The Nerd Interpretation of the Occupy Movement

Here is a useful insight by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic. It helps explain the success of the movement. It isn't a single idea, it is mechanism (in nerd terms an API, i.e. application programminf interface) that allows other groups to use aspects of other Occupy sites to build their own local version:

The most fascinating thing about Occupy Wall Street is the way that the protests have spread from Zuccotti Park to real and virtual spaces across the globe. Metastatic, the protests have an organizational coherence that's surprising for a movement with few actual leaders and almost no official institutions. Much of that can be traced to how Occupy Wall Street has functioned in catalyzing other protests. Local organizers can choose from the menu of options modeled in Zuccotti, and adapt them for local use. Occupy Wall Street was designed to be mined and recombined, not simply copied.

This idea crystallized for me yesterday when Jonathan Glick, a long-time digital journalist, tweeted, "I think #OWS was working better as an API than a destination site anyway." If you get the idea, go ahead and skip ahead to the documentation below. If you don't get, let me explain why it might be the most useful way of thinking about #Occupy.

...

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

...

So, here's your guide to the Occupy Wall Street API. I realize that this is not a realistic API, just a useful frame, but we employ, for verisimilitude, the REST architecture, just like Twitter. That means we only have a few actions: Get (retrieve info), Post (create or update info), Delete.

Read on to get the list of possibilities. It is useful to read the whole article.

Use of "Appropriate Force"

The police in the US are a power unto themselves and have gone beyond reasonable. They are brutes and bullies working to keep the billionaries safely ensconced in their ultra-rich homes looking down on the impoverished and starving. The police work to make blood flow to keep the ultra-rich happy.

From the UK's Guardian newspaper, protester and three-tour American veteran Kayvan Sabehgi was beaten by Oakland police during the Occupy protest's general strike on 2 November. Sabehgi, who was 'completely peaceful', according to witnesses, was left with a lacerated spleen...



And here is just one of many videos of US veterans being arrested for attempting to exercise their 1st Amendment Rights. So much for all the lip service about "honouring their service". When it comes to money, these poor suckers were cannon fodder to win the wars that the rich wanted, not the wars of the people, by the people, and for the people...

Public Enemy #1

US police have gone after an 84 year-old-woman, arresting her, pepper spraying her, at an Occupy Seattle demonstration. This is "justice" in America...



It is incredible that the police would become violent just when the group was very publicly deciding to go home. It shows that the police are not "forced" into brutal behaviour. This is gratuitous brutality just to "prove" that the cops are "in control". This is what the top 1% want. They want to keep the bottom 99% scared and disorganized. So they intimidate and brutalize.

As everybody knows... it is the 84 year old grannies who are the real threat to America. Not the trillion dollar crimes of Wall Street that have created 25 million unemployed and 10 million families losing their homes.

It is interesting that she ties the violence and repression from on top with the kind of violent repression used by Nazi Germany. She's lived the politics and she can testify to reality on the ground. And as she points out, the media don't carry any stories about real popular protest. Big corporations can "buy" the news coverage they want. The poor and middle class have to fight via protests in the street to get any coverage.

I don't buy all the "issues" of the left and political activists, but most of the time they are speaking the truth. They need to be heard. Democracy is the only tool to achieve a true civil society in which all interests get represented fairly. A real civil society needs an uncorrupted politics and a free media and a citizenry who pay attention and get out to vote. This combination is hard to achieve. That is why democracy so often is dysfunctional. But ultimately democracy is the only political system that can assure a fair society. Anything else leads, in the long run, to repression and collapse.

Update 2011nov18: Here's a photo of the woman being helped after being pepper-sprayed:

Click to Enlarge

Reclaiming America

Here is Lawrence Lessig on a new coalition to educate Americans about the corrupting influence of big money in politics and their society:

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

More details at unitedrepublic.org.

What Passes for "Justice" in America

From a post by Matt Taibbi on his Rolling Stone blog:

Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts

Had a quick piece of news I wanted to call attention to, in light of the recent developments at Zuccotti Park. For all of those who say the protesters have it wrong, and don’t really have a cause worth causing public unrest over, consider this story, sent to me by a friend on the Hill.

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.

Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.

He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court."

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of government generosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.

All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi’s debt.

Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs.

Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave back every penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now going to do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!

Here’s another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.

But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.

This is the reason why all of these settlements allowing banks to walk away without "admissions of wrongdoing" are particularly insidious. A normal person, once he gets a felony conviction, immediately begins to lose his rights as a citizen.

But white-collar criminals of the type we’ve seen in recent years on Wall Street – both the individuals and the corporate "citizens" – do not suffer these ramifications. They commit crimes without real consequence, allowing them to retain access to the full smorgasbord of subsidies and financial welfare programs that, let’s face it, are the source of most of their profits.

Why, I wonder, does a bank that has committed fraud multiple times get to retain access to the Federal Reserve discount window? Why should Citigroup and Goldman Sachs get to keep their status as Primary Dealers of U.S. government debt? Are there not enough banks without extensive histories of fraud and malfeasance that can be awarded these de facto subsidies?

Go read the original post to get all the embedded links. These are worth following up. You need to really appreciate the "tilt" of justice in America. The makes all too obvious that there is one "justice" for the 99% and a very different "justice" for the 1%.

What surprises me is that most people don't join the protests. They simply put up with the vast and ugly injustice in American life. They continue to hope for a better day, a fairer deal. But it is a fruitless hope. Only if there is profound change in America will the bottom 99% get a chance to improve their lot. They need to fight so that they can get a fair piece of the economic pie. For 30+ years under Republican rule, the rich have gotten fabulously wealthy while the middle class has treaded water and the poor have actually become poorer. Tragic.

America's Great Recession

The failure of Bush and now Obama to seriously engage in stimulating a failing economy has created a "lost decade". From Calculated Risk, here is a graph that shows the great chasm of lost jobs compared to other post-WWII recessions:

Click to Enlarge
The inability of America's political leadership to break the bonds of servitude to Wall Street and big corporate interests means that the bottom 99% will pay and continue to pay for the sins of the political leadership and the rich elite in the US. Tragic.

The US's Energy "Policy" is to Cut Off Its Oil Supply

Here is a bit from an article on the blog Watts Up With That? which points out the idiocy of the US energy "policy", i.e. cutting off its supply in order to "save the Earth"...

We told you ... how pointless and futile the McKibben driven 350.org protests about the XL pipeline were, because they did nothing to alter the fact that the oil would still be used, somewhere. See The Only Choice Is Where It Gets Burned

I mentioned in an essay Friday that:

Dr. Christy ended his essay with the title of this post saying “Don’t demonize energy, because without energy, life is brutal and short”….I thought those were good words to consider, especially since we have activist maniacs like weepy Bill McKibben out to demonize energy on a daily basis. McKibben and his followers, not possessing the intelligence to fully understand what they are doing, think “they won“.

Bottom line: that tar sands oil is going to be burned somewhere, in other countries willing to buy it. Stopping a pipeline has no effect on Canada’s export of the oil, only on American jobs, but McKibben and his 350.org is cluelessly ecstatic over this.

Looks like we were right, only one day later, Canada looks to sell the tar sands oil to China. From Energy Daily:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday that he was looking at exporting more oil to China after the United States delayed a decision on a controversial pipeline.

The conservative Canadian leader, taking part in a summit in Hawaii hosted by Obama said the pipeline decision had produced “extremely negative reactions” and that he discussed oil exports with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we are able to access Asian markets for our energy products,” Harper told reporters. “I indicated that yesterday (Saturday) to President Hu of China.”

Full story at Energy Daily.

I'm a conservationist, but a sensible one. These fanatics who cut their own throat are ridiculous. (I should qualify: these Pied Pipers sell "enviro" to the poor suckers who will live with the consequences while the "leaders" are rich and can buy their way out of the disaster they create.)

In the real world, the US needs oil. If it doesn't get it from Canada, then Canada will sell it where its is wanted and then the US will be locked out and have to get the oil from less secure areas which means that 1970s long line-ups for gasoline will return. That isn't a policy. That is political suicide brought on by following idiots who don't understand real "environmentalism". A serious environmentalist realizes that energy is essential for a sound economy and would be working to conserve and develop new technology, not cut supply. Conserve is like cutting down on carbs to get in trim shape. Cutting supply is like being stranded on a very small desert island with no food. You starve.

It has always bugged me that these phony "enviro" nuts want to cut GDP. Their fanatical policy wouldn't hurt them because they are rich and can buy what they need, and even if the society crashed because of the idiot policy, they would simply use their money to move to an unaffected part of the world. These people are selling the same kind of "Kool-Aid" that 1960s "back to the land" people sold. The rich kids, when they got tired, went back to their rich parents, got money, got back into school, or had their parents line them up with a job in the family business. Meanwhile those fools in the bottom 90% that followed the Pied Pipers of the 1960s into "back to the land" ended up living hard lives in urban inner cities or were marooned in desperately poor rural areas. Their lives were ruined by the lies of the "back to the land" sirens.