Stop Me Before I Vote Again

"In a surprise settlement reached Monday, the Longshore Workers Union (ILWU) and transnational grain exporter EGT announced they’d settled their legal disputes in Longview, Washington.
They are negotiating a contract that will cover ILWU members working at EGT’s new grain terminal there .....The settlement came as the ILWU and members of the Occupy movement separately prepared to confront a grain ship soon approaching the disputed terminal..Occupy groups on the West Coast had lined up hundreds of volunteers....ILWU leaders were keeping mum this week about the shape of the contract they are negotiating in the highly automated Longview terminal. At issue when talks broke down a year ago were pensions, the number of workers to be hired, and overtime pay for work over eight hours per day. EGT proposed to run 12-hour shifts at straight time.."

http://labornotes.org/2012/01/longshore-union-settles-grain-dispute-confrontation-loomed

Posted by Owen Paine on Friday January 27 07:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Everybody tells me I'm being much too severe on my poor liberal friends, with their abiding belief that Obie ain't so bad, and endless litanies of exculpations to prove it. The ponies, they're sure, would be flying out of the woodwork if it weren't for those mean old Republicans. Whereas it seems obvious to me that if every Republican in the Republic fell into a narcoleptic trance tomorrow -- and of course that would be a good thing as far as it went -- Obie and the Dems would still find some way to keep giving us austerity, war, and the police state. So, to paraphrase Thomas Frank, What's The Matter With The Upper West Side?

I'm just trying to understand. In particular, I want to understand the need to believe. I don't mean believing in God or Communism; those I can understand. From time to time I've believed in each, and sometimes both simultaneously. Hell, I can even understand believing in astrology. But I really can't understand decent people believing in the Democrats. There's nothing transcendent about the Democratic Party. It's like believing in Microsoft or Exxon. It's a very concrete presence with an easily ascertained history and structure and pattern of behavior. It's not a church or a movement; it's a political faction.

Is it that my friends simply don't want to believe that matters are really as bad as they are -- that the state and the parties are mere tools of a corporate oligarchy, and American "democracy" a thorough sham? Is that just too scary and depressing? Are they really "statists" in a sense that gives that much-abused and rather suspect term a real meaning -- that is, do they believe in a self-subsisting state, an autonomous force, that stands over and above, or over against, the conflict of various "interests" and might be made to referee them fairly, and with a kind concern for the little guy and human wellbeing generally, if only the right people were in charge?

If so, where did this thing come from? From what divine forehead did that virgin goddess the Referee State spring?

There aren't really a lot of fundamentally different theories about the origin of the state. There's a long tradition -- Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, though these gents differ sharply on the details, and the inferences to be drawn -- that tries to found it in a logical dialectic of chimerical entities: state of nature, social contract, general will, greatest good for the greatest number, etc. A mythological history is generally constructed to correspond.

Now one would have thought that in our hardboiled scientific world this kind of idealism would be laughed out of court. We'd want a concrete explanation, something based in real history. (Or maybe genetics, for all you sociobiologists out there. But the hell with you, and your little Dawkins too.) Once we undertake that historical project -- though of course there is much detail we don't know, and may never know -- is it not obvious, broad-brush-wise, that the origin of the state is domination of the many by the few?

Liberal "statists", it seems to me, confront a serious dilemma on this point. They can deny that the primordial state originated in this way. Or they can argue that at some point -- perhaps in 1776 -- a transformation took place and the state became something quite different, and potentially at least, much nicer. Rationally considered, there's not much to be said for either line of argument. The modern Senate is not just coincidentally named after the Roman one; and the Roman one, like its contemporary successor, was nakedly oligarchic, though the character of the oligarchy has changed somewhat (and not for the better, my old Latin teacher's ghostly voice is muttering in my ear).

So if I'm right -- if my liberal friends want to believe that the State is not just an emanation of the fundamental conflict of Many and Few, and this is why they have to keep believing, in turn, in the essential goodness of the Democratic Party -- then we push the question back a step: Why do they want to believe this fairytale about the State? (The bully state can become the referee state, and the angel is nothin' but de shark well goberned.)

I'm afraid the answer is that when push comes to shove, they don't want to be part of the Many, though they no doubt want to be much nicer to the Many than the Few currently seem disposed to be. As I've argued before, liberals are mostly recruited from relatively privileged social strata -- not the One Percent , okay, but maybe the Five Percent, or Ten out to two standard deviations. They do have a certain sense of themselves as smarter than the average bear, and perhaps rather better morally as well. So all these apparently nutty beliefs about the State and the Democrats come down to rather understandable extrapolations from a certain... erm... class position.

Which won't last. So I haven't given up on 'em, or at least, some of 'em. Things are gonna get worse and better at the same time. I derive a lot of hope from the Occupiers, and I'm quite sure that the next four years of Obromney are going to kick just about everybody I know in the nuts, liberals and non-liberals alike. The relatively privileged position of the liberal social constituency will steadily erode -- as mine has, God knows -- and this may bring some home truths home. I hope so, anyway.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Thursday January 26 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

I may have mentioned that I've been having some very vexing conversations lately with my liberal friends. I fear the nearing Presidential charade has got their hormones flowing.

Years ago, as a lad, I had a fine old Kentucky hound dog, unimaginatively named Mutt. Now Mutt was by nature a very gentlemanly dog, who had the good grace to look sheepish when he had done something stupid; as Diogenes remarked, a blush is the color of good breeding. Or something like that. Not that dogs blush, exactly. But their body language is very eloquent, and they generally have better breeding than their masters. In my experience.

Mutt had his limits, though. There was a very coquettish and un-fixed collie bitch -- I use the term in its technical, not pejorative sense -- who dwelt about a quarter mile down the little road we lived on, and whenever she went into heat, and the wind blew from that quarter, Mutt simply had to be confined. It was a case of Jekyll and Hyde. The usually companionable, sportive and humorous pal I thought I knew disappeared, to be replaced by a slavering -- literally slavering -- insensate sex fiend.

We locked him up in the shed and closed our heartless ears to his piteous, long-drawn melismatic howls -- so expressive; no two alike. If we had understood Doggish as well as Mutt understood English, we would have been amazed by his Pindaric eloquence, I feel sure.

Three or four times a day I would take him out on a leash -- a leash, forsooth; like putting a human in a strait jacket -- to scombre. He was like a lodestone. The collie's bower of bliss lay due east of us, and our house was foursquare to the cardinal points. So on the west side of the house, Mutt's quivering nose and drooling jowls were pointed directly at the walls of the house -- as if he could charge right through the brick to achieve the consummation so longed-for.

We walked clockwise -- very bad luck to do the contrary, where I grew up -- and on the north side of the house he nearly dragged me off my feet behind him. On the east side I had to assume a 45-degree list to starboard and the leash was taut as a fiddlestring. On the south side I had to put the leash over my shoulder and drag the poor horndog backwards, claws grubbing up the crabgrass; he knew that leg was taking him fifty feet farther from his heart's desire.

Well, okay, wrong organ.

I had a lot of sympathy for Mutt, though it would be some years yet before I would find myself in exactly his situation. So I should be more sympathetic to my liberal friends. The bitch is in heat, and the limbic system has taken over. Here's a recent message from an old old friend of mine, in response to some aspersions I cast upon Obama the God-Emperor:

It is not uncommon to underestimate the stimulus bill--the sheer billions that went into such progressive causes as alternative energy, health care, unemployment and infrastructure. Not to mention saving the domestic automotive industry. This was not the work of a neoliberal CEO.

But it generated such a tremendous backlash in the form of the Tea Party (which the voters bought into in the 2010 elections), that gridlock has been the consequence.

At least we are out of Iraq, whereas our presence there could have been infinitely prolonged.

It was Congress, responding to the Republican scream machine, that refused to supply the funding to close down Guantanamo, and which has refused to transfer prisoners to the mainland, after Obama announced that it would be closed.

The citizen detention component of the NDAA is grotesque, but it is so clearly unconstitutional that I have no doubt that the courts will strike it down in short order.

In the meantime, bills can be paid... After several years of being excruciatingly diplomatic, Obama seems to have found his voice again, and is calling out the Republicans as the real "job-killers."

Stopping Keystone arrested a fossil fuel extravaganza that authoritative voices said would have meant "game over" as far as climate change.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday January 25 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (24)

So did anybody actually watch the God-Emperor's speech from the throne tonight? I did not; I have a certain tendresse for the few brain cells I have left. I gather from email chatter that it might have been written by Tom Friedman; a thoroughgoing corporate manifesto with a few farthings thrown to the canaille.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Tuesday January 24 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

A faithful reader here asks, trenchantly,

Meanwhile, I request some commentary on the actual topic of this blog. Crap, Zero has a quarter billion laid in already and the Dims are running no prez primaries.

Meanwhile, it looks as if Zero's strategy of being only visually black and squatting squarely on the corporate nest has already ended this "election," as Brand A (or is it Brand B) can muster only the Mormon from Mammon or Newt Fucking Gingrich.

I can't pay any attention to it at all. The whole electoral charivari seems to me, on the one hand, a freak show, and on the other, a bore -- though you would think a freak show might at least be entertaining. Not this one, though. Perhaps because it's just the same old freakeries we've seen for most of my life. Bite the head off a live chicken? Hasn't that been done to death? And the most exciting guy on the tube these days is... Newt Gingrich?! What's old is new again -- except it isn't; it's just old. Obie's a monster, and there are any number of other monsters hoping to supplant him. It would be a dire situation -- if there were anything one could do about it.

When I started this blog, back in the day, I seem to have had the idea that talking with people about electoral politics was a useful thing to do. I am not at all a recovering Democrat; I never had any use for those downmarket whores at all; but apparently I thought that trying to woo people like my liberal friends away from the Democrats might be constructive, somehow. Maybe I thought it would shake things up -- help move American politics out of its tight orbit around that strange, strange attractor, the Republicrat duopoly.

Now, of course, I can't imagine why I ever entertained that idea. For one thing, I've come to the conclusion that people like my liberal friends are just no damn good -- politically, I mean; many of them are very fine people in private life; but you just can't talk them out of zombie-ing off to the booth and pulling the donkey's dick every opportunity they get. They're convinced that by doing that, and talking up the Donks and decrying the Teabaggers, they're advancing the cause of humankind -- being "progressive", in a word. There's something deeply and fundamentally askew with their thinking on this subject; they just can't take in facts that ought to be obvious to the meanest intellect, though many of them are in other respects quite clever people.

I'm starting to chew the carpet here. Maybe I'll talk a bit more about recent conversations with some good-hearted liberals -- and even a few people who consider themselves to be Marxists -- tomorrow, when I'm a bit more calm.

Speaking of which: My son, when he was about five, explained to me that the opposite of a "wild animal" was a "calm animal". This story has nothing to do with the subject of the post or the mission of the blog; I just love to tell it.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Tuesday January 24 08:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

"ALL Kids Deserve Educational Programming!" read the subject line on a recent email, from an earnest outfit called care2.com. I was a bit startled; the credentialling sector is not usually so candid about its operations. Of course it disappointingly turned out to be an appeal to keep PBS funded, so Sesame Street et al. can continue to "help kids succeed".

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Tuesday January 24 02:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

"Tumbril Time!" he calls it and many a stilted cheese head of a phrase or word
he trundles off to the chopping block

examples i must take to my poor poor heart :.

"Any headline modeled on “It’s the economy, stupid.”. To the tumbrils with it!

“Well…” , as in constructs like “His performance was.. well… frankly bad.” Equally awful is “…er”, as in “Is Angeline Jolie a great actor? Er… no.” The British are particularly keen on this piece of stylistic coyness."

----my god he's after me here ME !
and he's right as a rainbow too ---

“Really.” ‘folks’

all me ..all me ..

but not this
heaven fore fend me rom ever the use of this

‘stakeholder.’” .

snake holder
or stake driver
maybe
but not stake holder
even i ain't that timpanum challenged

but then
merciful godettes

don't the foil master slip
in agrre with this mildewed rag of a phrase

“Bad guys.”

our alex write
" Spot on.."

oh god
SPOT ON " alex ?

to the tumbrils with you too

you supple old pink fop !

-------------------------------

‘folks’
and stake holders

find it all here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/20/here-he-comes-again/

Posted by Owen Paine on Monday January 23 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

bustling battler
and white knight
in the war on corporate fraud
billy black
gives 40 wacks
to father S's sacred cow
APPLE

billy:

"Apple has just released a report on its suppliers that shows that anti-employee fraud is the norm....an NYT article on the report notes that it was bad publicity in the U.S.
that finally forced Apple to make greater disclosures about its suppliers’ frauds."

cited nyt article

"The calls for Apple to disclose suppliers became particularly acute after a series of deaths and accidents in recent years. In the last two years at firms supplying services to Apple, 137 employees were seriously injured after cleaning iPad screens with n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis; over a dozen workers have committed suicide or fell or jumped from buildings in a manner that suggests a suicide attempt; and in two separate blasts caused by dust from polishing iPad cases, four were killed and 77 injured.”

---------------------------------------

ya ya i know ...but for now lets NOT
get into the meta layer of corporate fraud
ie
reporting on supplier fraudwithout a real intention to stamp it out

---------------------------------------------------------------------

continuing right along :

anti-employee fraud ?

" illegal work conditions due to violation of safety rules,
violation of child labor laws,
failure to pay employees’ wages and benefits,
goods and loans provided by the employer to the employee that lock the employee into quasi-slavery."

" Apple calls its inquiries “audits” and it is apparent that most of its information comes from reviewing written and electronic records at its suppliers. That is exceptionally revealing. The suppliers know that they can defraud their employees with such impunity that they don’t even bother to get rid of records that prove their frauds."

" Apple has resisted making public its suppliers and the report refused to identify which suppliers committed which violations – often for years despite repeated, false promises to end their anti-employee control frauds. "

" Apple rarely terminates suppliers for defrauding their employees – even when the frauds endanger the lives and health of the workers and the community – and even where Apple knows that the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about these fraudulent and lethal practices."

".. unlikely in the extreme that Apple makes criminal referrals on its suppliers "

“...audits revealed that 93 supplier facilities had records indicating that more than half of their workers exceed a 60-hour weekly working limit.

Apple said 108 facilities did not pay proper overtime as required by law.

In 15 facilities, Apple found foreign contract workers who had paid excessive recruitment fees to labor agencies. "

".. though Apple said it mandated changes at those suppliers, and some facilities showed improvements, in aggregate, many types of lapses remained at levels that have persisted for years.”

there u have it sports fans

-------------------------------------------------

lesson for today ....billy's watch words:
.

“ Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market. The cost of dishonesty, therefore, lies not only in the amount by which the purchaser is cheated; the cost also must include the loss incurred from driving legitimate business out of existence.”

here is the black bloc sweeping condemnation you all live by as the way of the world:

"..... Companies like Apple and its counterparts create this criminogenic environment by selecting least-cost – criminal – suppliers who offer components at prices that honest firms cannot match. Effectively, they hang out a sign – only the fraudulent need apply to be suppliers. But the sign is, of course, invisible and cannot be introduced in court so Apple and its peers also get deniability. They are shocked, shocked that its suppliers are frauds that cheat their employees and put them and the public’s health at risk in order to make a few extra yuan or dong for the senior officers.

Fraudulent suppliers have compelling incentives to locate in nations and regions in which they can commit fraud with impunity. Nations that are corrupt, have weak rule of law, weak or non-existent unions, poor protections for workers, a reserve army of the impoverished, and have few resources devoted to prosecuting elite white-collar crime provide an ideal criminogenic environment for firms engaged in anti-employee fraud. The ubiquitous nature of anti-employee fraud
in many nations explains why U.S. industries have been so eager to “outsource” U.S. jobs to fraud-friendly nations. "

"....an important technical point. The wages reported in the most fraud-friendly nations are substantially overstated because workers work far longer hours without receiving the compensation to which they are entitled. Their hourly rate is much lower than reported, which means that the wage gap between U.S. and the most fraud-friendly nations is significantly greater than reported.
U.S. firms that have foreign suppliers in these nations are well aware of this data bias and make their outsourcing decisions based on the real (much larger) wage gap. "

--------------------------------

"Foreign Anti-employee Control Fraud harms U.S. Workers"

indeed indeed indeed comrade black

full article :
http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2012/01/anti-employee-control-fraud.html

Posted by Owen Paine on Monday January 23 06:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

contradictions among the locals
not surprising in the union biz
though more unusual among ilwu locals

the OCC blistering posted earlier
was from seattle local 19
they were fog horning away

this dated january 4 !
is from the actual longview local( 21) :

" The Longview Longshore Fight:
Join the Caravan to Mass Labor Protest -- Defend Our Union and Our Jobs!!!
by ILWU Local 21 "

..... ILWU Local 21 in Longview, Washington is under attack by a giant consortium...EGT .. ....
Longview Local 21 and San Francisco Local 10, Harry Bridges's local,
are asking for your support.....

The struggle is coming to a head ....

.... EGT plans to bring in a ship to load the scab grain stored in their terminal in Longview.

This could happen at any time, possibly in mid- to late-January.

We are urging workers to join a caravan to go to Longview from your area when the ship comes in ....

If thousands of union brothers and sisters show up ... along with supporters in other unions ..
and

the Occupy movement
who have aided the struggle against EGT in Longview,

we can put a stop to this union-busting operation...."

--------------------

goes on to itemize OCC support actions:

".... On Nov. 2,
Occupy Oakland mobilized 30,000 people to shut down the port to show their "commitment to solidarity with Longshore workers in their struggles against EGT in Longview, Washington." Local 21 President Dan Coffman speaking about Nov. 2 at Occupy Oakland said, "You can't believe what you people did for the inspiration of my union members. . ." ...."

".... on Dec. 12,
Occupy called to shut down the coast in support of the struggle in Longview. Again shipping in the port of Oakland was shut down, along with terminals in Seattle, Portland and elsewhere....."

--------------------------------------------------------
close :

We're all in this together. ...
Northwest locals have stepped up to the plate..
as has the Occupy movement.

Now it is everyone's turn. Together we have the power! Use it or lose it...."

January 4, 2012

---------------------------------------

full text

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/longview110112.html

Posted by Owen Paine on Sunday January 22 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

i suggest you haters of all thinks corporate
take a quick look at this :

http://www.bcg.com/documents/file84471.pdf

basically its the dark lord's prefered path to re- balanced trade

one has to love the bean town bean counters
real blue sky boys and girls
top shelf consultants

boston consulting group
art little and ...of course .bain consulting

bain

bain

bain

that rookery of limited liability mal practice advice

that roosting hutch for corporate birds of prey

that nest that will live in infamy
the hatchery in the 70'sof one young buzzard by the name of Mitt Romney
perpetual candidate for highest office
the former hands on the balls of straggling outfits

the crony-vulture cap clawman in chief
of nothing les then a bain consulting spin off

bain capital

a firm now getting its crooked gory trail of floating heads and legal peculation
revealed to us all in living color by the gnomes of mayhem

--------------------

back to the above report

its by bain rival and daddy op
boston consulting group :

gist ?

multi nationals please come home

come back here honey
and start the great reindustrial recycle

grab a part of our burgeoning low wage low employment
commerce and service sector job force

and

feed em back into a new domestic manufacturing sector

without unions
and with the same low wages shit fringes
Walmart and MacDonalds have come to love

the dream ?

fill the sizeable --- hundreds of billions --
unsustainable industrial trade hole
produced by the 35 year long ploicy contrived gauntlet
of
profitable destruction
that at long last
in this present convulsion
can stamp
the cio era "OVER"

yes the steel age of plentiful unskilled but organized
high wage industrial jobs is gone forever

but ..... in its place

===with a center of gravity shifted some what south of the ohio ==

you giants of the earth can erect a new plastic age
of unskilled unorganized
low wage re- industrial jobs

-----------------------------

ps

see all u lace cuff snuff sniffing " post industrial" hystericals

all along
u were just a pack of limp wristed cackling chicken littles

behold lame effete ones

industrial amerika re ascendent !

Posted by Owen Paine on Saturday January 21 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"from 2004 to 2008, only 6.2 percent of white borrowers with credit scores of 660 and above ended up with higher-rate mortgages. Latinos and blacks with good credit scores were at least three times as likely to end up with higher-rate mortgages."

my domestic partner's daughter used to sell these lovely credit plans to ass hole innocent householders

key the agent's commission is directly related to the rate agreed on

the higher the rate the higher the commission on a loan of x dollars

the strategy is start high and wait for an objection
how can i put this accurately ?

good credit
rule following
minority folks
from certain non commercially savy communities...
like african americans and chicanos
are more likely to asssume
they are getting honest helpful "service"
from a slime coated snake of an agent

its been my experience as well
selling total rip off
appliance protection plans

-------------------------------------
yes some big felon corporations have been forced by court order
to refund some usurious overcharges

but the systemic answer

a law that makes over charging for loans
subject to ruinous fines and compensations

of course no such law exists in any of the 50 states
let alone the federal level

Posted by Owen Paine on Friday January 20 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Owen Paine on Friday January 20 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

recall my earlier optimism ??

read this

"ILWU Local 19 ( Seattle)

resolution:

Whereas: we support the general critiques of the "Occupy" movement on our government and the economy, we object to their interference with our union's democratic process and in our struggle with EGT in Longview.
The "Occupy" movement has tried to substitute themselves for the membership in our struggle with EGT, and has attempted to subvert the ILWU on the following points:
1) They have shut down our ports while citing our struggle with EGT, without our consent;
2) They have claimed the ILWU "rank and file" support these shutdowns, without our consent or vote;
3) They have maligned and libeled individual members of our union, and our entire local, on the internet and in public;
4) They organized a community event locally "to support the struggle with EGT" without any meaningful prior communication with us;
5) They have denounced our democratically elected leadership for taking positions on behalf of our union in which they disagree;
6) They have appointed people to speak on behalf of the ILWU without our consent;
7) In Seattle, they initiated physical violence against our members for objecting to their actions;
[8)] They and their constituent parts continue this behavior, placing our unity, our union, and our struggle with EGT at serious risk;
9) They refuse to be receptive to pleas and requests to cease such actions as described above;
Therefore, Be It Resolved:
That all ILWU local 19 members withhold all support for "Occupy", formally or informally;
That we do NOT support or endorse any action taken by members of "Occupy" at the Port of Longview or anywhere else;
That we will only reconsider when representatives of "Occupy" come to our hall and apologize to our membership for their actions, agree to make that apology public, and agree to cease and desist in their actions as described herein "

eeeeh--yoik

now there are wheels within wheels here
thank the lord of struggle
and obviously
this is but one local not the entire ILWU

yet these gathering shadows
even if still incipient
these "contradictions between the people"
oughta set off the caution lights
all over OCC nation

"we are the 99% "
suggests a good deal of multi class solidarity..... eh ??

--------------------------------------

first thought :

ya there's some wreckless nasty shit in that local's push back

and yes
i hear ya

"who knows the quorum that drafted and approved that "resolution" mr paine

but its precisely that sort of paranoid stuck turd thought
that needs a good colon cleanse
whatever you do OCCers
don't let this very slight confirmation
of decades of progressive anti union agitprop
poison a beautiful prom date

--------------------
then again who am i to say

at any rate

let us hope patience and enlightenment will emerge on both sides here

and specifically I pray

the free bird OCCers will ponder this take:

"you're playing with livelihoods here blithe spirits"

-----------------
i had hoped to outline
a parallel course between the OCC as mr outside and the union as ms inside
or visa versa
especially visa versa in fact

with the OCC breaking the class binding legalities and taking the direct state hits
as much as possible

however this will require co ordination of a higher sort
then that demonstrated so far by the west coast OCCers and yes local 19 of the ILWU

proceed with all deliberate speed citizens on both sides

and you free class types
listen
you can't act like its now or never ....the OCC has legs or it don't

rushing a big action hardly changes that
one way or the other

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday January 19 03:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

administered after jackng up the OCCers in a love note

maybe it was not just inevitable

but at the very apex of saying his piece on the OCC

doesn't the CP's chair-comrade Sam Nerf

get into laying down
for time ten zillion plus one
his party's now vintage
"strategic mass line"

SAMMY:

"Which brings me to this year's elections. My impression is that some - maybe the majority - in the Occupy movement see the election process in its two-party form as an invitation to cooptation, and therefore they adopt an attitude of electoral abstentionism. This is mistaken in my opinion. Such a posture isolates Occupy from the main social forces and organizations in the country whose energies and resources will be focused in the electoral arena of struggle this year."

yup but forget that friends here's the real big meat ball right here :

"Moreover, the outcome of the election will set the broad parameters of struggle in the coming period. The defeat of the Republican right will position the people's movement to address, among other things, the inequality and exploitation that is built into our (capitalist) 1 percent vs. 99 percent society. On the other hand, a victory by the right will set the stage for the right to complete and consolidate a counterrevolution that began with the Reagan presidency three decades ago. "

total foolkrieging

the notion "the right " if they win the white house

"will ...complete and consolidate a counterrevolution "

is a hysterical joke

and on the other hand
as father S often points out here

present white hat unitary potus Barry o'Barry
has done a fair bit of
" completing and condolidating and counter revolving hizzseff " no ?

can u say NDAA ?

any real point paine ?

the coming "king for the next 4 "
jumping frog contest
makes no major difference either way

forget about it

except as a relaxing friend of a nite's sound sleep

quite the contrary comrade Sam

"the broad parmeters of struggle in the coming period "

are not up for a choice
here not in the slightest

whether administered with bare knuckles or thru a well padded glove

a punch in the nose is a punch in the nose

-------------------------------------

if there's to be a change in" broad parameters"

its out on the public commons and down in job places
where serious change must begin

Posted by Owen Paine on Thursday January 19 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If you spend any time in boats, one thing you learn early on is how quickly things can go horribly wrong, even on a calm pleasant day in well-charted waters, with a functioning GPS and all the other mod-cons.

Such was the fate, it seems, of Capitano Francesco Schettino. He took his ship a little too close to the well-charted rocks of Le Scole, a little south of Porto Giglio.

He was over-bold, no doubt. I wouldn't take my little boat -- which draws four feet of water -- anywhere near that close to those rocks, without decades of local knowledge. I would stay a half-mile seaward. Capt. Schettino's ship draws something like six or seven times the depth mine does. This fact in itself amazes me; a ship that big ought to draw fifty feet of water, not twenty-four. But they want to take the big ship into shallow picturesque harbors; so somehow they've built this floating soap-bubble. Which accommodates a staggering four thousand passengers and change.

The passengers want to be entertained. They want to see quaint Tyrrhenian fishing villages close up. Perhaps the villagers like to see it close up too; perhaps the company -- which has laid down officially charted courses far from any nasty rocks -- winks at the venturesomeness of its captains.

Schettino had the local knowledge; he and his colleagues had done this stunt before. The company didn't fire him. In fact they seem to have had some nice letters from the mayor of the quaint little Tyrrhenian fishing village about previous too-close passages. They know, thanks to the wonders of GPS, rather precisely where their ships are and were at any given time; if they had thought these daring 'fly-bys' were really a bad idea, they could easily have put a stop to them. But they didn't.

So why did Captain Schettino's ship rip a 150-foot gash in its hull, upon the rocks of le Scole, on this occasion, though others had escaped unscathed?

This may not be an answerable question. GPS --civilian GPS, that is; the military gets better spatial resolution, or so I'm told -- doesn't report your position down to the foot. A ship that big doesn't turn on a dime, in spite of all its stabilizer fins and thrusters. Did a gust of wind, or an unlucky set of the swell, push the ship twenty feet this way or that? Or did Schettino just fuck up? I doubt that we will ever really know -- though the owners will certainly favor the last of these hypotheses.

Let the record show that Schettino did at least one good thing. He brought his ship into the shallower waters of the bay north of the rocks that ripped her bottom open, and ran her aground near shore, in waters where she couldn't sink right down. This probably made the difference between the dozens of deaths we're seeing, and hundreds or even thousands if she had sunk in deeper water.

Four thousand people and more on that ship. How quickly could that many people have been marshalled into lifeboats and lowered away -- even if the ship's sides were perfectly vertical? And as the event showed, when the sides aren't vertical, the lifeboats can't be lowered.

And why weren't the sides vertical? There too lies a tale, I suspect. A lot of water came in, not surprisingly, when le Scole gashed the ship's hull like a can opener. But when the captain does his life-saving left turn into the shallow bay, all that water sloshes over to the starboard side and capsizes the ship, into the position now familiar from a thousand images, among them the one above. So there were no compartments belowdecks, designed to keep water from sloshing around. Or so it seems.

A case of optimistic design. Assume no water coming in. Or if it does come in, assume the ship is stationary and riding on an even keel. Assume you have time enough, before she sinks, to get all those four thousand fuddled retirees into lifeboats, and lower them down, past obligingly vertical sides.

Assume, above all, that nothing can go wrong; that human error can be ruled out. And when the human error occurs -- why then, blame The Nut Behind The Wheel. It couldn't possibly be anything... structural.

Captain Schettino doesn't cut a very heroic figure, to be sure. He does seem to have lost his nerve and abandoned his ship. Not a guy you want to hold up to your children as a shining example of what humankind ought to be. And yet, and yet... I personally have never been in his shoes. I would feel a lot more confident condemning him if I had ever faced what he faced and done better. In fact I'm not entirely sure I would have done so well.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Wednesday January 18 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Posted by Owen Paine on Wednesday January 18 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

That's Aristides The Just, shown above, obligingly assisting in his own ostracism. He probably deserved it -- anybody praised by Plato's fictional Socrates was almost certainly a very nasty brutish reactionary -- but still, the guy seems to have had a sense of humor, and a certain aristo insouciance which deserves admiration, up to a point.

Though I'm not usually a big friend to the ballot box, I love ostracisms, plebescites, recalls, ballot initiatives, all that stuff. The very least you can say about them is that they gum up the works. They subvert the orderly processes of "representative" "democracy" -- both terms really ought to have more than one set of scare quotes apiece, and the phrase, taken as a whole, may well be a contradiction in terms.

This is why liberals generally hate such channels for the expression of the fickle public's bloody-mindedness, of course.

Still, the liberals seem to be pretty happy with the progress of the recall campaign against Scott Walker, and for once, I'm with the liberals. There's a certain purity to an election with no Lesser Evil. Throw the bum out, or not? That's the kind of election I like. I'd pull the yes lever every time. I'd pull it for Walker, and I'd pull it for Obie. Impeachment should follow inauguration as dinner follows the cocktail hour.

Speaking of which, I do believe the sun is over the yardarm.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Tuesday January 17 05:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

recall the red hot STUDENTS FOR A DMOCRATIC SOCIETY (SDS)

that childrens crusade wildly fragmented into three mutually hostile hunks
at its climactic ' 69 convention

the hunk i supported at the time
emerged under the tutlege of the progressive labor party
--- a rather odd but then florishing early 60's vanguard figment --

my fragment was known to itself as THE WORKER STUDENT ALLIANCE (WSA )

(its two rivals were of course the far more famous weathermen or RYM I

and the baby maoists or RYMII)

now the trumpetteers of WSA called on us college kids
to rally round a student to the job site "work in "

man o man did the hardened cadre at the top
ever bally hoo this "work in " gig big time!

and it was received
at least at first
with all the usual dogmatical hopes
and stridently intoxicated expectations
customary to any batch
of still unfledged pinko born agains

and in the event ??

yup sure enough
despite a chorus of great bells and whistles at the commencement ...
"the work in " actions..... didn't work out

okay so why drag it up then ???

well OCC has a shot at getting it right for once
.getting a real OCCer / worker hook up going

and yes most OCCers are youth
as often as not carelessly labeled "students" by the fully job shackled

it seems to me this time encouraging signs abound

the harbingers the straws in the wind and such
are out there in reality for once
not just among campus pipe dreamers

the biggest concrete example i think
is the on going combined actions
of the dock workers out on the west coast
and the OCCs of that region

ups and downs so far ???

of course!

but the duo plow ahead anyway
apparently so far facing no irreconcilable differences

the contrast to 1970-71 couldn't be clearer

and its not just out on the left coast but else where too

partricularly in manhattan
---recall the pace college hard hat riot of 71 ?--

in the city that never sleeps
union pie ops actually showed solidarity
as a reciprocation for earlier OCCer acts of mass support
for the pies' own local union job site struggles

ya paine but what about "work ins" ???

well i think OCCers can play a role as shock troops
in the great effort to mobilize a self organizing movement
on amerika's tens of thousands of organizable and yet completely unorganized job sites

working not against the pies
but in co ordinated parallel

more later

Posted by Owen Paine on Sunday January 15 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Communist Horizon with Jodi Dean from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.

But perhaps the inadvertency wasn't entirely misplaced. Professor Dean has been spending a lot of time lately scolding Occupy Wall Street for not being Bolshie enough. Here's the latest:

In this essay, we claim that far from being a strength, the lack of demands reflects the weak ideological core of the movement. We also claim that demands should not be approached tactically but strategically, that is, they should be grounded in a long-term view of the political goals of the movement, a view that is currently lacking. Accordingly, in the second part of this text, we argue that this strategic view should be grounded in a politics of the commons. Before addressing the politics of the commons, however, we dispel three common objections....

The Prof then proceeds to knock down, in fairly brisk style, a number of straw men. Her reproaches however are couched in an idiom not altogether Leninist, or even Leninesque:

... anarchists and libertarians in the movement have repeatedly blocked proposals for introducing taxes on financial transactions and stronger oversight of the banking sector on the grounds that such proposals would expand the size of the government and the scope of its intervention....

... the 99 percent is not an actual social bloc. It is rather an assemblage of politically and economically divergent subjectivities.... the autonomist objection proceeds as if the multiplicity of political and economic interests of the 99 percent could immanently converge.... it has installed in the movement a serious blindspot with regard to real divergences, a blindspot that has high costs in terms of political efficacy as serious proposals get watered down in order to meet with the agreement of those who reject their basic premises.

Some of my lefty comrades have been much exercised by the rumored presence among the Occupiers of Paulites and palaeocons; that seems to be the card Professor Dean is playing here. It really gets some of the comrades frothing at the mouth. Here's one contributor to a mailing list I read, for example:

Libertarian types who oppose Social Security, minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and workers rights in general have no place in the Occupy movement, and should be banned by any means necessary. To believe otherwise is a betrayal to those who are suffering the effects of economic deprivation. It's a clear cut question of which side are you on.

Not to mention 'progressive' foundations. Dean's piece appeared on a web site sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, whose own web site makes fun reading. Its founder, Charles Merriam, a very colorful figure, was more or less present at the creation of my own alma mater, the University of Chicago.

Posted by Michael J. Smith on Sunday January 15 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (33)