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)
Posted in economics, Features, politics
Tagged Capitalism and Freedom, Earth, Employment, Free market, libertarian, Milton Friedman, Occupy Wall Street, OccupyLA, ows, protest, Rupert Murdoch, Sun, Zuccotti Park
We Don’t Need a Leader, But We Need Something
When the General Assembly in Woodruff Park in Atlanta declined to allow John Lewis, famed civil rights activist and sitting U.S. Congressman to deliver a few words of encouragement, I believe this movement made a curious and possibly detrimental turn toward the irrelevant. The reason for this is straightforward: I do not believe you can assault our broken democracy and our broken economic system simultaneously. By rejecting elected and aspiring representatives of the people from engaging in this movement and taking its message to city halls, state houses, and the impotent galleries of the U.S. Congress, there is a chance we could doom this protest to the alternate fates of destructive riots or perpetual but inconsequential unrest.
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Posted in economics, Features, internet, los angeles, politics
Tagged Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Kanye West, Occupy Wall Street, OccupyLA, ows, Slavoj Žižek, United States, Wall Street, Woodruff Park, Zuccotti Park
It seems like fuzzy math, to see a tiny crowd of mostly white youngsters with a spattering of legitimate community organizers claiming to be 99% percent of the population. Likewise is it hard to believe that a handful of redditors and youtube jockeys with their somewhat short-sighted stories about personal debt and unemployment could somehow embody the experience of almost the entire population of the richest country on Earth. On a day when everyone was making suggestions to these protesters on what their demands should be (including of course, yours truly) there were just as many people speaking out against the ‘dangerous’ ‘class warfare’ of a handful of idiot hippies who want to make us like the Communists.
It’s just as easy for opponents of this protest to dismiss its participants and their desires as it was for liberals to dismiss the Tea Party in its early days. Back then, the Tea Party seemed like an over-hyped Fox News focus group, suddenly transformed from studio audience to vocal mob, chanting and waving signs about liberty and socialism and Sharia law. But just as the Tea Party grew into a legitimate social movement with electoral power, this movement has the same potential, and it’s because its concerns do really do line up with the desires of 99% of people in this country.
(Much more below the fold)
Posted in economics, Features, internet, los angeles, politics
Tagged Debt, Donald Trump, Federal Reserve System, Freedom, Mad Max, Occupy Wall Street, OccupyLA, Sharia, Tea Party, Tea Party protests, Wall Street
The Counter-Counter Revolution
I took a trip to Los Angeles City Hall last night because I heard a rumor that there was the start of something big going on down there. Since I have a full time job in business development (read: job creation) I couldn’t attend during the day. I was, thankfully, able to drive my $750 automobile and park it in a garage for $15.00 and make my way to the ad hoc camp that serves as the epicenter of a new wave of the ongoing populist movement in America. I expected to find a handful of stalwarts, sharing tamales and tugging on one-hitters, waiting for the next day of shallow media coverage to march and yell. What I found instead was a diverse village of individuals, mostly young, self-organizing as a spontaneous protest spurned on by a feeling of hopelessness and invisibility.
But where is it going, and how is it going to get there?
(There is an epic rundown below the fold.)
Posted in Features, internet, los angeles, politics
Tagged Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, los angeles, Los Angeles City Hall, New York City, OccupyLA, OccupyWallStreet, Wall Street
