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Bill McKibben At Occupy Wall Street: ‘Wall Street Has Been Occupying The Atmosphere’

By Brad Johnson on Oct 10, 2011 at 6:46 pm

Our guest blogger is Bill McKibben, who spoke to Occupy Wall Street at Washington Square Park on Saturday. Below are text and video of his speech, via TreeHugger and It’s Getting Hot In Here.

Today in the New York Times there was a story that made it completely clear why we have to be here. They uncovered the fact that the company building that tar sands pipeline was allowed to choose another company to conduct the environmental impact statement, and the company that they chose was a company was a company that did lots and lots of work for them. So, in other words, the whole thing was rigged top to bottom and that’s why the environmental impact statement said that this pipeline would cause no trouble, unlike the scientists who said if we build this pipeline it’s “game over” for the climate. We can’t let this pipeline get built.

On November 6, one year before the election, we’re going to be in DC with a huge circle of people around the White House and they’re going to be carrying signs with quotations from Barack Obama from the 2008 campaign. He said, “It’s time to end the tyranny of oil.” He said, “I will have the most transparent government in history.” We have to go to DC to find out where they have locked that guy up. We have to free Obama, because there is some sort of stunt double there now. So on November 6, I hope we can move, just for a day, Occupy Wall Street down to the White House and get them in the fight against corporate power.

The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere. That’s why we can never do anything about global warming. Exxon gets in the way. Goldman Sachs gets in the way. The whole fossil fuel industry gets in the way. The sky does not belong to Exxon. They cannot keep using it as a sewer into which to dump their carbon. If they do, we’ve got no future and nobody else on this planet has a future.

I spend a lot of time in countries around the world organizing demonstrations and rallies in solidarity. In the last three years at 350.org, we’ve had 15,000 rallies in every country except North Korea. Everywhere around the world, poor people and black people and brown people and Asian people and young people are standing up. Most of those places, don’t produce that much carbon. They need us to act with them and for them, because the problem is 20 blocks south of here. That’s where the Empire lives and we’ve got to figure out how to tame it and make it work for this planet or not work at all.

Thank you guys very much.

Yglesias

Corporate Profits Repatriation, A Problem In Search Of A Solution

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2011 at 6:15 pm

Imagine a country. Poor but hardworking. It’s at or near full employment. Its workers aren’t the best educated in the world, but they’re better educated than the per capita GDP of the country would indicate. Unfortunately, their productivity is low despite a relatively solid education system because the workers lack access to capital and capital goods. They need to think of some way to inspire currency to flow in from outside in order to build their country up. You could imagine, say, post-Castro Cuba having the problem.

Just put a pin in that and ponder this email from MN:

I keep seeing proposals for a tax holiday to encourage the repatriation of profits held by foreign subsidiaries of American corps. The idea is that bringing the cash back would create economic activity.

What about reversing the idea by creating a disincentive to keep the profits offshore in the first place? Probably would take a change to the tax code, but you could certainly offset any tax credits or deductions against those profits.

There are, indeed, perennially proposals from Democrats to try to tweak tax deductions so as to discourage firms from shifting capital out of the country. That’s fine as a revenue-raising idea. But it’s important to note that there’s no real need for an alternative to the repatriation proposal because the repatriation proposal is a solution to a non-problem. This is not post-Castro Cuba. The United States is not a capital-starved country. We’re actually attracting large ongoing capital inflows. The current income tax code is kind of a mess—high rates, tons of loopholes—so I understand that various firms would prefer not to need to pay it. But there’s no bona fide policy problem that this is solving.

Climate Progress

The Other 99% of Us Can’t Buy Our Way Out of the Impending Global Ponzi Scheme Collapse

By Joe Romm on Oct 10, 2011 at 5:57 pm

Todd Gitlin is Wrong:  Occupy Wall Street Protesters Aren’t “Anarchists,” The Tea Party Members Are.

Chris O'Meara / Associated PressProtesters chanting "We are the 99 percent" march in support of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations on Thursday in downtown Tampa, Fla. About 400 people protesting against financial greed and corruption gathered Thursday, singing and waving signs at passing motorists.

We are seeing an accumulation of “wealth” by the super-rich to shame the Gilded Age.  The richest “400 people have more wealth than half of the more than 100 million U.S. households,” Politifact was grudgingly forced to agree that Michael Moore’s statement was correct.

I don’t think this is disconnected from the question I raised 2 years ago, “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“  As Tom Friedman reported:

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

But I suppose it isn’t a full Ponzi scheme in one respect.  The super-rich have so much wealth that they can insulate themselves from the collapse far longer than everyone else, with their gated and moated communities, multiple homes in multiple climates, security guards, private jets and general insensitivity to the price of anything — and hence insensitivity to the value of everything.

If you have $1 billion, well, even if you lost half of everything, even if you lost 90%, you’d still have an incredible standard of living to pass on to your children, assuming you could stomach the misery of billions.

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Yglesias

Why Not Build A City?

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2011 at 4:20 pm

The Washington Post has various people debate what to do with the obsolete RFK Stadium facility in DC:

It’s striking to me how unpopular what I think the obvious and roughly correct solution is. The structure should be demolished and the empty land plus the open air parking lots should be sold to builders to build . . . whatever. An urban neighborhood with houses and some stores. You’re talking about a big parcel of land that’s right by a Metro station offering a convenient 10 minute commute to the House-side of the Capitol. If you build some houses, people will live there and if people live there they’ll want to shop in some stores and eat in some restaurants. Trying to lure a football team to the location to play eight times a year is insane, but in general “what to do with a bunch of transit accessible land in the middle of a city?” isn’t such a complicated question. Just build more city.

Alyssa

‘Boardwalk Empire’ Open Thread: Victrola

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 10, 2011 at 4:08 pm

This post contains spoilers through the October 10 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

As a Boardwalk Empire newbie who’s shotgunning the series all at once, one of the things that stands out most about the show is its manneredness, its theatricality. Sometimes this works beautifully: Steve Buscemi’s very good at pulling off slight strangeness or outsizedness and making it seem natural, while Kelly Macdonald’s very good here precisely because she’s a bit of a neutral agent. She can do things like sneak into Nucky’s offices by pretending she’s a pregnant, itinerant Irish girl: she’s good at seeming invisible when it counts. But it doesn’t always work well, and last night’s episode focused on two characters where I think the mannerdness of the show doesn’t necessarily work very well: Lucy and Nelson.

I should make no bones of the fact that I think Paz de la Huerta isn’t a very good actress period, and in this role, she’s playing a character who is flighty and maybe doesn’t have much education or sense as if she’s stupid to the point of disgust. When she whines to Nelson that “I wanna go out…That neighbor lady stopped by the other day. She invited us for dinner…a simple dinner. Some conversation. Some music, for god’s sake…a Victrola…I used to be out every night in the week…Say what you want about Nucky, at least he was fun,” it’s hard not to feel anything but contempt for her. Has she managed to learn absolutely nothing about Nelson in the months he’s effectively kept her locked up in? Does she genuinely have no idea that there is precisely nothing in that whine that will move a man who, as he explains to her, without judgement of his parents, “was taken to a Christmas pageant by an aunt in 1894. When my parents found out, they broke off all relations.”
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NEWS FLASH

Occupy Wall Street Crowd Greets Fox Host With Chants Of ‘Fox News Lies’ | Yesterday, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera went down to Zucotti Park in New York City, the center of the Occupy Wall Street protests, where he was greeted by loud chants from the crowd of “Fox News lies.” Rivera was interviewing professor Cornell West and pundit Tavis Smiley, along with Fox Business’ Charles Payne, from the park, but his voice was almost drowned out by the crowd’s chants at times. Watch it:

RT has video from the crowd’s perspective that shows Rivera trying to make his way through the throng of demonstrators. Watch it here. (H/T: Mediaite).

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Oct 10, 2011 at 3:30 pm

Alyssa

‘The Good Wife’ Open Thread: Playing Parts

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 10, 2011 at 2:47 pm

By Kate Linnea Welsh

The Good Wife is all about image, innocence, and blaming the victim as half of Lockhart/Gardner, including Will and Alicia, are stuck in a hotel for a court-ordered mediation—with the defense lawyers are led by Will’s ex, Celeste. The show gets into issues of regulation and patent law as Lockhart/Gardner negotiate on behalf of a woman disabled by pain caused by the malfunction of an unapproved medical device of her doctor’s own invention. He didn’t tell her the device had not been FDA approved, and the patient thought he was using her as a test subject without her consent. Celeste first tries to blame the victim by claiming that the problem would have been recognized before permanent damage was done if the patient hadn’t been overmedicating, but when that fails, Celeste turns to a defense that centers on the device’s regulatory status. She claims that the device is a minor modification of an existing device, and therefore doesn’t need to be approved by the FDA, but Kalinda finds a patent application made in which the doctor says his device is original work, not a modification. In this case, regulation and governmental oversight of medical technology is presented as an unqualified good.

Lockhart/Gardner win this case on the facts – the mediator says as much – but the techniques they use to get there offer some insight into what the firm, and especially Will, will and won’t do to win. He will neither sleep with Celeste nor bet the outcome of the case on a card game with her – he insists he’s grown up – but he will use that game to figure out what the defense is willing to pay. And when he realizes that Celeste plans to play Alicia by making her jealous of Celeste’s past with Will, Will and Alicia gleefully use this supposed jealousy to play upon the mediator’s sympathies. After two seasons of Alicia’s public stoicism in the face of Peter’s infidelities, it was delightful to watch her play-act storming out of a room in a jealous huff. The mediator knows he’s been played, but he seems to admire Lockhart/Gardner for it, rather than hold it against them, and says he’d hire them himself if he needed representation. Once again, virtually everyone in the world of this show expects everyone else to be operating in a moral gray area, and it’s refreshing that the show doesn’t waste time on people getting unrealistically outraged about these things.
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Special Topic

VIDEO: Conservative Pundits’ Double Standard On Occupy Wall Street And The Tea Party

By Jeff Spross on Oct 10, 2011 at 2:30 pm

On Friday, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) dismissed the Occupy Wall Street protests and the growing 99 Percent Movement as a “mob” dividing “Americans against Americans.” Then yesterday on ABC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) pointed out Cantor’s glaring double standard: When the Tea Party — a similarly grassroots movement claiming the mantle of populism — arose, he happily endorsed it.

In the same vein, Chris Wallace declared on yesterday’s Fox News Sunday that the 99 Percent Movement was getting more coverage “than it deserves.” Of course, Wallace is one of the star hosts of a network that essentially served as the Tea Party movement’s unofficial PR wing, posting dates and times for rallies on its website and promoting Tea Party events during their regular programming.

This double standard of mocking and vilifying the 99 Percent Movement as misguided, irrelevant, or even dangerous, while embracing the Tea Party as a fresh populist cure for the nation’s ills, has been employed universally by the conservative echo chamber, with Fox News at its locus. ThinkProgress has the video evidence. Watch it:

Yglesias

Values Voters

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 10, 2011 at 1:57 pm

The Christian right had its big Values Voters Summit over the weekend, leading David Frum (who’s really trying to get kick out of the movement) to snark:

BTW: anybody else notice the implied message of scheduling a “values voters” summit on Yom Kippur?

Indeed.

Though something I endlessly find peculiar about American politics is the lack of distinctly Christian values in the most self-consciously Christian warrens of the political culture. Christianity has a lot in common with other religious and ethical systems. But there’s also all this fairly distinctive stuff in there about pacifism, turning the other cheek, etc. But “Christian” politics is, if anything, more violent and revenge-oriented than other strains of our political culture.

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