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I want you to stop being afraid
Of other Americans
Of other religions
Of other classes
Of other nations
Of speaking out.

You’re Americans.
Act like it.

If you don’t get it, ask an American who does.

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3. So beautiful!

Loved this image.

When Krugman won his Nobel Prize for Economics, I commented that it was like discovering that your favorite, rather scholarly, uncle was secretly an undercover agent.

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The use of pepper spray in wartime, we should be constantly reminding ourselves, is an official war crime. It’s chemical warfare, and it’s torture.

If these policemen were soldiers, and the students were citizens of a foreign country, those in uniform would be facing prison sentences for what they’d done. Why do police forces have the right to perpetrate with impunity what are effectively war crimes against their own people? Why do we accept this so easily?

From the Atlantic:

James Fallows: Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis

In case you haven’t yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened yesterday at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:

Let’s stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful protest against other people’s rights to go about their normal lives, and the rights of institutions to have some control over their property and public spaces. Without knowing the whole background, I’ll even assume for purposes of argument that the UC Davis authorities had legitimate reason to clear protestors from an area of campus — and that if protestors wanted to stage a civil-disobedience resistance to that effort, they should have been prepared for the consequence of civil disobedience, which is arrest.

Read the rest of this article…

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In every quarter since the recession officially ended in June 2009, the economy has grown. And yet ordinary Americans are still getting poorer, while the gap between the richest and the poorest still continues to grow. We need an economy that works for everyone, not just the rich.

The graph is from this article in the NYT.

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The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been widely seen in the media as a coalition of flakes, unsure of why they’re actually there, without any clear message. And while there may be a grain of truth in that there is no one clear leader articulating demands, as Glenn Greenwald said,

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?

I admire Glenn’s passion, and while he’s right, I think he’s articulating the wrong emotional message. He’s articulating disgust (“oozing,” “corruption,” “crony”). The problem with this is that disgust isn’t an attractive quality. It’s offputting. People aren’t generally inspired by disgust. And when they are inspired by disgust the effects generally aren’t very positive. All racism has an element of distaste and disgust within it. Disgust isn’t the way to go with Occupy Wall Street, and the bigger challenge of facing up to our current problems.

The message that needs to be evoked is, I believe, compassion. And I think that the message of compassion has arrived.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein “got it” and today published a column highlighting the “We Are The 99%” website. We Are The 99% is a simple evocation of the fear and suffering that ordinary Americans are experiencing — at the same time as bankers take home millions in bonuses, businesses sit on record piles of cash, and politicians argue about which of the most vulnerable to impose suffering on next.

These are simple stories: photographs of people holding up a sign explaining what they’re going through right now. They’re heartbreaking, Here’s just one:

I am 22. My husband and I have lived apart for 3 years. When we were 19, he joined the Navy so we wouldn’t end up on the street. He was stationed out west, and I am stuck in the east. The military does not pay for your family to move if it is your first duty station after joining, and we cannot afford to move me, our animals, or our belongings.
We never wanted this. We are the 99%.

These are not primarily messages of anger. They can lead to anger, but they start with the engagement of compassion. These people (we) are hurting. It’s impossible not to feel that and to be moved by it (well, I’m sure there are many right-wingers and libertarians who will play “blame the victim). But for most people — most of the 99% of us who aren’t doing well, and who are experiencing fear and distress and financial difficulty — compassion reminds us we’re not alone. It reminds us we have responsibilities to each other.

The message we need to get out there is a compassionate one. This should be the message, loud and clear, at Occupy Wall Street and in the world as a whole:

We are the 99%. We are suffering. We want an economy that works for everyone, not just the few.

Don’t take the 99% figure too literally. As Ezra Klein noted, “If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay.” The 99% figure is a symbol. It’s a symbol of the growing inequity in our society. The richest are taking everything. Their greed is rampant. They either don’t know or don’t care about how much the rest of us are struggling. We need to let them know, in no uncertain terms.

I am one of the 99%. I run a small publishing business. Until the crash of 2008 I made a reasonable living. Then sales plummeted and my income fell. I had to cancel my health insurance. My wife had to cancel her health insurance. We had to put the kids on a state health insurance program. That was humiliating and scary. Pressure from the health insurance industry means that kids have to be without health insurance for a month before they can be considered for a state health insurance plan. Both of our kids have health problems. That was a long month. Fortunately neither of them got sick in that month, for it could have bankrupted us. I live in fear of bankruptcy right now. If I get seriously ill, or if my wife gets seriously ill, we’d lose our house. A week in hospital would financially destroy my family. I don’t want that hanging over my children.

We’re lucky. We have a house (although it’s a struggle to pay the mortgage). I have a job (even though I just scrape by financially), My wife has work (although it’s part time and doesn’t come with benefits. But we’re the 99%. We’re the part of the majority that is one bill away from financial ruin.

That’s my story.

This post and the image below (I’ve made this image my profile picture on Google+) is my contribution. Please feel free to repost, and to bring people’s attention to We Are The 99%.

Facebook it. Blog it. Tweet it. Plus one it. Do it. Now.

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This appeared in my stream on Google+, having originally been posted by Armando Lioss.

I haven’t checked the figures, but given that the US accounts for almost 50% of global military spending, it looks about right.

Added later:
However, the military budget of the US has little directly to do with the country not having universal health care. The US in fact spends far more of its GDP on healthcare compared to other industrialized nations, although it gets far less for its money. If there is a common factor, it lies in the fact that government in the US is largely controlled by business interests who push military spending to absurd levels and who prevent the substantive healthcare reform that would allow all Americans to have access to healthcare.

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From time to time one of my kids will grab the other kid’s food and eat it. They have an excuse. Their brains are not yet mature, and they don’t understand fairness, or only in a selfish way, being concerned to get their share, but often being unwilling to let others have theirs.

This graph shows, well, graphically, I suppose, what’s been happening in the US since the 1960s, in terms of income inequality.

The US has been baking more and more cookies, but 5% of the population has been grabbing most of them, leaving very few to be shared among the 95% of the population who are, for the most part, actively engaged every day in making the damn cookies.

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Ross Douthat, the younger and hipper of the NYT’s right-wing columnists (the other being the rather gray and staid David Brooks) concludes a piece today praising the recent outbreak of bipartisanship with this extraordinary statement:

Real courage is required as well [as bipartisanship]. And this month’s outbreak of bipartisanship was conspicuously yellow-bellied. Republicans and Democrats came together to cut taxes, raise spending, and give free health care to the first responders on 9/11. They indulged, in other words, in the kind of easy, profligate “moderation” that’s done as much damage to the country over the years as the ideologies of either left or right.

Note how two different things here are lumped together as “yellow-bellied” (i.e. cowardly): the extension of the Bush tax cuts, and paying the health-care costs of heroic individuals who rushed in to the rubble of the World trade Center in order to rescue survivors and recover the remains of the dead, and in doing so exposing themselves to toxic chemicals.

I’d argue that the first of these things was arguably cowardly. The GOP insists that it stands for fiscal responsibility, even though in the post-war era it has shown a remarkable talent for poor fiscal management at a Federal level (see Where did our debt come from?). And true to their recent history, they forced through an extension of the Bush tax cuts, which push up the deficit. They had rejected the Dems original proposal that the text cuts be allowed to expire for individuals earning over $200,000 or couples earning over $250,000. I say this is arguably cowardly.

The case for calling the Democrats cowardly over this seems reasonable, on the face of it. They could have called the Republicans’ bluff, and allowed them to vote down the tax-cut extension in its entirety, as they had threatened to do. The GOP itself — well, I don’t think cowardice had anything much to do with it. Bush said that the rich were his base, and in insisting on extending tax cuts for the rich, the GOP was simply representing the interests of that base. I don’t believe they actually have any commitment to lower spending, and therefore can’t betray that commitment.

But it’s the second of Douthat’s examples that is extraordinary. He apparently considers it cowardly to provide health care for heroes. And it’s “profligate.” Profligate means “wasteful.” It’s a “waste” of money to treat people who got sick because they responded to a national disaster. And it causes “damage” to the country (this despite the fact that the spending in this bill was offset by savings elsewhere).

At this point I have to say that I’m simply at a loss for words. I just cannot even begin to understand Douthat’s sense of morals and values. I’m now officially speechless.

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