US Politics

The following is a guest post from Eric Rauchway and Ari Kelman, both history professors at UC Davis (and bloggers at the recently revived Edge of the American West, which I imagine will have a lot to say about this over the coming days.

—————————————

On Friday, 11/18/11, police at UC Davis doused nonviolent protesters with pepper spray.

The police officer with the pepper spray, identified as Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis Campus Police, looks utterly nonchalant, for all the world as if he were hosing aphids off a rose bush. The scene bespeaks a lack of basic human empathy, an utter intolerance for dissent, or perhaps both. Pike’s actions met with approval from the chief of campus police, Annette Spicuzza, “who observed the chaotic events on the Quad, [and] said immediately afterward that she was ‘very proud’ of her officers.” Clearly in Chief Spicuzza’s mind there was nothing exceptional about the use of pepper spray against nonviolent protesters.

[click to continue…]

I presume that most CT readers know that Occupy Wall Street was, to use the police euphemism, cleared and restored yesterday. Consider this an open thread to talk about it. While it’s a minor part of the story, the confiscation of the OWS library (as best as anyone can tell, the 5,000 odd books are now residing in a dumpster somewhere) hit me particularly hard. Trashing libraries is a very particular kind of political statement.

If you’re not reading Aaron Bady on this, you need to be.

bq. This was a very modest lesson in how power works. On Wednesday, several thousand UC Berkeley students learned a much bigger lesson, but in many ways it was exactly the same lesson: the rule is what the people with the force to enforce it say it is. And it becomes the rule when you either obey it, or when they use their force to make you obey it.

bq. …The person on the left is a colleague of mine, and I’ve seen his swollen hand and watched him limp and talked to him about what happened. I saw how physically shaken up he was, several hours after being beaten, and I went with a friend to get an Ace bandage for his hand. On the right, you can see someone I know who acquired several cracked ribs. I could go on. Or this video, in which you see the police yanking the director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities to the ground by her hair, applying choke-holds with batons, and punching people in the face.

Jesse Kornbluh adds that police broke the ribs of a 70 year old poet at the demonstration. Aaron suggests that people contact Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau at

Email: chancellor@berkeley.edu
Phone: (510) 642-7464
Fax: (510) 643-5499
200 California Hall, MC#1500
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-1500

“to suggest to him that this angers you and that he shouldn’t do it again, or perhaps that he should resign, yesterday.” I’m of the ‘he should resign, yesterday’ school myself. At the very best he is an _ex post_ apologist for the brutality of the riot police he called in, and he is plausibly directly culpable for it. If anyone knows the email addresses for the board of trustees (who I am guessing are politically appointed, but still), or other pressure points, feel free to provide them in comments, and I will modify the main post accordingly.

Just wanted to give our Ohio readers a chance to tell us how inordinately pleased they are with themselves. And to tell anyone who doesn’t yet know that, in an exceptionally high turnout, Ohio voters defeated their state government’s union busting legislation by a large majority. Well done everybody. And, from your friends in Wisconsin, thanks. Fantastic.

On the one hand, I’m glad DC is bringing out volume 1 of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane [amazon]. I’m glad, too, that they aren’t bringing it out until after X-Mas. That way, I can’t give it to Belle as a present, which would be unwise. On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that an even better book might collect just the covers of all 137 issues, cataloguing all the ways in which – due to being too fat, or a ghost, or due to Pat Boone, or a lead cube on her head, or being a giant, or very small, or too highly evolved, or having over-educated green ape feet – Superman’s girlfriend [UPDATE: girl friend!] serially failed ever to become his wife, or even his girlfriend, I think. Fortunately, the internet provides. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read an issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, but I can’t believe it could be as much fun as the covers promise. [click to continue…]

<a href=”http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/130821/”>From Open Pajamas Media</a>:

<blockquote>A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called <a href=”http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/”>Journolist</a>, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. <a href=”http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/01/journolist-membership.html”>Here’s a list of the members.</a></blockquote>

No, that was not the purpose of Journolist.  It was an ordinary liberal listserv that included pundits and professors.  Once in 2008, one of its members, angered by the American media’s harping on the Jeremiah Wright nonsense, suggested an aggressive pushback against conservative pundits.  No one took him up on the suggestion.  People complained for a while (on list and off, in public even) that Sean Hannity had fed a stupid debate question to George Stephanopoulos, and then they went back to arguing about social policy and the Red Sox.  The end.

Reynolds’ second update to his disingenuous/delusional post acknowledges that there might in fact be something to the Herman Cain sexual harassment story after all.  Do tell!  Now all Professor Reynolds needs to do is to take down and apologize for his little piece of slander about a liberal listserv that (a) did not actually do anything wrong in the first place and (b) clearly had nothing to do with the Cain story, having disbanded in 2010 when the right-wing press proved by geometric logic that it was unseemly for liberals to use the Internet to converse with each other.

Full disclosure: yes, I myself was a member of Journolist for about two years.  I was invited to join because I signed <a href=”http://gawker.com/5591801/scandal-liberal-journalists-colluded-to-write-open-letter”>the open letter about that ABC News debate of April 2008</a> — indeed, the very letter that is repeatedly cited in the wingnutosphere as proof that Journolist was colluding on an open letter!!  How did the writers of the open letter get in touch with me if I was not already a member of Journolist, you ask?  The amazing but true answer is below the fold:
[click to continue…]

Outsourced to Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

bq. I don’t reflexively think ill of all cops, and in my 27 years in New York City I’ve had some interactions with local cops who seemed impressively decent, grounded, and on-the-ball.

bq. But I would really like someone to convince me that this demonstrates anything other than widespread and deeply-felt contempt, by the NYPD, for the law and for the everyday citizens of this city.

bq. It’s not the fact that 16 police officers were indicted in the Bronx for ticket-fixing and other chicanery, it’s the fact that their arraignment was greeted by over 100 off-duty officers swarming the courthouse and physically blocking reporters from covering the event:

The assembled police officers blocked cameras from filming their colleagues, in one instance grabbing lenses and shoving television camera operators backward.

bq. This is far worse than anything any of the Occupy groups have done. Where are the helicopters, the tear gas, the tasers, the rubber bullets being deployed to pacify this threat to public safety? Oh yeah. They’re in the hands of these guys.

bq. It’s almost like they’re incapable of self-governance and unable to maintain the place in a safe condition.

Inspired by Michelle Bachmann, I’ve been thinking about what a 6-6-6 response to Herman Cain might look like. Being multiply disqualified from seeking election to the US Presidency, I decided to put in as much work as Cain and his team appear to have done, but no more. Hopefully, the magic of crowdsourcing will turn this into a comprehensive blueprint. So, here are the basic goals, and over the page, some of those devilish details.

The aim of the plan would be
(a) Reverse pro-rich and anti-worker policy changes of the past three decades to reduce, by 6 percentage points, the share of market income going to the top 1 per cent.
(b) Increase, by 6 percentage points of national income, the personal income tax revenue raised from the top 20 per cent of the income distribution
(c) Reallocate, or use more efficiently, current public expenditure equal to 6 per cent of national income

The aim would be to raise post-tax incomes for those in the bottom 80 per cent of the income distribution by around 20 per cent, while making around 10 per cent of national income available for new or better public expenditure.

For reference, US national income is currently around $13 trillion, so 1 per cent is $130 billion.

[click to continue…]

This comment by Yglesias is on target: “the TNR staff editorial on the subject [of OWS] feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.”

The staff editorial itself is not so important. What’s important is that, once upon a time, there were debates about trade ‘liberalization’ – globalization – that used to divide neoliberals and liberals and progressives. Basically, the neoliberals were gung-ho for trade on the grounds that the alternative was protectionism that amounted to shooting your own foot, and didn’t do any good for the poor in the Third World. And the progressives saw jobs being outsourced, labor unions weakening. Liberals were those caught in the squishy middle, per usual. We’ve had some debates on Crooked Timber of late about what ‘neoliberalism’ means. I’ve not participated because, honestly, term’s more trouble than it’s worth, worrying what it means. (I have other terms that are more trouble than they’re worth to worry about that I worry about. As a philosopher, I need to limit the number of such that infest my mental life.) The thing is: in the current situation, there is not – and should not be – anything analogous to the neoliberal side of the trade debate. No one sane thinks that this whole 99/1 business might be like NAFTA, i.e. something we have to go for, in an end-justifies-the-means spirit. [click to continue…]

Watching footage of the Occupy protests suddenly reminded me of Pete Seeger’s marvellous song (played at Jerry Cohen’s funeral btw). I thought it would be a nice thing to share.

The Guardian has an interview with Steven Pinker about his new book _The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes_ . It presents me with a problem. In order to evaluate its claims properly, I’d actually have to read the book, but everything tells me that doing so would be an immense waste of valuable time, so I probably won’t. I can, however, comment snippily on the material that surfaces in interviews and reviews … so here goes.
[click to continue…]

So I’m informed that the _Occupy Wall Street_ movement has a pretty good library, and that it’s possible to donate books to it by sending them to:

The UPS Store
Re: Occupy Wall Street
Attn: The People’s Library
118A Fulton St. #205
New York, NY 10038

I’ve just sent them a copy of Pierson/Hacker's <em>Winner Take All Politics</em>, which I think is both very readable (important if you are trying to get through it under not exceptionally wonderful reading conditions) and terrific on the substance of why we are in a 99%/1% society. I encourage CT readers (a) to send books that they think might be good reading for OWS people, and (b) to leave comments saying which books they think should be in the library, and why. You certainly do not have to do (a) to write (b), but if you are in a position to send a book, it would obviously be nice (and a good, albeit small gesture of solidarity – I may be atypical, but if I were sitting and camping out, I’d really like to have something good to read during the duller moments). Also – these don’t have to be weighty tomes of policy analysis or whatever – you may reasonably think that the people occupying Wall Street don’t need to read those books, or that they may want lighter and livelier stuff.

Ed, in comments on the previosu post, made a request for a post on the Occupy Wall Street movement. As with the movement itself, I have more enthusiasm than analysis to offer at this point. I went to a (very small) meeting a couple of weeks ago which was part of the planning for a similar protest in Washington starting on 6 October (more info here). Things have certainly grown since then, and it could be quite a big event.

In the generally undirected spirit of the movement, here is an open thread for your comments, predictions and so on.