I wouldn’t call Jesse a spokesperson for OccupyWallStreet and he wouldn’t either. But, damn, he’s good. Today he was a guest of Christiane Amanpour’s round table on ABC’s This Week. He’s able to derail George Will’s self-reverential bloviating about smaller government, deficit reducing blahdy-blah and he does it with a pugnacious, mischievous delight. I live vicariously through LaGreca because I’ve always wanted to stuff a sock in Will’s mouth and down his esophagous till it emerges from his ass too and I’ll bet I’m not alone.
You can view the video at Hulabaloo here. Scroll down to the bottom video and fast forward to minute marker 4:20. (I’m not familiar with this open source video format so it will take me awhile to find a WordPress friendly version)
Here’s a different video of Jesse at OccupyWallStreet:
[youtube-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EN_–FiUkE]
Amanpour introduced LaGreca as a DailyKos blogger. Let me take this opportunity to point out that yours truly was booted off DailyKos in January 2008 due to accusations of thought crimes against Obama. It didn’t take long for me to get over it as there were many like minded individuals to join me in the political Oort belt. In a matter of hours, I went from a trusted user with mucho mojo and a not infrequent recommended diarist to instant pariah. Talk about co-opting a movement. If there was ever a movement that was co-opted by the DNC and bent over to take it from the banker backed Obama campaign, it would have to have been DailyKos. It also had no problems letting itself be the conduit for misogyny and using the accusations of racism as a weapon to budgeon people who cared more about the economy and the aftermath of the Bush administration than the wet dreams of self-described “creative class”.
But the worst thing DailyKos did was watch 18,000,000 voters get disenfranchised by their own party and cheer that process on. There is no greater offense that one group of citizens can do to another than to deprive them of their right to be heard and their votes to be taken seriously. It was shameful and disgusting behavior based on the premise that the ends justified the means. Well, congratulations for getting it so stupendously wrong, Markos. Millions of unemployed people around the country can thank you for making their struggle to remain in the middle class that much harder and their opportunity to have their votes counted increasingly obstructed. After all, if a progressive site like DailyKos says nothing, why can’t Ohio or Indiana or Alabama do what they want with their voters?
I wouldn’t go back to DailyKos for anything, and it is unlikely they would want me back. But if I were Jesse LaGreca, I wouldn’t affiliate myself too closely with DailyKos. Forget about the right wingers who will jump on it. DailyKos has destroyed its credibility to the rest of us Democrats in Exile. We here at The Confluence have always associated ourselves with the working class, which in this context is anyone not living off their investments regardless of education, profession or delusions of grandeur. DailyKos started out with good intentions and then spent all of its capital on a presidential candidate who used it to inflict anti-working class policies on the rest of us.
Jesse, you done good. You are a natural. You’re feisty, articulate and clever. But do yourself and us a favor and ixnay on the ailyDay osKay. This is the last time I’ll be posting videos of you until you do.
And Markos owes me and the other Clintonistas an apology for helping to split the party and emasculate the left on Obama’s behalf. Stupidity doesn’t even begin to describe what a mistake that was. He let us and the rest of America down. The best thing that Jesse can do for OccupyWallStreet is distance himself from DailyKos and the stink of the party co-opting the site.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Dailykos, George Will, Jesse Lagreca, OccupyWallStreet, working class |
The Confluence 
Are there enough Democrats in Exile to be able to elect or re-elect a number of Representatives or even a Senator-or-two if they were to start officially a new party to be called the Real Democrats or some such? Would a Real Democrat Party attract enough Democrats not-yet-in-exile to be able to win some elections against brand-name Democratic Party opposition?
If so, I would be interested in the organized rise and march of such a Real Democrat Party. If it supported Fair Trade aGAINST Free Trade, it might gain millions of votes in the Midwest and maybe even
elsewhere. The problem would be how to organize a mass defection of Democratic office-holders/seekers and ordinary member-voters all at once to such a new party. People like Marcy Kaptur and Bernie Sanders would not join such a party if it were the same old Free Trade sour milk in a bright new bottle.
Who knows what will happen in the next year? Maybe a new third party will emerge to represent the 99%. It doesn’t have to be affiliated with OccupyWallStreet but the occupation is demonstrating what deep dissatisfaction there is with both parties.
If a new party emerged, would it be a new Democrat type of party? I couldn’t say. But I wouldn’t join a party that isn’t committed to economic fairness, social justice, privatization of religion a new non carbon based infrastructure and gender equality. You can call that what you want.
Hi I just got on this site and read some of these posts about the possibility of creating a revamped democratic party or at the very least mobilizing to influence them and the upcoming elections. I hope that any mobilization should seek to influence both parties under the banner of representing the average American worker out there and the theme of “a pox on both their houses.” I wholeheartedly share the criticisms of Daily Kos and I believe that they and the current democratic party, including Obama have their own elitist blinders and special interests that they pander to to get elected at the expense of any rational policy aimed at ensuring a vibrant economy, including manufacturing, and ensuring that we focus on jobs. We all know how the democrats have caved on taxation fairness, bailed out the banks, getting nothing in return, and joined the republicans on wasting precious American lives and dollars on unnecessary wars. I don’t know if viewpoints on immigration will resonate with anyone in your group since I believe the information out there and media’s treatment on the issue is so poor. the upshot is is that legal immigration has grown exponentially during a time when the U.S. cannot produce enough jobs even to keep up with the U.S birth rate; when jobs are being shipped to the same countries from which people are coming from to the the U.S. For example, numerous firms ship jobs to Mexico and the unemployment rate there is under 5% but democrats argue that we must continue to accept more people from countries whose economies are doing better than our own. Also, current immigrants are entitlted to welfare benefits, medicaid and housing assistance. Anyway, I believe this is a huge issue related to the jobs problem that neither party addresses and the democrats are worse than the republicans on that score.
Oh, crap, Mary, you lost me at immigration reform. I just lost my high paying, high tech job and it wasn’t to some dude in Guadalajara. I lost it to a person in Europe whose job was protected by a union. Mexican labor is so five minutes ago. They take low paying jobs. I’m more worried about Asian, German and French scientists getting the work that American scientists are more than qualified to do and which we paid a lot in taxes to support tge rest of tge country.
As for Mexican immigrants, I feel sorry for the kids in Alabama who aren’t going to school anymore and I think it is unconscionable to deny anybody medical aid. No, really, it’s immoral.
I recommend that you watch the video in the last post that features Naomi Klein. She talks about the false mantra of scarcity. That’s the issue that I think a lot of tea party people miss. Then, focus your anger up the totem pole, not downwards. You’re not going to get anything out of a poor person because they have nothing to give you except a false sense if security. There but for the grace of god go you. In this economy, if you are not part of the 1%, you don’t count.
That’s what the occupiers are trying to change.
The view on Mexican jobs competition may be different from the Midwest ( the Great Lakes Region/ Cornbelt Prairie States/ Ohio River Valley) may be different than the view from the Mid Atlantic and North Atlantic States. Here is a news story about 216 manufacturing jobs hijacked from Benton Harbor, Michigan and sent into exile in Mexico by Whirlpool Corporation. It happened just earlier this year. http://www.advfn.com/nyse/StockNews.asp?stocknews=WHR&article=43050632&headline=whirlpool-to-close-benton-harbor-plant-216-jobs-cut
216 jobs is very little by itself. But it is part of a steady drainage of manufacturing jobs away from the industrial MidWest into Mexico ever since NAFTA was passed and signed. It adds up to several hundred thousand lost manufacturing jobs and is part of the deepening perma-poverty of the MidWest. ( Job drainage to China and other emerging semi-slave-labor zones is far greater).
I would not be bitter about illegal Mexicon immigrants here though. Many of them are economic refugees in flight from the destruction of their rural economy and society instigated and mediated by the dumping of subsidized MidWestern corn on the Mexican corn market.
And that process began when Mexico de-protectionized its agricultural sector as required by NAFTA. Perhaps one might view the illegal Mexican immigrants more sympathetically if we relabeled them “NAFTAstinian refugees”? It isn’t just some progressives who remain bitter about NAFTA. It is several million MidWesterners who opposed it as bitterly as they could before it got passed and signed also. It is probably the mass exodus of economic exiles in flight from the NAFTAfication of Mexico which allows Mexico to claim 5% unemployment, because millions of otherwise unemployable Mexicans
are here, hot in Mexico.
Colonel (Ret.) Patrick Lang offered the fairest and most creative solution to the illegal immigration problem a couple of years ago at his
Sic Semper Tyrannis blog. He suggested that all currently illegal immigrants present in the United States be upgraded to the status of Non-Citizen Economic Residents. As Non-Citizens they would not be eligible to vote in any of our elections. But as Legal Economic Residents they would be eligible for the same minimum wage rights/ labor organizing-union joining rights/ Social Security collection rights (based on paying their Social Security taxes/ schooling for their children/etc.. as any US citizen. Under the Lang Plan, if 10 million more Mexicans wanted to come here, they could come here and become Legal Economic Residents. Under such a plan there would be no “need” anymore for illegal immigration from Mexico or China or sneaky student visa overstayers from Europe or anywhere else. And any employER hiring anyone here illegally at any less pay or worse conditions or less of anything else than what Citizens and Legal Economic Residents would be hired at . . . . would be subject to the most extreme and savage punishment conceivable under the law. (That last idea is mine, not Colonel Lang’s).
While the loss of so many manufacturing jobs to Mexico is very serious, I would argue that the loss of over 100,000 research and development jobs since 2008 is even more serious. What is really annoying is for obama to claim that there aren’t enough STEM majors in college when just about every science and engineering professional I know, including myself, has been impacted by layoffs, downsizing and mergers. This is a loss on an unprecedented scale. Many jobs are moving to Massachusetts but the people that got left behind through no fault of their own are blighted. And just to be clear, we aren’t talking about performance problems. We’re talking about company A buying company B and then laying off 19,000 scientists from company B. the financial industry puts a lot of pressure on companies to reduce costs and turn over productivity gains to shareholders. In the pharma/biotech area, which can only pay off in the long term, this has been devastating to both workers and the company that has to deal with pared past the bone research departments.
Once we are out of work for a certain amount of time, it is very difficult to get a job. Science moves at such an accelerated pace these days that our skills quickly lose their value without practice. I’m lucky in that most of what I do can be done on a computer and I have access to literature and licenses. But my friends who are lab rats exclusively? It is very hard on them. And once the scientific infrastructure is gone, it will be very hard to get it back.
My Michigan bias may be what leads me to think that mass jobicide in all key sectors is equally important. If America becomes a manufacturing outhouse on par with Moldova or Belarus, the nation becomes too poor to support any high-level STEMwork at all. If the STEM sector is laid waste by targetted mass merger-mania jobicide, then the nation becomes too “dumm” to keep pace with the global advance of manufacturing either, which makes the nation too poor to support the recovery of a willfully-destroyed STEM sector.
For now, a tax or even a deficit-funded PharManhattan Project would be the first thing to work on because the problem is more tightly focused and narrowly bounded and therefor the solution can also be more tightly focused and narrowly bounded too. The “Free Trade Abolition” problem is huger, more diffuse, and harder to solve. It will require a cultural reformation throughout American society so total as to enable a couple hundred million people to attack and destroy the entire Church of Free Trade. I will lift my little finger in that direction by
launching the following meme in hopes it will fly rather than crash.
— “Free Trade is the New Slavery. Protectionism is the New Abolition.”
But if we don’t solve the Free Trade Problem eventually, America will
collapse like the Soviet Union did from sheer poverty and corruption.
When that happened, many STEM people throughout the Soviet Union
were driven out of STEM work altogether by the general poverty crash-cramdown. In the long run, we really should want to prevent that from happening here.
By the way, I live in Ann Arbor and we here were all witness to the serial merger and re-merger and re-re-merger of pharmaceutical companies. You must know orders-of-magnitude more than I know about the work that was done in the huge research facility which was Warner-Lambert and the Pfizer (with maybe other nameplates I don’t know or remember). Now the ex-Pfizer facility is owned by the University of Michigan in hopes that it will become the incubator for new research and application projects and launches. Certainly we hope it does not become a ruin and a silent elegy to the High Classical
Scientechnological Civilization which once flourished here.
Oh! . . . another by the way . . . industry has declined enough in Southeast Michigan area that the air is clearer enough often enough that I can see the Ambassador Bridge from where I work day after day after day. The air never used to be that clear and transparent day after day after day. Very nice if you have a job. If you don’t , it is a “so what” fact at best.
You are spot on that globalization and other issues regarding skilled labor and high tech labor across the globe are crucial. I regret if I emphasized one segment over another. Yet, while the the scarcity argument is often blown out of proportion by the right wing in order to prevent a more just distribution of resources and to protect tax inequity, to say it is nothing is ill-informed and will do a disservice to your cause if you are sincere about representing the entire 99% of the population and of advocating for the necessary and widespread structural economic reforms that need to be taken in a variety of sectors to revitalize the U.S. and generate real wealth rather than bogus short-term financial scams. I am familiar with Klein’s work, unfortunately, in this instance the information base is sadly lacking. The U.S. economy has eroded and structural reforms across a variety of sectors need to be undertaken to generate more domestic resources that are kept in the U.S, in addition to more progressive and rational tax policies and financial regulations for just distribution. I am also terribly concerned that your comments indicate that you may be unduly focused on the top 20% in the wage earner tier, though claim you are a 99%. You say that you lost you high tech job to high tech competition in Europe: Firstly, I am sorry to hear about that and hope things change for you. Again, I reiterate that both ends of the totem pole need to be addressed. I know several people who work near where I live in NJ who just lost their 12 hour jobs to people who went to work for 8 dollar an hour–cash basis now. With all due respect, this isn’t passe as you say even if more upscale issues from other venues are also important. Displaced lower wage American workers deserve to be represented too and there are many of them in the 99% who are getting the shaft and ignored by the politicians not just people who make 100,000 K a year. I hope this movement does not take on an elitist bent of its own; it will stunt its growth and more importantly will not represent many people who also need and deserve representation. Anyway, I do wish you luck in all your endeavors and causes. I am probably in your socioeconomic cohort, with a piled high and deep from an ivy, but I really want to address issues that pertain to everyone in the 99% not just the next tier and intelligentsia below the 1% Good luck to you..
Mary, see my comment above. I am in an industry that has the media and our politicians have largely neglected. I *am* one of the 99%. My salary was good but I am nowhere near making the legenday $250,000 per year. I made less than half of that. But you behave as if our concerns were not really important. We’re also losing our health insurance and houses. We are no different. But you should worry anyway. Without us, you will not have a vibrant R&D sector. In the coming years, you won’t have new antibiotics, birth control or medications for mental illness.
In the past three years, all we ever hear about are the construction workers who can’t find jobs. We can’t find them either. It’s not that there is a shortage of projects and therapies we could be working on. It’s that the companies we once worked for are not hiring.
At all.
Don’t get in a snit over the lower wage Americans. I’ve always advocated for them. I come from Pittsburgh fergawdsakes. One of my grandfathers worked in a steel mill, the other was a union bus driver. I have uncles who were laid off in the late 70’s when US Steel decided it didn’t wan to make steel in the US anymore. I went to sleep in my grandmother’s house listening to the sound of machinery clanging and watching the sandblasting turn the evening sky red. I also know what happens to towns when the jobs go away and there’s no money to fix the water system so people are constantly at risk of getting sick from giardia. I’ve seen streets that you can no longer walk because they’re full of crack dealers and prostitutes. If you don’t think I understand the plight of the lower wage worker, you’re just wrong. Before I got my degree, I was one, working three part time jobs during the Reagan recession to make ends meet with no health insurance for me or my eldest daughter.
And yet, I will continue to advocate and draw attention to the plight of the high salaried, high tech worker. For us, the safety net is even more precarious. We live in high cost of living states. Our salaries, while generous, don’t get us lavish lifestyles in NJ. I drive a second hand car and live in a townhouse. That’s all I can afford on my salary. And now that my severance is almost up, I will have to pinch even more pennies to keep even that.
But more than that, we are the educated, tech savvy middle class that everyone is told to aspire to be. We pay taxes out the wazoo. Without us footing the bill for so much necessary spending, the collapse of local and state governments is going to accelerate. You should be worried about what is happening to us. And if you’re not, then you are extremely short sighted.
We can’t get anything but contract work and part time work with no bennies for all our degrees. You don’t think it can happen to you but it has happened to hundreds of thousands of us. If chemists and structural biologists and cheminformaticists aren’t safe, no one is.
And we’re not going to go away. We’re America’s dirty little secret. The country has no idea how bad the situation is.
Gosh, I feel like we are talking past each other although I agree 110% with your concern for jobs in the scientific communities. Let me try again. In addition for reforms in the sectors that have been discussed, I raised another issue with which I have a great deal of professional experience that is ignored by the media and both political parties because of long standing emotional feelings on the issue and complete disinformation by the media among virtually all the outlets, even conservative leaning outlets. It is a huge problem. If you reread my first column I mentioned the current LEGAL immigration system, which has a million and a half and growing people coming here every year and that is based on a new set of rules different from the system to which everyone hearkens whey they say “the U.S. was built on immigration.” (not to mention that the original system was enacted because the country needed workers to develop the country and in part because they wanted people to be able to live in a democracy which were rare at the time). And, the million and half a year hail from all over the world and include scientists from China, Russia, Europe, India, etc. who will compete for jobs in the American scientific community even though there are not enough jobs for American scientists here AND there are probably more opportunities for said scientist in the countries from which they hail than their contempararies in the U.S.. (i.e., China and India’s economies are booming– slowing down a bit but way better than the U.S, Russia’s economy last I heard was growing by 4% annually, at least quadruple the U.S.; Germany’s is better as is Sweden’s, France and England’s unemployment rate is around 7% compared to our 9% and they do a better job of relocating and supporting laid off workers. (If you aren’t familiar with current legal immigration laws and statistics, just ask I will give you info and websites, if you are interested)
A) For starters, can we all agree that there is a jobs crisis in the U.S. that is worse than many other countries both advanced and developing, (e.g., Brazil’s gangbuster’s economy, Mexico’s growth, due in part to its oil resources, globalization, and so-called U.S. free trade, and the list goes on and on. Is the U.S. in any position to take in so many more people that will compete for American jobs, when our economy is in such bad shape? Many LDC’s contiguous to North America have deep problems of distribution as do we, but their growth rate is good and they are democracies. If Russians could take on Soviet tanks, and Libyan’s and Egyptians die in the street to take on some of the most violent and repressive regimes on earth, then people in neighboring democracies can take on issues of economic justice similarly to what we are doing; Am I wrong here?
B), the jobs numbers are in part “hard facts.” I’m sure you have seen the media’s reports on the staggering amount of jobs that need to be generated to replace lost jobs and keep up with population growth. These figures don’t include the impact of Legal immigration which the media and the politicians both ignore because the dems don’t want to upset pro-immigrant interest groups and the republicans want cheap labor–and not just among low wage earners. Legal immigrants contain many educated and middle class people. We would need close to another 100,000 a jobs a month at least in addition to those the media reports when immigration is factored in. We know this will not happen and employers are happy to hire immigrants– to be biased against them would be discrimination. (FYI, the jobs #’s are not the only problem; the public schools are overwhelmed with children of legal immigrants and it is a great under-reported story as to why test scores are low, and this does not change even two or three generations after the parents’ arrival, even in NJ school districts that spend 22,000 per year a student to try to remedy the problem, including ESL classess and numerous support programs. We need K-12 school students that are able to acquire the math and science skills to compete in a high tech world but we are going in the opposite direction)
C) The reason that legal immigration is now so large is that there is no limit on immigration numbers for the familial relations category (now the main category) that replaced the old system in the late 1960s. I repeat, NO limit on that category. and, the only requirement for entry is that you have a family member–i.e. a system of nepotism. Given our economic problems, a system such as Canada’s is a much better model. A main path in Canada is the business category, in which people can come and open businesses, with the proviso they hire Canadian workers. In fact, they have a number of high tech and scientific start-ups there that arose from their immigration policy and they are another country that is beginning to kick US butt in high tech because of this much more rational and I would add fairer policy since it benefits everyone. Former U..S. immigration policies had components of this, which is why it used to contribute to genuine job creation but current immigration policy pretty much gutted rational incentives that would lead to quality US job creation linked to immigration. There are of course some immigrants that open up small businesses. Near where I live, there is a well-run 24/7 “minimart” with close to twenty employees. (Of course he only hires pakistani’s which is where he he is from :)!
Thank you for writing that.
Honk, honk.
RD: This guy’s better than Jesse:
http://www.correntewire.com/way_better_than_jesse
LaGreca won’t break with the Kossacks any more than Hullaballoo front-pager ThereIsNoSpoon will break with the Ventura County Democratic Party, where he is Vice-Chair. Na ga happen.
LaGreca was good enough to get in front of the cameras and sucker the rest of us, including me, but I think that (as above) the real message from real occupiers and not D operatives like LaGreca. I need to be a lot more careful with provenance and sourcing.
Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out. As for LaGreca breaking ranks, I try to never give up on people if they have the ability to communicate in a way that resonates. I’m not going to be a purist. All I’m saying is that Jesse will be much more effective for the rest of us if he breaks with DailyKos. Whether he realizes that or not remains to be seen.
The zeitgeist is changing, Lambert. I think we were way ahead of the game. We dissociated ourselves from the party apparatus early on and aligned ourselves with the working class. But we have to now anticipate where this movement is going and keep up with it and that will mean changes on our part as well. And part of that may mean learning to get along with the Jesse LaGreca’s provided they can break away with their former affiliations.
Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more, both about being ahead and now keeping abreast of the zeitgeist (and maybe preserving a place for the long form 😉 However, it really is the institutional role of the D party to infiltrate and decapitate and destroy whatever is to their left in Versailles — and right now, the occupations are squarely in their sights, and our famously free press will be only to happy to enable them.
For people like TINS and Jesse — who are really good at messaging — the litmus test is pretty clear: Break with the Ds. And the way for them to pass that test is to say right now that they won’t vote for Obama no matter what.
I know that just as in Egypt “all walks of life” have to participate in the occupations. But people like Jesse, who no matter what he may say, and even if he doesn’t want to, are going to get put in the position of being spokespersons by the press, so they need to be held a to a higher standard. The press is already running a play that the Obama’s kabuki jobs bill and the occupations dovetail.
the litmus test is pretty clear: Break with the Ds. And the way for them to pass that test is to say right now that they won’t vote for Obama no matter what.
That’s a very good test. Watch that closely and don’t let your guard down.
Vowing to vote for OR vowing to vote against loses your bargaining power. (Unless you’re saying “Nominate a different Democrat.”)
You must be new here. We’ve been refuseniks since 2008 because we were horrified at the way the DNC manipulated the primary voting process. We thought that was a bad omen and signalled that Obama would not be responsive to voters. We were right.
We would prefer that the Democrats nominate someone else ASAP.
I like Brenden Burke. He’s very authentic. The difference between Brenden and Jesse is that LaGreca has a knack for reducing what Brenden says down into easily digestible sentences. And that’s what you need if you want to make a point on TV where there’s not enough time to go on for 4 paragraphs.
I’d probably suck on TV so I appreciate the LaGreca’s out there who can distill the moment so well.
I’m not even sure that being on the TV is a good thing. It’s been noticed that the “reporting” really gets biased towards make spokesman. It’s a solidarity solvent…
I always like it when you go into that mess at DK that I also got caught up in. As they troll you outta there, your comments, defenses, counter-attacks get vanished away into archived TU territory. Then you can never get at them as you lose TU status. I remember you there at DK and I always loved what you said. But people disappeared without anyone knowing what happened until it was there turn for the brown shirts to come in the night and that was when the realization hit me, that there were few to defend me because few knew what they were up against until it was there turn to stand alone. Afterwards I used to read and saw Davefromqueens getting it and standing up like a bull in the ring getting slaughtered little by little. He loved that place and it was so sad to watch but I was out and saw what they were doing to him and couldn’t help.
He died of a heart attack over it.
It was constant harassment pure and simple. The same kind that drove the St Louis girl to suicide over facebook. I have had them come after me at utne cafe long ago and that was my boot camp.
As for Greco they probably wouldn’t have him on if he were big mojo at DK. It opens doors. But what kind of doors? Do you really want to walk through. I like Amapour but the Media is the Message and all of it is just information circulating globally to amuse us.
The Wall st sitters are not there to amuse us. Naomi Klein now sounds very old-fashioned with her rhetoric of shock, shock, shock. I ear Wall st will end like Paris Spring 68, just fizzling out into the void, all that energy dissipating.
The energy is there but we have no structure to deal with it, to use it. The French post moderns still write about May 68 and still wonder where all the energy went.
During hippiedom I could see where all the energy went. At the time. Now they can’t buy them off in the same way and I don’t think they know how anyway.
Unemployed masses are a grave danger to a system. So I am lightened to see so many unemployed. Look at what you have been doing RD wince you went on the dole. You would not have had the time before.
Ah, but when you were a young hippy, technology was in the dark age. Remember how NASA solved brought back Apollo 13 using slide rules? I am not saying that the Internet is the answer to all of our prayers because that’s naive. But it is the single most significant tool for getting this movement off the ground. It makes a national dialogue easier to accomplish and it has the potential to present itself as it is, not as the right and mainstream media wish to portray it. You get direct access to the movement without an intermediary.
No doubt the Democratic party would love to be that intermediary. But you know what? That’s why we have elections, to serve as our representatives in government. We don’t need a party to represent our dissatisfaction and anger to each other.
It’s really sad to hear of suicides and heart attacks at over being banned and harassed at DailyKos. That’s really unfortunate and probably indicates an underlying physical or mental state that the assholes at DailyKos aggravated. No one should have that much emotion invested in a site that is not their own. It took me only a couple of hours after being booted to start feeling optimistic about my abilities to write for myself even if no one ever read me. No one should feel like all is lost when they’re booted out if the tribe. But DailyKos uses that fear to keep people in line.
Too sad.
I don’t think most people realize just how true that is: That to a great extent we are globally fed pretty much the same news-telegrams from just a few different news agency (in the West most likely “courtesy of AP”!) and wherever you are, the exact same footage of news appear in the news hour.
Not all that different from when a Production Company sends out a movie trailer and they get to decide what we are allowed to see from the coming movie.
OT. The first round of the Socialist primary in France was today. The centrist François Hollande so far has about 38% of the vote, Socialist party head Martine Aubry has 30-odd %, the farthest left Arnaud Montebourg has 17%, Ségolène Royale (PS nominee 2007) only 7%.
This ain’t done yet, Ségo and Montebourg will probably endorse Aubry for the 2nd round.
The Socialists are looking stronger now. Dumping DSK’s lecherous ass is the best thing they could’ve done.
That sounds promising. Keep us informed.
Can you tell me how these outcomes compare to primaries in previous election years? Have centrists gained ground at the expense of the socialists? If so, can you correlate that with any cultural phenomenon?
It’s hard because the process has changed dramatically. The socialists had their first primary in 2007 but it was restricted to party members only. This primary is a new phenomenon, completely open to any French registered voter willing to pay 1 euro and sign a statement of adhering to the values of the left (a mild, generic statement in support of the Republique and social justice). As a result, polling organizations have had no clue how to construct a sample.
The Socialists are well-positioned to capture the center because the UMP (Sarko’s party) has veered so dramatically to the right, trying to capture the far-right Front National vote with its xenophobic discourse. The FN in its turn is trying to go mainstream, or at least trying to find an entrance in from beyond-the-pale, so the two parties are getting awfully chummy, at least rhetorically.
The self-identified center is anemic. Bayrou, the centrist candidate of 2007, is nowhere to be seen and Jean-Louis Borloo has decided to stand down.
As the PS has moved more to the center, the left of the spectrum is filled in by the Front de Gauche, an alliance of the Parti Communiste Français, the Parti de Gauche and the Gauche Unitaire. Their candidate is the astute and in-your-face Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist and minister under Jospin, whose style and message I like a lot. Very very down on the corporate media, the banksters, and globalization. If you get snippy with this guy he will stick his foot in your ass. Great fun to watch.
There, everything you wanted to know about French politics but were afraid to ask!
Great summary! If you want to go on at length, we could give you an account. It’s important to keep track of trends in other countries to see where we might be headed and whether there is something global going on. My gut feeling is that we’ve reached a saddle point for right wing dominance.
It would be my pleasure. I would only post upon important events and then only if I have the time and (how shall we say) mental wherewithal to do so.
Oh god, and I didn’t even mention the woes afflicting the UMP. They are mired in scandal up to their clavicles involving kickbacks, dead engineers, submarines, Lebanese arms dealers, suitcases full of cash and bean-spilling first wives with names like Helen of Yugoslavia. It’s pure cinema.
Let me hash it out with my partner in crime (Katiebird) and we’ll contact you.
Hey Ugsome, always love your reports from and about France. 🙂
And I absolutely agree with you about DSK and was appaled when he recently was interviewed on tv … by one of his – or his wife’s – female friends. Answering questions that had been given to him in advance. Not to mention all his famous male friends standing up for him, defending him no matter what. He is so the victim, isn’t he now!
What I wonder is, doesn’t it hurt François Hollande, that he left Ségolène Royale for another woman? Or is that “water under the bridge” now? Not that it should haunt him forever, it just seemed that the DSK debacle woke up French feminists, and they might have an opinion about this?
I don’t really know anything about the Hollande/Royale split is viewed nowadays; none of my friends much remark on it nor have I read anything about it in the press. I do hear it wasn’t a very happy split and they go to some lengths to avoid one another.
I watched that DSK ‘interview’ on TF1. He said you have to read the DA’s report attentively, then lied outright by stating he’d been cleared. No, sir, the prosecution did not have a strong enough case its view and that is something quite different. Clearly he was figuring that 13 million TF1 viewers don’t read English, don’t have the time or inclination, or figured DSK read it so they don’t have to. I really hate the guy now.
The DSK débâcle ( <–check out those diacritics ) woke up a lot of people and things started being discussed that were hushed up before. I often have the impression of having climbed into a time machine and landed 40 years ago. Then again, I have the same impression in the US in the Obama years.
Oh, and his defenders Bernard-Henri Lévy, Jack Lang and Manuel Valls can take a long walk off a short plank in my view.
the litmus test is pretty clear: Break with the Ds. And the way for them to pass that test is to say right now that they won’t vote for Obama no matter what.
That’s what I want to see. Some mention of Obama/Dems along those lines. At the moment his very existence is MIA from OWS. But since there is a policy of no politics , they avoid having to say anything about anything like that .Their options are open and the Dems have but begun to court. Whatever The next few weeks will be interesting.
The timing is right. Well, actually, we’re almost out of time to get the DNCs attention. But the Occupation is going to start affecting Obama and the Democrat’s if they can’t think of something to make the economy better. The country will blame them and start casting around for a third possibility, even if it has to be created.
Come to think of it, the occupation might have been the creation of the right wing noise machine instead of the left. What better way to focus attention on all of the ways the Democrats have failed us.
Come to think of it, the occupation might have been the creation of the right wing noise machine instead of the left……
there does come a point where what appears left and right on the street level , becomes one.
Another Jesse with something to say . I did not realize the amount of Secretary of the Treasury that have come from Goldman Sachs.
Jesse Ventura Attends Occupy Wall Street Protest .
I used to think that Tim Geithner was from Goldman-Sachs but Suskind’s book says that’s not true. He’ s just been around bankers too long so now he thinks like them.
Tim was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York among many other jobs. He’s been in with that crowd forever it seems.
Didn’t Geithner’s father work with Obama’s mother in the Ford Foundation back in the day ? Or is that an urban legend? Actually something like that makes a better reason why he’s there than anything else. It can’t be based on ability
Geithner’s Fed Bio
Timmy is as establishment as anyone they could possibly find.
good god! He’s US government tenure will start approaching J. Edgar Hoover’s record soon! /snark!