appearances to the deeper currents which they must use to guide themselves – but, one never knows.

Ronan @97: I’m really not sure how you can make a statement like this which such certainty. I mean, it’s a plausible argument that it wouldnt ‘spark unrest elsewhere’, but far from a gaurantee. And if you’re the Chinese elite (taking as given the assumption their *only* concern is with preventing unrest develping elsewhere) why would you risk it ?

The PRC must continue to build legitimacy for themselves over the long term. Acquiescing here can enable them to present credible arguments about their intentions elsewhere.

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Andrew F. 10.01.14 at 1:11 am

Or to put it more succinctly:

I’m not saying that Xi should do a full Gorbachev, but he should leverage the unique characteristics of this situation to make concessions that he would not elsewhere. The surprise of this move will make it all the more effective from a public diplomacy/propaganda/PR vantage – and the fact that it is a REAL concession will give it weight with the elites and policymakers, home and abroad.

He can increase the PRC’s legitimacy, enhance its international standing, make progress towards Taiwan, lower some of the tension with nearby nations, and diminish the potency of a symbol long viewed as threatening, all in a single stroke.

And for this, almost no risk is incurred – with the exception of a political risk from other powerful figures and factions in the CCP.

If the latter were manageable, though, I’d hope Xi would have the brass and the vision to make a move like this.

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Palindrome 10.01.14 at 2:20 am

@140 Andrew F.: “I’m not saying that Xi should do a full Gorbachev, but he should leverage the unique characteristics of this situation to make concessions that he would not elsewhere.”

Well, I think you have correctly identified the one individual Xi Jinping would most NOT seek to emulate, Mikhail Gorbachev. For years, the USSR/Russia has served as the abject lesson to CCP leaders of how not to proceed: don’t allow political reforms before (or simultaneously with) the economic. Gorbachev pursued glasnost as well as perestroika, and the resulting instability toppled his regime and shattered his empire. The CCP will NOT allow that to happen. You seem to think that if they just granted the legitimate demands of the people of HK that the protests would end and the government’s prestige would soar:

“The bold move, but the correct move, is for the PRC to show that it is a credible and true partner of the Chinese people, able to listen and make concessions where they are prudent and in the best interests, whether that be voting in Hong Kong or less corrupt local government in Chongquing [sic].”

What, then, will the CCP say to the people of Chongqing five years from now when they point to Hong Kong and say, “Why them and not us?” On what basis will the CCP be able to deny electoral rights to citizens of Shenzhen (right next door to the Hong Kong SAR)? Is crying ‘one country, two systems’ going to be viewed as an acceptable response? Highly doubtful. You argue that the disruptions in HK are not the cause of unrest in other parts of China. No one disputes this. Uyghurs and Tibetans will still seek autonomy no matter what the result in Hong Kong. Peasants whose land has been polluted or stolen will still seek justice whatever happens. But Zhongnanhai knows that fulfilling their 1997 promises can do nothing but feed the demands for greater political participation on the mainland that they have sought to tamp down for the past three decades.

The inescapable fact is that the CCP does not wish to give up power. They don’t want to transition to democracy, and they don’t want to be overthrown. Their problem is legitimacy, since the regime is now ideologically bankrupt. In order to maintain power, they can buy off some of the people (either through broad-based growth or through crass corruption) and intimidate the rest. It is all very well to talk about enlightened self-interest and good governance, but as Chairman Mao once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” That is what the CCP has, and that is what it will use.

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Palindrome 10.01.14 at 2:35 am

I should add that I do not believe this is a sustainable strategy. The CCP needs continued economic growth to justify their rule, but the repressive measures they will probably take vis. Hong Kong will almost certainly cause a huge hit to GDP growth. Not crippling, but enough to slow the country down quite a bit. At the very least, FDI will fall. It will accelerate the already large amount of illegal capital flight that goes on. China’s best and brightest will look for asylum overseas in yet greater numbers. And all of this economic misery, more than anything, will feed unrest in the rest of the country, which might result in some seriously interesting times.

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Rich Puchalsky 10.01.14 at 2:56 am

“the repressive measures they will probably take vis. Hong Kong will almost certainly cause a huge hit to GDP growth”

Not historically true: see my quote from Randall Collins upthread. All indications are that repressive measures basically have no effect as long as the repression works.

What is certain is that, after the fact, people from all sides will say that Occupy Central did something wrong. If they destabilize the country, they will be blamed for all the deaths and misery due to that; if they are repressed, they will be chided for challenging the CCP without a proper plan, or emulating the proper model, whatever that would be; if the protest blows over, they will be called ineffectual. After they are safely historical someone may look back at some iconic picture and say “Oh, how inspiring” just like the guy in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, but mostly people will tacitly agree that they were naive and that it would have been better if they’d never rocked the boat at all. You can see various people in this thread trying various of these out already.

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Palindrome 10.01.14 at 4:42 am

@143 Rich Pulasky: “Not historically true: see my quote from Randall Collins upthread. All indications are that repressive measures basically have no effect as long as the repression works.”

I didn’t mean to imply I thought it some universal law that repression always hurts economic growth. I just think that it would do so in this particular case, considering the current conditions in China and in Hong Kong. We can look at what happened in China in 1989 – there was a noticeable deceleration in growth for about 2-3 years after. Things didn’t really pick up again until after the Southern Tour in 1992.

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Palindrome 10.01.14 at 4:54 am

(Sorry, hit submit too soon.)

Which is to say, I really don’t see how Collins can claim that

“The market version of communist political control became a great economic success; international economic ties expanded and exacted no penalty for the deaths in June 1989; domestically Chinese poured their energies into economic opportunities.”

Several lost years of growth is hardly ‘no penalty’! And there was great uncertainty until 1992 whether Deng Xiaoping’s backing of the hardliners against the reformers indicated that he was giving up on economic reform along with political reform. In the long run, obviously the Chinese economy has done unimaginably well. But China in 1989 was on the cusp of a period of take-off growth, whereas in 2014 that great run of growth is obviously losing steam no matter what happens in HK. Considering the many, many structural problems in the Chinese economy that have accumulated year by year, one big shock might be enough for it to really stall out.

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Brett Bellmore 10.01.14 at 11:40 am

“He can increase the PRC’s legitimacy…”

Doff the rose colored glasses. These people aren’t aspiring democrats, concerned with matters like legitimacy. They’re a cabel running an empire, and they don’t much care if they’re liked, so long as they’re obeyed.

Their view is, essentially, that legitimacy grows out of the barrel of a gun, as long as everybody knows you’re willing to fire it. The residents of Hong Kong are setting themselves up to be this generation’s object example.

As a friend of mine says, Maggie Thatcher, burn in hell. That this would eventually happen was inevitable when the British decided to trap those people there, and hand over the population, not just some empty acres.

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hix 10.02.14 at 8:54 pm

Im sure not going to blame Occupy Hong Kong for anything. I do however understand that many in China find the Sovjet example very scary. It is an ongoing catastrophe. The former USSR countries would be much better of if they had just kept the old system. Thats quite something to achieve, considering the old one was also pretty bad.

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A H 10.03.14 at 3:37 am

People interested in foriegners views on Chinese politics might find this exchange between Dashan and John Ross rather amazing

https://twitter.com/akaDashan/status/517853641592406017

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