I am in the habit of listening to AM radio at work, including WABC. This is the station that is home to Rush Limbaugh and other ultrarightists. Last Wednesday when listening to Sean Hannity fulminate against Occupy Wall Street, I was startled to hear him reading from a blog post by Walter Russell Mead, the Bard College James Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities.
Walter Russell Mead
Mead, a tireless campaigner for the foreign policy needs of the one percent, is also the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relation. My understanding is that in order to be considered for this chair, you have to piss on a homeless person while he or she is asleep.
In 2003 Mead wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post backing the invasion of Iraq. Unlike other inside-the-beltway pundits, Mead never did a mea culpa as fellow Council of Foreign Relations one-percenter Leslie Gelb just did in the Wall Street Journal, blaming his mistake on “careerism”. Seven years after his initial support for Bush’s war, Mead still urged staying the course. This is clearly a man who is career-oriented as most of Leon Botstein’s hires are.
Mead is the editor of a magazine called American Interest (what else would you expect?) that has an editorial outlook quite similar to The New Republic, that is to say a toxic brew of Democratic Leadership Council positions, including a my country right or wrong support for Israel and hatred for trade unions and what’s left of the welfare state.
Blogging there as Via Meadia, Mead has been heaping all sorts of abuse on Occupy Wall Street. His first dispatch is dated October 13 and contains the observation that “Drums and granola in the park is not news” as part of an attempt to write the occupation off as some kind of hippie sideshow. This of course was before the movement became a model for occupations all over the world and a genuine threat to the one-percenters whose interests the yapping lapdog Mead defends.
Five days later Mead wrote another hostile article. Titled “The Vain And Empty Rituals Of Protest On The Streets”, it once again minimized the importance of the occupation:
In a mass democracy where everyone has a vote, and normal peaceful demonstrations carry no professional cost or personal stigma, if 100,000 people gather in Central Park for a protest rally it means that about 8,000,000 New Yorkers chose not to attend. It is not really news and it doesn’t mean much about where the city is headed.
A day before Mead wrote these words, a Quinnipiac poll revealed that sixty-seven percent of all New Yorkers supported the OWS goals, a clear indication of where the city is headed despite the James Chace Professor’s snotty remark.
Mead also described the occupiers as “scruffy students” and “angry loners”, in other words just like many of the very people he is paid to teach at Bard College. Fortunately, the Bard College contingent at Zuccotti Park chose to ignore the Henry Kissinger Chair at the Council of Foreign Relations and join other students outraged by the rape of America by hedge fund managers and the like—the very kinds of people who sit on the Bard College board of trustees.
Still obsessed with the dirty hippies, Mead let them have it yesterday with both barrels one last time. This time he was all worked up over a proposal to extend a tax surcharge for New York state residents making over a million dollars that was opposed by Governor Cuomo, a tool of Wall Street as some of us 99-percenters would say. By way of comparison, the latest issue of American Interest has an article in support of replacing a graduated income tax with a Value Added Tax (VAT), something closely related to a sales tax and regarded by many liberals as regressive.
Mead was particularly annoyed with the NY Times editors who stated:
But the Occupy Wall Street movement and the spreading protests it has inspired — scores of people gathered at the Capitol on Saturday, and an occupation is planned in Albany beginning at noon Friday — have reinvigorated lawmakers, organized labor and community groups that advocate for the tax’s extension.
He let the grey lady have it:
Note the deep wishful thinking about OWS. When a proposal with massive trade union backing can rally only “a few scores” of demonstrators to the union-worker rich state capital, this is not a sign of a political groundswell. It is just the opposite: a sign of advanced arteriosclerosis and apathy. Turning out crowds for demonstrations is one of those things that unions do; that they haven’t bothered with more than token crowds is a sign of the weakness of the OWS brand, not, as the Times coverage glibly suggests, its strength. And to suggest that the hacks and timeserving careerists who run the state government lobby groups for powerful vested interests were ‘inspired’ by these protests into actions they weren’t already planning is delusional. The fight over this tax extension is a central piece of the legislative strategy of the union lobby, and there is no doubt that the lobby would be making a powerful push — OWS or none, tiny demo in Albany or not.
If the movement became qualitatively larger and more influential, Mead’s litany of complaints about OWS would continue. His problem is not that the occupiers are small in number and irrelevant but that they exist. If Mead had a shred of honesty, he would be writing this kind of post:
Look, hardly a member of the right wing conspiracy, the “Liberal” magazine New York did a poll, 34 percent of those “Occupy Wall Street” lunatics are actually convinced the U.S. government is no better than al Qaeda.
And 37 percent say capitalism can’t be saved, it’s inherently immoral. They don’t seem to be telling that side of the story. They think it’s unfair when we’ve actually look at the signs that are being held up there, which are extraordinarily bizarre.
How long does this go on? What is the point in all of this? Do you believe in freedom or in confiscating what other people have? They want to empower their government to confiscate other peoples’ wealth and give it to them. The White House is feeding off of this protest. They’re hoping it becomes the moral equivalent of the Tea Party Movement. What would Rudy Giuliani be doing right now? I doubt he’d be allowing this to go on any further than this.
–Sean Hannity, Fox TV
Roger Berkowitz
While Walter Russell Mead makes few if any pretensions to liberalism, his fellow Professor at Bard College Roger Berkowitz offers a muddle-headed defense of OWS that on balance betrays hostility toward the movement in the “damning with faint praise” vein. Berkowitz runs the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, just one of a host of training centers there designed to turn out the Samantha Powers of the next generation. I first got wind of Berkowitz last year when I stumbled across an article he had written describing undocumented workers as those who “enter this country illegally [and] undermine our system of taxation, reduce the wages for working Americans, and contribute to a culture of corruption and lawlessness”. Wow, that’s a mouthful from someone speaking in the name of Hannah Arendt but then again in a 1956 article on the desegregation of Little Rock schools she had this to say: “It has been said, I think again by Mr. Faulkner, that enforced integration is no better than enforced segregation and this is perfectly true.” When asked by Harper Magazine’s Scott Horton to explain this racist article, Berkowitz replied: “What Arendt defends in the Little Rock essay is a vibrant right to privacy as a space where one can be truly unique and different in ways…” God help Bard College students paying $52,560 per year (11th highest in the country) to be miseducated by such a fool.
Berkowitz first weighed in on OWS on October 5th in an article titled “Don’t be Afraid to Say Revolution?” Although happy about the protest, he frets that “One of the ugly aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the indiscriminate anger at all wealthy people, as if being wealthy were wrong.” What a stupid notion. If there is anything that has been made clear down there it is that the resentment is directed at plutocracy, not at rich people per se.
Yesterday in an article that appeared in Michael Tomasky’s “Democracy: a Journal of Ideas”, a kind of upscale version of the pro-Democratic Party babble heard nightly on MSNBC, Berkowitz characterized OWS as “anti-political”. He also repeated the charge that the movement harbored racist tendencies based on the evidence of Atlanta protesters refusing to allow Congressman John Lewis to speak. This is a talking point of the Ann Coulters of the world, it should be understood. It couldn’t possibly occur to Berkowitz that the hostility to the two-party system might have something to do with Lewis being turned down (he spoke later in the day.)
Berkowitz also found himself getting “goose bumps” over the human megaphone used by the crowds at these protests, but not the “good kind”. In his eyes they must evoke Berlin in 1928 or something. One day it is a “mic check”, the next it is breaking the windows of Jewish shopkeepers or something, one supposes.
Mostly what annoys Berkowitz is the refusal of OWS to become political:
To reject leadership, to refuse to govern, to insist simply on talking and debating is not to be political, but is to announce one’s rejection of politics. To engage in politics one must not only rebel and tear down, but one must also found new institutions and build up. It is precisely the concern with foundation—the desire to build responsible institutions with power that would check and other powers and thus guarantee both political power and liberty—that Arendt understood to be the genius of the American Revolution. And it is precisely this political desire to found power that Occupy Wall Street protesters lack.
I for one hope that OWS continues to reject politics of the kind that John Lewis and Michael Tomasky represent. The single most important contribution these young people have made, including a sizable contingent from Bard College apparently, is a loud and clear challenge to the right of the one percent to control political life in the United States and elsewhere.
In my email exchange with him last year, I brought up the names of a number of Bard trustees who certainly fit the description of “one percenters”, all of whom he regarded as “respected people”.
It is difficult to figure out which one of them has abused democracy the worst. Is it Bruce Ratner who used political connections to get the green light for an abysmal development project in downtown Brooklyn and who secretly funded Astroturf “civil rights” groups to back Ratner’s ambitions?
Or is it Stewart Resnick who uses his connections to the Democratic Party in California to divert precious water resources to his pistachio nut and pomegranate plantations, leaving ordinary citizens without clean drinking water and toilets that will not flush? One wonders if this muddle-headed liberal would be so willing to defend the Stewart Resnicks of the world if it was his drinking water that was coming out of the faucet the color of tobacco juice.
