Tina Dupuy

The Occupy Movement, “the 99 percent,” has, ironically, been hijacked by a small minority within its ranks. I speak of a small percentage of Occupiers who are okay with property destruction. As we saw in Oakland over the weekend: They’re okay with breaking windows, trashing city buildings and throwing bottles at the police. In short: They are not nonviolent. They are willing to commit petty criminal acts masked as a political statement.

These are Black Bloc tactics and they’re historically ineffective at spurring change. The now Gingrich-vilified Saul Alinsky in 1970 said the Weather Underground (the terrorist wing of the anti-war movement) should be on the Establishment’s payroll. “Because they are strengthening the Establishment,” said the “professional radical” Alinsky. Nothing kneecapped the call for the war to end quicker than buildings being bombed in solidarity with pacifist sentiments.

Here’s the key point: Occupy is not an armed conflict – it’s a PR war. Nonviolent struggle is a PR war. Gandhi had embedded journalists on his Salt March. He wasn’t a saint. That was a consciously cultivated media image. He used the press and its power to gain sympathy for his cause. What he didn’t do is say he was nonviolent “unless the cops are d*cks,” a sentiment voiced at Occupy. Nonviolent struggle has nothing to do with how the cops react. In actual nonviolent movements they welcome police overreaction because it helps the cause they’re fighting for.

At some General Assemblies this issue is referred to as “diversity of tactics.” It means basically if you’re not okay with property damage, but if someone else is, you’re not going to stand in the way. To a liberal ear it sounds like affirmative action or tolerance. It sounds like diversity of opinion – it’s not. It’s 3,000 people peacefully marching and two *ssholes breaking windows; which becomes 3,000 people breaking some windows in news reports.

Violent tactics taint everyone involved evenly – consenting or not.

Property destruction is not only a bad PR move (it costs taxpayers and small business owners money) it’s not constitutionally protected Free Speech. It’s also not what democracy looks like. The First Amendment specifically states the right to peaceably assemble to redress grievances.

Moreover the destruction of property is exactly what Occupy is protesting against; it’s what the banks took from us. Occupy has pointed out the criminality of the banks and the seeming collusion with government to take wealth and property away from working people and give it to the wealthy. So protest property crimes, by committing crimes against property? It’s nonsensical.

Destroying property destroys moral authority. You can’t rail against Bankaneers while trashing a City Hall. You can but you lose. Then the cops look justified in their show of force. Being quiet is seen as consent and being in solidarity with Oakland is standing with their well-documented embrace of “diversity of tactics.”

Occupy should denounce violence and property damage. There should be a statement that Oakland doesn’t speak for the movement as a whole. Holding solidarity marches against Oakland police brutality is exactly what that sounds like. It sends the message that Occupy is happy to cost the Oakland taxpayers millions in damages. If Occupy is to succeed it has to purge the extreme (read: ineffective waste) elements now commandeering the movement.

Some have emailed me and asked if the people who autonomously did these acts of vandalism and violence were “undercovers” or extreme anarchists. My response has been their goal is the same and their tactics are the same, so why does it matter? If they’re undercovers trying to undermine the movement then disavow them. If they’re anarchists who believe they are a part of Occupy, disavow them. The distinction means little if the endgame and the solution are the same.

It’s not true that no one speaks for Occupy. Those using violence are speaking far louder than the “people’s mic.” They need to be purged, or the the entire movement will be marginalized.

The plan for the four month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street was the first national direct action by the movement thus far, a protest called Occupy Congress or #J17. Activists from all over the nation were to convene on the West Lawn of the Capitol for a National General Assembly (GA), followed by some teach-ins, a visit to the Rayburn House Office Building (where congressmen work) and a march to the White House. The plan was to speak directly to their members of Congress about the issues that brought them to D.C.

Not exactly radical. And far from revolutionary.

And that’s really the thing with Occupy: Yes there have been nearly 6,000 arrests in the last four months — a much higher concentration that for other movements in recent American history, such as the anti-nuclear power protests that resulted in around 2,000 arrested over a two year period in the mid-1980s. And yes, some demonstrators wear handkerchiefs over their faces, like early celluloid bank robbers (or anarchists). And yes, they chant, “mic check” and yell, getting people like Karl Rove to say things like: “Who gave you the right to Occupy America? Nobody!” But what they want at this point seems a piece with what any number of goo-goo D.C. worthies work for each day: a more representative democratic government.

“It’s not a coincidence that Congress’ approval rating is near 1 percent,” read OccupyDC’s Twitter feed. Indeed.

The Occupy movement argues — and has tons of evidence to back it up — that the U.S. government is overly concerned with the needs and desires of the wealthy and corporations and has less regard for, well, the little people.

Around 2,000 Occupiers from all over the country showed up on a soggy Capitol Lawn on Tuesday morning. Depending on who you asked, this was either way bigger than they expected or utterly disappointing. At one point last year, a call went out for an ambitious encampment of 1 million tents to be staked down on the National Mall, but that plan appeared to have been largely abandoned by Tuesday. For a movement inspired by the stagnant economy, getting that many activists on buses was always going to be a challenge, for simple monetary reasons, leading to some push-back against the idea of a mass national event at all. SEIU organized an Occupy Congress type of event last month called Take Back the Capitol. That action, according to attendees, had more people, more people of color and less energy. They had buses and numbers; just not the enthusiasm. One reason is that it was, well, organized, and it’s hard to accuse Occupy of being…well organized.

After an afternoon of large GAs on the lawn of the Capitol building, the Occupiers made their way to the doors of the Rayburn building. They briefly took the exterior balcony, hanging signs on a railing only to be quickly chased away by Capitol police. They chanted and cheered and hollered…then all stood in line patiently to get through building security. Once inside the building, the previously boisterous group split apart, becoming suddenly deferential inside congressional offices. Raucous on the outside; concerned average citizen on the inside. One California Occupier I followed walked into his congresswoman’s office and asked quietly, “We’re doing this correctly right? Asking these people to represent us?” He then went on to tell the staffers that his parents cannot retire and will have to work until they die.

I would describe most left-leaning activists as having the angst of artists, the interests of policy wonks and the emotional state of your average 7th grader. Which means all social movements at moments feel chaotic, like they’re about to detonate or implode. The Internet only makes this worse. There’s a near constant trickle of fear, rumor and hype among the protesters. They worry about everything and have control over none of it. For Occupy Congress, the big concern was that “autonomous anarchists” would show up and cause property damage. They’d break windows or do something that would stain the entire movement as vandals…or worse.

This did not happen last night. No windows were broken. There were six arrests. The “Black Bloc” threat didn’t show up.

And Occupy Congress did manage to pull off a massive protest on the steps of the Supreme Court. This was not planned and had it been, it likely wouldn’t have happened. It’s illegal to demonstrate on the steps of the highest court in the nation. In October, Cornel West, on the day of the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, held a sign reading, “Poverty is the worst form of violence” and was swiftly arrested in “solidarity with the Occupy Movement.” Tuesday, with only a handful of Capitol Police around over a thousand Occupiers rushed the steps of the Supreme Court. There was no way for the police to arrest that many people in a massive act of civil disobedience. The protesters then stood on the steps, cheering and chanting for a few moments, before just as swiftly leaving for the White House.

Had they known what they pulled off by accident was so unusual in the post-9/11 world, they might have stayed longer on the steps of the building where Citizens United was decided, facing arrest and forcing a point about the Court. Instead, the “leaderless” movement traipsed down Pennsylvania Avenue to the current home of President Obama.

It’s an apt metaphor for Occupy: Their tactical victories are, as they admit not “overly planned.” They don’t have paid linguists who study framing with focus groups to target key demographics. They are just convinced they’re right about the extreme wealth inequality (the worst in the industrialized world) in America and don’t know what else to do about it.

So, the nation’s problems have them occupied at this point … just not overly organized.

Original piece is here.

Nov 21 2011, 4:22 PM ET

Women may be the 51%, but the Occupy camps and General Assemblies look as gender-imbalanced as Congress

“I’m called ‘that white bitch who gets everything she wants’ at the GA’s,” says Elise Whitaker, 21, adopting a bit of a defiant posture. She’s been at Occupy LA since the second week of the encampment. A now former-assistant director for indie films, Whitaker is good looking in a vaguely familiar, probably-an-actor kind of way. She looks like just the type who moves to Los Angeles every day to “follow their dreams,” but she’s sleeping in a tent at City Hall. She tells me she has figured out what she wants to do with her life: activism. This is it for her. She loves this stuff.

It’s early November and helicopters are hovering over our heads as the Los Angeles Police Department arrests a guy who is thought to have attempted to light a woman’s hair on fire at the camp. He was kicked out and has been causing problems ever since. Nearly 20 police officers are gathered at the corner of the park. This interrupts my conversation with Whitaker and delays her next interview with a YouTube channel called Inside Out News.

During the very first week of the Occupation in LA I noticed that the gender breakdown in its General Assembly (GA) and various committee meetings was roughly the same as the within the U.S. Congress. In other words, about one-fifth of those who were participating in the (small d) democratic part of this Occupy encampment were women. It was the same with the people who slept in the camp.

This is pretty consistent throughout the movement in general.

Thus far I’ve visited eight Occupations in the U.S. and Canada, four on the West coast and four on the East: Toronto, New York City, Baltimore, DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, the University of California at Berkeley and Oakland.

The only GA that had anywhere near gender parity was the largest one there’s been yet — the GA on the day of the general strike at U.C. Berkeley. The largest GAs will only turn out 500 people max; Zuccotti Park is a tiny granite slab in lower Manhattan and can’t fit many more than that. But the Mario Savio Steps at Sproul Hall at Berkeley held more than 4,000 students and activists — and half of them appeared to be female. (Go Bears!)

This is not an expose of the Occupy movement’s outlook toward women or to suggest attitudes within it are radically different from those found elsewhere. I was also screamed at and called “bitch” at Occupy LA, but frankly I’m called worse in my fan mail on a daily basis. Yet as this movement has been in the media at a near constant rate for now two months, the story telling about it has not evolved. There’s either the agenda “journalism” whose practitioners show up to paint the protesters as violent or stupid or its equally useless counterpart, a virtual livestream of reporting on every detail, no matter how trivial. Everything else is crime reporting: How many arrests? Who’s pepper sprayed? Who’s died? No wonder we still hear the question: “What do they want?”

This movement is complex — how the members define themselves, how important the tents are (or are not) and what they’re doing is still being worked out in marathon meetings and through endless committee votes. This process of identity-formation is made only more complicated by police raids, and by the tear gas and pepper spray that gave greeted protest in some cities. Occupiers all viscerally sense the problem: extreme economic inequality. They all cite a lack of fairness — a lack of opportunity. They also agree that the status quo is failing.

But when it comes to women, Occupy is really a microcosm of the greater culture at large. This should give comfort to those who find Occupy’s dynamics puzzling — and greatly embarrass those in the movement who see themselves as revolutionaries. America’s gender conflict fault-lines are making a familiar reappearance inside Occupy, with results both predictable and novel.

I’m not the only one to notice the Occupy gender gap. This issue is talked about at GAs, I’m told, a lot. Nearly every night at Occupy LA, the question comes up: “What can we do to get more women out here?”

Of course there are women out there — and they are in the line of fire. Brandy Sippel, three-months pregnant, was clipped by a car during a protest with Occupy D.C. The driver sent three others to the hospital that night and was released by police. At a press conference the next day, the Metropolitan Police Department implied she and the other victims were “drunk diving” on cars. Another pregnant woman was pepper sprayed by police at Occupy Seattle. The police said pepper spray wasn’t harmful or they wouldn’t be using it. Susie Cagle, a journalist covering Occupy Oakland, says that when she was arrested during a raid by police, there were a higher percentage of women arrested on the roster than who were normally at the camp.

For an absurd contrast to these facts, last week a year-old Maybelline ad campaign for “Baby Lips” lip gloss resurfaced online. In a display of tone-deafness as to what it would take to make women protest, it shows models taking to the streets demanding softer lips, confronting cops with kisses and parading around with a banner reading “no more basic lip balm!” over the Brooklyn Bridge. Liberal bloggers immediately dubbed it L’Oreal’s attempt to co-opt Occupy, until the upload date on YouTube was noted. To me it was more like an ironic half-right foreshadowing; the majority of the Occupy protesters are not the target market for lip gloss.

There have been a couple of alleged rapes reported in encampments. One was in Occupy Baltimore during the first week of their encampment. Police said the victim’s claim lacked credibility and dismissed it. Another was at Occupy Philadelphia and is still being investigated by police. One protester was arrested in New York for rape. There’s this volatile mix of those waiting to pounce on anything to discredit Occupy and an open public space where female protesters are sleeping that absolutely anyone can wander into. There have been no reports of men being raped at Occupations.

Sadly, many responses have been much like the ones in the wake of correspondent Lara Logan’s sexual assault in Tahrir Square while covering their revolution: Yes, it’s tragic and awful, but you know you’re vulnerable so why are you out there?

Why are they out there? Why sleep in tents and risk being confronted by police only to be slighted by fellow revolutionaries at the same time? It’s simple: these women believe the country is broken and they see the Occupy movement as a the solution.

What is Occupy’s solution to its gender disparity problem? Occupy LA has a code of conduct and a zero tolerance policy for any violence or assault. Of course, it also lacks the ability to keep people out of the public space the camp is in. Occupy D.C., a more stable camp because it has not been raided, is able to work out intricate documents like a Declaration of Occupation (leaked last week), has set up a women’s tent. At first the idea was resisted because the men felt that inequality meant special treatment for one gender and equality meant equal treatment. Then the group consensus came around. Women needed a safe place. Some women have said its purpose is for “group menstruation.” (Shades of The Red Tent.) “There’s a legitimate reason and then there are fucking hippies,” said one male Occupier who’s proud of the new development. But it’s really an effort by the women there to make women feel more at ease at McPherson Square. Men there also have agreed to self-police other men and remind them sexist language makes women uncomfortable. Will that bring the numbers of female Occupiers up? Like everything else with Occupy, it’s all too soon to tell.

Back in LA, Whitaker tells me about a movie she worked on, Zombie Apocalypse: Redemption. She also played several background roles in it. “It’s good, have you seen it?” I tell her I regret having missed it. After our interview, I see her on Countdown with Keith Olbermann talking about an attempt to occupy Bank of America Plaza in downtown LA, which is owned by Brookfield Office Properties, the owners of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan. It brought to mind something she said to me before I left. Her moniker “that white bitch who gets everything she wants” struck me as demeaning and belittling — yet she sees as a challenge and almost a compliment.

She smiled coyly and informed me, “You know they’re right … I do get everything I want.”

The original piece is here.

Nov 16 2011, 2:09 PM ET

After their tents were pulled by the university, UC Berkeley students turn the school’s celebration of a ’60s icon into massive Occupy meeting

Mario Savio was a UC Berkeley student in the ’60s and a key member of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. He’s become an activist icon; Mario Savio Youth Activist awards are given out by his memorial fund. By the ’90s, the steps of Sproul Hall on the UC Berkeley campus where he gave his now famous “put your bodies upon the gears” speech were renamed the Mario Savio Steps. It was there last Wednesday that police raided an hours-old Occupy Cal protest and pounded student activists with batons. Yes, the chancellor of the university that celebrates Savio in its brochures, Robert J. Birgeneau, waited mere minutes before setting in motion a response that saw students beaten on the very steps bearing Savio’s name … just for setting up tents.

As the massive Occupy crackdown unfolded nationally, students facing yet another tuition hike — in a UC system that has seen its tuition triple in 10 years — took note and took to organizing.

In less than a week the campus had a general strike. Tuesday most classes were cancelled. And it just so happened to be the day the annual event Mario Savio memorial at Sproul Hall was going to take place. Which in turn led to the largest General Assembly (GA) in the history of the Occupy movement.

An amazing coincidence. One of those historical ironies that should make the school administration cringe indefinitely.

Some 4,000 (if you were to be really conservative) participated in a massive direct democracy meeting, now commonly referred to as the GA. The sea of students was tutored in the now identifiable consensus hand signs used by the movement. The facilitators laid out the ground rules: They were going to vote on whether or not to bring back the tents and set up an Occupation on campus. Yes, it was against the rules. Would they all (80 percent anyway) agree this was the right course of action? The GA attendees broke up into groups of 20 to discuss. That’s right: 4,000 people broke up into groups of 20 with at least three helicopters hovering just above to discuss the merits of the action. And then the facilitators clarified: just because you vote “yes” doesn’t mean you’re obligated to sleep there.

This came the day of Zuccotti Park being cleared by NYPD at the request of Mayor Micheal Bloomberg. In Oakland, embattled Mayor Jean Quan let it slip that there was a coordinated effort with 18 cities to clear Occupy movements in their cities. Occupy Oakland was raided for a second time this week. But police arresting and in some cases brutalizing Occupiers hasn’t made them go away. It’s made others more interested in the movement and made their struggle more sympathetic. Occupy Oakland made a march into UC Berkeley to support Occupy Cal. “I saw a revolt sign,” one protester remarked. “And I said ‘Oh shit, Occupy Oakland is here.’”

Oakland as a city and as an Occupation have their own very unique, very Oakland problems: One is their city government, two is their police and three is with the distrust of one and two. Oakland was the only city in America to have had a solidarity riot for Rodney King in Los Angeles. It’s a tough town. Oakland fell during the crack epidemic three decades ago and has never been able to fully pick itself back up. Of all the cities in America with an Occupation, the message of economic justice for the 99 percent should have been welcomed there. It wasn’t. At the end of October, the mayor went on vacation while over a dozen different police agencies accompanied the Oakland Police Department and moved in on the camp in front of the mayor’s office at city hall. The melee ended with multiple protestors injured, including a former Marine, Scott Olsen, whose skull was fractured after he was hit with a tear gas canister. Oakland has been a focus of the Occupy Movement ever since. It’s members came to Cal in a show of solidarity with the students.

In the largest GA history has ever seen (larger by at least 3,500 than similar meetings in New York) the group consensus was that they would, in fact, bring tents and set up an occupation on the Mario Savio Steps.

Berkeley professor Robert Reich, who was already slated to speak at the memorial tribute, offered the massive crowd these words: “Moral outrage is the beginning. The days of apathy are over, folks. And once it has begun it cannot be stopped and it will not be stopped.”

After he left the microphone, half a dozen tents slowly paraded through the crowd and up the Mario Savio steps to rest at the top. The PA system played the first song of a promised dance party. The first tune? Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

Of course.

The original piece is here.

We’re in a coffee shop near McPherson Square, the location of Occupy DC, and Michael Patterson, 21, and I are having hot cocoa on a cold November night. He’s wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt and baggy shorts. It’s freezing outside. “I’m from Alaska,” he offers as an explanation. He’s been sleeping in a tent in D.C. for over a month now. I’ve traveled to five Occupations in two countries. In every demonstration (including the one in Canada) I’ve found a vet to talk to:

In Zuccotti Park, Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, was sitting next to a table of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) literature. On his sweater were two buttons: an Iraq Campaign metal and one from the IWW. He served two tours in Iraq and now says he’s unemployed and can’t find work for over $10 an hour. And he can’t live on $10 an hour. When I asked him why he’s at Occupy Wall Street he says, “I went and fought for capitalism and that’s why I’m now a Marxist.”

At Occupy Baltimore, I met 21-year-old Justin Carson, who tells me he served in the Army National Guard in Iraq from 2009 until this February. His nickname is Crazy Craze. He says he has PTSD and is bipolar but won’t “do pharmaceuticals.” Then he told me I should look into the Illuminati since I’m writing an article.

It was a surprise to meet Iraq war vets at these protests. There are only, after all, around a million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in what was once dubbed the War on Terror.

Their presence became national news when Iraq vet and former Marine Scott Olsen’s skull was fractured by a non-lethal round fired by police in Oakland in late-October. A week later in New York, around 30 vets held a solidarity march from Zuccotti Park to the Stock Exchange. They had a rally at the park afterward where Bordeleau spoke. “This is the first major movement for social change we’ve seen in this country since the ’70s,” he said to me.

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He’s become a symbol of the Occupation Movement — he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his “freedom” of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

“There’s a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head,” says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. “Because he was out front.”

Patterson still sports a military haircut and a bit of the Army swagger. He also has a touch of that telling hyper-awareness war vets sometimes display; he’s a little twitchy, a little intense. He tells me he has PTSD and has been self-medicating with weed. He says it helps. What’s also helped is being a part of this protest movement. “This is the only peaceful solution,” he says. “If this movement doesn’t work, our country is not going to make it … We’re just not going to make it.”

Patterson became an interrogator in Iraq straight out of high school. His mother had to sign his enlistment papers. He turned 18 in Basic. “We’re an industrialized nation who’s a third world country. The super wealthy elite pretty much control our democratic process and everyone here is pretty much fighting for scraps and that’s not right,” he says.

I ask him what was the switch for him and when. He explained that it was WikiLeaks. It was the footage of the Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqis released by WikiLeaks in April of 2010. Up to that point he had been interrogating Iraqis and using what he describes as psychological torture. He was 10 years old when the World Trade Center was hit. He wanted to fight terrorism in Iraq. He bought into the whole thing, he tells me. He had been looking forward to signing up ever since the 5th grade and then, suddenly, last November, he found himself watching a video of his fellow soldiers gunning down Iraqis on the street and it all changed for him.

The Apache video, to a civilian, makes war look like a video game, but to Patterson, it was the first time he saw Iraqis as real people. Random people, with children and families who care about them. He tried to get out of the military as a conscientious objector after that. He was told it wouldn’t work because he’s an atheist. “So I just smoked a bunch of pot and got kicked out,” he says. He was officially discharged on June 7th of this year. He went back home to Alaska, where he read about Occupy Wall Street on Reddit.

He then went to D.C. to sleep in a tent a block away from the White House.

Patterson speaks in sound bites. He’s had a conversion and like those who find religion, the awakening has given him fervor. He’s witnessing: “Combat at Arms and Military Intelligence all come to the same conclusion: War is a business!”

He interrogated people who were later put to death in Iraq with no appeals process, he says. It haunts him. He didn’t fulfill his contract so he’s not eligible for the GI Bill. Even if he were, he explains, he still couldn’t afford to go to school without loans. He’d be wracked with debt just like so many other students who are down at their city’s Occupations. “I just want to go to college and teach high school,” he says.

For Patterson, like the other vets I spoke to, the Occupy Movement has provided a way to channel their outrage and their energy. Their involvement has been a plus for the movement, too, because vets are extremely helpful if you are planning a tent city in a park — they can get things done, and they are used to living in tents. It’s worth noting the anti-war movement during Vietnam was given legitimacy after the vets became their voice (John Kerry for example). But the vets themselves take solace in the act of being useful.

Or as Patterson puts it: “I haven’t had one nightmare since I’ve been here.”

Image credit: Tina Dupuy

Original piece is here.

LOS ANGELES — I had just taken the hour-long tour for those new to Occupy LA, a solidarity demonstration sparked by Occupy Wall Street in New York. My husband had been visiting the encampment, centered on the lawns around Los Angeles City Hall, in solidarity with me, snooping around the mini-gatherings that pepper the building’s grounds.

“You have no idea what’s going on here!” he declared after finding me on the corner of Spring and Temple Streets listening to an elderly Hispanic man standing on a box telling a captive audience how the bank took his home.

“Civics,” I answered.

“Then you do know what’s going on here,” he said.

Well first off: there’s a tour. There’s nothing more inviting and informative than that. It’s given primarily by Cheryl Aichele, a medical cannabis advocate who looks like the person you’d seek out at any event for answers; she’s non-threatening, sincere and most importantly knowledgeable. When I first meet her she’s in a large tent with a production company logo on it (this is how we roll in LA). It’s like a reception area for a community center. There’s a whiteboard with the schedule of a dozen or so committee meetings that day. They use words like “outreach” and “liaison” and combinations thereof for their committees (and sub-committees). There’s an “objective and demands” box that a middle-aged man stuffs a letter into. A woman next to me is inquiring about the AA meetings. She’s immediately paired up with a fellow 12-stepper within earshot. There are flyers and maps and notices. It’s Day Seven of the encampment — they have AA meetings.

“All of the problems we are facing are legal. They’re laws. We need to pass the right laws,” says my tour guide Aichele.

These are terrible anarchists.

A few days ago some LAPD officers came by to donate bags of clothes; they’re made available to anyone who needs them. The Occupiers offer free food, also provided by donors. There’s a lending library and a first aid tent. I’m told the health department came the day before. They told everyone to wash their hands and not to eat melon, but Occupy LA generally passed inspection.

“In LA, disasters tend to bring us together,” explains Professor Wendel Eckford, a historian with Los Angeles City College who’s been coming down to the Occupation everyday after class.

And it is a disaster: One of out of every five U.S. foreclosures this year was in California. The unemployment rate in Los Angeles is 13 percent. State budget crisis after city budget crisis has taken its toll.

There’s a boiling point and currently it’s expressed in the 253 tents surrounding City Hall. Its part Peoples Park, part low-budget film set and part civics crash course.

Due to a city ordinance they can’t sleep in the park surrounding City Hall. So every night all the tents move to the sidewalk and every morning they move back. They also recycle and have signs reading “Zero waste station” on all four corners of the park. I see a guy scrubbing a graffiti tag off of the wall of the landmark marble building. The group has a non-violence policy which includes graffiti. But their big concern: wheelchair access. It’s a new goal to make the whole occupation accessible to those with disabilities.

“We’d like to be an example for other cites,” says tour guide Aichele.

And by “cities” she means Occupations. Which are growing in number everyday.

Los Angeles City Council members make frequent visits to the tent city encompassing the building where they work. City Council President — and soon-to-be mayoral candidate — Eric Garcetti, who holds an annual Government 101 seminar at City Hall to help citizens make better use of the system, has been down at Occupy LA recruiting participants for next year’s tutorial. Councilmembers Dennis Zine and Bill Rosendahl also are staunch supporters of the Occupation.

But it was Councilmember Richard Alarcon who was approached by one of his constituents, a member of the City Liaison Committee for Occupy LA, Mario Brito, to support this demonstration. Alarcon tells The Atlantic, “[Occupy LA] is exhibiting the frustration of people throughout America.”

Alarcon’s resulting City Council resolution in support of the demonstrators reads like an Occupy Wall Street manifesto: “WHEREAS, the causes and consequences of the economic crisis are eroding the very social contract upon which the Constitution that the United States of America was founded; namely, the ability of Americans to come together and form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense of, promote the general welfare of, and secure the blessings of liberty for all, allowing every American to strive for and share in the prosperity of our nation through cooperation and hard work;.” It’s a three-page resolution mentioning Citizens United, foreclosures, wealth inequality, Egypt and corporate personhood.

“I’ve never written one that long before,” says Alarcon.

Alarcon’s resolution was expected to pass Wednesday morning with a wide margin of support, giving the Occupiers the blessing of the council.

Sure, there are hippies dancing. And yes, there are drum circles. It’s LA, so there’s also “medicinal” marijuana wafting about. But mostly the crowd looks like LA: Half Latino, a quarter African-American and Asian and mostly middle-class. And that’s who is in the meetings, not the hippies. In the meetings, people discuss things like Glass-Steagall, plans of actions and politicians to reach out to. There’s a general sense that this is something big and they need to figure out what to do with it. All is reported at the General Assembly or GA every night at 7:30 p.m. Participants use Quaker consensus decision-making hand signals in all meetings. Participants can indicate if they agree, disagree, kind of agree or oppose vehemently — all non-verbally. So speakers get to see the reaction of the crowd in real time. It’s public polling and it’s painfully slow and tedious. Meaning: this is what democracy looks like. Everyone has a voice and not all of them are poignant. Some of them are repetitive — and there’s a hand signal for that, too.

What about being on message? At the encampment, there are communists next to Ron Paul supporters next to vegan activists next to those LaRouche people (who always seem to show up) — even a couple of union guys. I’ve always called this liberal “micro-cause-ism.” Will they stay on point? “We’re not focused on the thing that’s not causing the problem,” says Aichele. Message cohesion is not the rigged system they’re rallying to change.

The cumbersome process and cacophany of messages is all about honoring the First Amendment to them. Everyone gets to be heard regardless of someone else’s opinion. As long as you’re the “99 percent” — which the vast majority of are — and are respectful and peaceful, you’re welcome at Occupy LA.

What are they doing there? Teaching people who are angry what to do about it. “The sense of building something together — that experience is empowering,” offers Aichele. They are occupying, yeah, but they are organizing. And that means teaching.

Eckford tells me Occupy LA isn’t leaderless — it’s “leaderful.” When asked when this demonstration will end, he says, “When we feel like our democracy is working for the 99 percent.”

How are they going to do that? This is how it starts.

LA Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass, who describes herself as a long time activist, quietly showed up with bags of El Pollo Loco for protesters last Saturday. “I just wanted to show my support.” She says the role of elected officials is to show their support for this movement she describes as organic.

Local civic leaders, union leaders, police, councilmembers, a couple of celebrities and members of Congress have all made their cameos at Occupy LA. It’s a hotspot.

Other cities have run into conflicts with the police. Occupy San Francisco had its demonstration quashed by police in riot gear. There were 700 arrested in New York on the Brooklyn Bridge. Boston’s occupation led to the biggest mass arrest in recent city history. LA? There were arrests at a Bank of America and at a Fannie Mae, it was rumored to be Occupy LA members. However the actual groups involved were the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the Service Employees International Union. Beyond a few who have tried intentionally to incite something, the LA protest has been peaceful and kid-friendly. Most importantly, it’s been effective.

How long is it going to be out there? I ask around. They are in it for the long haul, protesters say. “We’re not going fast, we’re going far,” is a phrase they use. The time between the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 gets mentioned.

I ask my tour guide how long she’s going to be out here. She pauses: “I don’t know. I’ve never revolutionized before.”

The original piece is here.

Jul 27 2011, 7:00 AM ET 68

The debilitating debt ceiling debate is par for the course — instead of compromising, House Republicans keep pushing bills they know can’t become law

House Republicans have been known to sneer at government red tape. Before becoming speaker of the House, Ohio’s John Boehner dismissed Obama’s health-care overhaul bill as “1,990 pages of bureaucracy.” But now that the GOP holds the majority in the House and therefore sets the schedule, House Republicans have been embracing a lot of pointless busy work and ideological signal-sending.

One quarter into the 112th Congress’s two-year term, only 14 pieces of legislation originating in the House have become laws (12 bills and two house joint resolutions). Fourteen. Compare that with the House in the 111th, which claimed 254 laws (plus 11 house joint resolutions) over two years. The 110th had 308 (plus 10 house joint resolutions). Even the often-derided do-nothing 109th Congress’s House controlled by the GOP passed 316 (with 16 house joint resolutions).

If the current House continues with this trend it will have produced a mere 48 laws by the end of the chamber’s full term.

Quick math: The last three Houses have by this time in their tenure produced an average of 76 laws each.

But when House Republicans are actually in session, it’s not exactly like they’re doing nothing. They’ve made a point of passing bills that “send a message.” Over and over, they’ve brought legislation to the floor that was doomed to die in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Why? To put taxpayer money where Republican congresspersons’ mouths (and votes) are. Yes, the House Republicans of 112th Congress are having a love affair with the symbolic vote.

Below you’ll find a list compiled by The Atlantic of the go-nowhere votes House Republicans have made. On the list are some repeat GOP bogeymen. The House majority has voted to defund Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR multiple times — in riders, in amendments, in emergency bills — none to ever become law. They’ve also voted at least twice to override President Obama’s moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. And of course they’ve voted several times to defund and block the dreaded “Obamacare.”

Call it grand standing, posturing, or GOPeacocking — in the 112th Congress it’s the new normal.

The following are bills the House of the 112th Congress has passed even though the bill will die in the Senate or face a presidential veto:

1. H.R. 2, Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act, Jan. 19

2. H.R. 1, Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act (amendments include: defunding the EPA, czars, Obamacare and Planned Parenthood.) Feb. 18

3. H.R. 3, No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, May 4

4. H.CON.RES.34 Ryan Budget Bill (lowering taxing for wealthy, dismantling Medicare), Apr. 11

5. H.R. 1363, One-week budget bill (with Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR defunding riders), Apr. 7

6. H.R. 910, Energy Tax Prevention Act (a.k.a. Stop EPA bill), Apr. 7

7. H.R. 359, Eliminate public finance, Jan. 26

8. H.R. 217, to Defund Planned Parenthood, Feb. 21

9. H.R. 1076, Defund NPR (this was an emergency vote), Mar. 15.

10. H.R. 1230: Restarting American Offshore Leasing Act, May 5

11. H.J. Res. 37: Disapproving Net neutrality, Apr. 9

12. H.R. 861, Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) Termination Act, Mar. 16

13. H.R.1214, Block Money for Constructing School-Based Health Centers, May 4

14. H.R. 1229, the Putting the Gulf Back to Work Act, April 13

15. H.R. 2560, Cut, Cap and Balance Act, July 19

16. H.R. 830, FHA Refinance Program Termination Act, Mar. 10

17. H.R. 836, the Emergency Mortgage Relief Program Termination Act, Mar. 14

18. H.R. 839, the HAMP Termination Act, Mar. 29

19. H.R. 1213, To repeal mandatory funding provided to States in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, May 3

20. H.R. 1217, to repeal the Prevention and Public Health Fund, Apr. 13

21. H.R. 1255, the Government Shutdown Prevention Act, Apr. 1 (This bill had language in it claiming if the Senate didn’t pass H.R. 1, then it became law)

22. H.R. 1315, Consumer Financial Protection Safety and Soundness Improvement Act (gutting CFPB), Jul. 21

Honorable mentions (brought to a vote by the majority only to be voted down by them too): Light bulbs!; clean bill for debt increase; defunding the Libyan conflict.

The original piece is here.

Jun 20 2011, 7:30 AM ET 687

Conservative filmmaker Stephen Bannon thinks his film can win hearts and minds — and maybe even, one day, votes — for the former Alaska governor

MINNEAPOLIS — He says his publicists didn’t think he should meet with me. “Why?” I ask. “They said you wrote something bad about Palin or something.” I tell him about the list I compiled of all her media feuds, with people like Dave Letterman and some former McCain staffers. Currently there are 86 names. My interviewee, filmmaker Stephen Bannon, shrugs, dismissing it, then goes about asking me questions about myself. This is a charming trait of his.

The night before I had viewed his latest film, The Undefeated. The original title was Take a Stand: The Stewardship of Sarah Palin.

“What did you think of my film?” Bannon asks. I smile. This was his opening question and he’s now asked it three times. I relent.

“I thought there were a lot of GOP dog whistles in it,” I say.

He says he has never heard that phrase before. Never? Really? He asks me what I mean.

The two-hour film is peppered with keywords. It’s like SEO (search engine optimization) for movies: the words “ethics,” “principles,” “threat to the establishment,” “CEO,” and “kitchen table” are repeated several times during the film. So when you walk out of the theater suddenly you think, “Sarah Palin’s ethics and principles are what make her a threat to the establishment.” And everything wonderful and wholesome on this planet is summed up in the phrase “kitchen table” — a table Palin chairs as its executive.

“Was that intentional?” I ask. What only can be described as a wry smile comes across Bannon’s face. “‘Dog whistles.’ I like that,” he says.

“It’s highly structured and very thought through,” he offers, then uses the word “sub-textual.” He says there’s a sub-texual understanding with those slogans.

He says he made the film for me. He didn’t make the film for what he calls “Palinistas.” He made it for people who don’t know that she is, according to Bannon, a woman of accomplishment. Yes, he believes the problem with the former governor of Alaska — the nearly three year object of the national media’s obsession and author of two books about her life — is that we don’t know her. And for Bannon, to know her is to love her.

At the 9:30 pm screening Friday at the RightOnline conference in Minneapolis, he told the less than two-thirds full room that we were viewing the “unrated version.” He said he’ll have to do another cut to avoid an NC-17 rating. Spoiler: in the beginning of the film there’s a picture of someone with a T-shirt with Palin’s name and the word cunt. Other than that, the film was pretty G-rated. Or if we’re being candid — it’s GOP-rated.

The themes and images are designed to make Republican-minded people react. There’s an entire (estimated) 15-minutes of the film devoted just to re-capping Palin’s 2008 Republican National Convention speech, along with reactions from her staunchest supporters (others of whom are interspersed throughout). The RightOnline crowd got fired up at the screening just like they did at the RNC the first time when Palin spoke of people in small towns: “They are the ones who do some of the hardest work in America who grow our food, run our factories and fight our wars. They love their country, in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America. I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town.”

And also when Barack Obama appeared in the documentary, making this April 2009 statement, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” That was, as Bannon would put it, “very thought through.” And effective. Someone in the screening shouted, “Terrorist!” at the images of the president of the United States during this scene.

“I don’t believe that. I’m not calling you a liar, but that didn’t happen,” says Bannon, told about the comment. It happened. I was sitting just two tables down from the shouter. “Did anyone say anything to him when he said it?” Bannon asks. I was too far away to see, I tell him. He later says that he is disappointed by that report. He says he doesn’t feel that way about the president, who he says made the right decision on taking out Osama bin Laden.

Bannon keeps on insisting he made this film for me. And I keep asking him what his goal was. “I want to drive a stake into the heart of ‘Caribou Barbie,’” he says. He wants to paint a picture of Palin as a frontier woman who, as he put it, “is Wal-Mart nation.”

There’s a lot of elite bashing in the film — and also just in talking with Bannon. He rails against elites with the same regularity the rest of us check to make sure we haven’t forgotten our cell phones (meaning: more than we want to admit to). Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs in the ’80s. He has two homes in nice Los Angeles zip codes, and he’s a Harvard Business School grad. “What’s an elite?” I ask.

“An elite is someone who’s for themselves and not for the country.”

Are polluters elites? Companies that frack? Wal-Mart? “Under your definition aren’t the Walton’s elites?” I inquire.

“I don’t know enough about the Walton’s to say that,” Bannon answers.

When pressed, he says that Mitt Romney, the current frontrunner in the GOP presidential primary, is an elite. Bannon served in the military, he tells me. I tell him I’ve always thought Romney’s weakest point was his five able-bodied sons and not one of them signing up for service. He mentions former governor Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich — also elites, in his calculus. Bannon says he wants this film to show people that Palin is better than Romney. Yes, he doesn’t even mention a general election. This film is to re-vamp her image in the eyes of Republicans, so they will leave the theater and have a newfound “begrudging admiration for her.” It’s not for the general population.

“So your film is a primer for her in the primary?” I ask.

Bannon knows how to answer this question. His cheerful face stretches into an ear-to-ear smile. “I’m a commercial filmmaker,” he says.

“So she’s going to run for president?”

Same smile. “I’m a commercial filmmaker.”

The final 10 minutes of the film are spent comparing Sarah Palin to Ronald Reagan. People said that Reagan was too extreme, too conservative, and that he’d never be president — and they were all wrong, according to The Undefeated. “Why do you think I did that?” Bannon asks.

For the power of the association, I tell him. So people will think the two politicians have similar qualities. He says the tea party movement is like the Reagan Revolution. I tell him I disagree. Palin is much more like Barry Goldwater, if anything. Goldwater supporters stormed the San Francisco Republican convention in ‘64, lots of them “never having been involved in politics before.” Just like we hear about the tea party. There was also the belief among Goldwater supporters that if there was ever a true conservative, the large bloc of dormant true conservatives would turn out to vote for him. Goldwater’s opponent, Lyndon Johnson, won in a historic landslide in the ‘64 election.

Bannon ponders this for a second and says Goldwater was Reagan’s John the Baptist.

Why is the film called The Undefeated? Bannon feigns insult at the question. He declares he thought I was smarter than that. Basically, he starts busting my chops and it looks like he’s filibustering. “I know she’s lost elections! See her at the end of the film in Madison and it’s like water off a duck. She’s not down. She’s undefeated.”

Isn’t that technically “not defeated?” Sports teams who’ve never lost in a season are undefeated. But being undeterred is not defeated, not undefeated. I suspect another dog whistle. A phrase that at this point in the interview Bannon likes tossing around with a chuckle.

Is the film just glazing over failures in order to magnify the good parts of Palin’s history? I mean, the New Testament is more critical of Jesus than The Undefeated is of Sarah Palin. I asked Bannon why he thinks people don’t like Sarah Palin. He says it’s because they don’t like her politics. That answer satisfies him absolutely. They just disagree with her and that causes all the vitriol hurled at her.

When Bannon says he made the movie for me, he means women. He calls them “new agenda women.” Women whom Bannon describes as being still mad about how Hillary Clinton was treated during the primaries. Yes, Steve Bannon is trying to capture the PUMA and feminist vote by rebranding Sarah Palin.

If Palin were more competent she’d be far less controversial to women. Women don’t like how Palin is treated, but for some, it’s not because she’s criticized by the media or scrutinized — it’s because she’s held to a lower standard than other politicians. If a man had given any of her answers to Katie Couric or in any of her interviews since, no one would think to make a movie highlighting all his accomplishments while being governor of one of the least populated states in the nation for a fraction of a term. It feels condescending to women who are actually smart and accomplished that Palin gets called smart and accomplished.

But The Undefeated’s director and writer admits his project is about subtext. And the intended subtext of our chat: Palin intends to run for president because she’s not defeated.

Principles. Ethics. A threat to the establishment. Kitchen table. CEO.

The original post is here.

Jun 18 2011, 3:45 PM ET

Why is there a giant Koch-funded conservative gathering at the same time and in the same city as Netroots Nation, anyway?

Over the last couple of decades plenty of women have thought they were going into a medical clinic to get a free pregnancy test only to enter what’s know as a crisis pregnancy center. Few of them offer actual health care, instead proselytizing against abortion, birth control and pre-marital sex to women at their most vulnerable. But these establishments often look like and are adjacent to Planned Parenthood or other women’s clinics. They mimic these institutions to press their political agenda in the most confrontational way they can. The right-wing Americans for Prosperity Foundation is using a similar tactic for — wait for it — blogger conferences. RightOnline describes itself on its website:

The RightOnline initiative was launched in July of 2008, with more than 600 activists and bloggers attending our first ever RightOnline Conference in Austin, Texas. It was the first conservative event to ever counter the leftwing Netroots Nation Convention … an annual gathering of what the media called the most concentrated gathering of high-profile progressive bloggers to date.

Yes, Netroots Nation, founded as Yearly Kos in 2006, has for the last four years had to compete with a counter-conference in the same city and on the same weekend it’s been held. While no one would ever mistake the conservative confab for the liberal one, the presence of a mimic conference with registration blocks in the same hotels insures that the Netroots crowd doesn’t get a media and messaging weekend to itself.

RightOnline remains smaller than Netroots Nation. It boasts 1,500 attendees in Minneapolis this year to Netroots’ 2,400. It’s cheaper to attend RightOnline, too: $120 for registration, meals included, compared a staggering $355 per registration for Netroots. But that’s partly because the two conferences, while both targeted to a blogger and online activist audience, are far from “opposite equals” (to use a math term).

Sponsored by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, RighOnline benefits from the Foundation’s annual budget of $10 million, overseen by board chairman David Koch, of Koch Industries-fame. Netroots’ filings to the IRS show a budget of less than $1 million.

In short, the foundation putting on RightOnline has more than ten times the cash of the liberal tweeples two blocks away, making it easier to attend. You’d think then its attendees would be happy. But by the look of those at the gathering, they’re a brooding bunch. And yes, the crowd with very few exceptions is entirely white. Netroots is a Benetton ad by comparison.

Tweeter @Mulletmanandy69 laid out some expectations for it as the conference got going, “Hoping for some good conservative fun at RightOnline. #ro2011″

What is conservative fun? Apparently it can be summed up in two words: Andrew Breitbart. Friday afternoon, on the first day of RightOnline, right-wing agitator Breitbart marched the block and a half to Netroots Nation in the sweltering heat with what he called an entourage. Some were left-wing bloggers there to record his annual blogger-con stunt. Yes, he’s done this before at Netroots and with the same result. He shows up at the liberal gathering and cameras are put in his face. There’s yelling. It’s put on YouTube. And the Loki of RightOnline goes back to his conference being the undeserving victim of hippie hate. As Slate.com reporter Dave Weigel said to me the moment the news broke, “Every conference has to have a Breitbart moment, the last one that didn’t was CPAC 2009.”

The two staple speakers every year at RightOnline are Andrew Breitbart and his equally incensed blogger colleague, Michelle Malkin. It sets the tone. Provocateur James O’Keefe was celebrated by the crowd during his speech on Friday afternoon. His talk was curiously titled “The Left Exposed: Where Investigative Reporting Meets Online Activism.” (It should be noted the 27-year-old is on probation for his antics.) Herman Cain was invited to speak, along with the two local Republicans hoping to secure the GOP presidential nomination for 2012, Rep. Michele Bachmann and former governor Tim Pawlenty. Most tellingly, there’s what looks like a shrine to Sarah Palin, a 5-foot tall painting of the governor in the hallway of the event space. The documentary about her was screened for attendees Friday night but the media superstar herself is not on the list of speakers.

It’s a conference about being online but the attendees haven’t been tweeting very much. It’s maybe one every ten minutes on their chosen hashtag #ro2011 — compared to the Netroots twitter stream which has been a reliable geyser. Inside the meeting hall (on a stage that would be the absolute envy of an over-the-top Texas episode of “Toddlers and Tiaras”) Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) gave a speech opening with the phrase “we share the same fear” and repeated it twice. She railed against Net Neutrality, the poorly named issue Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has called the most important free speech issue of our time. But they don’t need a conference to be against something Franken is for.

Perhaps that’s why the conference has to be held next door to where Franken spoke. It’s mainly to create the illusion of there only being two sides. You can find more than one opinion on every single issue imaginable at Netroots Nation. The attendees there agree absolutely on very little save the overwhelming compulsion to hand-wring. So why hold RightOnline so close by? Probably for the same reason pro-life groups set up fake clinics — mimicking the other establishment at close range is about confronting their political agenda in an in-your-face way.

You could even call it conservative fun.

The original post is here.

Jun 17 2011, 11:27 AM ET

Progressives have often suffered for what can be called “micro-cause-ism.” Meaning when you arrive at anti-war rally or the like, suddenly there are people clamoring to save the whales/polar bears, stop sexism/racism, free Tibet/Mumia and go raw/vegan/organic/local, etc., etc. Each of these causes believes it is the most important and should be accomplished first before anything else.

Which means everyone is always a little unhappy and not much ever gets done.

Every year at Netroots Nations, this takes place in miniature. There are booths in the exhibit hall vying for blogger attention and commenter praise. Every year the online liberal base of the Democratic Party (and self-professed independents) get together and argue over what issue is the biggest issue and how they’ve failed to win at said issue. Then they strategize how to do better. Then they do it the next year.

This year there is hallway chatter about “tea partying” President Obama: Make enough of a fuss to pull focus so that Obama is forced to move to the Left. There are calls to “primary” people. Primary Democrats who aren’t liberal enough, primary Obama — basically threaten Democrats with a force like that of the tea party, the GOP on caffeine. Mike Milkovich, the CTO of WareCorp attending Netroots, declared, “It would show that Obama really is a pragmatic moderate.” The self-proclaimed small business owner added, “I don’t know about you but I don’t want a radical as president.”

Is there a real call to primary Democrats for not being loyal enough to liberals? Could this be something we’ll be hearing about in the next couple of months? “It’s probably blogger hubris,” said Crooks and Liars blogger and prolific author Dave Neiwert. “Political naiveté. That gives us energy but it also blinds us to cold hard political reality of the world.”

So there’s not an actual get-off-the-couch effort to primary the president or act like the tea party in any way. That’s not what progressives are really talking about at Netroots this year.

It’s not really about the president right now, anyway. It’s not an election year. The GOP primary is barely ramping up. This time all micro-causes have fallen under the same “root” issue: Unions. Not only have union leaders descended on the conference. The gruff plainspoken Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers, was on a panel about combating corporate power in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Union leaders are out in force talking on a variety of subjects.

Suddenly, “like Wisconsin” is a phrase thrown around. It was in Madison this past spring where the press reported 70,000 people turned out on one cold Saturday to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) stripping collective bargaining rights away from public workers. And that 70,000 figure doesn’t even count the families who showed up first thing in the morning to walk around the capitol with their signs showing their support for the unions before going about their regular errands. It was in Madison where the prized “youth” turned out. It was old and young people who work for a living. Firefighters and elevator operators, teachers and students. It’s where all progressives got together as one voice saying one thing: Shame, shame, Scott Walker!

In the early 1900s, the labor movement was the primer for a range of progressive pet causes: Women’s suffrage, temperance and the New Deal. It’s only recently that liberals got branded as latte-sipping arugula eaters. Now the attack on the unions translates into an attack on all progressives. Reproductive rights, environmental issues, corporate personhood, media consolidation, election finance — they all seem to identify that they are at some point “like Wisconsin.”

It appears the attempt to bust the unions was just the thing to actually unify Democrats and dole out a knockout dose for their micro-cause-ism.

The original post is here.

Jun 16 2011, 10:57 AM ET

The sixth annual Netroots Nation (nee Yearly Kos) is being held in suddenly swampy downtown Minneapolis, Minn. The pre-conference events Wednesday consisted of two all-day marathon strategy sessions for two largely separate groups who both just so happen to have breaking news this week: the LGBT community and the labor movement.

In California on Tuesday a federal judge dismissed the challenge of a ruling made by Judge Vaughn Walker on Proposition 8. The appeal was based on the known fact that the judge is in a long-term homosexual relationship and therefore, according to the challenge, is unable to rule on the merits of the case. Judge Walker’s ruling against Prop 8 now stands. And in New York, the state legislature is debating making gay marriage legal in the state. A final vote could happen as soon as Friday.

In adjacent generic conference rooms at the Hilton were these progressive powwows. The (closed to the media but bloggers were invited) LGBT session was boisterous. Loud. It spilled over and through the partition into the open whisper-level labor meeting. They weren’t celebratory — they were energized.

They’re winning … duh.

Labor, however, is not having as good a time … really at anything. High unemployment makes unions easy targets. The under-employed resent those with pensions and health plans. And management is by definition not in line with the unions. Ditto owners and Republicans. And a higher court ruled this week that Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s law to strip public unions of collective bargaining now stands.

So, where does labor stand with progressives?

The AFL-CIO has always participated in Netroots Nation. It shows up every year with a booth and hands out spiffy union-made swag. But this year it’s different. Labor has taken some hard hits under a wave of new Republican governors in Michigan and Ohio. Union membership in the private sector is down below seven percent. To everyone’s surprise, it’s down even in the last two years with a labor-backed Democrat in the White House. “This is our chance to get out of the booth at the exhibit hall and have a deeper conversation,” said Joseph Geevarghese, Deputy Director at Change to Win, a coalition of American labor unions.

The labor movement now talks about Wisconsin in the same way people talk of 9/11: It changed things. Geevarghese notes Wisconsin where the labor movement was born — and now it’s seen as the best place to kill it.

But now, like 9/11, it’s also become a rallying cry. Progressives and liberals (the distinctions and differences have never been clearly explained to me) have largely not paid attention to organized labor. They weren’t out supporting unions and union interests, notes Geevarghese, “Before Wisconsin from progressives it was largely indifference.” Communications Director at Change to Win Paco Fabian uses the word “ambivalence” to describe progressives’ attitude toward labor. “They have no familial relationship with unions. They don’t know what unions do,” he said.

“It’s not that progressives forgot about labor until Wisconsin,” said Firedoglake blogger David Dayen, who was invited to the session. “Everybody did.”

So that was the goal of the all-Wednesday cabal — remembering why labor used to be important. The solemn group of organizers, activists and bloggers aired their grievances with labor being “demonized.” They talked about messaging. They discussed strategy. They in short: They communicated.

Is this going to make a difference? Will this save organized labor? Did the hosts of the event feel like they got out of this what they were hoping for? Did something start here in the Marquette III room today?

Fabian seemed optimistic in his resolve, “It’s really all about the follow-up.”

Original post is here.

May 20 2011, 8:02 AM ET

Doomsday prophet Harold Camping tells The Atlantic what to expect when the end of the world begins

LOS ANGELES — In his relentless study of the Bible, 89-year-old Oakland-based Harold Camping has seen the signs. You may have also seen them recently.

They read, “Judgment Day: May 21, 2011 — Cry mightly onto God,” followed by a bright yellow stamp that proclaims, “THE BIBLE GUARANTEES IT!”

The end is near … very near, according to the billboards and Camping. Indeed, it’s this weekend.

The end of the world will be at exactly 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011, says Camping, who along with his organization, Family Radio, are behind those billboards across the country forecasting the Rapture this Saturday. The Rapture, the Last Days, Armageddon and the Final Days of Judgment are all interchangeable. It’s when God will destroy the Earth to show his love for humanity.

Is that Eastern Standard or Pacific Standard Time?

Neither, says Camping, whom I interviewed recently for my online news show TYT Now. The Rapture is at 6 p.m. on May 21, 2011, where ever it’s 6 p.m. first, with the “fantastically big” world-ending event taking place on a time zone by time zone basis.

That means we can expect the Rapture to start when it hits 6 p.m. at the International Dateline at 180 Longitude — roughly the between Pago Pago, American Samoa, and Nuku’alofa, Tonga. We’ll know it’s Judgment Day because there will be an earthquake of previously unprecedented magnitude, Camping predicts.

So, according to these calculations, the Rapture will actually begin like a rolling brown out across the globe at 11 p.m. PST on Friday, May 20th. “Everyone will be weeping and wailing because they’ll know in a few hours it’ll come to their city,” said Camping.

This also means that, if Camping is right, his signs littering California and in his current hometown of Oakland — not to mention thousands of atheists throwing Rapture parties — have the date wrong. It’s Friday, Friday…gotta get down on Friday.

What are Camping’s plans for Armageddon? “We’re not planning anything at all,” he told me. The secular world will have their cameras out there filming the destruction, he said, and “I’m sure our pre-occupation will be watching that come around…. It’s going to be a horror story of tremendous proportion.” And so, the nearly nonagenarian messenger of doom has decided his final day will be spent gleefully watching CNN’s obligatory disaster porn.

After I had interviewed him, I stumbled upon Camping’s listener supported radio station by accident. I was on “The 5″ Freeway in the middle of the hours-long slaughterhouse-stench exactly halfway between LA and San Francisco. Family Radio is the strongest of all the signals in that area.

Camping’s baritone bursts out of the speakers emphasizing his certitude. His End of Days prediction are all very obvious to him — after all he’s an end-all authority. Even though he’ll tell you the bible is the authority, he’s merely its humble teacher. He’s spent several decades looking into it. “Time spent reading the Bible” is his main verification for everything he touts. He never wavers and even his caveats sound definitive.

Of course, Brother Camping, as his supporters call him — a 1942 U.C. Berkeley grad originally from Boulder, Colo., with a civil engineer degree — bucks traditional fundamentalist doctrine. It makes you lean in just a little closer to hear what he has to say. If you ask him, this belief that the world is 6,000 years old is just malarkey. To him, it’s simply ridiculous if you look at the evidence. Which he, of course, has.

The Bible, he says, is his university. Take that Berkeley.

This self-professed Christian man of science — and current syndicated world wide call-in radio host — has studied the Earth’s age in depth. He took five years out of his life to just research it. He says he looked at tree rings and such and finally came upon the truth: Much to his surprise, 1988 was the 13,000 birthday of the world. Anyone who says any different is mistaken.

The thing to note about Camping is that, like all doomsday prophets who get a following, he’s charming. There’s something in his delivery which is very compelling to listen to, even if everything he says is purely fictional.

When I interviewed Camping he used the recent earthquake in Japan as an example of what the Rapture will be like. Judgment Day will make that, “look like a Sunday school picnic” he explained. By the time I caught him on the radio a month later, the Japanese earthquake had become proof of the end. It had been transformed into a sign.

Camping is not the first to decide the world will end. It’s a perennial fascination with humankind. The “end of time” has been a popular topic since the beginning of time. No one has gotten it right yet, but that hasn’t stopped still more from trying. Yes, most doomsday sayers have begrudgingly died of old age.

Camping’s tic is to bombard skeptics with arithmetic. Noah’s flood? 4990 B.C. (of course).

Camping writes on his site:

Just before the flood Noah was instructed by God that in seven days the flood would begin (Genesis 7:10-16). Using the language of 2 Peter 3:8 that “a day is as a thousand years,” it is like saying through Noah, who was a preacher (2 Peter 2:5): “mankind has seven days or 7,000 years to escape destruction.” Since 2011 A.D. is precisely 7,000 years after Noah preached, God has given mankind a wonderful proof that Judgment Day will occur in the year 2011.

In short, if you add two and subtract for leap year (noting there is no year zero), then multiply by three (because of the Holy Trinity), then you have something infallible. See, he’s done the math. The math is in the Bible. The Bible is infallible. Discussion over.

It’s the magic of arbitrary facts — they start to support themselves after a while.

If YOU don’t believe that means YOU don’t believe in the Bible. And if you don’t believe in the Bible … well … perish the thought because Judgment Day is soon.

Doomsday prophets are religion’s going out of business salesmen: “You look like a nice guy, let me level with you, this deal is not going to be here tomorrow. This whole place is over. This deal — you’ll never see it again. Yes, we take all major credit cards.”

Brother Camping, like most who spend their time predicting the date God will smite all but the proper kind of Christian, is a prolific writer. His subject is urgent — his word count ample … even if his point is time is limited. Camping’s monolithic manifesto published in 1992 was titled “1994?” In it he postulated, based on seemingly random numbers appearing in the Bible that the Rapture, was likely to happen in 1994. “Remember early in our study we learned that the final tribulation period could be either 70 years or 23 years in duration. The three and one half days of Revelation 11 are far to short to be understood in any way except symbolically,” he wrote.

Most of the book is pretty vague: It’s most likely September 1994. But it could be before 2011. It’s possible in 2011. It could be somewhere in between.

I asked Camping if he regretted writing that book, if it now hinders his credibility. “I’m not a bit embarrassed by that. You know anytime we’re learning — and the Bible is really complex,” he said. And then he went to his default “I’ve spent 50 years reading the Bible” to authenticate his claims.

But now at the end of his life, Camping has gotten very specific. He’s giving the precise time, which he says was encrypted in a book written nearly 1,400 years before time zones were invented.

And if he’s wrong? He’s already written the pamphlet, “We are almost there!”

Doomsday prophets are the greatest example there is of “failing up.” If Saturday (Friday night for the West Coast) comes and goes quietly, Camping can always claim it means the end is even sooner now. He’s already been wrong. The wrath of the general public as his date comes and goes could endear him more to his most loyal followers.

Michael Moyer at Scientific American wrote, “Our fears of the apocalypse may in the end mirror the most fundamental fear of all: fear of our own mortality. It is all of a piece–death, the dissolution of our people, the extinction of our species.” And after all, scientists believe that we are, in fact, doomed. Our species, like all species is temporary. Plus, in four billion years, this planet is toast. Wait long enough and nothing you recognize will matter or exist. Our planet is mortal. It’s middle-aged and some day it will die.

So in a way, Camping is right about there being an end. It’s just his calculations of the timeline are (as per usual) just a little off.

Original post is here.

A conversation with the more than decade old group that delights in mocking the powerful by pretending to be them yesmen.banner.jpg General Electric likes their tax rate low, according to CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Very low. Despite $5 billion in profit last year the company paid no income tax and received a $3.2 billion tax benefit, according to The New York Times. Which is less than low: It’s taxpayer padded.

Then Immelt was tapped to be an outside economic adviser to the Obama administration, which has been decrying low tax rates for companies and the rich.

Very embarrassing.

So last week, when USA Today reported the company will give back the tax benefit due to public outcry, it seemed credible. The paper wrote: “Facing criticism over the amount of taxes it pays, General Electric announced it will repay its entire $3.2 billion tax refund to the U.S. Treasury on April 18…. The company earned $11 billion in 2010 on revenue of $150 billion. The company, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, plans to phase out the tax havens over five years and said it will create one job in the US for each new job it creates overseas.”

Only it wasn’t GE that said it was giving the money back, phasing out tax havens and recommitting to creating jobs in the U.S. No, a real GE spokesperson came out and announced that that was ridiculous nonsense — a hoax. Nor was GE going to “adopt a host of new policies that secure its position as a leader in corporate social responsibility” or give its $3.2 billion tax benefit back to the Treasury. “GE did not receive a refund,” said spokeswoman Deirdre Latour.

GE, whose tagline is “Imagination at Work,” had been spoofed by activists from U.S. Uncut and the Yes Men. The group forced the multinational corporation to come out and quell investors’ fears it was giving back money received via tax loopholes from the U.S. government.

The villain gets tricked into a public confession by his enemy?! This would be written off as a stock schmaltzy ending for a movie. The flippant feel good conclusion before the credits roll. This is a well-worn device for lazy screenwriters — but the Yes Men have been doing it in real life for nearly two decades.

“It’s comedy with a goal to get people to do something. To act,” Yes Men co-founder “Andy Bichlbaum,” who says his real name is the fake-sounding Jacques Servin, tells The Atlantic in an interview.

Do the group’s members call themselves comedians? “I do sometimes when the police are involved,” confesses fellow co-founder “Mike Bonnano,” who gives his real name as the equally fake-sounding Igor Vamos.

“We create a joke in order to enable reporters to write about it,” says Servin. “We make important things funny.”

When pressed, the two men, whose day jobs are as college professors, say they feel they’re activists at heart. That what they do is about having a voice. They see themselves first and foremost as citizens of a failing democracy — and GE was a perfect example of why. The company, Servin points out, hides its profits, took bailout money and then didn’t pay taxes. “Americans don’t want that,” he said. The Yes Men hoax illuminated the matter.

The Yes Men, who were founded roughly around 1996, are the old salts of the spoof. Most of their stunts involve months of planning — then last maybe 30 minutes before they’re found out to be a spoof. In 2008, the group printed 80,000 copies of a fake New York Times with the headline, “The Iraq War Ends.” It cost them around $13,000 for the stunt. It was quickly exposed as a mockup, but still allowed reporters to write about the subject.

They have an extraordinary record of successful hoaxes, a couple of films under their belts, a few cease and desist orders and only one lawsuit to speak of. In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce filed a civil complaint “to protect its trademarks and other intellectual property from unlawful use by the ‘Yes Men’ and others in furtherance of their various commercial enterprises.” “The ‘Yes Men’ and their associates misappropriated the Chamber’s logo and other protected marks; created a fraudulent Web site that was an exact replica of and linked to the Chamber’s actual site; and falsely claimed to be speaking as the Chamber under the Chamber’s copyright,” the pro-business group alleged.

Their so-called crime? The Yes Men had held a fake press conference and said the Chamber was changing its environmental policy. A judge has yet to throw the case out.

As with the Chamber stunt, the GE hit involved a website. The Yes Men credit US Uncut’s Justin Wedes and Carl Gibson with the success of the GE prank, which teetered on securing a website (GENewsCenters.com) which could be — and was — mistaken for the company’s real site GENewsCenter.com.

Now because we’re wedged into a false notion that the right and the left are opposite equals, the question must be asked: Isn’t this just like what James O’Keefe did to ACORN? Or like what Andrew Breitbart so bravely threatened to do to teachers this week on Hannity?

Isn’t deception coupled with a political agenda resulting in a public spectacle what both sides now engage in? Culture jamming used to just be the domain of the left. Isn’t O’Keefe the Yes Men of the right?

That’s not how they see it. “Attacking the weak? There’s no tradition of honor in that,” says Vamos. “The thing that analogy ignores is power.” O’Keefe’s unscrupulous crusade against a nonprofit that assisted the disenfranchised wasn’t comedy. Just like a cool kid pantsing a wimp in gym class to make others laugh isn’t a performance artist — he’s just a bully.

Seeing the downtrodden duped isn’t comedy, activism, or journalism: Its conveniently edited cruelty, the Yes Men say.

“They [O'Keefe and Breitbart] created a lie,” says Servin. “A lie they feel entitled to commit because they know what’s best for society. What they do is what the PR industry does — they create fake stories.”

He adds, “We create a fake story to expose the truth.”

Indeed the rash of hidden camera stings by O’Keefe and those he’s inspired, like the one against Planned Parenthood, are not only are racially-tinged and sexually titillating (i.e. involving characters who are Muslims, people of color or hookers) — they re-enforce rightwing conspiracies and fears. The O’Keefe NPR sting, for example, showed an NPR employee — gasp — having lunch with two wannabe donors who claim they’re funded by the — gasp — Muslim Brotherhood who want Sharia law to replace US law.

“Yeah, radically different in every way,” remarks Servin on the comparison.

In contrast, the disgraced O’Keefe, thinks of himself as like the Yes Men. He told Playboy in an interview, “I want to make society more transparent and ethical.”

And that’s the key difference: The Yes Men take on power while opposed to O’Keefe takes on power’s victims.

You could say the Yes Men are the George Carlin of political theater. Meaning: You watch what they do with deference simply because there’s no one else who can do what they do a) as well as they do it b) as successfully and c) for as long.

They do not see it that way. They seem to believe anyone can do what they do. Which is the blind spot of the uber-talented: Of course you can do this too! Their new project is “Yes Men Labs,” where others can create a Yes Men type of hoax. “The Yes Lab is a series of brainstorms and trainings to help activist groups carry out Yes-Men-style projects on their own,” reads their site. A franchise? “It’s more like a school,” says Vamos.

The Yes Men say they get at least one request a day asking them to “do something about this or that topic.” It’s at the point where it’s simply impossible for them to do all of them.

They can’t — so now they teach.

Link to piece at theatlantic.com

Ayn Rand fanboy and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan (R) appears to have baffled the entire Beltway of blabbers into muttering monosyllabic loops of the words “brave” and “bold.” Yes, the House Budget Committee Chairman released his plan, The Path to Prosperity, and it is a shocker… especially if you’re not aware of the buzzword-laden 74-page document’s intellectual history.

To help get The Path on the road to widespread approval — at least outside of the GOP-run House of Representatives, where Democrats opposed it during voting Friday — Ryan sent a letter in February to one William Beach, the director of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. On U.S. House of Representatives letterhead, Ryan implored, “The Committee on the Budget requests that The Heritage Foundation provide technical advice or assistance to the Committee for the use of all its Members with respect to budget proposals provided by the Committee.” That included giving the committee “specific information on budget scoring” of such proposals, “together with such nonpartisan analysis, study and research as the Foundation may have that is relevant to such proposals.”

Now, it’s an open question as to whether the Foundation — a rightwing gem funded by Koch Industries, Exxon Mobile and Altria nee Phillip Morris — has such “nonpartisan” research. Their mission, after all, “is to formulate and promote conservative public policies,” and generally that’s the Grand Old Party.

No surprise, the Foundation approved of Ryan’s “bold” and “brave” plan to cut taxes further for the wealthy (by a whopping 10 percent) and increase the burden on the rest of the populace. In turn, Ryan boasted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed:

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4 percent by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Meanwhile, last three pages of Ryan’s The Path: Fiscal Year 2012 Budget Resolution, published by the House Budget Committee are, in essence, this very analysis provided by the Heritage Foundation — complete with a link to the Foundation’s report.

The Heritage Foundation in general and Beach, in particular, do have a long record on this type of economic enthusiasm — and as it turns out, those past nonpartisan analyses provide a clear measure by which we can assess the credibility of the latest round of tax-cut dependent growth projections.

Let us turn now to a paper published in March 2001 titled, How Faulty Official Figures Greatly Overstate the Cost of the Bush Tax Plan. In it, Beach along with his colleagues Daniel Mitchell and D. Wilson wrote, “Official estimates — even from the Bush Administration — greatly overstate the revenue ‘cost’ of President George W. Bush’s tax reduction plan. The reason: Official ‘bean-counters’ typically assume that changing tax rates causes little or no change in work and investment.”

They continue: “In reality, of course, quite the opposite is true…. Lower tax rates lead to a bigger tax base, which leads to some degree of revenue feedback, lowering the net cost of the tax rate reduction. When this reflow effect is applied to President Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax plan, the actual net revenue cost is less than $1 trillion, or 53 percent of the official estimate.”

Fact: The unpaid Bush tax cuts cost America $2.5 trillion during their first 10 years. A revenue loss of $2.11 trillion plus $379 billion in additional interest payments on the national debt, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

That’s $1.5 trillion more than the Heritage Foundation so boldly and (ahem) bravely claimed would be lost — and also $900 billion more than the “bean counters” cautioned.

There were a couple of other predictions Beach and his team made that also fell flat when they touted the bill initially called the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001″ (and, later, the Bush tax cuts).

In their report they claim: “The Heritage Foundation Center for Data Analysis (CDA) conducted a dynamic simulation of the proposals in the President’s tax relief plan. The final results show that the Bush plan would significantly increase economic growth and family income while substantially reducing federal debt.”

Instead, the federal debt shot up nearly $5 trillion under this plan — and half of that debt came from the tax cuts. As far as increasing economic growth and family income, the middle class saw a Lost Decade where their wages failed to rise for the first time in the four decades that the Census Bureau has been keeping track .

The Heritage Foundation’s 2001 report kept up a drumbeat of upbeat expectations and projections. If Bush tax cut legislation were to pass, it would, the Foundation said:

1) Effectively pay off the federal debt;
2) Reduce the federal surplus by $1.4 trillion;
3) Substantially increase family income;
4) Save the entire Social Security surplus;
5) Increase personal savings;
6) Create more job opportunities.

The authors continued, confidently predicting that “over 1.6 million more Americans would be working at the end of FY 2011″ thanks to the Bush tax cuts. Some other promises: “the unemployment rate would average just 4.7 percent instead of 4.9 percent from FY 2001 to FY 2011″ and the cuts would create growth so robust that the “Social Security surplus would increase by $53 billion, making more resources available over the next 11 years to reform the program.”

We all know how that worked out.

In an inspired bit of timing in June of 2008, basically days before the economy cratered and President Bush had to “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” the Heritage Foundation announced the tax cuts were a success.

In a report, J.D. Foster wrote: “Tax relief worked…. It produced a more growth-oriented tax policy for the long term, helping the economy to weather current storms arising in the housing and capital markets.”

If this were Vegas, where the house thrives on bad bets, the Heritage Foundation would not only get their room comped, and some free tickets to the Blue Man Group — the entire Strip would be begging to have them visit their casinos.

I asked Beach, whose name is on the report for the Bush Tax Cut report and Ryan’s plan, about the rosy forecasts that turned out to be incorrect. He said warmly, “I do like to be right more than wrong.” He called it a standard economic theory to cuts taxes for the wealthy to create a greater supply of labor and capital (though, of course, liberal economists disagree with this supply-side economic thinking, as does the reality of the last 30 years).

“Models are meant to give advice. Lawyers give advice but they don’t know what will happen in the future,” stated Beach. He noted the dot com bubble that was about to burst when his report was published, and said that that, coupled with 9/11 and then what Beach called “politically motivated spending increases by the Bush Administration,” threw things off. He meant Medicare Part D and the Iraq War.

“Trends of the economy are what you’re forecasting.” Beach added, “Trends are almost always wrong.”

Even my car mirror — a device that gives empirical data in real time — has a disclaimer about objects being closer than they appear. But projections about the wonders of tax cuts are almost always sold as absolute.

If the forecasters don’t see it their reports as scripture, why do the politicians?

Arguably all events are unforeseeable. That doesn’t give a pass as to why policies that haven’t worked are being repackaged as bold new ones we should try for the first time.

Ryan’s plan isn’t bold and brave. It’s been and done.

There are 2.5 trillion reasons why the Bush tax cuts failed at “substantially reducing federal debt” and why further cuts would result in similar results.

“The one thing that’s not in dispute is that we have to do something,” Beach offered graciously. He’s very right about that.

But maybe Ryan who voted for the Bush tax cuts three times, Medicare Part D, plus TARP and the deficit-funded Iraq War said it best when he wrote in his proposal, “Government at all levels is mired in debt. Mismanagement and overspending have left the nation on the brink of bankruptcy.”

Brave.

Image credits: The Heritage Foundation

Original post here.