Occupy Wall Street: No time for conspiracist nonsense

I'm headed down to City Hall in Philadelphia later today for a firsthand look at the Occupy Philadelphia movement. So I decided to check out the local website, and was greeted with this headline.

"Twelve families rule the world," eh? Google that phrase and you'll see that it's closely tied into conspiracy-minded nonsense that's a close cousin to anti-Semitic tropes that generally surface whenever protests against "bankers" get started. (Depending on how you search the phrase, the Wikipedia entry for the Rothschild family sometimes comes up fourth in the results. 'Nuff said.) And as much as I might be sympathetic to some of the movement's grievances, I'm not really interested in signing on for anti-Semitism or conspiracist nonsense. (To be fair, the Occupy Philly page also includes an essay from Chris Hedges, who warns against designating "Jews, Muslims" as enemies.)

Understand: Conspiracy theories—whether the "12 families" bit, or birtherism, or 9/11 trutherism—are almost always have no relation to the truth whatsoever. They're built on grievance and speculation, but not fact. Again: I'm not interested in signing onto a political movement with roots in angry fantasy.

Nor are most Americans, I suspect. Conspiracy-minded nonsense—in addition to being nonsense—is also a political loser. Birtherism doesn't help the Republican Party with independent voters, and crap about the Illuminati won't help the Occupy Wall Street movement build a critical mass of support either.

Conspiracism. Bad on the reality. Bad on the politics. I hope that when I go to City Hall today, I find something more grounded and less crazy than what the website offers. You can offer a critique of the status quo—and should, as far as I'm concerned—without resorting to fever dreams.

Update: The headline has been changed.

Debt, and Occupy Wall Street

I've not yet been down to see the Occupy Philadelphia protest, though I hope to do so before the weekend is out. But reporter Kia Gregory has been down there this morning, Tweeting her observations. This one particularly struck me:

The Tea Party movement, you'll recall, began with Rick Santelli's famous rant against "losers" who'd fallen behind in their mortgage payments, defying the Obama-led government to do anything that might lessen the burden of those mortgages—because, after all, taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for the unwise choices made by millions of individuals.

Admittedly, I think one of the wisest choices I made during the middle of the last decade was to not buy a house—despite a fair amount of peer pressure to do so. On the surface, there was plenty of reason to do so: I (at the time) had a solid career, loved the community was in, and expected to stay there a long time. Still: Buying a house looked likely to put me $150,000 or more in debt. An older colleague mocked me for my fear of such a substantial debt, suggesting I was avoiding the rites and even responsibilities of adulthood. But when circumstances changed—and then became more challenging—the lack of that $150,000 albatross around my neck gave me and my family a lot more freedom to make choices. The Philadelphia cardboard sign makes a really good point, it turns out.

But it's not been so long since we, as a society, had a very different attitude. Granted, it's an attitude my generation's grandparents—Depression-raised as they were—didn't seem to share. Debt wasn't a burden—it was "leverage," a way to get ahead, to "invest" in education or housing or (less crucially) a better SUV. If you could pay for those things with your own resources, super, but as my older colleague seemed to suggest, you were behaving counterproductively if you didn't take on the debt to get ahead.

Now, in a time of depressed housing prices and a high unemployment rate, that debt seems less like leverage and more like an anchor. I'm not sure what responsibility society—and taxpayers—have to the people who are now crushed by that burden. But society is not blameless in creating the problem in the first place. And I do suspect that the economy as a whole won't start to really move forward again until people feel like they can afford to buy stuff again (stimulating demand) instead of paying off their credit cards. There are probably two ways of doing that: Helping out the "losers" now, or settling in for a lost decade or more.

There is no freedom in debt. So what should we do about it?

T

Taken at Old Towne & Sanna's

Jo.

Taken at Old Towne & Sanna's

Barack Obama: Ineffective at the stuff you want done, devastatingly effective at the stuff you wish he'd leave alone

California's four U.S. attorneys, declaring that marijuana dispensaries in the state are illicit, profiteering operations violating federal law, today announced multiple criminal complaints and forfeiture actions against medical pot stores, property owners and major cultivators.

"We want to put to rest the notion that large marijuana businesses can shelter themselves under state law," said Melinda Haag, the top federal prosecutor in San Francisco who joined U.S attorneys from Sacramento, San Diego and Los Angeles in a Sacramento press conference.

Haag said the voter-approved Compassionate Use Act, which legalized medical marijuana use in California in 1996, "has been hijacked by profiteers...using the cover to make enormous amounts of money" as California cities burgeon with marijuana storefronts purporting to serve suffering people.

via blogs.sacbee.com

In Topeka, nobody wants to prosecute domestic violence

Back in my home state of Kansas, the Shawnee County District Attorney has decided to stop prosecuting domestic violence misdemeanors including domestic violence (see comments below) because of budget cuts. The city of Topeka—the county seat, and state capital—has responded with an ordinance to repeal its own domestic violence law so it doesn't get stuck with all the domestic violence cases.

Seriously.

I outsource my commentary to my friend Notorious PhD:

Of the many things that counties and states have shoved off on municipalities (just as the federal governement offloads its responsibilities onto the states), why is it women* whose bodies are being put on the line?

That was a rhetorical question.

Poverty and frustration with long-term unemployment increases the incidence of domestic violence (especially male-on-female domestic violence). There are complex cultural reasons for it tied up with American notions of masculinity. But the point is that the same thing that is causing violence to rise is also behind this move to decriminalize this type of violence. There are very likely outcomes here, none of them good.

Read the whole thing.

In my household, we've sometimes discussed whether we'd ever want to move back to Kansas given its recent political turn to extreme rightwingism. The state has always been conservative, but it's often been a kind of moderate conservatism. No more. The debate in Topeka is one more sign that my home state—which I have great fondness for, still—is becoming unlivable.

Today in inequality reading: The other 99 percent

In 1974 the top 0.1 percent of American families enjoyed 2.7 percent of all income in the country. By 2007 this same tiny slice of the population had increased its holdings to fully 12.3 percent—roughly five times as great a piece of the pie as it had enjoyed just three decades earlier. Half the U.S. population owns barely 2 percent of its wealth, putting the United States near Rwanda and Uganda and below such nations as pre-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt when measured by degrees of income inequality.

Over one in five American children is living in poverty, and the number is rising. By the end of 2010, corporate profits rose by fully 15 percent of the economic pie—their biggest share of the economy since such statistics became available nearly 70 years earlier—while the share going to workers’ wages dropped to their lowest level in the same period and fell below 50 percent of national income for the first time.

via americanprogress.org