Occupy Wall Street: The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend Edition

A nice little article from Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone:

Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right

The article starts off with a mention of how internet Spy Andrew Breitbart had clandestinely infiltrated some journal web hangouts, stole their correspondences about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and compiled them for a crowd-sourcing effort to study them in depth.  Breitbart's last claim to fame was keeping a series of pictures of Anthony Wiener's junk on his personal phone (oh, and then releasing them to the public).  Breitbart's call to action can be found here:

'Crowdsource' This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to 'Destabilize' Global Markets, Governments. 

The gem from the Breitbart bit goes something like this:

The true purpose of the Occupy movement appears to be further economic and governmental destabilization, at a time when the world is already facing major financial and political challenges. By embracing the Occupy movement, President Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and their union allies may be supporting an effort to harm both the domestic and global economies; to create social unrest throughout the democratic world; and to embrace other radical causes, including the anti-Israel movement. 

How awful that the Occupy Wall Streeters would want to destabilize economies further than they were already destabilized by all the batshit the Occupiers are protesting?  There's two sides here... the first consists of banks (with a dash of government collusion) that nearly wrecked the global economy causing painful shockwaves that many people still feel today.  The second side consists of a few thousand people world-wide essentially saying "Dude, that wasn't cool."  I'm not sure convincing more people to agree with the "Dude, that wasn't cool" sentiment should be considered the greater destabilizing crime here.  I honestly pity whoever downloads the 8800 pages of emails posted and pours through them drooling at the thought of catching dirty liberals red-handed like an episode of Murder She Wrote.

But back to Taibbi.  His article first mentions that the people writing those stolen emails aren't actually organizers of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Second, and to the point, it mentions that the poor Occupy Wall Street movement is now going to take hits from all sides as we try to compartmentalize it under convenient labels.

This whole episode to me underscores an unpleasant development for OWS. There is going to be a fusillade of attempts from many different corners to force these demonstrations into the liberal-conservative blue-red narrative.

This will be an effort to transform OWS from a populist and wholly non-partisan protest against bailouts, theft, insider trading, self-dealing, regulatory capture and the market-perverting effect of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks into something a little more familiar and less threatening, i.e. a captive "liberal" uprising that the right will use to whip up support and the Democrats will try to turn into electoral energy for 2012.

Both sides are already guilty of sullying the pure idea at the core of Occupy Wall Street.  Taibbi describes how

...Obama has already made it clear that he is "on the same side as the Wall Street protesters" and that the Democratic Party, through the DCCC (its House fundraising arm), has jumped into the fray by circulating a petition seeking 100,000 party supporters to affirm that “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.”(I wonder how firmly the DCCC was standing with OWS sentiment back when it was pushing for the bailouts and the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act). 

We've similarly heard about MoveOn.org jumping into the demonstrations and attempting, seemingly, to assume leadership roles in the movement.

Given that, it seems pretty easy for the right to conjure up their response.

All of this is the flip side of the coin that has people like Breitbart trying to frame OWS as a socialist uprising and a liberal media conspiracy. The aim here is to redraw the protests along familiar battle lines.

The Rush Limbaughs of the world are very comfortable with a narrative that has Noam Chomsky, MoveOn and Barack Obama on one side, and the Tea Party and Republican leaders on the other. The rest of the traditional media won't mind that narrative either, if it can get enough "facts" to back it up. They know how to do that story and most of our political media is based upon that Crossfire paradigm of left-vs-right commentary shows and NFL Today-style team-vs-team campaign reporting.

The point is that the Occupy Wall Street movement has its core idea down so close to the base, that it literally should strike a chord with everyone in the proverbial 99 percent-ers.  It may strike a chord with me for different reasons than a hard core member of the tea party, but our goals can be achieved through the same means.  There's no reason for anyone actually paying attention to need this couched into the comfortable terms Taibbi described.  The core is simple enough for anyone to grasp, and it already has plenty of "with us or agin us" built in.  As Taibbi states:

Both traditional constituencies want these companies off the public teat and back swimming on their own in the cruel seas of the free market, where they will inevitably be drowned in their corruption and greed, if they don't reform immediately. This is a major implicit complaint of the OWS protests and it should absolutely strike a nerve with Tea Partiers, many of whom were talking about some of the same things when they burst onto the scene a few years ago. 

Politicians and the media have turned us all into Pavlovian dogs, but our triggers are the words "tea party" or "liberal" instead of bells.  The Occupy Wall Street movement gives us all the chance to put our knee-jerk slobbering to good use pushing for change that's actually worth affecting.  Taibbi concludes by writing:

The only way the Goldmans and Citis and Bank of Americas can survive is if they can suck up popular political support indirectly, either by latching onto such vague right-populist concepts as "limited government" and "free-market capitalism" (ironic, because none of them would survive ten minutes without the federal government's bailouts and other protections) or, alternatively, by presenting themselves as society's bulwark against communism, lefty extremism, Noam Chomsky, etc.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying one thing: beware of provocateurs on both sides of the aisle. This movement is going to attract many Breitbarts, of both the left and right variety. They're going to try to identify fake leaders, draw phony battle lines, and then herd everybody back into the same left-right cage matches of old. Whenever that happens, we just have to remember not to fall for the trap.

I know there are people on both sides that would rather spar with the opposition at all costs rather than stick to their ideology and push for useful change, but here's hoping they either come around or can somehow get drowned out from the conversation.

As a quick aside to the "suck up popular political support indirectly" from Matt Taibbi's quote above, I found this Rachel Maddow clip to be an interesting (albeit probably highly unlikely) solution to one of the biggest hurdles our country faces... private money corrupting our public elections.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We need the people who benefit the most from our current system to fix it, which will probably never happen. We shouldn't forget that our founding fathers ingeniously devised all sorts of paths to solve our problems, and maybe it's time we put a few more of them into practice.

Fool me once... shame on you......... Fool me- you can't get fooled again.

I'm going to kick this one off with an old favorite...

The reason I bring this up is because late last week, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney released his list of foreign advisors... something that Rachel Maddow looked at in great detail in the following clip.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The crux of the video addresses how Mitt Romney tapped a slew of former George W Bush foreign policy advisors and former members of neoconservative think tanks from the late nineties and from early in W Bush's presidency.

One of those think tanks was The Project For the New American Century, a group that actively campaigned to get our 9/11 response to include an invasion of Iraq.  While the group is now defunct, the website still exists here.  Maddow half-jokingly describes it as a collection of all the worst foreign policy ideas from the last decade together in one place.  She goes on to say that

 ...with the greatest foreign policy failure in American history hung around their necks, with the Project for the New American Century neocon fantasy a punchline now, Mitt Romney, as a presidential candidate has decided to embrace them.

Romney tapped six former members of The Project and three out of four members of the group that picked up where The Project left off when it dissolved (the Foreign Policy Initiative).  One of the guys, Cofer Black, helps head up the security group Blackwater.  Another guy, who Romney signed up for his anti-proliferation team, was the guy who pushed for President Bush to include the crap about British intelligence reporting that Iraq was all up in Niger's business trying to acquire yellow cake uranium.

As Maddow rightly points out, if you've screwed up that badly in a particular area, you should be disqualified from ever working in that area again, and I tend to agree.

Rick Perry: The "N Word" Edition

Sometimes you just have to take the easy pitch:

Rick Perry's Week Off To A Racially Insensitive Start

Not much to say beyond Rick Perry hunts animals at a camp called "Niggerhead."  Granted, that was something painted on a rock by the lessee prior to Rick Perry's Dad, who took over the least in the early 1980's.

From the Washington Post article itself that the Vanity Fair piece references:

At Rick Perry's Texas Hunting Spot, Camp's Old Racially Charged Name Lingered

Rick Perry says that as soon as his Dad could, he painted over the offensive language and even later turned the rock over to cover the language further.  I'm not really sure what more could be done given the unfortunate racism painted on the rock.

But the Washington Post piece interviews a number of people who hunted with Perry at the camp and their recollection of that rock differs.  Here's Perry's:

“My mother and father went to the lease and painted the rock in either 1983 or 1984,” Perry wrote. “This occurred after I paid a visit to the property with a friend and saw the rock with the offensive word. After my visit I called my folks and mentioned it to them, and they painted it over during their next visit.”

Straightforward.  Perry saw it, told his Dad about it, they painted over it.  Now, one dissenting account:

“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”

And another:

“I was just so taken aback that it was so blatant, so in your face,” said a person from the Dallas area who visited the camp once in 1990 or 1991 and did not want to be named in a story potentially critical of Perry. “It was just, ‘whop.’ It was a big rock, big enough to write that whole thing out.”

And finally The Washington Post checked it out:

As recently as this summer, the rock was still there, according to photographs viewed by The Washington Post.

In the photos, it was to the left of the gate.  It was laid down flat.  The exposed face was brushed clean of dirt.  White paint, dried drippings visible, covered a word across the surface.  An N and two G's were faintly visible. 

Now, I have to admit, I don't read this story and think "Daaaaaamn, there goes Perry's campaign."  I found a lot of the background in the article to be pretty interesting, describing Perry's section of Texas over the last sixty years or so.  Two particular quotes jumped out at me:

Throckmorton County, where the hunting camp is located, was for years considered a virtual no-go zone for blacks because of old stories about the lynching of a black man there, locals said. The 1950 Census listed one black resident in Throckmorton County out of a population of about 3,600. In 1960, there were four; in 1970, two; in 1980, none. The 2010 Census shows 11 black residents. 

Mae Lou Yeldell, who is black and has lived in Haskell County for 70 years, recalled a gas station refusing to sell her father fuel when he drove the family through Throckmorton in the 1950s. She said it was not uncommon in the 1950s and ’60s for whites to greet blacks with, “Morning, nigger!” 

“I heard that so much it’s like a broken record,” said Yeldell, who had never heard of the hunting spot by the river. 

Racial attitudes here have shifted slowly. Haskell County began observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day two years ago, according to a county commissioner. And many older white residents understand the civil rights movement as a struggle that addressed problems elsewhere.

And the other:

“It’s just a name,” said Haskell County Judge David Davis, sitting in his courtroom and looking at a window. “Like those are vertical blinds. It’s just what it was called. There was no significance other than as a hunting deal.”

The name “Niggerhead” has a long and wide history. It was once applied to products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often to geographic features such as hills and rocks.

In 1962, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names changed more than a hundred such names, substituting "Negro." 

“Typically these were in areas where African Americans were not all that common,” said Mark Monmonier, a geography professor at Syracuse University who wrote a book on the subject of racially offensive place names. 

The federal action still left many local names unchanged. In Texas, Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, lobbied to change the name of a mountain in Burnet, Tex., that had the same name as Perry’s hunting spot. In 1968, it became “Colored Mountain.” In 1989, the Texas NAACP began lobbying the state legislature to change many more names, such as “Nigger Creek” and “Niggerhead Hill,” although there has been resistance from private landowners, according to news accounts. 

I think a lot of elitist east coast liberal snobs often forget just how different this country can be from area to area.  We get wrapped up thinking how could anyone in their right minds not agree with my compassionate, logical stance?  We demonize people like those who live where Perry grew up and call them racists, writing them off completely as irrational.  We also fail to try to dig a little deeper to understand the context and intent, leaving us with articles that feel like cheap shots like the Vanity Fair piece originally linked.

The full Washington Post story doesn't try to duck the racism of the name of that camp, but it does dig deeper and provide a pretty interesting slice of history that puts it all in context.  It doesn't forgive or excuse, but in providing a fuller picture, it helps crystalize that Perry isn't a racist and the camp name is a horrible relic left over from a more regretful time.  It explores the institutional discrimination of our country and how that problem always exists in the fabric of our population (what's up GOP candidates who want to reinstate Don't Ask Don't Tell?),

But that doesn't stop Herman Cain from seizing his opportunity.  From the Vanity Fair piece:

Perry’s former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain appeared on Fox News yesterday and said, “For him to leave it there as long as he did, until before, I hear, they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country.”

I would imagine something else offensive to a lot of black people in this country would be equating slavery with political platform sound bytes in ways that cheapen the suffering that institution inflicted on millions of people and our country as a whole.

Cain did it anyway.