Vanity Fair

Ian McEwan

Slate

Andrew Sullivan

David Corn

Anna Wintour

The Atlantic

New Yorker

BBC

Washington Post

Al Jazeera

Reason

NY Daily News

Jacob Weisberg

LA Times

Fox News

A Rueters article about comments from his peers.

and hilariously, The Onion.

Some tweets:

@meropemills – Sat next to Hitchens at dinner once. He said ‘Do you want to come back to my hotel room or what? I haven’t got time to send flowers’.

@stephenfry – Goodbye, Christopher Hitchens. You were envied, feared, adored, reviled and loved. Never ignored. Never bested. A great and marvellous man.

@RichardDawkins – Christopher Hitchens, finest orator of our time, fellow horseman, valiant fighter against all tyrants including God.

@timminchin – “To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’, the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” Christopher Hitchens

@richardpbacon – There are few more entertaining hours than looking up clips of Christopher Hitchens on YouTube.

@prodnose – The news of Christopher Hitchens’ death somehow still a jolt. A fierce and raging light goes out.

@krishgm – How rare to find somebody you never met in person whose death you feel is a genuine loss to our collective intelligence.

@DRUNKHULK – GOODBYE CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS! IF THERE GOD! HE GOT HIS HAND FULL RIGHT NOW!

@PeterBradshaw1 – I knew Christopher Hitchens a bit in the 90s. As a writer, he was a Jimi Hendrix in an industry full of session rhythm guitarists

@SalmanRushdie – Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops. Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011.

@askegg – “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” – Christopher Hitchens #GodIsNotGreat

@nealbrennan – Christopher Hitchens. RIP. Brilliant writer/orator. The man could have vanquished me debating the facts of my own life.

@RickWarren – My friend Christopher Hitchens has died. I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.

@pourmecoffee – I always saved Christopher Hitchens’ articles to read later. I wanted to be as smart a reader as he was a writer. RIP.

@georgeeaton – Hitchens on Gingrich in 1995: “He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office. He has a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his skull”

@THudson13 – “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks” – Christopher Hitchens

@MissEllieMae – “People ask, ‘What do you think of him?’ and my answer is: ‘He doesn’t make me think.’” Christopher Hitchens on David Cameron.

@andymcsmith – I can’t say what Christopher Hitchens was like when sober because I never met him in that condition, but he was great company drunk.

@Dark_Muncan – “Sex and drugs don’t go half as well as some people believe, it’s very often you’re forced to choose” Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

@helenlewis – Remembered my ultimate favourite #hitchens quotation: “The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.”

Some classic articles:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/christopher_hitchens_death_how_hitch_used_winnie_the_pooh_to_explain_a_balkan_crisis_.html

Some videos:

Possibly the best YouTube clip that could be put forward at this moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKYfEHCjucg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEVntZ8a-xk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQorzOS-F6w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=Odi7F64r7CM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECI4QK_mXA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDBkB_0xdz4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP51NnoVErA&feature=fvsr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xitITUubMoA&feature=endscreen&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=A6e08nrQhwc

I drove myself down to City Hall on Tuesday night to take part in what would probably be the most important political event in our city for a long time.  I live tweeted as much as I could – right up until my Android phone ran out of batteries.  For those of you who thought I may have been arrested or hurt – do not fret.  Yours truly stayed well out of the way of both protesters and the police, I didn’t even yell and scream.  I just wanted to be there to show support for all involved, and to witness and document a moment in history.

In case you missed them, here were the tweets I did manage to transmit (skip to the next pic if you’ve already read them):

   Driving by @OccupyLA, where is everybody? #prollyintheircars Wed Nov 30 03:20:56 +0000 2011

 Wow, this place is pretty busy, but it seems depressed, a little defeated. @occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 03:44:46 +0000 2011

Kids Village is cleared out. Group is talking about the contingencies if the police move in. @occupyla #OWS Wed Nov 30 03:47:27 +0000 2011

Cameras coming in. So a guy interviewed in Spanish holding a plastic oil bottle and a coiled tube. Wtf??? #OWS @occupyla Wed Nov 30 03:51:36 +0000 2011

Verify? RT @DaHaFa Twitter is time delaying ‘#OccupyLA’ searches. Even realtime searches are being delayed. #ows @occupyla #occupycolumbus Wed Nov 30 03:52:13 +0000 2011

Park’s open to the public until 10:30 so there shouldn’t be any real problems till after that. @occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 03:58:08 +0000 2011

Helicopter flyover with a bright spot on the GA. Then another one. Why is this so threatening to them? #ows @occupyla Wed Nov 30 04:01:25 +0000 2011

Cop helicopter is circling low, clearly drowning out the deliberative body.Circliing shadows,Blatant suppression of organization. #OWS #ola Wed Nov 30 04:02:51 +0000 2011

The intimidation is working on me, my heart is racing and I’m scanning the perimeter for the squads,Loud rotors,ga is breaking up @occupyla Wed Nov 30 04:04:54 +0000 2011

 Sorry, GA moved into discussion groups, helo’s gone for now. @occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 04:06:33 +0000 2011

There are an unfortunate number of drunken maniacs here. @OccupyLA #ows #sorrybut #itssketchy Wed Nov 30 04:09:58 +0000 2011

Only one Guy Fawkes.Hopefully people know he was a theocrat terrorist. Somewhere, Hugo Weaving is grinning with a moustache. @occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 04:13:59 +0000 2011

I probably should have told @tweety_byrd that I was coming down here. @occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 04:15:22 +0000 2011

How did you confirm? RT @OWSLosAngeles confirmation that hash tags are being delayed for 45 minutes – retweets are critical Wed Nov 30 04:19:32 +0000 2011

Got hungry and had to 1% it over to 2nd St for some kimchi fried rice. There are a lot of reasons this is not revolutionary. #ows #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 04:44:54 +0000 2011

@wilw Luckily they don’t control the hundreds who have smartphones. Thanks Internet! Wed Nov 30 04:46:48 +0000 2011

RT @znmeb: @gofiliberto There’s no delay now – I think it was a temporary glitch Wed Nov 30 04:49:20 +0000 2011

RT @ElOaklandTejano: LAPD now staging in Chavez Ravine to defeat #occupyLA. Chavez Ravine a neighborhood destroyed 4 corp interests. ht … Wed Nov 30 04:56:01 +0000 2011

RT @UncleRUSH: Dear Mayor @Villaraigosa & LAPD — if u are going to raid #OccupyLA camp, pls show restraint. This is peaceful protest. #OWS Wed Nov 30 04:56:33 +0000 2011

@OccupyWallStNYC also @OWSLosAngeles and me! ( @sydiot ) #ows #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 04:58:58 +0000 2011

@OccupyWallStNYC We call that ‘Dodger Stadium.’ Wed Nov 30 05:00:09 +0000 2011

RT @LAObserved: Very big police gathering at Dodger Stadium, in left field parking lot. Many parked cars outside LAPD academy. Wed Nov 30 05:03:04 +0000 2011

Occupiers setting up barricades made from toppled trashcans. Not sure that’s a good idea… #occupyla #ows Wed Nov 30 05:07:07 +0000 2011

KCAL9′s getting a spiffy close-up from behind the barricades. They’re live now. #ows #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:08:26 +0000 2011

RT @twistedcat: Ch9 aerial footage from Dodger stadium massive amts of cops loading onto metro busses NOW. At least 200 @OccupyLA #ola #ows Wed Nov 30 05:12:10 +0000 2011

RT @CBSLA: BREAKING: LAPD officers are loading into dozens of buses outside Dodgers stadium as Occupy LA protesters prepare for their ar … Wed Nov 30 05:13:01 +0000 2011

It is about to go down, hundreds of cops reported on the way. I’m staying to the side to observe in support. #OWS @occupyla Wed Nov 30 05:14:17 +0000 2011

Every MTA bus that goes by I’m like omgshiiiii @occupyla @#ows Wed Nov 30 05:18:02 +0000 2011 @robgwilson yes indeedy, outside the park at 1st and spring. Wed Nov 30 05:18:41 +0000 2011

Media’s interviewing Beck at Main and 1st. No barricade on this entrance. #OccupyLA #OWS Wed Nov 30 05:23:33 +0000 2011

Chopper hovering now, is that CBS News? Are they close yet? @robgwilson #OccupyLA #OWS Wed Nov 30 05:27:43 +0000 2011

Guy who I saw dancing earlier is now hurling. Can’t say that isn’t a health hazard, yo. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:30:17 +0000 2011

There are some seriously tense mentally ill derelicts here. I can see them provoking a punch in the face pretty easily. :/ #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:32:26 +0000 2011

I kinda wish I had my bike. Wed Nov 30 05:34:13 +0000 2011

there’s a srs bsns group of occupiers in surgeon masks behind the barricade, they’re planning for the worst. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:37:49 +0000 2011

LAPD is closing the streets leading to City Hall. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:39:15 +0000 2011

Corner of Main and 1st is crowded. Green hats everywhere – they’re Ntl Lawyers Guild legal observers. Yay! #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:44:57 +0000 2011

This raid sure must be stimulating the helicopter fuel economy. #atleast5 #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 05:48:47 +0000 2011 LAPD

is probably waiting for 10:30pm for the park to close, right? #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 06:00:29 +0000 2011

The light is back, don’t look up, it blinds. I’m waiting for the acoustic weapons. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 06:03:34 +0000 2011

‘Road Closed’ sign over barricade will be the featured pic for a lot of stories on this raid. #OccupyLA #OWS Wed Nov 30 06:07:34 +0000 2011

Someone set off some low fireworks over the corner. Pretty cool/dangerous! #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 06:12:32 +0000 2011

Shit, I’m losing batts Wed Nov 30 06:25:03 +0000 2011

Just realized what that vinegar smell is. #dontgasmebro #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 06:26:13 +0000 2011

About to get the dispersal order from LAPD. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:08:28 +0000 2011

@UnboundedMama I am here. Wed Nov 30 07:17:22 +0000 2011

RT @OWSLosAngeles: Officers have tear gas confirmed by @OakFoSho http://t.co/Y7jjHtTm Wed Nov 30 07:18:13 +0000 2011

Acoustic weapons are moving into place. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:27:23 +0000 2011

A man is lying in front of a CNN van, it’s surrounded now, cops helping them back it out. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:33:02 +0000 2011

LAPD officers just crossed through to get to the media. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:36:42 +0000 2011

Have the people captured downtown or are we captured here ourselves? Is there a difference? #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:40:32 +0000 2011

There is a core of about thirty occupiers surounding a single symbolic tent before the stairs. These will be the last to go. #OWS #OccupyLA Wed Nov 30 07:47:23 +0000 2011

RT @MichaelSkolnik: Actual quote from KCAL9, “We made an agreement with LAPD to not give away their tactics.” #OccupyLA #WhatHappenedToO … Wed Nov 30 08:08:16 +0000 2011  

And at that point, my device ran out of batteries.  But then this happened:

(Photo courtesy guardian.co.uk)

At 12:18 AM an army of LAPD officers in riot gear streamed out of City Hall and into the camp.  The occupiers were mostly caught off guard, as many (including myself) believed the cops were coming from the south and along the main roads. The stairs that lead out the south entrance of City Hall lead directly into the center of the camp, right where the most hardcore occupiers were seated, encircling a symbolic tent, waiting for the police to take them by force.  At this point, I was standing in the middle of 1st street staying back from the crowds, trying to get a good view of what was happening.  When I realized that the police were moving in, I approached the park to see if I could get a better view.  Right as I did that, I saw another column of about two-hundred police approaching the park from LAPD HQ – I was directly in their way. Not interested in being beaten up or arrested I moved aside as they descended on the protest.  At this point it was difficult to see anything but the mass of gear-clad cops who moved quickly and tightly together.

I did not witness any violence from either side, but it was at this very moment that my friend Tyson Zoltan Heder was being pushed to the ground by a police officer while looking through the viewfinder of his camera, attempting to photograph the process.  Tyson is a freelance photographer and journalist, and he had come to the protest solely for the purpose of documenting it and had no intention to confront or resist police.  After he was pushed to the ground, he demanded the name of the officer who assaulted him, loudly, but politely and without any further escalation.  It was at this time that three more officers grabbed him and pushed him to the ground, confiscated his camera, put their knees to his neck and arrested him.  Here is a video of the altercation:

I believe it supports Tyson’s story very well.  There are other angles and accounts, of course.  Tyson was arraigned today (after having his bail set at $20,000, 4x higher than most of his fellow arrestees) on charges of Battery on a Peace Officer, Assault on a Peace Officer, and Resisting Arrest, supposedly because he spit on the officer in question. I’ve scrutinized the tape and can’t see it happen at all.  He is the only demonstrator that was so charged, and its hard not to notice that the vocal photographer was the subject of the greatest reaction from police.

A friend of Tyson’s has set up a fund to which you can donate to help him with the cost of defending himself and to replace the camera that LAPD destroyed in the incident.

If you’d rather make a superficial gesture of support on Facebook, you can like this page instead.

(Photo courtesy guardian.co.uk)

Once the police moved in, they began to methodically and effectively divide the surrounding area by posting lines at each intersection and keeping people within them.  This process is called ‘kettling’ and it is extremely effective at diffusing groups bent on staying in a place.  Once you’re divided from your compatriots it becomes a lot harder to feed off of the energy from others, and you become a smaller potential danger to the safety of police and others.  Generally police will allow people to exit the area of the protest (by themselves, obviously) but not return, and as things got hairy I found myself moved farther and farther from the epicenter.  The largest group of protesters congregated at the intersection of 1st and Main and remained there throughout the end of the eviction.  Sometime around 1:30 AM the police declared it an unlawful assembly and started taking people out.

The police were intimidating in their sheer numbers and their militant demeanor, but at no point did any of them threaten or otherwise make a move toward me or those around me.  They took the insults and taunts of the more crazed occupiers in stride, not once responding or reacting.  From my personal vantage-point, the police handled what could have been a very messy situation int he best way possible.  They pacified the demonstrators through overwhelming numbers and meticulous planning and generally sound restraint.

Not everyone feels this way, of course.  I have read first hand reports of bad treatment, especially after the mainstream media pool was asked to leave the vicinity of the remaining protesters.  Folks who I’ve communicated with who were arrested complained of extremely tight handcuffs and being kept in a bus waiting for booking for more than six hours.  Others said they tried to leave the protest before the arrests but were prevented from doing so, all of them ended up in jail.  Still more said they got away from the final fracas only to be chased by LAPD and assaulted once out of the eyes of journalists.  I haven’t spoken to any police officers to hear their side of the unreported stories from this night, but I’m sure they could speak volumes.  The fact is that some of the loudest and most vehement protesters seemed mentally unstable in one form or another (see the ‘drunken maniacs’ I refer to above.)  This was not the case across the board, of course, but if I were a cop that would have been all I remembered.  The four dozen National Lawyer Guild legal observers didn’t make as much of an impact as the insane guy who climbed a light post and almost fell and killed himself.

(Image courtesy guardian.co.uk)

Once most of the kids were pulled out of the park, a team of sanitation workers arrived in hazmat suits to dismantle the camp.  They set about it quickly, and even before the last protester was pulled out of his tree, the camp was mostly dismantled.  The park is now fenced off and surrounded by a 24 hour patrol of 50 or so police.

So now the tents are gone.  Does that mean Occupy LA is over?  It depends on who you ask.  You can’t evict an idea, after all.  But whether a movement without a leader and without an explicit cause can survive without its primary aspect of identity (the camp) is hard to say right now.  I’m just glad that the violence was minimal and that the point was made.  What comes next will have to wait for another post.

There is a lot going on right now with all the subjects I like to write about: Occupy LA is getting evicted (probably tonight) to make way for a movie shoot (starring Sean Penn, ironically).  CitiBank’s deal with the SEC to protect them from fault in the MBS mess was overturned by a New York judge.  SOPA and PIPA are threatening the free space of the internet for the sake of protecting intellectual property laws conceived in the 19th century.

But I wanted to point out some good news that I stumbled upon while reading an article on ESPN about the recent success of Tim Tebow’s high-school style offense for the Denver Broncos:  The age of multi-megaton, city-destroying  nuclear weapons has come to an end.

Many major news organizations did not even report that last month the final B53 city-buster nuclear bomb was disassembled. Here, the Federation of American Scientists has the details. A vestige of the darkest days of the Cold War, the B53 was a nine-megaton death device, the most powerful U.S. weapon ever built. Its blast yield was about 750 times greater than that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Horrible as the Hiroshima bomb was, many citizens of Hiroshima survived; the B53 was designed to incinerate an entire large city such as Moscow, leaving no one alive. Once the United States had more than 300 of these monstrosities; now all are gone. The equivalent Russian very large nuclear bombs have been disassembled, too.

Kudos to Gregg Easterbrook for noticing this tidbit and for pointing it out in a sports column.  I am not one of those fans who wants strict segregation of my sports news from the other stuff.  I love when the commentary crosses over (the way it does in my own brain and normal conversations) and when a story like this pops up it reminds me of how lucky we are to care about whether the QB Option is viable in an NFL offense.  That we haven’t been annihilated by a Soviet nuke certainly deserves some excessive celebration.

He continues:

Someday when historians look back on our era, they may not pay a huge amount of attention to Lady Gaga or Ryan Seacrest but will be amazed that we paid so little attention to the end of the doomsday threat to civilization. In the mid-1980s, the United States and old Soviet Union each possessed more than 30,000 nuclear warheads, including hundreds on both sides powerful enough to obliterate large cities. Had an all-out nuclear war occurred, most of humanity would have died, while the survivors might have envied the dead. Today each side has about 2,000 nuclear warheads, and the New Start Treaty, ratified by the Senate in 2010, requires both sides to drop to about 1,500 warheads by 2016.

Once that’s finished, America still will have plenty of deterrent power — 1,500 nuclear bombs is, itself, unimaginable force. And war with the remaining nuclear devices still would be horrific. But 95 percent of the old doomsday arsenal will no longer exist. Yet not only is this not hailed as wonderful news, many don’t even seem aware such progress has occurred.

Nuclear weapons and the policies surrounding them are by grim definition the most urgent and terrifying things the human race must deal with.   In our rush to win the Second World War and the ensuing Cold War, the US and USSR (and others) developed a technology so destructive that it has taken nearly a century to walk back the march toward Armageddon.  The development of weapons such as these, whose sole purpose is to eliminate entire cities full of people, even as simply a deterrent to the use of similar weapons, is the greatest mistake ever made by mankind.  That we are now in a place in history where that threat is somewhat reduced is a great victory for governments and people everywhere.

The American soldier, Tebowing before it was cool. For his sake and ours, let's keep our wars 'conventional.'

Now, someone go tell Iran that their game plan is outdated and will only hurt them in the long run.  Storming embassies and building nukes is so 1979, and unlike the Denver Broncos’ offense, there’s no way that option succeeds in today’s game. Hopefully the people of Iran stand up and demand an end to apocalypse before it’s too late.

The latest chapter in the on-going preemptive eulogy of the great freethinker, essayist and contrarian (and unwitting hero of this very blog), Christopher Hitchens, is a video cut together by r/atheism frequenter gonzoblair.  Dozens of folks from all over the world toast the life and work of a singular intellectual, and drink to his honor a bit of his favorite liquor, Johnny Walker Black. (Accept no substitute.)

The diversity of the group is remarkable (although they almost all speak in Hitch’s tongue of English) and their sentiments are sincere.  That a man could attract such positive wishes mainly for pointing out the shortcomings of figures like Mother Theresa, Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II and the Hebrew God is a testament to how honesty is the king of virtues, and that truthfulness with one’s self is paramount.  I do wish that more mention was made of his journalistic pursuits, as my first encounter with his writing was in the inspirational Letters to a Young Contrarian.  That book made me unashamed to assert myself when I was sure I was unpopularly right, and to check myself when I had unpopular doubt.  I’ve never looked back.

Perhaps it is a feature of being such an outspoken atheist that people take the trouble to tell you how much they care before you die.  Just think about how nice this world would be if we made such an effort to everyone we loved.

Here’s to you, Hitch.  Cheers.

J/K, I'm a dog!

I’ve had this picture open on my workstation for a week now, because every time I see it I smile like a dumbass.  Thanks r/pics.

Thanks to my very good friend Landon Zakheim – who curated the second annual “Razorblades in Your Reese’s” Halloween short film program at the Downtown Independent last Monday- I was exposed to the tender and hilarious ennui of filmmaker Emily Carmichael.  I am very happy this has happened.  Her short The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting was an outcast among the more shocking and musically epic shorts in the program (The Legend of Beaver Dam is one of the greatest things ever, as well), but its sensibility was dry and sweet, like some Yellow Tail at a dinner party with friends you don’t quite you know yet.  Her contemporary take on this classic myth is fresh and she uses her symbols well.

But it’s her ongoing animated series The Adventures of Ledo and Ix that has me jazzed up.  In this currently 8-part work, Carmichael uses the pixelated melodrama of the adventure RPG to cast absurd exigence on the hero/sidekick-vs-indifferent-cosmos experience.  In four minute bursts, and with only 256 colors (which close-up, still manage to evoke real pathos), she parses the loopholes of consciousness, the automation of society, fear of the unknown, and the habits we cling to that give us meaning.

In her words:

The interface between the epic and the everyday is one of my most lasting fascinations, so I decided to give my adventurers modern dialogue and recognizable concerns. I wanted to explore how they experienced the predicament–constant travail in quest of a goal that’s never fully explained–and how, in their own different ways, they might long for something else.

I want to play this imaginary video game.  

Anyone who spent hours pondering cause-and-effect with Chrono and Frog, stoked a nearly suicidal long distance romance with  a princess you never met, or wished Waiting for Godot had a boss level -they will want to watch every single one of these.

Let's chat about bank fees, shall we?

#remember X 2

#nov5

#BankTransferDay #treason #plot

#aintnoreasonwhy

#neverforget

#BankTransferDay is Upon Us

It probably wouldn’t surprise you if I told you I was participating in Bank Transfer Day, the Occupy-inspired day of protest where people are encouraged to move their deposits into credit unions and out of the major banks.  You might be surprised when I tell you it was primarily a personal budget decision between my partner and I, and not one made from idealism or outrage.  I even did it early, to avoid any trouble with my November rent check.

It isn’t often that the prudent aligns with the ideal.

I had discussed the idea with Jenny, albeit briefly, just a few weeks prior.  It was she who brought it up, which surprised me. I am the more, shall we say, ‘cavalier’ with finances, as I often prioritize the moment over the big picture.    Either way, it was interesting that she mentioned it, and it put me into a contrary mindset when considering the idea.

Should we move our money?  Is it really better for us to move out of this major bank, which is so omnipresent and theoretically convenient, and don’t I benefit somehow from being a part of that?  Is quasi-political anti-Wall Street sentiment a good thing to account for in financial decisions?  Is this an ethical choice, or an economic one?  Is it just fashion?

On one hand, I feel like I agree with both the sentiment and method of Bank Transfer Day. It presents a clear way for individuals to take ownership over the fruits of their labor and put it work for their community through non-profit institutions and local savings banks, while simultaneously issuing a meaningful rebuke to bail-out financial institutions: “lend or die.”

On the other, I visit the websites of some of these credit unions, even federal ones, and I’m struck by the archaic nature of their design and the hokieness of their incentives – a chance to win a vacation?  What does that have to do with banking?

Then, on October 29th, I received this email:

The name of the MegaBank has been redacted to protect the ...innocent.

The aforementioned Important New Information was that unless I had a mortgage with the bank or maintained a balance of about half my annual salary, my account would begin to incur a monthly fee roughly equal to 1% of monthly income to pay for the conveniences of branch banking, ATMs, the website, having my cash available to me, etc.  MegaBank  is unable to invest my measly deposits at a high enough rate of return to provide me with free banking.

So I left.

They didn’t take it personally.  How could they?  Banks aren’t people. (right?)  Plus, they were essentially requesting that I leave or become a different kind of customer – one who pays for banking in ways other than allowing the bank to earn interest on my deposit.  I am not that kind of customer.  I can’t afford that sort of thing.

So I took the hint and my money with me.

Fortunately for me, my partner is a member of a federal credit union by way of her very generous, wise,  and good looking parents.  That credit union is associated with an ATM network that includes a machine in the basement of the building in which I work, which is a huge plus.  And the cost of banking is less than what I was offered at the MegaBank.

The revolution will not be capitalized. (see what I did there?)

One Choice Moves a Market

It is a crime, in some places and cases, to instigate a bank run based on false information about that bank’s solvency.  It is not, however, illegal to hold boycott a bank or any institution (except the government).  But boycotts, like strikes and walkouts, have to fight the strong economic pressures that the working class must deal with daily to support their families.  Asking a neighbor to forgo work or assume extra fees, for an agenda that presumes to help relieve those very conditions, is always a tough sell.  Such movements need a wave of support and a catalyst of ethical and social importance to do much more than inconvenience middle management and further jeopardize the economic security of workers.  (Such actions are in progress, which is a-whole-nuther story.)    People must be free to do what is best for them so long as it does not jeopardize the freedom and safety of others and future generations.  It is in everyone’s best interest that we choose the most efficient ways of employing our labor, and paying extra fees to purchase a superficial sense of social consciousness is not efficient.

But when a cause is really as simple as spreading awareness about how our money is managed - getting people to look at their bank statements and think about how much finance charges and service fees are taken out of their hard earned money, to consider how much they really need their bank, and how little their bank needs them, and then help them make the split – that is common sense, it’s market-based, and it’ll lead us toward an economy where wealth is the property of individuals, not institutions.

If that ends up affecting the behavior on Wall Street, then so be it.

News broke today that the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had a little disagreement about a transfer of assets between subsidiaries of Bank of America Corporation (BAC) which owns both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America (BofA, the retail bank you’re more familiar with.)  It seems that BAC is moving something on the order of $75 trillion dollars of derivatives risk from Merrill Lynch, which is not insured by American taxpayers, to Bank of America, which is.  This means that just as European banks are about to crumble in on themselves in an epic default, BAC has pushed their substantial share of the risk of those defaults from their shareholders to the FDIC, effectively putting taxpayers on the hook.

Here is another great piece on the transfer from former regulator William K. Black.

They did this without a peep from the Federal Reserve.  Through the FDIC, you and I now bear the risk of the screwed up European banking system without ever engaging in these risky and fraudulent debt obligations to begin with.  They ate the meal, now we clean the $75 trillion dishes.

This is why people do not, and probably should not, trust the financial sector and its narrow interests. People now associate ‘Wall Street’ with a threat to regular people with regular jobs and regular investments. The financial sector is the largest contributor to federal elections, including President Obama.  Mitt Romney is one and is surrounded by them.  And the media is literally owned by them, and are aligned according to a strict imaginary line that seperates D’s and R’s who both say ‘Wall Street is the best.’

Take this great video from Jay Smooth.  He applies an apt metaphor:

The reason this shell game is so effective is because the financial industry, like most industries, is extremely large and complex, so we rely on journalists and commentators to provide us with information and context. When they lie, we all lose.  The same is true for all serious professions.

It’s impossible to expect most people to understand finance.  God knows I don’t.  That’s why I pay for financial experts to manage my money.  But if you turn your back for a decade or so and find that the “smartest guys on Earth” have turned a tech boom into a gaping crater full of houses no one can afford, all while collecting seven and eight figure salaries, you have to wonder if maybe the profession needs a serious thrashing before you give the keys back.

The deal that went down today is a perfect example of what is wrong with our monetary and banking systems.  Derivatives meant to hedge risk are useful to bankers as long as that risk is perceived as low, and as long as they’re earning humongous nominal returns that they can strap on at shareholder meetings to flap around and grab big bonuses.  But the instant the dookie starts to pile up, or when the credit ratings agencies that lied about the value of those assets start to admit they were totally and completely wrong, then suddenly it’s time to move those assets into insured banks, just in case.

It’s like raising a pyromaniac for a kid and then sending him to live with your parents once he learns how to light a match.

As folks in finance and politics continue to level criticism at Occupy for being socialist and pointless and anti-Semitic and anarchist and secretly-led-by-nefarious-Jews, ALL AT THE SAME TIME, it’s important for everyone to remember that instances of corporate malfeasance and exploitation of public institutions is not only extremely common and easy to identify, it’s also much more detrimental to society than anyone who commits Medicare fraud or files a frivolous lawsuit (often the counterpoint allegation, along with the freeloading 47% who ‘don’t pay taxes’).  Powerful people always point to petty criminals to justify their own lawlessness to create an illusion of symmetry between completely out scaled phenomenon.

The financial system will always be complex. A more equitable system is likely to be more complex than the one we have now – if only because more individuals would participate directly, instead of relying on employers and unions to create wealth for them.  But that complexity cannot be an excuse for the kind of chicanery currently being spun by Bank of America, Ben Bernanke, and the Treasury Department.

At least with the solidarity and spirit shown by Occupiers everywhere, now they know that we are watching them, and we won’t go down the same way twice.

Hope is not an exit strategy.

You know the argument about a rising tide, and how it lifts all boats?  This has always seemed a dubious metaphor to me because of all the assumptions it must make in order to apply, and all of the obvious features of the ‘tide’ that it conveniently leaves out of the idiom.

Join me while I break it down.

(much more below the fold)

Grow Your Way Out of It

First of all, tides do not rise forever.  A tide is, by definition, an endless cycle – it rises and falls in equal measure, according to the cycle set by lunar gravity – so using it to symbolize the economy is at once extremely appropriate and hilariously ineffective at demonstrating this idiom’s message: that growth benefits everyone and has no downside.  The axiom also assumes that everyone has a boat, and is not simply standing on the ocean floor or flailing helplessly somewhere near the surface, with rising water inching ever upward, threatening to drown the boatless.  Thirdly, it assumes that waters are more or less still, and that as the water rises lifting all these lovely boats, that waves and winds won’t crash us all together, or topple overladen vessels, spilling the fruits of our labors into the salty economic brine.

The notion of a mutual social benefit to the growth of private capital through markets is the central principle holding our economy together.  Milton Friedman says in Capitalism and Freedom that:

“there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

In this 1970 article, Friedman explains that business does its good by performing its central function for the benefit of its principal or stockholders, and that any deviation from that interest is a betrayal of principle and threatens a free society.  Friedman famously argued for an entirely voluntary society, one where no individual’s interest was subservient to a general social good that he did not willingly engage at his own expense.  He also provided ample evidence to back this up, and is considered one of the greatest economists in history.  Even for those who would disagree with him, he is required reading, and considering that the primary philosophy being touted at Occupy is a repudiation of his life’s work, he should be first on everybody’s list.

Jobs Create Job-Creators

“Money is created at the top, ” a libertarian friend of mine told me this week, after I had made an offhand crack about my work being for the benefit of others.  This assertion took me back, and it made me really consider the things I know about labor and capital.  In a way, money is created at the top – particularly through a phenomenon derided by anti-Fed activists as ‘printing money’ through the fractional reserve system.  In short, banks can lend money they don’t have because they’re only required to keep a fraction of deposits on hand.  So when you and I deposit our $100, if a banker is required to keep only 10% reserves, he can lend $1000 on that $100 bill.  He can then earn interest and accept risk on that artificial money, and since he has enough cash on hand to pay us out should the occasional need arise (since most people keep their money in banks all the time) he never has to worry about being short.  He earns 5% on $1000 instead of $100, pockets the difference, and wham, money created.

But this is not what my libertarian comrade was suggesting.  Like other adherents to that faith, my friend is allergic to public intervention into private markets.  For him, the idea of our currency being manipulated for the benefit of anyone, banks or single mothers, is a distortion of a perfect system that will lead to waste and resentment between citizens.  What he meant was that it is the people who risk their capital by buying equipment, hiring workers, paying for regulatory compliance, and marketing products and services in a competitive space that create the added value that grows an economy.  This is what’s called referred to as a supply-side argument, and it is a particular way of looking at how markets work – but it is not the only way.  Markets are a proven mechanism – they are extremely effective at distributing resources efficiently  through the aggregation of individual choices in competitive environment.  Anyone who has ever had a job or run a business understands the power of markets to spurn us on to greater efficiency and purpose by sheer necessity and self-interest.

But knowing that markets work and accepting them as the basis for our cooperative society does not require a belief that it is capital and its risk and management that creates growth in our economy.  While liquidity and risk is essential to the functioning of a market, the most important input into any system is energy.   In all industries on planet Earth, that energy is generated by one of two things:

1) the Sun

2) Human beings, which are in turn powered by the Sun.

Let me explain:

Natural resources are scarce on this planet, and the companies that grow and extract them, whether they be coal or oil or corn or lumber, risk their capital to bring those goods to market where they can fuel our lives.  But those resources are the stored energy of sunlight – oil and coal are carbon deposits created by the fossilized remnants of ancient sea algae (most likely).  Corn is an earlier form of that same energy – photosynthesized energy stored with carbon into a burnable form.  That energy fuels the otherwise closed system of planet Earth and allows for the growth and complexity of life.

Human beings also add energy to the economy, but like corn and oil, humans are ourselves more efficient ways to store and release the Sun’s energy. We, through our complex brains and ingrained social habits, are even more effective at employing energy (from food) into focused work.  Like a bicycle for the Sun, we employ its energy in a way that expresses itself over many magnitudes, affecting system much larger than ourselves.

So, is capital an expression of that same concept of potential energy?  Is money, like oil, a finely condensed way of storing human labor so that it can be implemented in an efficient and focused way?

I believe that it is.  Ask anyone who has a job if their boss works hard and their answer will usually dictate their level of satisfaction with their job.  If their boss provides an invaluable skill or talent (including the management of employees) then people will respect her, and will work hard.  If they provide only oversight and discipline, or if they hinder progress by flattening the success curve to suit their inabilities, people will despise her and work poorly.  It doesn’t matter if this boss is a manager at Wendy’s or Steve Jobs – the boss’ value is not determined by his wealth of capital, but instead by his talent and labors at organizing the workforce.  The value added by labor and human talent is the engine that drives industry, not money.

Money is a tool to store labor and energy.  It is not created by the rich through some magic spell (except when it is).  It is created by the efforts of billions of people toiling daily to keep themselves alive, and the way our system is diverted now, that surplus value is captured at the top where it can be directed according to business principles, not social ones.

The protesters on Wall Street and everywhere else are expressing a commonly held belief that those that we entrust with the handling and implementation of our currency, our debt mechanisms, our capital markets, and our public finances have simultaneously preached growth through individual effort while they have hoarded and mismanaged the fruits of that same labor.  There is a sense that no matter how hard one works, that the outcome of that work will belong to someone else, somewhere far away.  It doesn’t matter to people if that person is a welfare queen or a billionaire playboy.  They want their lives to matter, because the greatest risk a person can take is not with their financial capital, no matter how big that capital might be.  The biggest risk we take is with our life.  Humans may not be the scarcest resource on Earth, but ask any individual what his own life is worth and he’ll have a damn hard time giving you a number.  Our lives our irreplaceable to us, so it should come as no surprise that folks are not willing to spend it for nothing.

For more on this, I highly suggest the following audio lecture by Noam Chomsky:

In any event it is a bit difficult to take seriously arguments about efficiency in a society that devotes such enormous resources to waste and destruction. As everyone knows, the very concept of efficiency is dripping with ideology. Maximization of commodities is hardly the only measure of a decent existence.

Thanks, Noam.

A Voluntary Society

We cannot choose to be born into a different society.  We can not, as human beings, move freely between territories to choose the system we prefer.  Instead, we are provided with two choices when faced with an already established system: join or die.  This is why our Constitution is so precise in protecting the rights of individuals to speak out and attempt to alter the status quo – doing otherwise would impose the tyranny of previous generations on the presently alive.  Zachary Elkins, professor of political science at the University of Illinois, says that Thomas Jefferson intended the Constitution to be rewritten every 19 years.  Most countries rewrite their doctrines every generation as well.  To do so admits that the rules should change and improve over time.

That our Constitution has remained sacrosanct for so long has been a boon and a curse.  The machinery of our government is extraordinarily slow, and for all the praise heaped on our Founders for creating a ‘perfect’ writ, that law and its application required a massive Civil War and 100 years of degradation and riots to overcome the evils of slavery.  It took the threat of defeat in a World War before women were truly integrated into the business world, and only by the sheer necessity of factories and government offices to churn out the instruments of death.  But still, our Constitution has protected, through thick and thin, certain universal human rights that may not have been politically expedient to the rulers of any particular time.  This balance between principle and contemporary novelty is what defines the endless struggle between Left and Right, young and old, liberal and conservative that exists in every modern society.

This protest, and similar ones around the world, express the emergence of a new generation, connected like never before, and faced with an economic and political order that to them is unfamiliar and ineffective.  It doesn’t matter to the young that things were worse before capitalism.  They care only for the present and the future, and they’re not going away.

These guys aren't going away either.

The New Society: Horizontal or Sideways?

Despite the wide ranging implications of the First Amendment, the protesters at Zuccotti Park do not have a legal right to occupy private property without permission.  The owners of that property do not have an economic incentive to allow the demonstration on their land, and have the legal prerogative to ask them to vacate.  To stay in place, even and especially facing the threat of forcible eviction, is a rejection of that property right in favor of another kind of force – a human inertia that develops as more and more people occupy a small space.  The big question of the day is whether such a confrontation can be postponed long enough for this movement to develop beyond the need for such an event.  My impression is that it will not.

I would love nothing more than for the people of this country to descend on downtowns everywhere and establish communes where horizontal governance can be explored and prepared for scalability.  The power of the internet combined with the idleness of an unemployed nation presents an unprecedented opportunity for our society to take a step towards a new paradigm of political and economic arrangement.  But I cannot help but fear that obstinate protests on private property will devolve into something more violent and undesirable, long before a nascent social order can take any kind of root.  Is the genie really out of the bottle?  Or is this a passing wish that will wear off in the morning?

My belief is that for this protest to succeed, it must harness the levers of political and economic power where they are housed – in boardrooms and ballot boxes.  I believe that through directed and principled action, like organized bank boycotts and walkouts, through voting, through social enterprise and volunteerism, that we could make adjustments that would foster a more cooperative society that doesn’t lean on greed and self-interest as an organizing maxim.  Stand-offs with police are exciting and visible, but they are also dangerous and divisive, and they alienate fellow citizens who would otherwise be on the front lines of this fight for social democracy – police and public safety workers.  They are some of the hardest hit by the current bank-borne disaster that has a lot of us out of work.  It’s their salaries and benefits that we’re fighting for, and it’s their spirit of social responsibility and the willingness to risk life and limb for the good of others that allows for the cohesiveness of civil society.

I urge the government of New York and other cities to allow these protests to continue in peace.  I also urge the organizers and general assemblies to coordinate directly with city governments, police and property owners to reach an understanding about the use of land and resources.  If this is going to be a transformative uprising with a positive outcome, it has to be non-violent, and it has to make real change.

In the 60′s, folks threw themselves onto the machinery of war to try and grind it to a halt.  Ghandi and Martin Luther King , Jr. went to jail to reveal the injustice against which they fought.  Are we fighting the right to own a park in downtown Manhattan?  Or are we fighting for the right to control our own destinies, and to not be boxed in by debt and a wage system that funnels energy from the bottom to the top?  Where, exactly, should we make our stand?  I don’t know.  I just hope it doesn’t happen in the haze of teargas, or at the expense of lives or livelihood.

I understand that for many people this is an emotional cause, not an intellectual one.  But the argument we make has to be reasonable and based in reality, not on blind hope and wishes.  There is a valid argument to be made, and we can make this argument against private property without seizing it by mob action.  We can address inequities in the marketplace without shutting it down. We can fix society while we live in it.  We have no other choice.