Now, there weren’t many police in riot helmets. Maybe 3 or 4, plus another 15 police (including two White Shirts) milling around. When I arrived there were two NYPD squad cars, two vans, and three mopeds. You might say to yourself, as someone responded to me on Twitter, Hey man, 3 or 4 riot-helmeted cops with their hands in their pockets, looking bored, isn’t such a big deal. Well, you’re wrong. It’s absolutely a big deal. Not because the police were going to beat up anybody, or arrest anybody, but simply because 50 teachers protesting the closing of their school do not deserve to be treated like potential rioters — even by 3 police officers.

Police departments across the country are becoming increasingly militarized. Security contractors devise new methods of coercion against protesters constantly. As a result, confrontations between peaceful activists and cops often resemble paramilitary-style raids rather than restrained police action — most obviously in the way police have dislodged Occupy encampments nationwide. The aggressive theater that the PDs engage in is meant in no uncertain terms to intimidate anyone with the gall to raise their voice in dissent. Speak up and you will be kettled, pepper sprayed, jailed, beaten with truncheons, or simply advanced on by a phalanx of heavily armored stormtroopers. This morning’s action only serves to illustrate how deeply embedded the militarized reaction to all forms of protest is in the NYPD.

Why were there police there at all? Honestly, does anyone believe that one or two officers is an insufficient force to observe 50 teachers assembled, as is their right, outside their high school? It’s completely beside the point that the officers were bored, and that there were no confrontations. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the lazy, uneventful, automatic militarized response is what I find so distasteful. The teachers I spoke with after the event were mildly concerned, but not seriously, about the police presence. They seemed to be bewildered by it more than anything else. But an activist and journalist who writes under the name Dicey Troop and I were more incredulous. Bloomberg’s army has become omnipresent for anyone participating in OWS, but their presence at Washington Irving was almost comically disproportionate.

Organizers of the event are calling for a massive public showing on January 31st at 6:30 at Brooklyn Tech to defend Washington Irving against the city’s proposed shut-down. According to information circulated this morning, 6% of the students at Manhattan’s high-need schools (of which Irving is a part) are special needs. At Bloomberg’s new Manhattan schools, the percentage is much lower, between .5-1%, according to the flier.

Bloomberg’s New York City is a city of increasingly privatized education, and an increasingly militarized response to all forms of protest. We would do well to remember his legacy accurately.

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The growing momentum of Occupy Wall Street in lower Manhattan, and the hundreds of sympathy demonstrations that have sprung up throughout the country, show that a substantial number of people are ready to identify as the 99 percent of Americans who have been left behind. Beginning with the Wisconsin union protests and continuing through Occupy Wall Street, increasing numbers of Americans are becoming comfortable with pointing out what has long been obvious – there is an entrenched political and financial class that has centralized wealth and power in the hands of the very few. The very language of Occupy Wall Street – identifying as one massive group, the 99 percent – recognizes and highlights the central class disparity that so often goes ignored in our society.

Earlier this year, Joseph Stiglitz wrote a widely read piece for Vanity Fair called, “Of the 1%, By the 1%, For the 1%.” In it, he citied numbers that felt, like the latest ranch-based gaffe from Rick Perry, shocking, yet expected. The top 1 percent control 40 percent of the wealth in America, an increase from 33 percent 25 years ago. In the piece, he warned that the kind of unrest seen recently in the Middle East will eventually spread to a society as stratified as ours. Though Zuccotti Park is different from Tahrir Square in many significant ways, Occupy Wall Street offers an outlet for anger at the richest 1 percent that we haven’t seen in America in recent memory.

Why haven’t Americans been more vocal in their condemnation of the massive upward redistribution of wealth over the past 30 years? One probable, sad answer is that a lot of people didn’t know about it. One survey shows that though the nation’s richest 20 percent of people account for 85 percent of the nation’s net worth, respondents predicted that they only accounted for 59 percent. And before we heap undue blame on these people, let’s remember how frequently USA Today runs a headline telling their readers just how much they’re getting screwed every day by the Masters of the Universe.

Another possible answer is that, as Howard Zinn says, “we’re taught to believe there’s only one class.” The phrase “American Dream” was coined in 1931 by the writer and historian JT Adams and has since had a fairly elastic definition, though it’s still generally understood as Adams described it:

“[A] dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable … regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Cliched though it may be, this idea courses through the veins of American culture, and though it has never been a particularly precise rendering of the American experience, it nevertheless informs our national self-conception. As a result, the 99 percent of Americans who haven’t shared in the economic prosperity of the past 30 years often identify with the interests of their bosses instead of their peers. This manifests itself in all sorts of ways, from an ever-increasing distrust of unions to our perverse obsession with watching Donald Trump fire people on his comedy business program.

The myth of the American Dream is only sustainable, however, if America delivers the goods. Whether we’re talking about the shared prosperity of The Great Convergence in the post-war period, or the massive private debt that households took on between the early 1980s and 2007 – more on that in a minute – many people in America felt like things were good, and getting better. Once the bubble burst and the jig was up, a lot of those household balance sheets looked a lot worse.

Now, in the midst of what is horrifyingly called a “jobless recovery” – or worse, an “unrecovery” – there’s no engine for optimism in America. Nor should there be. The average annual income in 1988 was virtually the same as it was in 2008 – $33,400 to $33,000, respectively. Why did households feel like their wealth was increasing while their wages stagnated? Because their wealth was increasing, due primarily to rising real estate prices. And before you say, They should have known better, remember that the prevailing economic paradigm was housing prices would continue to rise indefinitely. So family’s assets – which, for the non-rich, basically means their houses – grew faster than their debts accumulated. Beginning in 1980, the increase in household debt was due primarily to deregulation (via Krugman), but don’t tell that to policy makers. Better instead to blame it on workers who haven’t seen a raise in 30 years.

All this adds up to one central question: Are Americans ready to start talking about class? Well, the 15,000 union members, students, workers, and work-seekers who marched from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park on Wednesday certainly are – and they’re betting that are a lot more people are coming.

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I bring this up because the media on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be treating the fires on Wall Street and the fires in London as two different fire-symphonies, and, thus, they find it impossible to fit them both in their head at once. This is not the case. A more accurate metaphor would be that each of these two disasters is one hand of a piano player, and to only listen to one line is to miss the very necessity of their interconnectedness.

On Wall Street, you have panic about the strong possibility of low growth for the foreseeable future (if we’re lucky) or a double dip recession that no one can see the bottom of (if we’re not). The culprit, the cause of this panic, is the austerity caucus — the political and media elites who made the possibility of an effective stimulus impossible the first time around, and who make the possibility of an additional stimulus now equally impossible. And I’m not just talking about the GOP here. Obama may have not been a member of the austerity crew at the beginning of his administration, but he clearly is now. He has adopted the language of the faux-deficit hawks in claiming deficits, not lack of demand, are the problem.

What’s worse — and legitimately stomach turning — is the White House’s decision to continue to focus on deficits even though they know it won’t be an effective jobs-creating policy. After speaking with Administration officials, Robert Reich (via Krugman) writes [my bold]:

So rather than fight for a bold jobs plan, the White House has apparently decided it’s politically wiser to continue fighting about the deficit. The idea is to keep the public focused on the deficit drama – to convince them their current economic woes have something to do with it, decry Washington’s paralysis over fixing it, and then claim victory over whatever outcome emerges from the process recently negotiated to fix it. They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

What an inspiration! What a plan to Win The Future! 1) Adopt language and arguments of the opposition, 2) Give the opposition 98% of what they demand when they threaten to blow up the country, 3) DIG IN, AND HOPE THE VOTERS AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION. There’s not enough bile on the Internet to adequately criticize the Obama administration’s economic policy at this point, and I say that as someone who has read a fair amount of youtube comments.

What does this have to do with London? Let’s reuse a sentence from that block quote above!

They hope all this will distract the public’s attention from the President’s failure to do anything about continuing high unemployment and economic anemia.

Throw in a nod to increasing student tuition and a decrease in social programs (and change President to PM) and you have a pretty accurate description of the austerity hate surging through London right now. The austerity crowd that has rendered America incapable of righting the economy is the same crowd demanding “shared sacrifice” throughout Europe.

The protests and riots in London — and I’m not condoning the riots, violence, arson, “looting”, etc — didn’t come from nowhere. People don’t riot out of the blue. People don’t like to riot, or enjoy rioting, or riot because they are crazy, anti-social thugs. Some of those people take part in riots, but a riot by its very nature is something unstoppable. Asking whether the riots are “good” or “bad” completely misses the point — they are the sad but often inevitable result of disastrous economic and political conditions. That’s what important to understand about them. You can’t ask whether a storm is “good” or “bad”, you can only ask what the atmospheric conditions are that created it.

Notice as well the media’s intense desire to demonize every element of the London protests. This clip from the BBC (via Feministing) tells you all you need to know about how the establishment views these lowly rioters and those who attempt to explain their behavior. As soon as Darkus Howe, the interviewee, refers to what’s happening as an “insurrection” (min 3:20) and not the prescribed term “riot” — and relates it to broader Arab pro-democracy movements, an even greater taboo to break in polite company — the anchor responds by saying, “You’re not a stranger to riots yourself, are you?” Howe responds by saying he’s been to protests before. The disgraceful innuendo is as objectionable as it is obvious.

The political and media elite are so removed from those who their policies affect they are virtually incapable of understanding the problems of the poor and the marginalized, yet any solution to Wall Street’s or London’s problems has to acknowledge that they are on opposite sides of the same fire. It’s hard to see where that solution will come from, and that’s why the Age of Austerity is going to be so painful and so prolonged, like a Tom Waits song, with melody and harmony intertwining the whole way.

The post Wall St., the London Riots, and the Age of Austerity appeared first on The Faster Times.

The first thing you should do when you think about the beginning of this week is stop thinking about the beginning of this week. That goes double for anyone out there who is a small individual investor. Felix Salmon advises you to do nothing, or maybe to buy stocks, sell bonds. But these two insane days — one of which was a top 10 worst day and one which was a top 10 best (time stamp 4:55 on Tuesday, no permalink) — taken on their own only tell us what’s obvious: the market isn’t operating under any clear rules.

What was true last week, before the S&P downgrade, before Monday’s panic, and before Tuesday’s Fed announcement is still true today. The US has a very weak economy that is in serious danger of falling into a second recession, and a political and media class that is incapable of accurately describing the problems facing the country or prescribing solutions to ease the suffering of the permanent underclass in America.

And lest you think permanent underclass is too shrill a phrase to use to describe people facing poverty in America, consider some recent findings. Nearly one in six American families is on food stamps. The median net worth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that Latino households — a gap that has widened during the recession. The real unemployment rate is at least around 16%, higher, again, for blacks and Latinos.

These past two days on Wall Street don’t change anything for the majority of Americans, because there is still no engine for growth in America. The Fed’s announcement today that it will keep the federal fund rate (the rate at which banks lend to each other, usually overnight) at between 0% and 1/4% is completely underwhelming. It’s essentially the same policy they’ve been implementing. And more importantly, when you look at what the Fed is actually saying … well they’re saying the economy is really bad and there’s not much they’re going to do about it. Krugman wants to see QE3 not because he’s sure it will work, but because the Fed should be doing something to juice the economy.

After Obama’s absentee press conference — and I’m referring to the time he was there, not the delay — and the Fed’s whiff this afternoon, it’s hard to see today’s market bounce as evidence of anything other than the market’s volatility, not enthusiasm. What’s worse is that the only actual economic data point from today … wait for it … was another bad one. Non-farm productivity dropped .3%, and after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised last quarter down 2.4% — from 1.8% to -.6% — that gives us two consecutive quarters of negative productivity, which hasn’t happened since the last half of 2008. So the only actual number of the day is extremely negative, yet the stock market soared to near-record gains. It’s getting easier to understand how these people blew up the world economy more and more every day.

The disconnect between the elite policy makers and the public is hard to overstate. The disconnect between the establishment media and the public is equally hard to overstate. We’re living in a country crippled by self-inflicted austerity madness, limping towards what the gallows dwellers are referring to as a recovery-less recovery at best, and a Lesser Depression at maybe worst. So don’t ignore the screaming headlines about the DJIA, but when someone or something shows you it is in a state of panic-induced frenzy, do them the respect of believing them and stick to the underlying trends.

The post What You Need to Know About the Market Bounce appeared first on The Faster Times.

The first thing to understand about Monday’s wildly swinging markets is that fear of US debt isn’t the culprit. If investors were afraid of the US’s solvency — ie, if they agreed with S&P’s decision to downgrade the US’s credit rating — you’d see people fleeing Treasury bonds. Instead, rates on t-bills are down across the board. That means, in no uncertain terms, that Treasury bonds are still seen as the safest game in town, which is why investors want to park their money there, despite low interest rates.

That’s why the conventional wisdom on this is so absurd, and so wildly misguided. That wisdom, such as it is, goes like this: markets are worried about the S&P downgrade, so traders got spooked and are selling rapidly. The problems with this analysis is that, yes traders are selling, but they are buying the very product that supposedly cause the panic in the first place.

Much more likely is that the market realized — due to last week’s weak GDP numbers, among other signs of low growth, and the debt ceiling ass-clownery — that the US is politically incapable of dealing with these problems, not financially incapable of dealing with them. When you look at the weak numbers right now, they look bad. But here’s an even worse thought — who has any reason to expect that 2012 will be any better? What is the engine for growth in America right now? There have been rumors of another round of quantitative easing (QE3) — an unconventional monetary policy the Fed can use to stimulate the economy — but that’s about it.

Further stimulus is necessary and would benefit the country at every level in both the short term and the long term. There is a lack of demand in the economy that can only be remedied by government spending. The fact that rates on Treasury bonds are so low shows that the market isn’t worried about government debt, it’s worried about lack of economic growth. This is not to say that the government should only worry about the markets, or that what’s good for the markets is good for America. But it’s clear that an economy can’t function if the stock market is on fire.

Will we see further stimulus? Well, no. This article from yesterday’s New York Times struck me as an accurate forecast of an unnecessary situation. I’ll explain what I mean, but first here are the two key passages:

Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.

…

Unlike during the first downturn, there would be few policy remedies available if the economy were to revert back into recession.

Reading this story, written by Catherine Rampell, you’d think that every option for recovery had been tried and failed, and, by gosh, nobody knows what to do! That’s simply not the case. Yes, it’s hard to see Washington fixing this problem, but that doesn’t mean they can’t. The first stimulus kept the economy from descending even further into chaos, and there’s every reason to believe that another, larger round of stimulus would get the economy growing at something close to full capacity.

As Matt Yglesias wrote last week about the paltry jobs report, and the fact that government jobs are disappearing while private sector jobs are increasing:

So in a sane world you’d take those 154,000 new private jobs, add on a few thousand public sector jobs, and you’d be on the road to recovery. Not the fastest, awesomest recovery in human history but definitely a real recovery in which the employed share of the population is steadily rising and where more employed people means more income means more sales, etc., etc., etc.

But we didn’t add a few thousand jobs to the public sector. Instead we once again lost tens of thousands of government jobs.

It’s not impossible to describe a world in which America is on the road to recovery, and the markets aren’t on fire, and the US credit rating hasn’t been downgraded. If you want to see that world, you’re basically talking implementing the policies advocated by the Krugman/Delong/Thoma axis — massive WPA-style jobs program, stimulus spending on infrastructure, reinstatement of Glass-Steagall Act, etc. Describing that world is easy, but imagining those policies getting enacted in Washington is much more difficult, especially now that austerity fever has taken a seemingly unshakable hold on the world.

As a final thought, credit-default swap spreads on the major banks are way up, and Bank of America’s stock is way down. If you’re looking for another reason to be pessimistic, increasing CDS spreads is a good place to look.

The post What You Need to Know About Today’s Market Crash appeared first on The Faster Times.

1) All forty-seven Senate Republicans signed-off on a balanced budget amendment last week that would render all but two of the last 30 years’ budgets unconstitutional, including every year of the Reagan administration.

2) Paul Ryan’s nonsense budget proposal — which derives much of its purported savings from shifting costs to the elderly and the poor, as well as pretending that unemployment will drop to 2.8% — is the talk of the town! He is a Very Serious Person, says Washington DC.

1+2= Hahahahahaha. Which is to say,

3) The budget amendment that all 47 Senate Republicans voted for would make silly Paul Ryan’s budget unconstitutional until 2030.

As a party, they can’t even propose legislation that is internally coherent. Not even close! It’s like saying on Monday, “I need to get oranges out of my life for good,” and then on Tuesday accepting a position as the CEO of Tropicana — while still saying that Monday’s statement holds true. If a friend acted the way the GOP acts, you’d have that person committed.

Yet the media pretends that the Republican Party is a functioning party acting more or less in good faith. Do they know that Elmer Fudd isn’t a journalistic role model?

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Sen. Jim DeMint yesterday stated that a vote on raising the national debt ceiling should be conditional on the passage of a newly released GOP-backed balanced budget amendment, The Hill is reporting.  One could scour Washington DC — a veritable hellhole of corporate whoredom and cynical posturing — for two more destructive ideas, and come up short.  And DeMint has managed to join them in unholy wedlock!

The first idea — that we should be playing around with defaulting on our national debt — has become popular with the more fringe elements of the GOP.  First of all, it’s not going to happen.  Even Paul Ryan has called that outcome “unworkable.”  Second, if it were to happen the effects would be apocalyptic.  Just ask the normally rhetorically restrained Sec of Treasury Tim Geithner, who said refusing to raise the debt limit would result in “the first default in history caused purely by insanity.”  Speaker John Boehner said it would result in “financial disaster.”  Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said the consequences of a national default would be “catastrophic.”

You get the point.

The second idea in this gruesome twosome is newer.  Last week the Republicans introduced a constitutional amendment that would, among other things, require a 2/3 majority of both chambers of Congress to vote on a tax increase and make it unconstitutional for total government spending to exceed 18% of GDP.  The amendment actually makes it harder to balance the budget, because of the extra hurdles in raising taxes, and puts a completely arbitrary cap on spending related to GDP.

Bruce Bartlett calls the proposal, “mind boggling in its insanity.”  Ezra Klein points out (twice, actually) that not a single year of the Reagan administration would have been deemed constitutional under this amendment.  NOT A SINGLE YEAR OF THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION.  You can see why he pointed it out twice.  Not a single year of the Bush era would have been constitutional, and only two years of Clinton would have been.  The fact of the matter is that the boomers are getting older, and Social Security and Medicare will increase in relation to GDP.  You can’t just say, “we don’t like that.”  Or, rather, you can, but you will be labeled as someone who is mind bogglingly insane.

And now Jim DeMint is threatening to play chicken with defaulting on US debt unless the GOP amendment is passed.  Neither of those things are going to happen, and DeMint well knows that, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t acting like a psychopath.  Threatening to plunge the world into the greatest economic disaster perhaps imaginable because you want to pretend to care about the deficit is nothing short of deranged.

He’s acting like some kind of faux-deficit hawk super villain, ready to plunge the world into unknowable chaos.  But instead of world domination he’s seeking a temporary upper-hand in the news cycle, a goal so utterly asinine it only serves to reinforce how unhinged from reality he is.  And it’s not just DeMint  — the 46 other Senate Republicans joined him on the balanced budget amendment, that, again, would have rendered all but two of the last 30 years unconstitutional.

They know that none of this will happen, but they also know that they’re shifting to Overton window to the right with every new crazy proposal.  And, after a while, things like privatizing Medicare seem less out of bounds by comparison.

The post Madman Jim DeMint ties budget amendment to raising debt ceiling appeared first on The Faster Times.

The local hero in question is Jeff Cox, 39, who it turns out is not the calm and collected public servant you might expect him to be.  No, he is not one of the cooler heads you hope will prevail.  According to Mother Jones, who broke the story:

[Cox] evinces contempt for political opponents—from labeling President Obama an “incompetent and treasonous” enemy of the nation to comparing “enviro-Nazis” to Osama bin Laden, likening ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Service Employees International Union members to Nazi “brownshirts” on multiple occasions, and referring to an Indianapolis teen as “a black teenage thug who was (deservedly) beaten up” by local police. A “sensible policy for handling Afghanistan,” he offered, could be summed up as: “KILL! KILL! ANNIHILATE!“

So, here’s a guy who has a history of inflammatory and reactionary writing advocating the use of violence against peaceful protesters.  I’m very hesitant to call for someone’s removal from their job after a Twitter outburst, but Cox’s recent writing is clearly representative of his general outlook, and his behavior is inappropriate for someone in his position.

So long buddy, and I can’t wait to see you on Fox News.

More Faster Politics:

Sarah Palin’s Secret Facebook Account

Bloomberg Fights Efforts to Defund Planned Parenthood

British Tolerance: Anti-Islam or Common Sense?

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Generally speaking, Friedman’s column in today’s New York Times is relatively harmless.  And I will give him this: he’s very savvy at jumping on the newest bandwagon, whether it’s “globalization-friendly environmentalism” or revolutionary fervor, you can bet that he’ll be there to profit on it.  Today’s entry can be filed in the latter category, and as far as it goes isn’t bad — until the ever-present tenancy to render Israel’s occupation of Palestine invisible rears its ugly head.

You almost never hear the word “Israel,” and the pictures of “martyrs” plastered around the square are something rarely seen in the Arab world — Egyptians who died fighting for their own freedom not against Israel.  [emphasis added.]

The American media has collectively approved the narrative that Egyptians are fighting for their freedom from a tyrant, which is correct.  But for Friedman, it’s simply impossible that Palestinians fighting against the occupation of their country are fighting for their own freedom as well.  For Friedman, they are fighting against Israel.  That country’s action’s are almost never closely examined and criticized in the American media.  Israel reacts, not instigates.  Israel is the victim, never the aggressor.

One of Friedman’s recent columns — Before Egypt, After Egypt — offers some criticism of Netanyahu and describes the dangers of Israel becoming an “apartheid state.”  Again, that’s fine, but the entire column is predicated on the idea that Egyptians are “anti-Israel” by definition.  Friedman doesn’t use the word “occupation” once when describing future potential problems between Egypt and Israel.

This kind of bias isn’t restricted only to Friedman’s Op-Ed pieces.  Ethan Bronner, reporting from Jerusalem, recently wrote:

There has long been concern that popular sentiment in Egypt is anti-Israel.

Again, that article, which portends to describe the future relationship between Israel, Palestine, Egypt, and America doesn’t use the word “occupation.”  Worse, in describing the recent history of the region, Bronner writes:

Events of the past five years — the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s influence in Iraq and the shift by Turkey toward Iran and Syria — have turned many Israelis rightward, fearing that the more time passes the more the region is against them.

There’s a passing mention of the collective massacre of Gaza — referred to as “the Gaza war” — and of Israeli commandos killing of nine on the Mavi Marmara. Not included is mention of Isreal’s bombing of Lebanon in 2006, or the war crimes Israel was disproportionately guilty of during its siege on Gaza.  Once again Israel is cast as the victim, never the aggressor.

The point here is not to blame Israel for all the woes of the Middle East.  The point is that the American public is so vastly uneducated about the Middle East in general — and the Israel/Palestinian conflict specifically — that these kinds of errors of omission and framing do serious damage to our ability to understand what’s happening in the region.  And, frankly, if you read several stories about Israel and never once come across the word “occupation,” you’re not getting the full story.

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