Occupy... This!

A lot has been made of the similarities between the Occupy Wall Street (and Occupy… etc.) movement and last year’s Tea Party movement. The most obvious similarity being that both movements arose without a lot of organization or content but contained heapfuls of anger and disgust. The Tea Party’s focus was Big Government; the Occupy WS’s focus is financial institutions and big banks (and in a broader sense, their influence on government). Later on, establishment Republicans jumped on the band wagon and essentially co-opted the movement (e.g., “Mr. Tea Party” Sen. Jim DeMint). But what about their differences? There are three key differences between the two movements that seem apparent to me:

1. Occupy’s Signs Don’t Include Spelling Errors

Remember all those emails from last year with pictures that people had taken of the signs being used in at the Tea Party rallies? It was an illustration of borderline illiteracy. (As a refresher, check this out.) In contrast, the signs being displayed at the Occupy rallies do not contain misspellings or obvious contradictions like the infamous “Get your damn government hands off my Medicare!”

All right, so what’s your point Mr. Smartypants? That one group’s smart and the other’s not?

No. The distinction is that the persons rallying for Occupy are more educated than the persons who rallied for the Tea Party. This becomes apparent when you hear interviews of the participants, many of whom are graduate students, out of work teachers, etc. It’s interesting to see the difference between the groups. Now, obviously, this is not a scientifically proven difference—we’d have to do surveys and such, and the Tea Party rallies were last year, not this one. But it does seem to me, based on what I’ve seen reported and interviews and such, that this is a clear difference. And they are justifiably surprised that they are unemployed and, in many cases, have been for a long time. I say “justifiably,” because historically it has always been the case in this country that if you get a good education, you won’t have trouble finding a job. That appears to be true no longer.

2. Young

Another key difference appears to be that the Occupy protesters are younger generally than the Tea Partyers. This is, again, not scientifically provable, but viewing footage of the rallies and hearing interviews, it does seem to be the case that a lot of these folks are in the twenties (although you do hear the occasional report of a retiree joining the rallies like the one I heard a few days ago on NPR). Based on my own interactions with graduating college students, law students, and other graduate students, this does not surprise me. This is a group that, again, grew up with the concept that you’re practically guaranteed a job upon graduation from college or with an advanced degree. That is definitely not true today, and it’s baffling and frustrating for these folks.

And they’re not worthless hippies! Good grief, the smoke being blown up the collective ass of America from the right about these people is just ridiculous. Ultimately, I don’t think that sort of propaganda, which runs along the lines of the old “go get a job, hippie!”, will work, because there are no jobs to be had.

3. Angry at the Right People

And here’s where I get a little political. I agree with Paul Krugman that the final main difference between the Tea Party movement and this one is that the participants in the Occupy movement are angry at the right people. Last year’s Tea Party movement had the odd combination of rallies against the social construct—the government—that was the only thing keeping the economy from completely coming off its wheels. It also was, essentially, a rally against itself, since the “government” is run by the people.

But who caused this economic collapse? The causes are many, but the root cause appears to have been the speculative buildup of the sale and purchase of unregulated derivatives (which are, essentially, bets) that created massive liabilities, liabilities large enough to take down most of the big financial institutions in this country. The primary culprit was the credit default swap related to securitized mortgage bonds. If you really want to read a good account of how this developed, open up The Big Short by Michael Lewis. (Warning, however—after you read that book, you will be filled with great anger at Wall Street. But you should be anyway, so go ahead.) In my opinion, the blame primarily rests with a few managers in various large banks and financial institutions who made stupid decisions. Or, to put it more broadly, the problem was the big banks and financial institutions themselves being able to engage in unregulated, stupid investments.

And, now, following the massive bailout of Wall Street, Big Banks, and the wealthy individuals who massively benefited therefrom, here come the Republicans railing about deregulating the financial industry—turning back even the weak financial regulation bill that was passed in 2010—and complaining about “too many regulations” and “class warfare” (re: class warfare, this seems to mean to Republicans anyone who is against cutting taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals or raise taxes in any way on those groups). I suspect that many in the Occupy rallies have the same reaction when reading and hearing those sorts of things: WTF???

So, the guys who ruined our national economy and made millions while doing it should be told to strap it back on and get back out there? Be given tax cuts and allowed to run their own show again? Are you kidding?

Rachael Maddow and the rapid descent of cable news

This will be an admitted rant. Having lived through 9/11, and dealt personally with the aftermath of our government's response, I have not felt an overwhelming urge to watch the litany of news coverage, as though nothing had happened in the last 10 years.

And then I had to see Rachael Maddow. While I hate Fox for what that network has done to journalistic integrity, Rachael Maddow and MSNBC have taken that low to greater depths of irresponsibility.

For those who did not see it, Rachael Maddow presented a program that to me is no different than Jane Fonda sitting in a North Vietnamese tank discussing the American "war crimes" in Vietnam, referring to our Prisoners of War.

I am in the military. I will be the first to admit we made mistakes early in the "post-9/11" period. Lots of them. But one thing about the military - unlike most organizations, we have the ability to not only learn from mistakes, but rapidly implement corrections. If we don't, people die. There were people who thought after 9/11 that "enhanced interrogation techniques" - essentially light forms of torture - would deliver results. In fact, they did not. We had to re-learn old experience - torture is not effective as an interrogation technique because the person being tortured will say anything to make it stop.

So, here I am in 2011 confronted by the same garbage accusations I have heard - and were dealt with - by 2004-2005. Discussion of Abu Ghraib as if it was last year, and not in 2003. And the whole time, Rachael Maddow making empathetic looks that say - "Oh, I understand that the government made you do horrible things." But there is no retort - no one saying that we have learned from our mistakes. We would not have turned the Sunnis in Western Iraq if we had not learned... we would not have decimated al Qaeda in Iraq if we had not learned... we would not be leaving Iraq now if we had not learned...

The name of the program is "Day of Destruction, Decade of War." The implication is we have responded to too great a degree. Which is all I hate about the new cable news. And here we have the crux of the problem - oversimplification of the issues. As Americans with a bicameral system, we like black and white. But our nation exists in a world of gray.

In the future, we will likely look back on this time as the second age of yellow journalism. My only hope is we survive this second age with no worse affects than the first in the early years of the 20th century.

Me & Mr. Boortz

I was perusing the pages of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution last weekend—following my usual routine of obsessive reading about the Braves (most of the news concerning which I had already read via various internet sources, but which didn’t stop from me re-reading it all again, of course) in the Sports section, followed by a skim/spot read through the front page, metro, and business sections—when I made the mistake of glancing at the editorial section.

When I can bring myself to do it, my usual method of reviewing the editorial section of the AJC involves taking a few seconds to see what everybody is talking about, scanning the first couple of sentences of each column to see if I already know what the “liberal” or “conservative” is going to say, and then, the rare instances I don’t, moving to Stage Two. Stage Two involves probing a bit further with a brief skim over the internal paragraphs of the column and then reading the thing itself if it seems interesting.

I frame this in terms of reluctance, incidentally, because the stupidity and spin that litters editorial pages, the AJC included, usually pisses me off or disgusts me, which is not how I like begin a day.

Anyway, I carried out that strategy once more last Saturday and found nothing worthy of Stage Two, until I ran across Neal Boortz’s column. It was an opinion piece that was kind of a general diatribe—no single issue was addressed. Accordingly, it whizzed by Stages One and Two as a result of its skipping around of topics—there was no real theme, just a kind of yammering. It went like this:

* Stage One: Hmmm, what is this about? Can’t tell from the initial sensationalist intro.

* Stage Two: What does that have to do with the other stuff? What? Are you SERIOUS?

Then commenced the reading, the irritation, and actually enough outrage to pound out the following email to the editors of the editorial section at the AJC:

***

Dear AJC Editors:

I know you gave Neal Boortz a column, but just because you give him a weekly column, does that mean that you completely cede editorial control? I’ve read and listened to Mr. Boortz off and on for years, and though I usually disagree with him, he makes the occasional good point. Today’s article, however, was like reading propaganda from crazy town. I would list the multiple factual inaccuracies, but I know you wouldn’t publish such a lengthy response. Instead, it’s YOUR JOB as the editors to filter out extreme rhetoric (and, frankly, poorly written material) from the pages of your newspaper. If Mr. Boortz chooses to “mail one in” you should excise it and simply note that Mr. Boortz’s column is not appearing today. And tell him to work harder.

Dan Wright

***

For those who do not know, Neal Boortz is a locally / regionally famous conservative talk-show radio host. He’s been on the Atlanta scene for years. He projects as a kind of rugged libertarian-minded sort, but he’s really more a conservative with libertarian leanings.

(The original column by Neal Boortz appears here.)

That was, I thought, the end of it. Then, however, I received the following email last Wednesday evening while I was at a Braves game:

***

Mr. Wright, I spoke with Mr. Boortz's editor and he would like for you to point out what you believe is inaccurate in the column if it is not too much of an inconvenience for you. As a columnist, Mr. Boortz gets wide latitude, but there should not be clear factual inaccuracies in his column.

Kind regards,

Shawn McIntosh

AJC Public editor

***

Okay, I admit it, I was proud. I had gotten their attention. The single voice was standing up to the wide river of ideological blather and had actually been acknowledged for once. However, this also meant that I had to write a response.

Guys, I’m pretty busy these days. I’ve got two kiddos and (with my wife) am running my own business, among other things. While I try to crank out a blog post every now and again, my free time went from marginal to near-non-existent the last couple of years, and when I’ve got it, I’m usually not aiming to write about politics, frankly; rather, I’m looking for activities mostly involving beer.

Additionally, responding to conservative blather is harder than one might think. It’s not a simple matter of demonstrating, “hey, you said 2 + 2 = 5; it’s really 4.” Even though there are clear and obvious problems with the premises of most facially conservative or “libertarian” thought, it takes a little bit of time to break it down and show it for what it is.

I went ahead and did it, though. (I know, those of you who know me well are thinking, “enough with the lead-ins, Dan, we knew you were going to respond, what did you say?”-- that is, those of you who are still reading this thing.) It’s an okay response in my estimation. It’s one of those deals where you could just go on and on, but… In any case, my response follows:

***

Shawn:

Thank you for responding.

These are the portions of Mr. Boortz’s column that I found to be factually inaccurate and not deserving of publication in a wide-circulation newspaper:

* Mr. Boortz’s reference to Obama as “a man with so little understanding of what it means to be an American”: It’s fine to attack the man’s politics, but the repetitive effort to frame Obama as some kind of foreigner (and what seems to be a veiled reference to the never-ending and shifting claims that he really wasn’t born in the U.S. or is a Muslim) crosses a line between serious political opining and propaganda.

* “World history is full of dynasties, monarchies, dictatorships and theocracies; but representative democracies — republics, if you will — are few and far between, and history shows they usually die a violent death. The life expectancies of governments such as ours is just a bit over 200 years, and we’re there.” I have heard this 200-year-average-lifespan claim a number of times—in fact, I heard it over lunch today and had to inwardly cringe. Hard right conservatives seem to break it out when they want to scare people. It’s usually a lead-in to making radical arguments for backward change.

So, what’s the source here? Most often, people like to make the romantic comparison of the “decay” of the United States with the “fall and decline” (to borrow the title of a famous historian’s masterwork about the Roman Empire) of the Roman Empire. There are quite a few problems with this comparison, however. First, the government was hardly a representative democracy or republic in a modern sense. There were counsels of prominent citizens and a senate, but it was more rule by oligarchy or aristocracy for most of the life of the Roman “republic.” Another problem—it lasted a whole lot longer than 200 years. Try 550 or so. Yet another problem: most historians consider the apex of Roman power and prestige to have occurred during the Roman Empire, 200 or so years after the republic faltered (in approx. 120 A.D.).

What other sources are there to make this bold statement? Well, we have another favorite topic of the right, the rise of the Nazi regime. However, the Nazis took power only 15 or so years after the formation of the Weimar Republic. That’s nowhere near 200 years! (Incidentally, I always find it somewhat odd that the right uses the example of the Nazi party when trying to criticize liberals. The Nazis were, after all, a fascist group… an extreme hard right group, that is.) The true lesson of the fall of German democracy in the 1930s is that democracies can fail if they are systematically attacked and undermined from within. That is a lesson that we should take a hard look at when we view our own current collection of oddballs in Congress. We should be very sensitive, it seems to me, to those who want to “tear it all down” (I’m looking at you, Tea Partiers), because it can be torn down; these institutions are not, as many folks seem to assume, indestructible.

Another problem with Mr. Boortz’s statement is that representative democracies are, in fact, not “few and far between” in modern history. Virtually every nation in Europe is currently a representative democracy of some kind or another. That was certainly not the case only a couple of hundred years ago at the foundation of our country. The Arab Spring shows a movement towards democracy. Many nations in Asia are democracies or trending that way. Facts belie this statement. If there is a trend, it’s towards democratic forms of government, not away.

I really weary of these oft-repeated phrases, so oft-repeated that no one really thinks to question them anymore. But we should; accepting these kinds of statements sets the stage for irrational arguments and confrontations. Sure, if our democracy is about to “expire” and be blown away by the winds of history, perhaps we should go ahead and give up—dismantle it, “kill the beast.” Social Security? Well, it’s just a matter of time anyway. Medicare? Forget it, a luxury our broken and dying civilization can no longer afford.

But it’s just not true.

* “The slide to the ultimate end seems to be when the people have figured out that they can use the ballot box to claim someone else’s property; and we’re there as well.” Where is the authority for this statement? What is he talking about? I mean, this really baffles me. Is he talking about Communist Russia or China? Maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall the citizens of those countries voting to install that kind of governmental system. They had it imposed on them.

Now, there are many socialist democracies in Northern Europe that have voted for things like universal medical care and pensions and the higher taxes to support them, but they seem to be doing just fine. England, also, has universal health care, and I don’t see that country falling to its “ultimate end.”

Like I said in my original email, this is talk from crazy town. Maybe in Crazyland, they all voted to lower the retirement age to 25, and the country vaporized into anarchy.

It’s fantasy.

* “There is, after all, no constitutional right to vote in a presidential election.” There actually is a constitutional right to vote in a presidential election, but the voting is technically not for president, but for electors who will vote for the nominee of their party. I include this statement in the category of inaccurate facts, because (i) in practice, you go to the ballot box and vote for president, and your vote counts—simple as that. To suggest otherwise is being a bit intellectually dishonest; and (ii) he links this statement with “culling the voter registration lists.” The oddity of voting for electors in a presidential election as opposed to directly for the people running for that office does not support jettisoning names off of the voter registration lists because of a perceived lack of a constitutional right to vote. There’s no logical connection there. There also would be pretty obvious due process rights involved here; that would be the 14th Amendment, which is, in fact, part of the Constitution.

My other objection to the column was that it was a shallow treatment undeserving of inclusion in the AJC. For example, Mr. Boortz’s shallow concept of “rights” and how they are addressed under the Constitution. Well, he did say that the concept of rights was “hard.” I do agree with that.

This sort of rhetoric is distinctly unhelpful… it sets out certain facts in an authoritative and general way (no specifics allowed) and then leaps to illogical but connected conclusions. E.g., the example cited above about not having a right to vote in a presidential election. Let’s cull the voter registration lists, because there’s no constitutional right to vote! I’m pretty sure Mr. Boortz is aware that he is doing this, but sometimes I wonder. Either way, it’s unfit to be in your newspaper.

Sincerely,

Dan Wright

P.S. There are no doubt other factual inaccuracies in Mr. Boortz’s column. Those were just the ones that popped out to me upon reading it. Having read some accounts of the Founding Fathers, I question his blanket statements about what they thought or did, but I don’t really have the time or, frankly, inclination to look them all up. As I always tell my friends and relatives, don’t accept things just because you hear them; analyze and research them.

***

Your turn, Mr. Boortz.