Visual source: Newseum
Michael Kimmelman reminds us that protests in public spaces have a long history and that seeing people in these spaces has its own kind of power.
We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.
Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.
What's really amazing is how few of our public spaces these days are really "public." The commons have been divided, the spoils handed out, and now we have to settle for places we're allowed... until we're not.
Nicolas Kristof sees frustration at the heart of the Occupy movement.
... many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don’t comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to “occupy Wall Street.”
There are differences, of course: the New York Police Department isn’t dispatching camels to run down protesters. Americans may feel disenfranchised, but we do live in a democracy, a flawed democracy — which is the best hope for Egypt’s evolution in the coming years.
Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year. There’s a parallel sense that the political/economic system is tilted against the 99 percent. Al Gore, who supports the Wall Street protests, described them perfectly as a “primal scream of democracy.”
Kristof makes a couple of good points here. One, capitalism is still the best functioning system we've seen. Two, that or banks are engaged in their own form of robbery—taking money from the citizens to cover their risks.
David Ignatius draws many of the same connections as Kristof, but only makes it two paragraphs before he tries to paint OWS and the Tea Party as aspects of the same movement.
What’s intriguing about the eruption of Occupy Wall Street is that it’s so similar to other populist movements that are demanding change in nearly every major region of the world. You can’t help but wonder if we aren’t seeing, as a delayed reaction to the financial crisis of 2008, a kind of “global spring” of discontent.
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The Tea Party movement may wear conservative colors, but it arose as a protest against elites in Washington and on Wall Street who were seen to be profiting at the expense of everyday people. Occupy Wall Street comes at these same issues from the left, but the two movements have much in common.
Yes, so much that fighting
for Wall Street is a central component of Tea Party philosophy. Not surprising, in a "movement" started by traders for the benefit of traders. Sure, the Tea Party makes noise about the bailouts that are conveniently in the past, but is staunchly against new regulations or punishment of those involved in milking the public.
Elisabeth Rosenthal wonders what became of global warming. Not the actual warming, which is increasingly making itself obvious in its effects on the world, but the issue of global warming.
Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, Mr. Obama now talks about “green jobs” mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe’s new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.
“In Washington, ‘climate change’ has become a lightning rod, it’s a four-letter word,” said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.
It's only a four-letter word if you buy into the nonsense that regulation is somehow responsible for cutting back on jobs, and that deregulation would increase jobs. That may not be global warming, but it's certainly a lot of hot air.
Steve Rattner dares to touch what might be the real third rail in politics today: globalization.
For the typical American, the past decade has been economically brutal: the first time since the 1930s, according to some calculations, that inflation-adjusted incomes declined. By 2010, real median household income had fallen to $49,445, compared with $53,164 in 2000. While there are many culprits, from declining unionization to the changing mix of needed skills, globalization has had the greatest impact.
Yes, globalization. The phenomenon that free traders like me adore has created a nation of winners (think of those low-priced imported goods) but also many losers. Nowhere have these pressures been more intense than in the manufacturing sector, which I saw firsthand as head of President Obama’s Auto Task Force.
Unfortunately, after all that, Rattner completely flatlines on a solution. The best he can come up with is tax incentives for business. Not only that, he makes a silly argument that Solyndra shows government shouldn't invest in nurturing new technologies. So Rattner sees the problem, but not an answer. Apparently, suggesting anything that might really address this problem (i.e. backing away from "free trade" agreements) is still unthinkable in D.C.
The New York Times wonders why the wealthy don't want to be like Warren.
The Congressional Research Service found that 200,000 millionaires — almost two-thirds of taxpayers with taxable income above $1 million — paid a lower tax rate (combining income and payroll taxes) than the typical taxpayer making less than $100,000.
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Demanding a modicum of fairness is not class warfare. It is sound policy. With the government in need of money for programs to revive the economy, create jobs, help the most vulnerable, and wrestle down the deficit, the undertaxed riches of the rich are a natural place to look.
Yup.
Leonard Pitts provides his insight on the phenomenon of Herman Cain.
Modern social conservatives, in my experience, do not hate black people en masse. To the contrary, there are two kinds of blacks they love. The first is those, like Rice, who are mainly mute on the subject of race, seldom so impolite as to say or do anything that might remind people they are black. The second is those who will engage on race, but only to lecture other blacks for their failures as conservatives conceive them. And that, friends and neighbors, is Herman Cain all over.
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He thus neatly encapsulates what has become an article of faith for many white conservatives; namely, that it is they, not black and brown people, who are the true victims of bigotry. Mind you, they have not a shred of a scrap of a scintilla of evidence to support this cockamamie idea, but they believe it anyway. And now they find support for their idiocy in this Negro from Atlanta.
Personally I'm just baffled at what has happened to the well-honed conservative Anti-Christ radar system. I mean, here's a guy named "Cain" telling them he wants to be the leader of the free world and will force onto everyone the number 999. You can practically small the brimstone! Or maybe it's pepperoni. In any case, I challenge you to write a letter to your crazy aunt and point out this Revelation.
I appreciate you donating your time to read this article this morning, but what happens if you go all in and donate your brain?
So far researchers have conducted nearly 50,000 interviews with participants and successfully taken more than 500 brain donations.
With brain donation, unlike other types of organ donation, it's important to have information about the donor and their mental functioning during life. For years, nurses have visited the homes of future donors to interview them and have them complete a battery of tests.
It's not a pass / fail situation. They take your brain no matter how they answer the test. So... no pressure.
Was there a Great Cthulu of the Mesozoic, a massive squid that not only ate giant sea-going reptiles, but turned their bones into a self portrait? Um, maybe not.
... I kept hearing rumors of a bombastic, super-hyped presentation due to be presented at this year’s Geological Society of America meeting in Minneapolis. The scuttlebutt was that someone was going to give a talk about a super-intelligent, predatory squid which fed on huge ichthyosaurs during the Triassic. Fascinating, if true, but the reason that all the paleontologists I met were chuckling was because there was not a shred of actual evidence to back up the claims. Apparently, whoever was set to give the talk had apparently stayed up late watching It Came From Beneath the Sea too many times.
Boy, are you going to be sorry you laughed when the Great really, really Old One gets here.
Cthulhu R'lyeh Fhtagn!
