Hold Fast

Matt Stoller has spent time at #OccupyWallStreet and his post at Naked Capitalism explores what’s happening there, who’s participating and what it means. The whole post is, as always with Stoller, worth reading. But this passage stands out: What these people are doing is building, for lack of a better word, a church of dissent. [...]

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With all the enthusiasm and accompanying nitpicking about #OccupyWallStreet, this passage from Teddy Roosevelt’s speech Citizenship in a Republic strikes me as appropriate: The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves [...]

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Originally posted at AMERICAblog John has been posting regularly on #OccupyWallStreet, particularly highlighting the disgusting and brutal NYPD attacks on non-violent protestors. I also highly recommend Sarah Jaffe’s rich and detailed post at Alternet, which does a great job contextualizing why people have been occupying Wall Street for more than 11 days at this point. [...]

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Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism responds to Melissa Harris-Perry’s post on The Nation that racism is driving the abandonment of Barack Obama by white liberals. Harris-Perry has been one of the more prominent reflexive defenders of President Obama, but her charge of racism is serious and merits evaluation. Smith does that, as well as connecting [...]

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This is part of what Lee is responding to: I think the police abuses are less important (though certainly terrifying and outrageous) than the reason there are people occupying Wall Street. Camp gets at it later in the video, but I just think it’s worth highlighting that this is happening because people are occupying Wall [...]

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Professor Elizabeth Warren: I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No! There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest [...]

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Speaking of class warfare, a blogger at The Economist has a pretty remarkable-in-its-boldness post on Barack Obama and his assertion that he isn’t perpetrating class warfare with his tax plans. In a speech in Storm Lake, Iowa, Mr Obama pitched his proposals to more heavily tax high earners as a counterbalance to high levels of [...]

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I’ve actually been trying to find this quote for a long time and it’s finally come across my transom. Al Franken in Lies: and the lying liars who tell them : a fair and balanced look at the Right. “Any time that a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush’s tax [...]

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In no particular order… It could have been much worse. That it isn’t is a good thing. Obama is going after Republicans around taxes for the rich. It’s a political issue, though, and it’s not clear that the policy outcome behind it will ever stack up to the rhetoric used to advocate it. The idea [...]

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