Informed Comment

The Occupy Wall Street protests spread Thursday to Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Philadelphia, though these rallies were relatively small compared to the estimated 20,000 who came out in New York on Wednesday.

Aljazeera English reports on the Thursday protests, in which some protesters tried to breach the steel barriers police have erected around Wall Street’s skyscrapers– essentially creating a “no free speech” zone in the penumbra of Capital:

Surprise! Corporate mass media is hostile to the movement. So let us look at what the Web is saying about it.

The big numbers in New York were a result of the union support the movement is attracting, which suggest that it is neither a flash in the pan nor inconsequential.

The grassroots movement and the unions, of course, have to work out the terms of their cooperation. Some union organizers are annoyed that they got out 100,000 protesters last year in Washington, D.C. and were blacked out completely by corporate media, but the OccupyWallStreet.org supporters are being reported on.

But the Occupy Wall Street people were also largely ignored until the police attacked them, and until some of them closed down the Brooklyn Bridge. It may be that unions are too well-behaved to make a media splash nowadays.

Also, only 11.7 percent of US workers are unionized, a 70-year low, which may have given the reporters the notion that this is a declining and increasingly unimportant movement. Its downfall began when Ronald Reagan signaled that employers could fire union organizers without fear of Department of Justice retaliation. Walmart and other big corporations routinely just fire workers for trying to make a union, and this authoritarian behavior by corporations has been accepted by American society. Often these corporations use tricks like hiring employees for fewer than full-time hours, so as to avoid having to pay health insurance. Since Walmart, e.g., made its way importing Chinese-made goods into small town America, goods produced in a Communist system where unions are also prohibited or tightly controlled, the entire Neoliberal project worked against worker rights from both sides of the Pacific.

In the contest between multi-billion-dollar corporations with operations on several continents, and some poor little group of small town employees, the corporations win every time if the employees can’t even organize to challenge corporate policies. And American workers are flat on their backs, and vulnerable to a stomping, with millions thrown out of their jobs altogether and the rest kept on a short leash.

Jonathan Alter considers the potential impact of the OWS movement:

1. It might make Mitt Romney a posterboy of hated banks if he is the Republican presidential candidate in the general election

2. It could mobilize people to vote who otherwise might not have (though Alter notes that Republican state legislatures have been trying to make it more difficult to vote for youth and non-drivers– most of whom would be Democrats)

At Tomdispatch.com, Andy Kroll outlines the reasons for the outrage sparking these protests– centered on the “lost decade” of the Bush era, during which everyone got poorer except the very rich:

1. “In 2010, the average middle-class family took home $49,445, a drop of $3,719 or 7%, in yearly earnings from 10 years earlier.”

2. “poor families watched their income shrivel by 12%, falling from $13,538 to $11,904.”

3. The US now counts “more than 46 million men, women, and children among this country’s poor. In other words, 15.1% of all Americans are now living in officially defined poverty, the most since 1993″

4. African-Americans and Latinos were hit especially hard, with their middle classes virtually wiped out, as many homeowners lost their most important asset:

“Between 2005 and 2009, the household wealth of a typical black family dropped off a cliff, plunging by a whopping 53%; for a typical Hispanic family, it was even worse, at 66%. For white middle-class households, losses on average totaled “only” 16%.”

BUT

5. “the top 1% of earners enjoyed 65% of all income growth in America for much of the decade”

It could make a person angry.

John Lake at Blogcritics looks more closely at Alexa Obrien of @USDaysofRage and the principles she put forward for her Days of Rage campaign, aimed at securing

1. Non-Violence
2. Principles before Party — US Day of Rage will never endorse, finance, or lend our name to any candidate or party
3. Volunteer — Every US Day of Rage organizational committee on the state, city, and federal level should be entirely self-supporting, declining outside contributions from any political party, association, or candidate. US Day of Rage is not a money making operation. We are volunteers.
4. Autonomous Except in Matters Affecting the Whole — We do not support, for example, violations to our principle of non-violence. USDayofRage.org is here to help facilitate city and state level organization, and to organize the federal protest at the US Capitol.”

Posted in US Politics | 4 Comments

The culture wars kicked off by the 1960s are still with us. Indeed, much of the discourse of contemporary American conservatism can be boiled down to “damn liberal hippies ruined the country and they were wrong about x, y and z.” Fox Cable News and other conservative mouthpieces go to extraordinary lengths to badmouth the 1960s counterculture. They even blamed John Walker Lindh, the American member of the Taliban, on Bay Area culture. But note that Lindh from his teenaged years was interested in the dry legal aspects of Islam, and rejected Sufi spirituality. Children of liberal parents become fundamentalists all the time (in fact, Rupert Murdoch’s media are attempting actively to produce that outcome). Lindh wasn’t warped by hippie liberalism– he rebuffed it, and might as well have rebuffed it for evangelicalism.

Steve Jobs, who died yesterday, combined in himself all the contradictions of the Sixties and of Bay Area experiments in consciousness. It seems to me entirely possible that the young Jobs would have joined the OccupyWallStreet.org protests.

He is a one-man response to the charge that the counterculture produced no lasting positive change. Jobs’s technological vision, rooted in a concern for how people use technology or could use it more intuitively, profoundly altered our world. He used to say that those who had never had anything to do with the counterculture had difficulty understanding his way of thinking.

Jobs was the biological son of Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Syrian Muslim then graduate student in political science from Homs, which is now in revolt against the Baathist regime).

That is, like Barack Obama, Jobs was the son of a Muslim.

Simpson, young and unmarried, gave Jobs up for adoption, but she and Jandali later wed and gave Jobs a sister. He never appears to have met his father a political scientist who later went into the casino business, but he did get to know his half- biological sister Mona. That is, Jobs’s childhood was wrought up with a) Muslim immigration to the United States and b) the sexual revolution, both phenomena of the 1950s that accelerated in subsequent decades. Of course, these two parts of his heritage had only an indirect impact on him.

His adoptive parents were Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian Jobs (his adoptive mother would therefore be of Armenian heritage.)

Jobs dropped out of college, gathered Coca-Cola bottles to turn them in for money, got free meals from the Krishna Consciousness Society (“Hare Krishnas”), and later made a trip to India, where he converted to Buddhism.

I’d be interested to know how that happened. There is very little Buddhism in India. Tibetan Buddhists have centers in places like Varanasi (Banares) in North India, because these monks are political or cultural exiles from Communist China. The Dalits or ‘untouchables’ of western Indian have had a conversion movement to Buddhism. Jobs is said to have gone with a college buddy to see a Hindu guru devoted to the monkey-god, Hanuman. I really wonder whether the Buddhism was not encountered in the US rather than in India, though the trip to India may have influenced his decision.

In the same period, he was doing psychedelic drugs like LSD, which he later said were very important to his creative vision.

So the whole world made Jobs, and he remade the world. Homs in Syria is the city of his biological paternal forebears. It produced scientists and historians. Hilal al-Himsi, who died in the 9th century, translated from Greek into Arabic the first four books of Apollonius’s work on the geometry of cones.

Indic spiritual traditions were important to Jobs, especially Buddhism. The quest for states of altered consciousness, which characterized some in my generation, was central to his creative vision.

The DOS operating system was something that only an engineer could love, a set of odd commands entered on a blinking line against a black backdrop. Jobs preferred icons, and changed computing forever. He, at least, was convinced that without the liberal social and spiritual experimentation of his youth, his creative vision would not have been the same.

Buddhist Mandala

iPhone 4

The conservative backlash of the past 30 years has put hundreds of thousands of people behind bars for drug use (though not for alcohol use, the licit dangerous drug), and Rick Perry’s insistence that the US is a Christian nation is an attempt to erase the Steve Jobses from American history. Herman Cain’s Islamophobia is an attempt to exclude people like Jobs’s biological father from American legitimacy. But you can’t take a Muslim Arab immigrant, a Hindu guru, Buddhist monks, and some little pills out of this great American success story without making nonsense of it. Multiculturalism and cultural and religious experimentation, not fundamentalism and racism, are what make America great. Jobs showed that they are not incompatible with that other American icon, business success. Contemporary conservatism has given us over-paid and under-regulated financiers who add no real value to anything, unlike Jobs. If the Perrys ever do succeed in remaking the US in their own image, it will be a much reduced, crippled America that can no longer lead the world in creative innovation.

Posted in US Politics | 71 Comments

The overturning of the conviction for murder of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito by an Italian court on Monday contrasts with the fate of Troy Davis.

In both cases, a conviction was built on shoddy evidence. In both cases, during the appeal the weakness of the case became apparent. But in the US, the verdict was allowed to stand. If Amanda Knox had been in Georgia’s legal system, she would probably be dead instead of on an airplane home.

Would it help for appeals in the US, like those in Italy, to have a jury? That step might counter-act the natural instinct of any court to preserve its authority by resisting a charge of having made a major error. The Italian system often modifies the original judgment on appeal, which seems to me a virtue. Would it help if attorneys could serve on the appeal juries, as in Italy?

Would it help for the United States, like Italy, to abolish the death penalty?

That is obvious. But it won’t happen as long as a significant part of the country actually cheers executions (the part that otherwise claims ad nauseam to be ‘pro-life.’)

Posted in US Politics | 34 Comments