Breaking News: 1:00 AM Bloomberg Moves In To Evict Occupy Wall Street Protesters

(Above, a picture of Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, at Occupy Wall Street, explained here.)

Noticing New York and National Notice usually don’t cover breaking news. A breaking news focus doesn’t readily permit the kind of considered contextual articles that seem to be the most valuable addition that can be made to the prevalent media chatter. This article will make this exception to cover important breaking news.

Bloomberg reportedly had the New York Police Department move in at 1:00 AM last night (without warning) to remove the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zucotti Park. According to one of the protesters who was there, interviewed on the BBC, the police moved in with knives to cut up and shred the property at the encampment. Reportedly about 70 protesters were arrested. (Another report said 200.) On the BBC you can hear protesters chanting to the police: “Who do you serve: Who do you protect?” and “Shame on you.” You can also hear, “Don’t push me.”

The dispersed protesters are now reassembling at a number of other nearby city sites. There were reports that Bloomberg closed down subway stations to divert the public away from the area.

Bloomberg seems to have chosen his time to evict the protesters so as to fold it in into reports of attempted evictions occurring elsewhere in the country. So it will be less noticed? So, with the help of a short public memory, it will hopefully disappear after a quick run through the 24- hour news cycle?

Bloomberg held a press conference this morning to explain his actions. Most notable in the press conference from standpoint of what Noticing New York and National Notice have previously reported were the following:

• Bloomberg cited health and safety reasons (not suppression of the protesters speech) as the principal reason for removing the protesters. In doing so he gave what I believe were inaccurate (and to my mind manufactured) descriptions of the conditions in Zucotti Park. The many times I have been to Zucotti Park while the protesters were there I never found or felt it was unsafe. I never found that it was difficult to enter or use the park except for the impediments in doing so that came from police barricades and sometimes from shoulder to shoulder police. I did not note that the many elderly choosing to be in the park seemed to feel any concern about their safety. A paralyzed protester in an expensive wheelchair and on a breathing apparatus also did not seem in the least perturbed about his safety. Why did Bloomberg feel it necessary to stress multiple mischaracterizations in this regard during his press conference? Why bother to say things like “there were reports of. . [insert inflammatory thing that didn’t happen] . . . but the police could find no evidence of this”?

• Bloomberg also said several times that the protesters had to be removed because they were violating Brookfield’s property rights. That’s something already written about by Noticing New York and National Notice. Brookfield is the theoretical owner of Zucotti Park. Zucotti Park is the kind of quasi-public space we now see replacing and substituting what used clearly to be public space. So Bloomberg is making the case that Brookfield’s ownership private rights were an operative factor justifying constriction of the protesters’ rights to free speech and free assembly. The argument that free speech violates property rights is increasingly easy as the skewing of wealth in this country to the 1% conjoins with a rapid and continuing privatization of what was previously public.

• Bloomberg was very clear that going forward he (together with Brookfield) intends to be in control of exactly how he wants the protesters to exercise their free speech rights in Zucotti Park. He said this will extend to the police searching people entering Zucotti Park, randomly or as the police see fit.

• Bloomberg said that he did not believe that the protesters were exercising their free speech rights. At the same time Bloomberg has been working to have the press report repeatedly that he is a strong believer in “free speech.” Again, one theme of Bloomberg’s press conference was that he is willing to tell the protesters how they may and should express themselves.

• At one point during the press conference Bloomberg mocked the strength of Occupy Wall Streeters’ ideas and their inability to get their ideas out in other ways. Some of their ideas are that a 1% Club, of which Bloomberg (who became the city’s wealthiest man while mayor) is conspicuously a member, exercise too much control in this country. That most certainly extends to control over who gets to say what and where and with what kind of amplification by the media and with what kind of assistance by paid advertising.

• In the press conference Bloomberg said that throughout the crisis he had been in constant contact with Brookfield Properties. This was despite the fact that earlier in the coverage of Occupy Wall Street the Bloomberg’s administration had prevailed upon the New York Times to report that Bloomberg’s staff was under “strict orders from Mr. Bloomberg” not to “lobby the owner of the park, Brookfield Office Properties.” I did not hear anyone at that press conference ask Mr. Bloomberg about the fact that his live-in girlfriend companion, Diana Taylor, is on the board of Brookfield.

Informative background with respect to much of the above is available in an earlier and thorough Noticing New York article written about Bloomberg’s intention to evict the protesters back on October 13th: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

(Above, another picture of Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, at Occupy Wall Street, explained here.)

Damned If You . . . WHAT? Deep Doo Doo (or Don’t Don’t) Questions For Whistleblowers: Does All It Hinge On Private vs Public Sector Employment?

(Picture of fired Penn State football coach Joe Paterno above from Wikipedia.)

From the world of football to the world of politics, that's where we are going, but we are not going to be talking sports metaphors applied to politics. . . The topic by which we will make our segue is very real world: the duties of of whistleblowers . . . . How they may be punished for what they do or, as the case may be, don't do.

A lot of eyes are going to be on the Penn State football game that is being played today.

In the Penn: Trouble For What You Don't Do

The Penn State sexual abuse of young minors scandal presents an interesting question now that it has resulted in the firing of the university’s football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier. Without getting unduly specific about the unattractive details of the allegations with respect to Jerry Sandusky it is interesting to note that some think that the fired Paterno did nothing wrong.

That’s what's said in this high Google-ranking letter to the editor taking issue with a Star Ledger editorial:

In your editorial “Paterno must go” (Nov. 8), you say he should have called the police. Why? . . .

Yes, it was his duty to pass on what he had learned, but not his job to call the cops. . . .

Paterno did the right thing by notifying superiors. To do otherwise would be overstepping his authority.

(See: Joe Paterno fired? He did no wrong, Friday, November 11, 2011, Letters to the Editor/The Star-Ledger.)

The original editorial the letter was responding to was of exactly the opposite opinion as to whether simply reporting illegal conduct internally to superiors was sufficient rather than reporting it externally to those who will actually do something about it:

Paterno acknowledges being told about one of the alleged assaults, but instead of calling police and turning in his friend in 2002, Paterno allowed athletic director Tim Curley to handle the matter. Curley is one of two school officials charged with covering it up. Both have stepped down.

* * * *

Paterno insists, “I did what I was supposed to do,” by handing off to Curley, but Paterno did only the minimum the law required. Telling Curley doesn’t absolve Paterno from a moral obligation. He should’ve taken action himself.

(See: Joe Paterno must step down after Penn State child sex abuse revelations, Tuesday, November 08, 2011, Updated: Wednesday, November 09, 2011, By Star-Ledger Editorial Board The Star-Ledger.)

That was before Paterno's firing. The New York Times, after the firing, similarly editorialized that firing Paterno since he “failed to call the police” was justified “because he did not take steps that probably would have ended” very wrong acts. (See, Editorial: Penn State’s Response, November 10, 2011.)

Nonetheless, feelings sympathetic to Paterno and the course of action he took are running strong. There was also something verging on a riot (far surpassing the anything Manhattan’s Occupy Wall Street protesters have done) as thousands of students took to street to express displeasure over Paterno’s firing. Apparently, the students were also of a mind that Paterno did no wrong by not doing more. (See: Penn State Students Clash With Police in Unrest After Announcement, by Nate Schweber, November 10, 2011.)

The New York Times ran a whole article, a long one, focusing on exactly what Parterno did and didn't do:

Paterno, according to the prosecutors, did not call the police. Instead, the next day, he had the university’s athletic director visit him at his home, a modest ranch house just off campus in State College. According to prosecutors, Paterno told the athletic director of the report regarding the former coach, Jerry Sandusky.

* * * *

[Quoting Paterno’s son, Scott] “The appropriate people were contacted by Joe. That was the chain of command. It was a retired employee and it falls under the university’s auspices, not the football auspices.”

It appears prosecutors believe that Paterno, whatever his personal sense of obligation to inquire or act further, met his legal requirement in reporting the graduate student’s allegation to his direct superior, Curley.

Under state law, if a staff member at a school makes a report of possible sexual abuse of a child, it is the responsibility of “the person in charge of the school or institution” to make a report to the state’s Department of Public Welfare.

But the people up the chain of command, including Spanier, didn’t make that required “report to child welfare authorities.” (See: In Sexual Abuse Case, a Focus on How Paterno Reacted, Doug Mills/The New York Times, by Mark Viera, November 6, 2011.)

The Central Whistleblowing Issue: What Follow-up Can You Expect When Reporting Misconduct?

The Times article says that a dean emeritus of the school, Nicholas P. Cafardi, who it describes as a “professor of law at Duquesne University School of Law and an expert on the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal” said that Paterno “had reason to expect that others would do their jobs.”

Really? Paterno “had reason to expect that others would do their jobs”? How can someone be an “expert on the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal” and think that when whistleblowers report misconduct of this sort within an organization that those in charge of an organization can, without question, be expected to do their jobs?

This goes to the crux of the most central issue when it comes to Whistleblowing: When you only report things internally within an organization where improper conduct is occurring can you truly expect that others will do their jobs or should it be your personal duty to report it externally? Parterno was fired because, in retrospect, it was considered clear that he should have reported the incident, at least eventually, externally to those would take effective action. This is the standard the university and the the editorializing newspapers are applying even though, as the story is being told, Paterno did not personally investigate to ascertain the truth of the allegation.

Now (and here is our promised segue), compare the dismissal of Paterno and university president Spanier* for what they didn’t do with the punishment of whistleblowers working in the government for what they did do.

(* As well as the additional Penn State employees who are losing their jobs.)

Two Roads Diverge In a Wood

Granted, it may be that whistleblowers are invariably faced by a dilemma: damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Even if it is not an absolute Morton’s Fork decision, it is easy to understand that the position in which whistleblowers find themselves is almost always going to be uncomfortable, but is there a distinction when it comes to private sector whistleblowers versus whistleblowers working for the government. Maybe the former are more likely to be damned if they don’t while the latter will be damned if they do. Do you think?

I began mulling this over because at the same time I was listening to stories about the Paterno and Spanier dismissals I was recalling what was said on a recent Leonard Lopate broadcast discussing the fate of whistleblowers in the government sector. Lopate was talking with constitutional and civil rights litigation lawyer Glenn Greenwald and the observation was that, when it comes to government, unlike what happened to Mr. Paterno, whistleblowers are most likely to be damned for what they DO rather than for what they DON"T DO, if and when they take effective action to report misconduct.

The Path That Government Wants Not Taken: Whistleblowing

At about 6:45 minutes into the program Greenwald and Lopate were discussing the Bush administration’s warrantless spying on Americans that was a clear violation of the FISA law enacted by Congress:

GREENWALD: Interestingly, nobody has ever been indicted. The only person who paid any price is this individual Thomas Tamm who was the mid-level Justice Department lawyer who found out that this law was being broken, picked up the phone and called Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times. He lost his job over it. He had no money to hire a lawyer. He went bankrupt and had all kinds of problems. Only the one who exposed the crimes suffered. The criminals themselves suffered none.

LOPATE: Is that often the case?: The whistelblower is the one who winds up paying the biggest price?

GREENWALD: Sure. And then if you look at what the Obama administration is doing now with how it is arguing that the Bush torture regime should not be held accountable under the law, that the warrantless eavesdropping program shouldn’t be, that even the private sector crimes that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis shouldn’t be. The argument they make is that it is more important to look forwards, not backwards. But again, if that were applied across the board, even to the margin lines, then you could have a debate about it but it wouldn’t offend the rule of law principles,* but the Obama administration is on an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, to punish the people who expose government criminality but not the criminals themselves . . . . .

(* We will get to Greenwald’s “rule of law” concern in a moment. Essentially it relates to his thesis that there are different legal standards now being applied to the elite 1%, as opposed to the other 99% of the country.)

At this point there was a brief discussion of the situation of Sergeant Bradley Manning, a distinguishable situation because, whatever higher moral imperatives people think may apply, Manning probably violated the law when he leaked classified information to Wikileaks. But Manning’s initial extraordinarily harsh and unusual Obama administration-imposed detention conditions were brought up with Greenwald commenting that the Obama administration was:

. . . sending a signal to say, `if you also learn of things that we have done in secret that are high-level law breaking, you should think twice about whether you will expose it because look at what we have done to Bradley Manning.

The Greenwald/Lopate discussion proceeded to focus specifically on concern analogous to what happened with Paterno:

LOPATE: But whistleblowers have all sorts of protections under the law. How come they don’t always apply? I don’t mean Bradley Manning (he may very well have criminally leaked things), but the whistleblower who revealed unwarranted wiretaps, I would think that he would have been protected.

GREENWALD: But he wasn’t, and that was Thomas Tamm who was criminally investigated. And the reason is that they have protections IF they invoke an internal procedure within the government, so they go to their boss, or they go to an investigative agency within that department, but that goes nowhere; those are always whitewashes. So leaking to the media which is the traditional way in which we learn about important aspects of criminality, that does not have any whistleblower protection.

At the very end of the broadcast segment (at about 29:300 Lopate and Greenwald had one more exchange of crucial relevance:

LOPATE: Now, Haven’t things like Wikileaks enabled citizens to know more about wrong doing? It looks now like Wikileaks might finally be destroyed.

GREENWALD: Well, those two thoughts go together perfectly: I mean, when somebody steps up and actually exposes what the government is doing then they become an enemy of the state.

A Distinction Explained By A Government/Private Sector Dichotomy?

So, do you think? Do you think there is a distinction when it comes to private sector whistleblowers versus whistleblowers working for the government as to judgements whether they will get in trouble for reporting misconduct externally or not reporting it externally to those who will take effective action?*

(* It is acknowledged that Paterno was expected to report organizational misconduct to the police, which is to law enforcement, while Tamm reported organizational misconduct to the New York Times, which is only a media organization; but in purely practical terms because of government structure there was no effective course of action for Tamm to take in reporting the misconducts except to go to the press.)

At one point in the Greenwald/Lopate discussion Greenwald explained that “crimes committed in [government] office” are not viewed as “real crimes.” If that’s true, and it probably is, it would sufficiently support the distinction we are making with respect to government vs. private sector whistleblowers and we might leave it at that . . .

Maybe Not

. . . But that would be unfair to Mr. Greenwald because he has some broader observations that account for what is happening and as I have said before they are scary, even scarier than what we have just discussed.

This is Mr. Greenwald’s “rule of law” point. Mr. Greenwald theorizes that we have been on a downward slope since the pardon of Richard Nixon and that there is now an elite club, essentially the 1% Club, that expects to behave with impunity while for the rest of us other standards apply. He suggests that “leniency,” the non-application of the “rule of law,” is something we see “only among the powerful.” As for the rest of us? Greenwald offers startling statistics: The United States has 5% of the world population and yet 25% of the prison population worldwide is in US.

Glenn Greenwald is the author of “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.”

Here is a link and WNYC summary of the Leonard Lopate segment and you may click below to listen to it:

Glenn Greenwald on Our Justice System
Monday, November 07, 2011

Glenn Greenwald argues that, over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been replaced with a two-tiered system of justice—the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. With Liberty and Justice for Some reveals the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.

Another Explanation: Government By and For the Elite

Does this bigger picture of Greenwald’s throw into a cocked hat our observation about different treatment specifically intended to discourage whistleblowers in government? No, because Greenwald has another observation: The 1% Club has essentially become the government. Greenwald referred in his discussion with Lopate to an Atlantic Magazine article “The Quiet Coup” by Simon Johnson (May 2009), which made the case that a financial oligarchy has taken control of the government. Greenwald also points out that the press is no longer the bulwark against the absence of the rule of law it might once have been considered to be. That is because the media class, now consisting of highly paid employees of large media corporations who are no longer outsiders and instead identify with the elite, now defend this exclusive leniency for the 1%.

There you go: How’s that for kicking the football all the way into the realm of politics?

Post Script Thoughts:

• It is worth noting a couple of things about the warrantless wiretapping that violated the FISA law:

• As pointed out infrequently (if ever) except as was noted by Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu in his book “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” the phone companies were assisting the Bush administration to violate the law at the same time they had pending before the Bush administration approvals they wanted for the reunification of much of the original phone company monopoly.

• The failure to prosecute administration and phone company officials for breaking the law was also due to the passage of the telecom immunity act which unprecedentedly gave retroactive immunity for past criminal acts.

• For those National Notice readers who have difficulty thinking objectively and unemotionally when it comes to topics like Wikileaks and Bradley Manning that circumnavigate the issue of national security it is worth remembering that the issues of concern discussed here relate to all government conduct. Listening to the Lopate/Greenwald segment you will hear the discussion taken out into broader territory.

Bill Maher Reiterates Theme of Plutocrats Favored By Unlevel Playing Field of "Lobbyists & Suits": Glenn Greenwald Dittos Advantaging Rules For Elite

Regarding the above headline, Maher didn’t say “plutocrats”; first he said the “right wing” and a week later he said “Republicans” but each time he was clearly referring to the 1% Club, that elite group that is specially advantaged by rules by which they want the rest of us to play, rules setting up contests they expect always to win, because as Maher says, those contests are played with “lobbyists and suits” and they have all of the “lobbyists and suits” on THEIR side.

As Rachel Maddow observed, this means the elite can ignore the 99%.

(Bill Maher, above, on the first show where he commented on futility of the plutocratically-preferred processes.)

The first time Maher ventured this thesis to explain way the 1% Club so desperately objects to the rule-changing presence of the Occupy Wall Street 99 percenters in the streets, I wrote about it in National Notice, including exactly what Maher said: Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Bill Maher: Right Wing, Wanting It THEIR Way, Yearns To Get Occupy Wall Street On THEIR Unlevel Playing Field of Lobbyists and Suits.

One week later, on his next “Real Time” edition, Maher returned to the topic of how the 1% Club craves rules that render futile for the rest of us the forms of participatory democracy into which we are conventionally channeled. I wrote about his doing so in one of two Noticing New York articles that translated how Maher’s thesis applies to the futility of public hearings in New York City for big real estate projects when those projects are handing out enormous benefit at the expense of the public to politically connected developers through heavy use of of subsidies and frequent abuse of eminent domain. (See: Wednesday, November 2, 2011, Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process? and Tuesday, November 8, 2011, Public Hearings For Big Real Estate Projects: Refining Your Sense of the Absurd.)

In the first of those two Noticing New York articles (linked above) I covered Maher's updating remarks about his thesis from that second show:

My point I was trying to make last week is that the Republicans don’t want them in the streets, the people, because they would like them to fight the way THEY fight, with lobbyists, where they will lose.

* * * *

When the original Red Coats. . . didn’t like it when George Washington and his troops were fighting behind trees, you know, not fighting in a straight line with red coats where they can be SHOT– It’s the same thing with these people. They’re not fighting FAIR in the way they will LOSE by going to Washington and getting a lobbyist: They’re in the streets! It’s the same way you guys are all saying about Obama, “Oh, he’s out campaigning. He’s not governing!” Yeah, he’s not sitting in Washington giving you guys bills that you’ll crumple up and throw away. He’s taking his case to the people. Is there something wrong if you are not winning with one tactic . . . . Is it so wrong to try the other tactic where you might be able to WIN?

(Above, Maher the seconds Friday night with Ron Christie reacting to his remarks.)

In that same Noticing New York piece I mentioned the very similar sentiments expressed by Chris Hedges when he was discussing Occupy Wall Street on an edition (October 24) of Charlie Rose where he and Amy Goodman were guests. (A link to the video of that discussion is available on the Noticing New York post) Hedges, described a world where it “doesn’t matter what the citizens think,” where what Goldman Sachs wants, Goldman Sachs gets because, as a practical matter: “There is no way to vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs.” Maybe you can vote as a technical matter but if you do “vote against the interest of Goldman Sachs” your vote will simply be ignored because, as Bill Maher might analyze it, your vote doesn’t count in a system where “the other side has all the lobbyists and all the suits.”

In the second of those two Noticing New York articles where I wrote about public process and big real estate projects in New York discussing the absence of the rule of law for the elite, spurred me to bring up Glenn Greenwald’s thinking:

There is a theory, a rather frightening one, that there is now a club, a political and financial class, that is above the law. I heard this theory propounded by Glenn Greenwald, the author of “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful” on a Leonard Lopate show segment yesterday.

Mr. Greenwald theorizes that we have been on a downward slope since the pardon of Richard Nixon and that there is now a elite club that expects to behave with impunity. He was utterly too convincing in the case he made. I hope it’s not true.

Here is a link and WNYC summary of the segment and you may click below to listen to it:

Glenn Greenwald on Our Justice System
Monday, November 07, 2011

Glenn Greenwald argues that, over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been replaced with a two-tiered system of justice—the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. With Liberty and Justice for Some reveals the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.

Maybe Mr. Greenwald should appear as a guest on one of Bill Maher’s upcoming shows. It sounds like there is a lot they could flesh out on the topic of the tailoring or rules specially benefit the 1% Club and equipping them with impunity at the expense of the rest of us.

Is it just fringe thinkers who believe this kind of special rules inequality has gotten entirely out of hand? My thoughts were picked up by a post on Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report site comparing this to hot-off-the presses editorial in the Wall Street Journal. Said the Wall Street Journal in its editorial:

As important as this economic damage is [from corporate welfare/crony capitalism] the corrosive effect that corporate welfare has on public trust in government. Americans understand that powerful government invariably favors the powerful, who have the means and access to massage Congress and the bureaucracy that average citizens do not. This really is aid to the 1% paid by the other 99%.

(See: Tuesday, November 08, 2011, Catching up: WSJ on corporate welfare, Noticing New York on the connection between public hearings and the lack of public trust.)

The Journal’s editorial headlined “The Corporate Welfare State: A cause to unite the tea party and the Occupy Wall Street crowd” and beginning:

The Occupy Wall Street protesters aren't good at articulating what they want, but one of their demands is "end corporate welfare." Well, welcome aboard. Some of us have been fighting crony capitalism for decades, and it's good to have new allies if liberals have awakened to the dangers of the corporate welfare state.

Corporate welfare is the offer of special favors—cash grants, loans, guarantees, bailouts and special tax breaks—to specific industries or firms.

. . . You’ll have to be a paying Journal subscriber to read more. . . Sounds a lot like National Notice, Noticing New York (and NPR) as written here:

Monday, October 24, 2011
On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On

and here:

Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Opposition To Crony Capitalism As Uniting Cause: Resource-Grabbing Mega-Monopolies (Like Atlantic Yards) As Catalyst For Great Recessions/Depressions

When the “Wall Street Journal” begins to sound like the “Occupy Wall Street Journal” maybe Occupy Wall Street is having and effect.

Faces of Occupy Wall Street: A Wonderful Site For Wonderful Sights

I have been writing a number of articles about Occupy Wall Street under my "Noticing New York" and "National Notice" banners and much of what I have posted includes relevant photos I've taken of the protesters at New York's Zucotti Park. My own pictures are entirely serviceable but there are photos and then there are photos. I can direct you to a wonderful site for wonderful sights if you would like to see lots of portraits of individual Occupy Wall Street protesters, all of them beautifully done.

I suggest visiting the main page and hitting the "Random" button for one marvelous surprise after another. The picture at the top of this post is an example.

The site I am referring you to is: OWS Faces (We are all here). Repeat: OWS Faces.

Below are links to "Noticing New York" and "National Notice" OWS articles done to date. (You can also hit the "Occupy Wall Street" label that follows this post to pull up any future National Notice OWS posts I do after this one.

If you want to see one of my photos, here is something I snapped today, giving you the idea of what sort of purpose Bloomberg's barricades around the protesters might be serving.

Saturday, October 22, 2011
Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

Friday, October 14, 2011
Not THAT Michael White: Visiting Occupy Wall Street and How I Know The Economy Is Bad (For the 99%)

Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Bill Maher: Right Wing, Wanting It THEIR Way, Yearns To Get Occupy Wall Street On THEIR Unlevel Playing Field of Lobbyists and Suits

Sunday, October 23, 2011
On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On

Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Opposition To Crony Capitalism As Uniting Cause: Resource-Grabbing Mega-Monopolies (Like Atlantic Yards) As Catalyst For Great Recessions/Depressions

Sunday, October 16, 2011
Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2011

Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Visiting Occupy Wall Street We Hear “Eliminate the Fed!”: OR Maybe Just Federal Reserve Directors Backing Mega-Monopolies For the Super-Connected?

Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Big Politically-Connected Real Estate Projects: Ignoring The Public Majority With Futile “Participatory Democracy” Hearing Process

HOV Lanes (“High Occupancy Vehicle” Lanes) and Mississippi’s Proposed Constitutional Personhood Amendment

One of the many uproarious “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episodes features a joke where the Larry David character hires a prostitute so that he will have enough people in his car to use the faster-moving HOV or “High Occupancy Vehicle” Lanes.

This election day one of the matters pending that we shall soon hear about is whether a proposed “personhood amendment” to the Mississippi state constitution will pass. The amendment, a “right to life” initiative, declares a fertilized egg to be a “person.” If it passes it will make most of the better forms of birth control illegal in the state. (A tourism problem?) It will also play havoc with how a lot of laws will have to be interpreted. Word is that the amendment might pass. I wonder: Do the people of Mississippi, polled at being about 50/50 on the amendment, know what they are getting themselves into?

Here just one ridiculous question. If the amendment passes will the High Occupancy Vehicle Lane laws in Mississippi have to be rewritten? If they aren’t, how will the police officer who stops someone for using the lane know how many “persons” are in the car?: “But officer, I have a fertilized egg inside me.” What if the woman can claim that she has both an egg inside and a sperm cell she is sure is hellbent on fertilizing that egg?

Maybe the state of Mississippi will decide ii needs to address the need to make such challenging distinctions by pushing back its legal definition for the beginning of life still further. Maybe it will decide that a person exists if there is a man amorously interested in a female companion and they are both in the same car. Maybe, if a man and a woman are together in a car it will be considered a prima facie case for proving “personhood” if the woman has been hired for purposes of prostitution . . .

. . But wait a minute! That’s sort of the opposite of the joke of the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode, where, as memory serves, the joke's whole point depended on the fact that though the Larry David character had hired a prostitute he had absolutely no interest or intention of having sex with her.

By tomorrow morning we should know whether the citizens of Mississippi are going to be dealing with a whole lot of headaches involving interpretation of a whole lot of statutes. We'll also know whether you will need to think about what birth control you are using before you decide to visit the state.

Bill Maher: Right Wing, Wanting It THEIR Way, Yearns To Get Occupy Wall Street On THEIR Unlevel Playing Field of Lobbyists and Suits

(Above, Bill Maher on his show this week making the statement talked about below.)

Messages Needing To Break Through: Private Companies Keeping Public’s Solutions Off the Table

Right near the end of this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, at about the 45 minute mark, Rachel Maddow was talking about how there was no mystery to the fact that “so many common sense solutions, not very partisan solutions” to America’s problems were “off the table” because one or another “big business wants them off the table” “precluding these serious issues from getting traction.” (“Crony capitalism” ?)

Thomas Friedman, who in the discussion had just identified a set of issues such as a possible carbon tax (i.e. fossil fuels tax) that are vexingly “off the table” thereupon asked how “we the people” can, “leverage our energy to take these people on,” saying with exasperation that this was what he was “hungry for” right now.

That’s when Maher ventured his insight that the right wing wants Occupy Wall Street to resort to more routine and conventional forms of opposition because, if they do, those with the money will have them outgunned so that the Occupy Wall Street crowd will lose. Maher’s words:

When I see these Occupy Wall Street folks and I hear the right wing say `Humph, these people down there with their dirty, filthy. . pissing in the street’ and, you know all this stuff. It’s like, you know what?: They want them, to do it THEIR WAY. They don’t want them in the streets. They’re saying `come inside, put on a suit and get a lobbyist instead, because that way, `we know you’ll lose.’ . . .

. . . This is the only other way to get power when the other side has all the lobbyists and all the suits.

Maddow, commenting on what makes street demonstrations effective, said that demonstrations were designed to be “inconvenient” and “in the way” so they won’t be ignored.

Touré (the MSNBC correspondent and one-name author of “Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?”) commented that inconvenience to the protesters themselves was also key because by expressing the “depth of their commitment” it gave their actions power.

Apparently concurring, Maher said about the value of the particularity of this Freedom of Assembly tactic that:

The only thing that impresses the other side is willingness to stay in the street.

With Privatization Public Expression Becomes an Option “Off the Table”

These observations accord with the key points of a Noticing New York article I posted this week about Occupy Wall Street’s free speech and how it had been effective in breaking through with its message by physically occupying the Zucotti Park space. I quoted Michael Kimmelman, the new architecture critic of The New York Times, that, “we tend to underestimate the political power of physical places” and that the power of various media aside, “nothing replaces people taking to the streets.”

I further noted that as Occupy Wall Street has been achieving surprising success in transmitting its message to a receptive public Mayor Bloomberg has reacted by redefining what he originally described as free speech as something that he no longer wants qualified as such, or to accept. It seems that pro-Wall Street Bloomberg, much as Bill Maher aptly described, would like Occupy Wall Street compelled to communicate more conventionally, on more Bloombergian terms, in which case it is doubtful its message would be getting through as effectively.

Bloomberg already has formidable potential tools at his command to bring about what he wants in terms of breaking up a ‘real estate’ insurrection: His live-in girlfriend is on the board of the private company that owns the `public’ space of Zucotti Park, and Bloomberg is very entwined with the developers of the Real Estate Board of New York who are now seeking to change the law retroactively to evict the OWS protesters.

All of this is especially important, because meaningful free speech, the ability to actually break through with a message is being increasingly threatened with new, historically unfamiliar constraints. Free speech is threatened by an escalating privatization of that which used always to be public. As I wrote, privatization of the streets and parks (real estate) is coming up as an issue right now with Occupy Wall Street but there is also the broader background issue of privatization of the basic elements and channels of speech, via unprecedented restrictions imposed by copyright and through ownership of monopoly media and airwaves. We are even having to fend off pending schemes to privatize ownership of the Internet. And the implications of such privatization for political expression are all the more bleak considering the way in which the nation’s wealth and resources are being ever increasingly skewed to the wealthy.

People publicly “taking to the streets,” is a great leveler to get popularly supported messages through. But when you take on the plutocrats, as Bill Maher suggests, those plutocrats are going to try to convince you to do so on their home playing field, an unlevel one, where you will lose because they have “all the lobbyists and all the suits.” In a world where everything is rapidly being privatized you need “lobbyists” and “suits” to express yourself, unless you resort to “taking the streets.” But, in New York City, that option too is fast being precluded to by the privatizing of previously public space: streets, sidewalks and parks. If Bloomberg and the New York City real estate oligarchs have it their way it may soon be that to demonstrate in what used to be public space you will need your own private army of lobbyists and suits.

I said a lot more about this in my Noticing New York article on the subject: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?

If you read it you will also gain an appreciation (also explained here) for why the picture below depicts Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, joining the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

On NPR, Echo of Coinciding Principles Noticed: What the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Ought To Agree On

(Above, Mayor Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, at Occupy Wall Street?- Keep reading.)

On Saturday I had just posted a Noticing New York article, almost a treatise, about Occupy Wall Street and how it is confronting the subtractions of free speech flowing from Occupied Wall Street’s declared bane, the increasingly unfair effects of concentration of wealth in this country. In that article I had commented briefly:

Objection to the teaming up of government and monopoly should be common ground for both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street activists although I suspect that the proportion of Occupy Wall Street protesters astute enough to realize this may be greater.

(See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)

The post was hardly up when I heard much the same point made in a very good eleven-minute “All Things Considered” story about what the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party have and ought to have in common: Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party: United In Distrust, by NPR Staff, October 22, 2011. (I went back to add a link to it in the article I already had up.) This point, perhaps the strongest part of the story, was in NPR’s audio version of the story (not the written article accompanying it), transcript now available. It is an exchange between All Things Considered host Guy Raz and Harvard professor and activist Lawrence Lessig:

RAZ: In some ways, the Tea Party was a response to the perceived growth and power of government. And, of course, Occupy Wall Street is a response to the perceived growth and power of corporate America. Are those incompatible ideas?

LESSIG: No, they're not. Because whether you are upset about the size of government or the size of corporations, one thing everybody should be upset about is when corporations use their power to corrupt the government, to reinforce their size and their influence. A critical change in the way in which we've seen America become much more unequal was driven by changes in public policy that was driven itself by the kind of influence that my book [“Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress — and a Plan to Stop It”] is trying to attack.

So whether, again, you like big corporations or you like capitalism, you and the right cannot possibly defend crony capitalism. And that's why Cato Institute and every single credible principled right-wing organization or libertarian organization or conservative organization has historically fought that kind of corruption.

The whole story is worth listening to. This exchange occurs at about minute 8:00 if you click below.



Professor Lessig's book suggests one solution he thinks would help: campaign finance reform. Whether or not that would be easy, given such things as free speech issues, it is worth thinking about. Lessig points out that all the money for the nation's political campaigns comes from .5% of the population which means that it is really the .5% vs. the 99.5% that Occupy Wall Street ought to be talking about.

Coinciding Principles Noticed Before

I have been making the point of this obvious common ground for some time now. For instance here:

Noticing New York Philosophy

Where does Noticing New York stand on the political spectrum? Noticing New York attempts to apply both conservative and liberal tests of what good government should be. They overlap a great deal more than is generally acknowledged. Conservatives may fear big government and liberals may fear big business, but these days the preeminent problem both should unite to oppose is the collusion of big government to give big business the edge

(See: Wednesday, March 23, 2011, Whither the New York Times? Noticing New York Comment Respecting a Manhattan Institute Sponsored Debate.)

And here:

The New York Times is often referred to as a “liberal” or “liberal establishment” newspaper. I think that is inaccurate. I think the Times is more a quasi-Democrat-establishment paper. To me, true liberals have more in common with libertarians than is often acknowledged. The Democratic establishment and the Times have assimilated predilections to unfairly support big business at the expense of the rights of individuals and local communities that ought to be protected. This doesn’t make them different from Republicans: mostly it makes them more like them.

A Voice on Eminent Domain

The city needs voices to speak out for "limited government, individual liberty, constitutional fundamentals” and those voices should be speaking out against eminent domain abuse as a foremost concern.

(See: Thursday, September 11, 2008, If the Sun Sets.)

And here:

Even though or despite the fact that the Atlantic Yards area was, through natural economic processes, attracting substantial economic capital and creating million dollar co-ops and condos, Atlantic Yards is a supreme example of something with so many bad economic equations it would never happen except for public subsidy. That subsidy is overriding private enterprise in a huge way that ought to be offensive to conservative and liberal thinkers alike.

(Sunday, November 15, 2009, Jane Jacobs Atlantic Yards Report Card #30: Avoidance of Cataclysmic Money? NO.)

An Odd Couple: Like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, More In Common Than They Think

Author and columnist Amity Shlaes, whom most would consider to be at the conservative or libertarian end of the political spectrum was one of the principles involved in running the now defunct newspaper the New York Sun written about in the “If the Sun Sets” article linked to above was. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman who writes for the New York times si what many would consider a liberal. Much was made of a supposed feud between Ms. Shlaes and the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman at a time when you could find at front table of Barnes and Noble new books that each of them had written analyzing Depression economics. Ms. Shlaes’ late 2007 book was “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression”; Krugman’s book, “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008” came out in 2009 and was a reworking of a 1999 Krugman book.

Each of these books endeavors to inform the reader about where the dangers lurk respecting what can send a country into a downward economic spiral, either an economic depression or a severe recession like the Great Recession we are now experiencing. Ms. Shlaes’ book, which I previously wrote about in a Noticing New York article (Wednesday, February 11, 2009, A Brooklyn Paper Editorial & Atlantic Yards: With Nothing Else Good To Say, We Are Stimulated To Say. . . ), is clearly focused to a large extent on finding fault with the Franklin Roosevelt administration’s handling of the Great Depression. It seeks, if you will, to bust the myth that Roosevelt handled it with aplomb. Krugman, on the other hand, would argue that, in big-picture terms, that the FDR administration acquitted itself well by having government step in to stimulate the economy in a Keynesian way, spending when private enterprise was failing to so.

One thing Shlaes’ book makes clear is just how free rangingly Roosevelt was reaching to experiment as he was trying to address the Depression. While the Milton Friedman/Richard Nixon “We are all Keynesians now” statements of 1966 and 1971 secured in economic convention the importance of Keynesian thinking when Roosevelt was president, that thinking was brand new and everything associated with it just an experiment. Shlaes is clearly preoccupied with the lines that should not be crossed, or are not beneficially crossed, when a subsidizing government steps in to take over enterprises that she thinks should be done independently by the private sector.

Shlaes’ criticisms of the fuzzy cost calculations and empire building associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) sound reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’ criticisms of the TVA in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” where Jacobs points out how the TVA (financed with what she describes as capital imported into the region by the government) with the assistance of tricky (government program) “advantageous accounting,” went astray from its original clean, healthy environment and low-cost power goals, once involving hydro-electric power, to provide subsides, ultimately, for uneconomic coal-fired and nuclear plants. Jacobs always endeavored to think freely, refusing to be tagged with political labels such as liberal, conservative, libertarian, Democrat or Republican.

Shlaes’ concepts of the multitudinous things she thinks government should not be spending on may make counter-cyclically Keynesian government spending a greater challenge but oughtn’t to preclude it. That being said, Krugman and Shlaes are both opposed to “crony capitalism.”

Krugman on Crony Capitalism

Krugman brings up the topic using the term a number of times in his “Return of Depression Economics.” For instance, as many are doing these days he compares current problems in the United States to Japan’s crisis of long lasting economic doldrums and says this of the Japanese economy and its “distinctive characteristics” once mistakenly associated with prospects for success (p.60):

Only much later would those same distinctive characteristics– the cozy relationship between government and business, the extension of easy credit by government-guaranteed banks to closely allied companies– come to be labeled crony capitalism and seen as the root of economic malaise.

On page 82 he revisits this in connection with the Asian economic bubble:

What should have been noticed was that he claim that Asian borrowing represented free private-sector decisions was not quite the truth. For Southeast Asia, like Japan in the bubble years, had a moral hazard problem– the problem that woudl soon be dubbed crony capitalism.

This leads in to a description of the necessary job the Asian banks were consequently not doing and why they were not directing “funds to their most profitable uses” (p. 83);

The answer, basically, was political connections– often, indeed the owner of a finance company was a relative of some government official. And so the claim that the decisions about how much to borrow and invest represented private-sector judgments, not to be second-guessed, rang more than a bit hollow.

There is more and the entire book is worth reading.

Bubble Popped on Crony Capitalism

Crony Capitalism makes it possible to go hugely into debt without getting corresponding assets in return. It means that society's investments aren't productive. If you pump money into a country without getting value in return you get a bubble economy* which shouldn't be good for anyone. But if a crony capitalism economy is going to be good for anyone it is probably going to be the cronies in whom such cronyism is concentrating the wealth.

(* Although John Maynard Keynes played speculatively as a mind exercise with the notion of government’s generating economic growth simply by hiring people to dig holes and fill them up again, he pointed out how wastefully nonsensical the notion was, even though it would have a stimulative effect. He did not address the bubble-inflating aspect of such conduct if it is paid for with debt and an expanded money supply. One thing to be wary of: Construction worker unions will support projects that are the conceptual equivalent of digging holes and filling them in again. Example: Atlantic Yards' tearing down of newly renovated top-of-the-market condominiums.)

Shlaes: Find and Reward Success, Not Government Connectedness

Even though Shales never once uses the actual term “crony capitalism” or a variant thereof in her own book, this kind of analysis is quite consistent with the kind of thinking and the many situations she presents with a mind to arguing that there were government practices on the part of the Roosevelt administration that unnecessarily prolonged the Depression, how not everything that was done in the name of lifting the nation out of the Depression was serviceable in doing so and how much of what government did was unwittingly counterproductive.

What Shlaes keeps returning to as her central vision for the kind of workable capitalism for which she argues is establishing a cycle of finding and rewarding economic success, rewarding such success not political connection. Crony capitalism, with its assets that don't produce, is the opposite of that and leads, overall for a country as a whole, to failure. Crony capitalism leads to a downward spiral, a cycle and ever-increasing concentration of power as political connection is rewarded instead.

(For material on the Krugman/Shlaes feud/debate here are some links, although what you will find discussed are their differences not the commonality discussed here. The last two links attempt some reconciliation of their viewpoints: November 19, 2008, 3:22 pm, Amity Shlaes strikes again, By Paul Krugman; Shlaes Back to Krugman, Posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008, by Amity Shlaes, November 29, 2008, Changes in money-wages and Amity Shlaes, Opinion November 29, 2008 The Krugman Recipe for Depression, Massive government spending is no solution to unemployment; The Leonard Lopate Show / December 01, 2008 / Paul Krugman on Depression Economics; Krugman vs. Shlaes — Not A Fair Fight, by Marion Maneker - November 29th, 2008; and My take on the Shlaes/Krugman debate, by Adam T, Sun Nov 30, 2008.)

Common Ground of Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party Not Shared By Crony Capitalist Bloomberg

What does the Tea Party think about the fact that they may have common ground with Occupy Wall Street? Well, some Tea Party spokespersons have been commenting that the difference between the Tea Party and Occupy is that te Tea party believes in process and the Constitution and the Occupy Wall Street protesters don’t. Really? Where did that come from? Where that comes from and what Occupy Wall Street protesters think about this and the potential for common ground will have to be the subject for a later article.

As for why there was a picture of Bloomberg’s two Labradors Photoshopped to show them joining the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, two things:

• Occupy Wall Street and the Tea party might have reason in common to oppose crony capitalism but Bloomberg is a man in favor of crony capitalism and practices it

• To read about the way that crony capitalism is concentrating wealth at the top and thereby putting in jeopardy your free speech rights to protest that very fact, (AND what the New York City real estate industry has to do with it), you’ll have to read my above-mentioned Noticing New York article about why Bloomberg’s dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, should perhaps be joining the Occupy Wall Street protesters. (See: Saturday, October 22, 2011, Occupy Wall Street and the Banks- Messages From Bonnie & Clyde, “They’ve Got Too Much Money”: Ownership of the Public Forum by the Wealthy?)