Wall Street Protest Spurs Online Conversation – NYTimes.com

8 Oct

Inspired by the populist message of the group known as Occupy Wall Street, more than 200 Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have sprung up in dozens of cities during the past week, seeking volunteers for local protests and fostering discussion about the group’s concerns.

Some 900 events have been set up on Meetup.com, and blog posts and photographs from all over the country are popping up on the WeArethe99Percent blog on Tumblr from people who see themselves as victims of not just a sagging economy but also economic injustice.

via Wall Street Protest Spurs Online Conversation – NYTimes.com.

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Ron Paul Wins Conference Straw Poll, to No One’s Surprise – NYTimes.com

8 Oct

All of the major Republican contenders spoke on Friday or Saturday at the conference, a pep rally for religious conservatives sponsored by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association and other conservative Christian groups and attended by 3,400 people. Of the 1,983 who voted, 37 percent chose Mr. Paul.

But what turned heads here was the low support registered for the two presumed front-runners for the Republican nomination, Mitt Romney and Gov. Rick Perry. Mr. Romney, who has struggled to win the allegiance of religious conservatives because his stances on abortion and same-sex marriage, received 4 percent of the votes. Mr. Perry, whose conservative credentials are considered nearly impeccable, tied with Michele Bachmann at 8 percent, well behind Herman Cain (23 percent) and Rick Santorum (16 percent).

via Ron Paul Wins Conference Straw Poll, to No One’s Surprise – NYTimes.com.

Nonviolence Works

8 Oct

John Horgan talks with Steve Pinker on blogginheads.tv about Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. There’s a brief segment where they talk about how nonviolence as a tactic (e.g. as Gandhi advocated) is more effective than violence. In particular, Pinker mentions a study that showed that nonviolence insurrections succeeded about 2/3s to 3/4s of the time while the violent ones only succeeded about a quarter to a third of the time.

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Occupy Wall Street: A historical perspective – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com

8 Oct

One can find precedents for decentralized movements in the New Left of the 1960s, which promoted participatory democracy and critiqued bureaucracy and centralization. But in developing a historical perspective, it may be useful to alter the frame we use to analyze the present moment by asking these questions: Did past insurgent movements happen in unexpected ways and at unexpected moments? Did they take established structures by surprise? And were those established structures slow to adapt, resist or incorporate these insurgent movements? I think the answer to those questions is yes.

via Occupy Wall Street: A historical perspective – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.

Cleaning Up the Capitol [aka fighting corruption]

8 Oct

Lessig takes on the model of lobbying as “legislative subsidy” developed by political scientist Richard Hall and economist Alan Deardorff as an alternative to the naive lobbying-as-bribe model. Legislators come to Washington passionate about several issues. Quickly, though, they come to depend on the economy of influence for help in advancing an agenda. They need the policy expertise, connections, public-relations machine, and all the rest that lobbyists can offer. Since this legislative subsidy is not uniformly available, the people’s representatives find themselves devoting more of their time to those aspects of their agenda that moneyed interests also support. No one is bribed, but the political process is corrupted.

At the same time, Lessig argues, fund-raising is not only a way of obtaining campaign cash but a method for members of Congress to live beyond their means. Congressional political action committees engage in massive spending on dinners, parties, retreats at fancy resorts, and other fundraising events with donors. These events enable members to treat themselves to vacations and high-priced meals they couldn’t otherwise afford.

via Cleaning Up the Capitol.

 

H/t Tyler Cowan

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The NYPD, now sponsored by Wall Street – Salon.com

7 Oct

JPMorgan gave a massive gift of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation in the form of money, patrol car laptops, “security monitoring software,” and other tech resources. But the donation was given starting late last year and was completed by spring 2011, so it was obviously not made in response to the Occupy Wall Street protests. …

The police foundation is the private fundraising arm of the NYPD. It allows donors to make tax-exempt gifts to the department and in turn the foundation funds a wide-range of specialized NYPD units, international counterterrorism work, and high-tech gadgetry.

“This gift is especially disturbing to us because it creates the appearance that there is an entrenched dynamic of the police protecting corporate interests rather than protecting the First Amendment rights of the people,” says Heidi Boghosian of the National Lawyers Guild, which has had legal observers posted at the major Occupy Wall Street marches. “They’ve essentially turned the financial district into a militarized zone.”

via The NYPD, now sponsored by Wall Street – Salon.com.

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Unions on Wall Street

7 Oct

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‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protests Offer Obama Opportunity and Threats – NYTimes.com

7 Oct

Are the Democrats worthy?

To hear some Democratic analysts tell it, the mushrooming protests could be the start of a populist movement on the left that counterbalances the surge of the Tea Party on the right, and closes what some Democrats fear is an “enthusiasm gap” between their party and Republicans in the 2012 election.

But that assumes the president is able to win the support of these insurgents, rather than be shunned by them.

via ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Protests Offer Obama Opportunity and Threats – NYTimes.com.

Confronting the Malefactors – NYTimes.com

7 Oct

It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.

What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.

via Confronting the Malefactors – NYTimes.com.

Wall St. Protest Lures Many New to This Sort of Thing – NYTimes.com

6 Oct

Richard Florentino, 62, a retired engineer from Staten Island, suggested that protesters might one day unite with the Democratic Party. Others said Occupy Wall Street might spawn a left-leaning equivalent of the Tea Party.

via Wall St. Protest Lures Many New to This Sort of Thing – NYTimes.com.

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