Why there's an Occupy Wall Street movement: The banks get bailed out, the poor have to pee in a cup

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As more Americans turn to government programs for refuge from a merciless economy, a growing number are encountering a new price of admission to the social safety net: a urine sample.

Policy makers in three dozen states this year proposed drug testing for people receiving benefits like welfare, unemployment assistance, job training, food stamps and public housing. Such laws, which proponents say ensure that tax dollars are not being misused and critics say reinforce stereotypes about the poor, have passed in states including Arizona, Indiana and Missouri.

via nytimes.com

Really: Bring the troops home from Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — Detainees are hung by their hands and beaten with cables, and in some cases their genitals are twisted until the prisoners lose consciousness at sites run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan National Police, according to a United Nations report released here on Monday.

The report, based on interviews over the past year with more than 300 suspects linked to the insurgency, is the most comprehensive look at the Afghan detention system and an issue that has long concerned Western officials and human rights groups.

It paints a devastating picture of abuse, citing evidence of “systematic torture” during interrogations by Afghan intelligence and police officials even as American and other Western backers provide training and pay for nearly the entire budget of the Afghan ministries running the detention centers.

The report does not assess whether American officials knew of the abuses. But such widespread use of torture in a detention system supported by American mentors and money raises serious questions about potential complicity of American officials and whether they benefited from information obtained from suspects who had been tortured.

via nytimes.com

Jenice Armstrong's unhelpful anti-bitch advice for women in business

Here is the opening of Jenice Armstrong's column in today's Daily News: "IF PROFESSIONAL women really want to get ahead, then they have to stop acting like bitches."

No really. It gets better from there.

To be fair, this isn't Armstrong speaking for herself. Instead, she's quoting Susan Tose Spencer, former vice president of the Eagles—her father owned the team—who has a new book full of advice for business women. Like: Use your "feminine wiles" to your advantage. But don't complain about sexual harassment! That's whining! The best thing to do is just ... add more sexiness to be harassed. At least that seems to be the lesson here:

In her book, she shares an anecdote about the time she ran into a problem with her biggest customer's male buyer. He was the touchy-feely type and kept reaching for her leg under the restaurant table. (If it had been me, I would have had that loser's hand twisted up behind his back and slammed his face up against the tables. But then again, I'm just a wage slave, and Spencer couldn't afford to alienate the guy.)

So, she writes, the next time she met him for dinner, Spencer brought a beautiful female colleague with her. She and the other woman made a point of sitting on either side of the buyer, so he had to turn his head and look from one to the other. The distraction kept him from playing grab-a-leg, enabling Spencer to keep his business and her own virtue.

"You can't embarrass the male ego. Once you embarrass them, you make an enemy," Spencer warned.

Ick. You notice the burden here isn't on the man to avoid getting handsy because he might make an enemy of a well-connected businesswoman. Just: Ick.

But get back to the whole "bitch" thing. Spencer's contention is that women get the label because they deserve it: "You know they're always called bitches. Well, why? Because they act like them. Think about it. They kind of try to sabotage a guy. Or they'll talk behind his back."

Here's the problem: A successful woman will always—always—have the bitch label affixed to her at somewhere along the way. We all know this. I bet Spencer has been called it a time or two. Or three. My workplace experience is that women are no more or less likely to do the sometimes-ugly work of getting ahead. But when they do, it's the b-word for them. And men aren't held to the same standard: Steve Jobs was famously hurtful to his employees at times, yet the last week of hagiography-eulogizing has somehow mitigated that quality—or turned it into an advantage: He was just trying to make the product better! And maybe that's so. But is there any doubt that a Susan Jobs would've been seen much, much differently?

Spencer's journey, too, is shaped by the fact that she had access to the top rungs of the corporate ladder by virtue of her lineage. Would she have been vice president for the Eagles in the 1980s if her father hadn't owned the operation? Maybe ... but doubtful. It's pretty easy to dispense advice on taking third base if you were born there—and easy to be all sugar and charm if you didn't have to fight your way to the top. I'm not sure Spencer's advice is all that helpful to real women—or that Armstrong's amplification of it is all that helpful to Philadelphia.

99 Faces, 99 Signs

An Occupy Philly Tumblr:

Inequality reading: The Top 1 Percent

American households right at the 99th percentile (that is, the cut-off for the top 1 percent) will earn about $506,553 in cash income this year, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. The income curve is very steep at the high end, meaning that people just a few tenths of a percentile point above that make much, much more. A family at the 99.5th percentile, for example, makes $815,868; its neighbor at the 99.9th percentile makes more than double that, at $2,075,574 a year.

The top 1 percent of American earners receive about a fifth of the country’s income, according to Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, two economists who study inequality.

But as we’ve noted before, economic inequality isn’t just about what you make each year. It’s about how much wealth you have already accumulated, too. And inequality is far, far greater when you include wealth.

According to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization, the top 1 percent of Americans by net worth hold about a third of American wealth.

via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

T decides to kill his daddy

Taken at Philadelphia Museum of Art

Does terrorism justify exempting the Defense Department from budget cuts?

That's what Bentley Rayburn suggests at National Review today:

Congress should remember that we are still facing very real threats. Today, we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and fighting al-Qaeda across the globe using intelligence and special-operations forces backed up with Predator drones and other modern technologies. We’re also protecting the nascent democratic movements in Libya and elsewhere, expanding operations to hot spots like Yemen, and rotating home a fighting force worn down by a decade of repeated, extended combat deployments.

Terror attacks are on the rise as the threat spreads around the globe — according to the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 2,534 terror attacks worldwide in 2010, nearly triple the 945 recorded five years ago.

I found that last paragraph interesting, so I went to the National Counterterrorism Center website. I couldn't verify Rayburn's numbers, but I did find a couple of other very interesting charts in the NTC's report on 2010 activity.

Like this one:

And this one:

So: Barely any non-military Americans were killed in terrorist incidents around the world in 2010—and 13 of the 15 who did die, died in Afghanistan. (One in Iraq, one in Uganda.) No private-citizen Americans were kidnapped.

Which is to say: It sure doesn't look like Americans are the targets of all this rising terroristic activity.

That's not to say that the United States doesn't have a legitimate concern with this trend. And these numbers don't include uniformed U.S. personnel who died in terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the charts above raise the question of whether rising terroristic activity "worldwide" is an actual threat to American security. That's the metric that should determine defense spending priorities: A civil war in the Congo—tragic as that is—doesn't necessarily count.

But the arguments by Rayburn and Max Boot and other hawks rest on the presumption that the United States military should remain a globe-spanning colossus. That's an issue that should be on the table. Our interests—and our security—doesn't stop at our borders. But neither are they infinite. Certainly our resources aren't. Nor should the defense budget be.

John Yoo's red herring

The former Bush Administration torture advocate thinks Obama is a wuss for actually trying to justify the assassination of an American citizen:

It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the field may well hesitate in the field, as they will not be able to tell in the heat of the moment whether an enemy is American or not.

I call BS. Nobody—nobody—disputes the right of American troops to engage enemy combatants in battle on an actual battlefield. If that's what Yoo means by the heat of the moment—and it seems so—then there's no dispute. If Anwar al-Awlaki had been charging against American troops in Afghanistan, AK-47 in hand, there would be no debate to be had. The chance that an American soldier will hesitate in that moment, wondering if the enemy is an American citizen, is virtually nil. And Yoo—once again—is disingenuous for suggesting so.

The debate comes in murkier areas. If reports are to be believed, al-Awlaki was tracked by American drones for weeks while officials waited to get a clear shot at him that wouldn't result in massive collateral damage. That's admirable if true, but it's also something less than a "heat of the moment" situation: American officials were able to make a considered decision to assassinate the man. And because of that, it's more than fair to question the process by which al-Awlaki was targeted.

But this is the world Yoo inhabits. There are precious few ticking time bombs, yet they always justify extreme action where considered processes might serve Americans better.

Today in inequality reading: Americans are getting poorer

WASHINGTON — In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found.

Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.

The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour even as the economy has been growing. Unhappiness and anger have come to dominate the political scene, including the early stages of the 2012 presidential campaign.

via nytimes.com

It's this kind of dynamic that helps create the "Occupy Wall Street" movement.

When Philadelphia sucks

A MOTHER of four who was the director of her own elementary school and day care in Overbrook was a bystander killed by reckless gunfire Saturday night, police said.

"She was an excellent person," said Homicide Lt. Mel Williams. "You have a real victim here."

Hafeezah Nunrid-Din, 31, was heading to a car with her father on Malvern Avenue near 58th Street shortly before 8 p.m. when two young men ran past her and her dad, Williams said.

Shortly after, gunshots rang out, according to police. It's believed the bullets were intended for the two men who ran past Nunrid-Din but instead, they hit her once in the left shoulder and once in the right side of her back, police said.

via philly.com

What I saw at Occupy Philly

Occupy Philly: Oct 9, 2011 from Joel Mathis on Vimeo.

The Occupy Philly movement, as far as I can tell from my visit today, is dominated by neither fringe conspiracists nor the middle-class mainstream. Mostly, it seems to be made up of plucky twentysomethings who seem to have expected that the world they grew up in—the go-go 1990s and the "go shopping in the face of disaster" aughties—was the world they would inherit, and are cranky they didn't.

Yes, there were Marxists and Socialists and anarchists scattered among the crowd. But the tired "dirty, smelly hippie" stereotype doesn't fit what I found. Much of the crowd was, to all appearances, Standard Urban Hipster—not exactly suburbanites, exactly, but not nearly so outré as to alienate the masses either.

What it did seem to be, in fact, is a movement of privilege. The protesters were overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly literate—and Philadelphia, for all its greatness, isn't really either. Most of the faces of color on Dilworth Plaza belonged, frankly, to homeless panhandlers who were sleeping there long before all the kids with liberal arts degrees showed up. Why not more minority participation? It could be that a big chunk of Philadelphia's population has gotten the short end of the stick for so long that the current crisis doesn't seem like that much of a crisis—only more of the same. The people who are protesting who the ones who had something to lose in the first place, and lost it.

For all that, there wasn't a lot of rage to be found at City Hall either. The spirit, in fact, seemed to be upbeat. Some protesters were helping gather and distribute food. There was a library set up, as well as an area for wi-fi use and tech support. One area was designated for a solar-powered battery to charge up; volunteers collected litter. There was even a stickball game on the north side. Speakers reminded the crowd that the plaza, for now, is their home—and to treat it as such. But far from the air of petulant, hypocritical entitlement that some media reports had led me to expect, what I found was a bunch of young people in the act of building—in miniature—the kind of society that they seek. That's nothing to scoff at.

Not that there weren't eye-rolling moments. One speaker exhorted protesters to use the readily available public toilets. "Please do not pee on your neighbors," he pleaded—apparently because that had already happened. A young woman took the mic and introduced her boyfriend, a young man who is on a hunger strike "until he gets some answers from Wall Street, or until medical professionals tell him to quit" the hunger strike.

Despite the crankiness at Wall Street—well-represented in the signs I photographed for the video above—I didn't see a ton of radicalism. Again, yes, the Marxists and the Socialists. But the angriest-sounding speaker inveighed heavily against corporate CEOs and their multimillion-dollar compensation packages—but added he didn't want to take those away: He just wants to ensure that everybody else can get by, too. Not exactly "when the revolution comes, you'll be first against the wall" stuff.

I do not know what Occupy Wall Street and all the related protests will become. Maybe they'll peter out. Maybe the fringe radicals will come to dominate. But that isn't what is happening right now. Right now, regular folks—young, smart, educated folks to be sure, but not weirdoes—are frustrated because they don't see a way to claim their piece of the American dream. And yeah: That should make the Top 1 percent very nervous.

Tent City at Occupy Philly

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

Mitt Romney: We're No. 1! We're No. 1!

But I am here today to tell you that I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. In an American Century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world.

via nationalreview.com

Let's leave aside the question of whether that's really a sustainable vision or not, at least in the details. I guess my question is: Why is being No. 1 the goal?

For all the talk—mostly from the right—about honoring the Founders and their vision, I don't really find much in the Federalists about trying to have the biggest military or trying to lead the entire world. What I *do* see is talk about trying to create a country of liberty and a government of responsibility. The Founders were revolutionary, but it strikes me that they were also rather modest: They wanted to create a country that worked well. And for the most part, they did. The rest sort of fell into place. I suspect that always trying to be Top Dog, however, is a sure way to undermine the rest of it.

Am I wrong?