[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQcvbw6ExTQ[/youtube]

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:death threats are coming infor a 78 year old professor because of some paper she wrote 40 years ago. Why? Well, apparently Glenn Beck's been ranting about her everyday on his program and his online publication. Who knew that a random CUNY professor helped bring about the demise of our 'system'? Where's my pitchfork?

I don't like having to defend Glenn Beck, but it's not just about her paper from decades ago. In the article that you cited, last month she wrote that "an effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece,” and that “protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones.” Saying that we need riots like Greece, with local "targets," sounds like the sort of ignorant inciting to violence that she is decrying from Beck.

Of course, the death threats are awful.

The really awful part is that people can't tell the difference between setting up targets and shooting guns at those targets and calling for 2nd amendment remedies versus someone talking about protests. A protest is not the same as what's been called for by Beck and the like. A target for a protest is not the same as a target for a 2nd amendment remedy.

redistricting 'oddities'...gross

drsmooth wrote:

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:death threats are coming infor a 78 year old professor because of some paper she wrote 40 years ago. Why? Well, apparently Glenn Beck's been ranting about her everyday on his program and his online publication. Who knew that a random CUNY professor helped bring about the demise of our 'system'? Where's my pitchfork?

I don't like having to defend Glenn Beck, but it's not just about her paper from decades ago. In the article that you cited, last month she wrote....

Good for you, you at least peered at the NYTimes article ABOUT her article. Butgo read it - it's just about as short at the Times blurb.

In it, she basically explains that jobless people can be harder to organize & mobilize than you might at first imagine, because, y'know, they don't have much discretionary resources to work with, being jobless & out of money & credit & with their conventional social connections somewhat disrupted & stuff. You or I might have suggested she clarify that the odds against her hypothetical are 1,302,428,741,430 against, but I doubt that would have kept the Fox crowd from croaking themselves hoarse.

So once you've read her actual article, you may like having defended that loathsome gob of sphincteral exudate at Fox even less.

Her article was awful. She wants the unemployed to riot, like in Greece, in order to persuade the federal government to institute huge public works projects on their behalf. And the best part, in my opinion, is that she argues that for this to happen, the unemployed will need to "have a set of claims" to go with their proud new identity. Does it matter what these claims are? Does she care? It seems that she hopes the unemployed will develop (misplaced) anger directed at their old bosses, or politicians. What a great solution to unemployment! Destruction of property and rioting, all because of "robber-baron CEOs!" Why don't we just call her movement the Broken Window movement?

Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant. (Welfare moms in the 1960s did this by naming themselves "mothers" instead of "recipients," although they were unlucky in doing so at a time when motherhood was losing prestige.) Losing a job is bruising; even when many other people are out of work, most people are still working. So, a kind of psychological transformation has to take place; the out-of-work have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible.

Werthless wrote:Her article was awful. She wants the unemployed to riot, like in Greece, in order to persuade the federal government to institute huge public works projects on their behalf.

that's nonsense, of course. She never says she "wants" anyone to riot. She explains what conditions might have to exist to produce one.

Whoever taught you to read, you should get your money back.

The article has the germ of a few valid (if obvious and long-understood) points--that the dispersion, depression and disorganization of the unemployed renders them powerless; that to some extent they're the victims of a set of policy choices rather than/in addition to their own life choices and circumstances; and that collective action potentially offers a way to better the situation.

But this has been tried before, and hasn't gone well. Anyone familiar with the history of the civil rights movement (start with Branch's "America in the King Years" trilogy) knows that, stunning as this seems, getting legal equality was the easy part; the impossibility was real action to level the economic playing field. And this was in the '60s, when we had real liberals in power, with a vastly more progressive tax rate and a general faith in the ability of the public sector to make a positive impact in the lives of individuals and communities (this was the idea of the Great Society); in the forty years since, the guys at the top have tightened things up a great deal, to the point where Warren Buffett famously talks about paying a lower marginal tax rate than his secretary. (They managed to convince the country that Great Society was a failed waste of money, where it actually did more to ameliorate suffering than probably any set of public programs in human history.)

Which maybe explains the part of Piven's article that bothers Werthless (and, I have to say, me; I find her evident unwillingness to grapple with any of the personal or societal downsides of dependency pretty awful even before parsing exactly what she's advocating to get us to a safety net that I see as more constraining than supporting): it's admittedly difficult to see how we peaceably reform ourselves out of the structural corruption in which we're now enmeshed.

Still, there are all kinds of dumbassed academics at both extremes, and she's probably (even) more harmless than most. Beck's harassment and incitement here is disgusting even for him.

No, Doc. Angry=riot.

Never mind that it's probably true that virtually all the unemployed are in that situation due to the actions of others.

As far as dependency--anyone who works for a paycheck is as dependent as someone getting a few measly bucks from TANF or unemployment.

NYT's Postmortem on Olbermann firing

He seems like a really shitty employee

pacino will continue blaming random non-Olbermann people/corporations for what happened though

What her remarks do is allow people on the right to say, " See, they do it, too. Our guys aren't the only ones inciting violence." It doesn't matter what she actually said, just that it helps diffuse the outcry over the AZ shooting.

That's why this is coming out now.

Guardian just got its hand on a motherlode of documentation relating to palestinian/israeli negotiations in 2008. I started reading the article and my brain just shut down, there's that much in there.

Two biggest revelations seem to be:
that in 2008,the Palestinian Authority offered Israel the largest chunk of Jerusalem ever - significantly more than in the Camp David talks - and Israel said no, because it didn't meet with their demands. That's the focus of all of today's articles.

The Palestinian Authority were privately tipped off about Israel's war in Gaza in 2008-9 (those details are to follow in the coming days).

Plus the usual stuff about palestinian collusion with Israeli security forces, British Intelligence involvement in a plan to defeat Hamas, etc. and so forth.

man, I'm surprised Obama even bothered to send someone over there to try and revive talks. They'd have no politically credible non-hamas representatives to talk to. I wonder if the real purpose of the new diplomatic push involving mitchell was to try and identify new players and start all over again (again).

I don't have enough knowledge of how the politics on the palestinian authority might change, but I would guess the emphasis from here on out is a greater push to get Hamas involved in a political process, because the Palestinian leadership's actions must have completely alienated their people at this point. I find myself wondering how much of this was common knowledge on the ground, given the relatively small population of Palestine, and how much the rest of the world is just playing catch up.

Oy.

some nice points in the following Comment is Free post in the guardian:

This claim of representative capacity – and worse, the assertion they were representing the interests of Palestinians in their struggle for freedom – had become increasingly thin over the last decade and a half. The claim they were acting in good faith is absolutely shattered by the publication of these documents today, and the information to be revealed over this coming week.

Why has this gone on for so long and at such high cost? And why haven't the Palestinians been able to create the democratic representation so urgently needed to advance their cause? Israel, along with those who share its worldview, would assert that the problem lies with the Palestinians themselves, being part of an Arab political culture that can only breed either authoritarian governments or terrorists. Yet what these documents reveal is the extent of undemocratic, authoritarian, colonial and, frankly, terrifying coercion the US, Britain and other western governments have been imposing upon Palestinians through this unaccountable leadership.

The one which makes the most sense to me is the following:

These officials have led a new generation to believe that participating in public governance is base and self-seeking, that joining any political party is the least useful method to advance principals and create change.

Through their harmful example, they have alienated young Palestinians from their own history of resistance to colonial and military rule, so they now believe that tens of thousands of brilliant, imaginative and extraordinarily brave Palestinians never existed or, worse, fought and died for nothing. It cuts them off from any useful mobilising methods and techniques that they might draw upon today – the democratic and collective mechanisms that are needed more than ever. They have given young people the idea that there is no virtue in collective organisation, the mechanism by which popular democratic change is made and preserved.

Oh, wow, this stings. Senior Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat to George Mitchell in 2009:

"Nineteen years of promises and you haven't made up your minds what you want to do with us ... We delivered on our road map obligations. Even Yuval Diskin [director of Israel's internal security service, Shabak] raises his hat on security. But no, they can't even give a six-month freeze to give me a figleaf."

All the US government was interested in, Erekat went on, was "PR, quick news, and we're cost free", ending up with the appeal: "What good am I if I'm the joke of my wife, if I'm so weak?"

drsmooth wrote:Whoever taught you to read, you should get your money back.

Is your mom's 800 number still in use? Perhaps you could put in a good word for me. She usually doesn't give discounts for any of her services.

Werthless wrote:

drsmooth wrote:Whoever taught you to read, you should get your money back.

Is your mom's 800 number still in use? Perhaps you could put in a good word for me. She usually doesn't give discounts for any of her services.

toll-free? Not dear old ma. She is and has been hip to the 900# racket. And with all the calls you used to make, she was able to retire comfortably. Thanks!

But I gave more thought to your admittedly reluctant defense of poor multimillionaire Glenn, and the formidable media network that owns his nutsack. Work with me here: the guy had to go waaaaay out of his way to identify this septuagenarian anarchist as an Enemy of the People, which seems kind of strange given that what would really make her an imminent threat would be if numbers of the kinds of people she's purportedly "inciting" were, you know, likely to actually read what she was writing.

I'll grant that in the academy she's held in some special regard. But not in the pages of the New York Post, or even the Daily News.

So you see, goofy Glenn's witch hunt turns out to make pretty much no defensible sense at all. We all have far more to worry about in screechings from the likes of him - which frankly isn't probably all that much - than we do from this superannuated campus radi-gal (check her out in a miniskirt, back in the day. C'mon Werthless - you know you'd hit it).

An appellate court has booted Rahm from the ballot because he lived in DC not Chicago for the last year. Everyone else has ruled him eligible. Hopefully some higher court restores him to the ballot.

A he he he

Breaking news: Appeals court kicks Rahm Emanuel off ballot. Deion Sanders says Emanuel quit on the city of Chicago.

Wizlah wrote:

Through their harmful example, they have alienated young Palestinians from their own history of resistance to colonial and military rule, so they now believe that tens of thousands of brilliant, imaginative and extraordinarily brave Palestinians never existed or, worse, fought and died for nothing. It cuts them off from any useful mobilising methods and techniques that they might draw upon today – the democratic and collective mechanisms that are needed more than ever. They have given young people the idea that there is no virtue in collective organisation, the mechanism by which popular democratic change is made and preserved.

Wiz, I have to say I agree with the idea the poster laments, to this extent - there IS no virtue in collective organisation. It's more a matter of "the worst (least "virtuous") except for all the others, etc.

Did anyone happen to notice that Bachmann is giving a response to the SOTU address??? When Paul Ryan is already the official Republican responder?? WTF???

She's so running for president. IF she won the nomination, and not Mitch Daniels, would jerseyhoya and werthless go crazy?