Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

They more closely resemble the Yippies and not the hippies if you want to use comparisons from that era to make it easier for others to understand them.

The Yippie group didn't start until late 1967, and was much more political than the hippies and they were also into quite wacky stunts. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see some wacky stunts in the months ahead though, from OWS offshoots.

The original hippie movement basically died in roughly mid 1967 in my opinion. I was trying to refer to 'hippies' from the earlier 60s that were much closer to beatniks than the 'flower children', while both were counter culture. Herb Caen said it well - "Turn them on, if not to drugs, then to beauty, love, honesty, fun."

OWS of course has virtually none of the drug culture, but from my visits to two groups in cities near me, they are very much into honesty, questioning authority, non-violence, anti-war and strong community - and are especially anti-establishment. They're a rhyme of history. Many would also probably object to my characterization as hippie descendants - much like fans of 'Burning Man' alternative community thinking would also object to it... it's just an opinion.

The root of the group to which I refer are also a bit Gandhi-esque in the sense of non-violence and pacifism like original hippies, and are quite inclusive of many other 'anti-establishment' views. I may be contrarian in the sense that I also believe that their lack of leaders and a multi-point program shows a cool understanding of how not to provide a clear target for black/negative PR from bankster and similar types.

The war of ideas is very much in play.

[mesyn191]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Yea OWS is different from either the Yippies or Hippies but you seemed to be talking about anonymous and /b/ too which was what I was responding to. OWS does borrow heavily from the Yippies too though in the respect that they're essentially leaderless.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

OWS's first offspring?

California’s Campus Movements Dig In Their Heels



LOS ANGELES — It has become something of an annual tradition on California college campuses, in what is perhaps the most prestigious state university system in the country: the state makes large cuts in public universities, they in turn raise tuition, and students respond with angry protests.

But this year, propelled in part by the fervor of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in part by the state of the economy and California’s mountainous budget woes, the battle is sharpening. Indeed, the Occupy movement — on campuses, at least — is transforming itself into a student-led crusade against increases in tuition.
A video that showed two University of California, Davis, police officers using pepper spray on seated protesters has gone viral, with hundreds of thousands watching what might have been a relatively small encampment compared with the larger protests across the country. The video has led to demands that Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi resign. On Monday, Ms. Katehi said she was putting the campus police chief on administrative leave as a way to rebuild trust on campus.

The attack has galvanized protesters on other campuses. Students at the Los Angeles, Berkeley, Riverside and Davis campuses said Monday that they intended to restart their encampments Monday night, in part to test whether they will be rousted or arrested in the wake of the pepper-spraying.

After years of watching the state’s budget for higher education erode, they are demanding that the state and university administrators find a way to lower tuition that they say is squeezing out the middle class.

Mr. Arnone said he expected dozens of students to camp at U.C.L.A. overnight Monday. At the same time, other students are planning to camp out and guard a Bruin statue, the campus mascot. The statue is often vandalized this time of year, ahead of the football game against the school’s cross town rival, the University of Southern California. “We’re going to make them deal with whether they’ll selectively enforce their laws.”

The University of California president, Mark G. Yudof, convened a conference call with the chancellors of all 10 campuses, urging them not to use police force to respond to “peaceful, lawful protests,” said Daniel M. Dooley, a senior vice president for the system who participated in the call. The president also plans to create protocols to detail how the campuses should respond to the ongoing protest.

Mr. Dooley said that he did not expect Ms. Katehi to resign and that President Yudof had confidence that she could move the campus beyond the incident.

Thousands of people gathered on the Davis campus for a noon rally Monday where Chancellor Katehi spoke. Organizers of the protest there told her she should wait in line with other speakers.

“I am here to apologize. I feel horrible for what happened on Friday,” she told the crowd. “I don’t want to be the chancellor of the university we had on Friday.”

She added: “I know you may not believe anything I am telling you today, and you don’t have to. It is my responsibility to earn your trust.”

Administrators in the U.C. system have long complained about the state’s budget cuts and in many ways are sympathetic to the protesters’ demands.

“The rapidly rising fees give us all heartburn,” said Gibor Basri, the vice chancellor for equity and inclusion at Berkeley, who has met with the protesters several times. “We don’t believe that higher education is a private right but a public good.”

Chancellor Katehi

Public Opinion and the Occupy Movement

The Occupy Wall Street protests continue to spread around the country, highlighting grievances some Americans have about banks, income inequality and a sense that the poor and middle class have been disenfranchised. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that almost half of the public thinks the sentiments at the root of the movement generally reflect the views of most Americans.

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Yea OWS is different from either the Yippies or Hippies but you seemed to be talking about anonymous and /b/ too which was what I was responding to. OWS does borrow heavily from the Yippies too though in the respect that they're essentially leaderless.

Cool, and yes anonymous does remind me of yippies although anons have the volume up substantially higher.

I had to laugh about /b though - it's one subject I would never have expected to come up on iTulip. Just defining it would take a room full of PhD's. ;-)

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

it's one subject I would never have expected to come up on iTulip.

See: Paradigm Shift - OWS

[cobben]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[I]OWS's first offspring?

A video that showed two University of California, Davis, police officers using pepper spray on seated protesters has gone viral, with hundreds of thousands watching what might have been a relatively small encampment compared with the larger protests across the country. The video has led to demands that Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi resign. On Monday, Ms. Katehi said she was putting the campus police chief on administrative leave as a way to rebuild trust on campus.

Mark Ames: How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities


Yves here. Reader sidelarge raised the issue yesterday in comments, of UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi’s role in abolition of university asylum in Greece. The story is even uglier than the link he provided suggests.

A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber) I’ve checked this out with our friend in Athens, reporter Kostas Kallergis (who runs the local blog “When The Crisis Hits The Fan”), and he confirmed it–Linda Katehi really is the worst of all possible chancellors imaginable, the worst for us, and the worst for her native Greece.

. . .

She’s the right goon for the right time: As Yasha Levine reported two years ago, UC students have been battling against rapacious austerity measures jacking up their fees in order to pay back Wall Street bankers who bet and lost UC pension funds. That’s a big reason why UC students are fed up and Going Occupy. And “Chemical” Katehi’s answer is the sort of answer banksters like hearing: Stomp out dissent and squeeze every last drop of juice out of them that you can.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Heated and stretched, Dave Zirin adds his to the mix:

Two Scandals, One Connection: The FBI link between Penn State and UC Davis

Dave Zirin on November 23, 2011 - 10:32am ET


Two shocking scandals. Two esteemed universities. Two disgraced university leaders. One stunning connection. Over the last month, we’ve seen Penn State University President Graham Spanier dismissed from his duties and we’ve seen UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi pushed to the brink of resignation. Spanier was jettisoned because of what appears to be a systematic cover-up of assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial child rape. Katehi has faced calls to resign after the she sent campus police to blast pepper spray in the faces of her peaceably assembled students, an act for which she claims “full responsibility.” The university’s Faculty Association has since voted for her ouster citing a “gross failure of leadership.” The names Spanier and Katehi are now synonymous with the worst abuses of institutional power. But their connection didn’t begin there. In 2010, Spanier chose Katehi to join an elite team of twenty college presidents on what’s called the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which “promotes discussion and outreach between research universities and the FBI.”

Spanier said upon the group’s founding in 2005, “The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board promises to help universities and government work toward a balanced and rational approach that will allow scientific research and education to progress and our nation to remain safe.” He also said that the partnership could help provide “internships” to faculty and students interested in “National Security issues.”
FBI chief Robert Mueller said at a press conference with Spanier, “We knew it would not be necessarily an easy sell because of the perceived tension between law enforcement and academia. But once we’ve briefed President Spanier on the national security threats that impact all of you here at Penn State and at other universities, it became clear to all of us why this partnership is so important. “

But the reality of this partnership is far different. Its original mandate was about protecting schools from “cyber theft” and “intellectual property issues.” As has been true with the FBI since Hoover, give them a foothold, and they’ll take off their shoes and get cozy. Their classified mandate has since expanded to such euphemisms as “counter-terrorism” and “public safety.” It also expanded federal anti-terrorism task forces to include the dark-helmeted pepper-spray brigades, otherwise known as the campus police.

As Wired magazine put it in 2007, “presidents are being advised to think like ‘Cold Warriors’ and be mindful of professors and students who may not be on campus for purposes of learning but, instead, for spying, stealing research and recruiting people who are sympathetic to an anti-U.S. cause.”

Chancellor Katehi said in 2010 that despite these concerns, she was proud to join the NSHEA because “it’s important for us to learn from the FBI about the smartest, safest protocols to follow as we do our work, and it is equally important that the FBI has a solid understanding of matters of academic freedom.”

Sacremento’s FBI special agent in Charge, Drew Parenti, praised her involvement, saying, “The FBI’s partnership with higher education is a key component in our strategy of staying ahead of national security threats from our foreign adversaries…. we are very pleased that Chancellor Katehi has accepted an appointment to serve on the board.”

As for the actual meetings between the presidents of academic institutions and the FBI, those discussions are classified. If you are a rabble-rousing faculty member or a student group stepping out of line, your school records can become the FBI’s business and you’d be none the wiser.

Chris Ott, from the Massachusetts ACLU, said of the NSHEA, “The FBI is asking university faculty, staff, and students to create a form of neighborhood watch against anything that is so called ‘suspicious.’ What kinds of things are they going to report on? Who has the right to be snitching? One of the scary things is who [on the campuses] will take it upon themselves to root out spies?”

In the wake of the scandals that have enveloped and now destroyed the careers of Spanier and Katehi, the very existence of the NCHEA should now be called to question. Given the personal character on display by these two individuals, why should anyone trust that the classified meetings have stayed in the realm of “cyber theft” and intellectual property rights? What did the FBI tell Chancellor Katehi about how to deal with the peacefully assembled Occupiers? Was “counter-terrorism” advice given on how to handle her own students?

As for Spanier, how much of Sandusky’s actions at Penn State, which were documented on campus but never shared with the local police, was the FBI privy to? Why did the school hire former FBI director Louis Freeh to head up their internal investigation? Does that in fact represent a conflict of interest? And most critically, did the “chilling effect” of a sanctioned FBI presence at Penn State actually prevent people from coming forward?

When Spanier was asked in 2005, if he was concerned about whether a formal partnership with the FBI would cause objections he said, “If there is an issue on my campus, I’d like to be the first person to hear about it, not the last.” In the context of recent events, it’s probably best to let those words speak for themselves. But fear not for the futures of these two stewards of higher education and academic freedom. Maybe Spanier can put his experience as a federal informant to good use from inside a federal prison. As for Katehi, if, as suspected, she’ll be unemployed shortly, perhaps she can take advantage of one of those fabulous internship opportunities having the FBI on campus provides.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/164783...e-and-uc-davis

[Slimprofits]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift



yep

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Back-to-back identical commercials - just like on real TV - nice touch! Only refinement I can think of is one should end abruptly for no discernible reason and cut to another commercial 'in progress'. (Commercials and progress - oxymoron?) And now back to our game - where we've missed a play but will fill you in . . . .

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

a liberal's two-cents . . .

Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood

Fans were shocked when Batman writer Frank Miller furiously attacked the Occupy movement. They shouldn't have been, says Rick Moody – he was just voicing Hollywood's unspoken values

The film 300, directed by Zack Snyder, based on a Frank Miller graphic novel of the same name, is just what you would expect from the heavily freighted right-wing filmic propaganda of the post-9/11 period: the Greeks, from which our own putative democracies are descended, must fight to the death against a vast but incompetent army of Persians (those hordes of the Middle East), who are considered here unworthy of characterisation – in fact, every character in the film is unworthy of characterisation – and the noble Spartans (the Greeks in question) achieve heroism despite their glorious deaths on the field at Thermopylae, by virtue of the moral superiority of their belief system and their unmatched courage. Ruthless enemy! From the Middle East! Heroic, rugged individualists! A big, sentimental score! Lots and lots of blue-screen! Endless amounts of body parts spewing theatrical blood!

It's a barely watchable film, but what from Hollywood these days is not similarly unwatchable, when so many high-profile releases are based on a medium, the comic book, made expressly to engage the attentions of pre- and just post-pubescent boys. At least comic books themselves are so politically dim-witted, so pie-in-the-sky idealistic as to be hard to take seriously. But in the films of this era, the Marvel and DC era of Hollywood, even when the work is not self-evidently shilling for large corporations (with product placement) or militating for a libertarian and oligarchical political status quo (which makes a fine environment for large, multinational corporations), the work is doing nothing at all to oppose these things. Paying your $12.50, these days, is not unlike doing a few lines of cocaine and pretending you don't know about the headless bodies in Juarez.

With this in mind, an honest recognition of cinematic propaganda, we shouldn't be shocked by Frank Miller's comments about Occupy Wall Street. It is naive to be shocked by them. But let's evaluate the particulars of his remarks just the same. Miller tries to repel the OWS message ("Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty titbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism") by reminding us that we are at war. This despite the fact that OWS is focused primarily on income inequality, and thus mainly taken up with domestic politics, such that OWS doesn't really take a position on the "ruthless enemy" and doesn't need to. Miller's particular approach, the warmongering approach, is self-evidently reminiscent of the

Bush/Cheney years, in which any domestic reversal was followed by an elevated level on the colour-coded risk-assessment wheel. But in this post-Iraq war moment – when the most aggravated conspiracies we seem to have in New York City involve, for example, a lone Dominican guy who advertises his hatred of the government on Facebook and who may have been entrapped by local police – our "ruthless enemy" just doesn't seem quite as numerous as Miller's Persian hordes.

Beyond Bush-Cheney fear-mongering, Miller's further complaint seems to be that people who camped outdoors in Zuccotti Park for two months were not terribly clean. (The Spartans were no doubt tidier in Thermopylae.) But if the crowd of 32,000 who turned up to march in NYC last Thursday – after the "pond scum" had been ejected from the park – are any indication, this hygiene issue is no longer a reliable talking point for Miller (or for Newt Gingrich, the rightwing posterboy of the late 80s who has now entered the race for the Republican presidential noimination). The 32,000 included some professional types, at least one retired police officer and lots of elderly people, many of whom had recently showered. Same thing at UC Davis, and at Berkeley. Those college kids usually have showers in their dorms.

Miller also accuses the OWS protesters of being too technologically savvy. For example, he accuses them of playing Lords of Warcraft. Now, I admit it, I know nothing of multiplayer online role-playing games, nor do I own an iPhone nor an iPad. Nevertheless, I maintain I am correct in imagining that what Miller actually means here is World of Warcraft. This superficial mistake (suggests what should be plain: that Miller wrote his jeremiad quickly, perhaps late at night, when a lack of restraint is often linked with the onset of unconsciousness. He didn't bother to reread it. He therefore overlooks at least one obvious point. Namely, no one is more likely to play World of Warcraft than the kind of adolescent boy who also thinks 300 is quality cinematic product.

Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it. And Frank Miller has done Occupy Wall Street a service by reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility, which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry. We should be grateful for the reminder. And we might repay the favor by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/20...lywood-fascism

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

a liberal's two-cents . . .

Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood

....American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood.... has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

Does that make American cinema cryptofascist? Is "cryptofascist" a word that you can use in an essay like this? I keep trying to find a space somewhere between "propagandistic" and "cryptofascist" to describe my feelings about Miller's screed. But perhaps it's more accurate to say the following: whatever mainstream Hollywood cinema is now, Frank Miller is part of it. And Frank Miller has done Occupy Wall Street a service by reminding us that our allegedly democratic political system, which increases inequality and decreases class mobility,
which is mostly interested in keeping the disenfranchised where they are, requires a mindless, propagandistic (or "cryptofascist") storytelling medium to distract its citizenry. We should be grateful for the reminder. And we might repay the favor by avoiding purchase of tickets to Miller's films.

+1
now _this_ is refreshing, eh?
a liberal takedown of hollywierd = almost heretical it would seem - tho i'm just abit less than impressed when he's dumping on em just because miller's movies glorify violence/death with trashy c-grade cinema vs his ideological POV -

would be very interested to know if he had anything to say about
INSIDE JOB?

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Targeting the Paradigm Shift . . .

Anthony Hardwick never thought of himself as an activist or even much of an organizer. He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., graduated from Park University in Missouri in 2009, and looked for a job by scouring the Internet for cities with low unemployment rates. He settled on Omaha, where he found two — as a shopping cart attendant at Target and a printing supervisor for OfficeMax. There he met his fiancée, Denise Holling.

“Basically, I just wanted to pursue the American Dream,” Mr. Hardwick told me this week, as the bearded, burly 29-year-old emerged as the unlikely hero of a nationwide movement to roll back the start of the holiday shopping season to the day after Thanksgiving.

Late last month, Mr. Hardwick’s supervisor at Target told him he would be needed at 11 p.m. Thanksgiving night in order for Target to open its doors at midnight for Black Friday, which the discount retailer was doing for the first time this year.

“I’d have to be at Target from 11 p.m. until 4:30 a.m., then I’d have 30 minutes to scurry down to OfficeMax, where I was starting at 5 a.m.,” he said. Mr. Hardwick makes $8.50 an hour at Target, and between his two jobs earns about $25,000 a year. “I used to be able to pull 24-hour shifts,” he said. “I’d drink Red Bull. But now I’m 29, and I’m starting to feel it. I’d have to nap.”

This didn’t sit well with Mr. Hardwick, who figured he’d be sleeping while his fiancée and future in-laws gathered for the traditional turkey dinner. Although a Target spokeswoman told me the company did its best to accommodate employees who wanted the day off, this often isn’t possible, and Mr. Hardwick said he wasn’t given the option. Mr. Hardwick turned to the Internet and discovered the Web site Change.org, best known for a recent online petition to get banks to roll back debit card fees.

“A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day,” he posted on Nov. 3. “A full holiday with family is not just for the elite of this nation — all Americans should be able to break bread with loved ones and get a good night’s rest on Thanksgiving!” He asked the Web site’s visitors to join him in calling for Target retail stores to restore the 5 a.m. opening time on Black Friday.

But a “full holiday with family” has become increasingly elusive as competition from 24/7, 365-days-a-year Internet shopping has caused retailers to throw open their doors on a day once sacrosanct “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” as Abraham Lincoln put it when he established the national holiday in 1863.

Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday to the fourth Thursday in November (from the last Thursday) in an overt attempt to lengthen the holiday shopping season and bolster retail sales during the Depression. And the holiday’s demise as a no-shopping interlude is the culmination of a steady retreat from pervasive blue laws that once banned shopping not only on Thanksgiving and other major holidays but also on Sundays. Today Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the last states to restrict shopping on Thanksgiving, and Paramus, N.J., the site of several major malls, may be unique in banning shopping on Thanksgiving and Sundays.

“The blue laws began in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims, so I guess it’s fitting that we still have them,” Jon B. Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said. “Christmas is sacrosanct. But there’s been a bill proposed to permit shopping on Thanksgiving. It hasn’t moved. We endorse it every year, but do I have members beating down my door to push this? No.”

Among national retailers, Target is hardly the worst offender. Although some Target stores are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving before reopening at midnight, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has been open all day on Thanksgiving for years, and this year moved up its Black Friday door-buster specials to 10 p.m. Thursday. K-Mart and many Gap and Old Navy stores are also open all day, and a wave of stores, including Macy’s and Best Buy, opened this year at midnight on Friday with special holiday promotions. Some retailers are now talking about “Black Thanksgiving.”

“For many people Black Friday shopping is now as much a part of the holiday tradition as the turkey,” the Target spokeswoman said. “Black Friday has an exciting, euphoric feeling. A lot of our team members get very excited. Months of hard work have gone into preparing for this.” She said Target moved up its store openings to midnight only after much deliberation, and the move had been “overwhelmingly popular” with both customers and employees.

Mr. Hardwick said he was aware of all this, and had modest expectations for his petition. “I promoted it on Facebook and figured I’d sign up some friends and family,” he said. “At first it just sat there.” But gradually comments piled up on the Change.org Web site.

“I’m sick and tired of these attempts to brainwash us into thinking Christmas is about how much money we spend,” Deborah Schwartz posted. From Bryce Allison: “It’s a national holiday, not a national shopping day ... maybe try giving thanks for your employees that bring you so much money.” Scotty Brookie wrote, “Encouraging people to shop in the middle of the night is bizarre.”

David Breeden, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Minneapolis, saw Mr. Hardwick’s petition in the broader context of the holiday. “Thanksgiving is one of the few civil holidays,” he said. “A lot of people don’t celebrate Christmas. But Thanksgiving is a national holiday and it’s a day for giving thanks for what we have. What’s wrong with stores opening at 10 a.m. on Friday? Everything will still be on the shelves when you unlock those doors. How about letting everyone breathe for a day and just relax? That’s a spiritual issue, too.”

New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford mentioned Mr. Hardwick in a recent article in which others expressed their dismay that Thanksgiving was turning into another shopping day. Other media contacted him. “I’ve been on TV,” he said. “I spoke to NBC; I spoke to MSNBC, CNN, the Christian Broadcasting Network.” People at Change.org helped him manage the attention, and he finally got to put his college degree in public relations to use. Thousands of online supporters flocked to the petition. “I was overjoyed and flabbergasted,” he said.

He also drew his share of critics, most saying he should stop whining and give thanks that he has a job at all. “That was the same argument that was used when 7-year-olds were working in coal mines,” he said. He doesn’t belong to any unions or expect to join one, but “It hasn’t been that long in our history that workers have had a voice,” he said. “To give that up does my forefathers a disservice and I’m not going to do that.”

Target has been handling Mr. Hardwick gingerly. “We have a great belief and understanding that team members should express their feelings,” the Target spokeswoman said. As Mr. Hardwick’s petition gained momentum, his holiday hours disappeared. He said his supervisor told him there had been a misunderstanding and “they were able to meet their staffing needs without my services.”

Earlier this week Mr. Breeden, the minister, led a small group to Target headquarters in Minneapolis where he presented officials with Target shopping bags bulging with nearly 200,000 signed copies of Mr. Hardwick’s petition. They had called ahead, and security guards in blazers and a Target official met them in the lobby. “It was all very polite and civil,” Mr. Breeden said. “We weren’t carrying bullhorns or trying to disrupt anything.”

On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Hardwick joined his fiancée and future in-laws — and six newborn puppies — for a dinner of bacon-wrapped turkey, ham and side dishes before heading to bed around 9 p.m.

At OfficeMax, a customer had recognized him. “You’re the Save-Thanksgiving guy!” He said he hoped that next year, Target would reconsider its early opening, or at least allow employees to opt out of Thanksgiving duty and hire additional workers from the ranks of the unemployed. “This wasn’t really about me,” he told me on Thanksgiving. “It’s about my co-workers, my team members and anyone else in retail.”

By 10 p.m. Thanksgiving night a line had formed outside Target’s Bloomington, Minn., store, a scene that a spokeswoman said was repeated at their stores around the country. As the line grew to about 1,500 people, employees gathered inside, chanted and then counted down the seconds to midnight. They clapped and cheered as shoppers poured in. Supplies of a Westinghouse 48-inch flat-screen HDTV, offered at $298, sold out in six minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/bu...r=1&ref=global

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[I]Targeting the Paradigm Shift . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/bu...r=1&ref=global

this is a beauty and the purrfect compliment to having enjoyed a live performance of Dickens' A Christmas Carol last night in the fabulously intimate `Iao theater - is it just me, or has the whole 'black friday' madness season - that now seems to begin the day after halloween - has so throughly corrupted/ruined the holiday season, its almost as if they try to make us feel guilty (almost, but not quite) for not lining up at way dark thirty for the chance to 'score a bargain' - and in the truest sense of A FRAUD, they taunt us with BIG BOLD *** D I S C O U N T *** PRICES, with fine print in the item description that casually mentions stuff like "..no rain checks, at least 2 per store" ??? sho thing brah, come on down and camp out at 2pm the day b4 turkeyday (how so aptly nicknamed) so you can be first in line at 2am, hope you dont get trampled as the frenzied, near panicked and aggressive mob goes foaming into the store - and if you aint aggressive enuf? (and 'they' all worried about the OWS protesters getting carried away???) you got fat chance of getting your hands on 1 of the "2 available per store" - tween that and the phreakin xmas music blaring everywhere, with the GD radio stations being the most aggregious offenders in ruining most of the next 3 weeks by playing it TOO DAMN EARLY, its enuf to make me wanna HURL!

anyway... now that i got that rant out of my system - i have a few comments on this one, and thanks don, for putting it up here

its like everything else that starts as a SIMPLE desire to enjoy a few brief moments of distraction from our work-aday lives that gets CORRUPTED by.... TADA! the .gov and its magical ability to allow the unintended consequences of a good intention to ruin things for us in the long run in exchange for the 'thrill' of instant gratification (and this one proves my point)

....But a “full holiday with family” has become increasingly elusive as competition from 24/7, 365-days-a-year Internet shopping has caused retailers to throw open their doors on a day once sacrosanct “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens,” as Abraham Lincoln put it when he established the national holiday in 1863.

Franklin Roosevelt moved the holiday to the fourth Thursday in November (from the last Thursday) in an overt attempt to lengthen the holiday shopping season and bolster retail sales during the Depression. And the holiday’s demise as a no-shopping interlude is the culmination of a steady retreat from pervasive blue laws that once banned shopping not only on Thanksgiving and other major holidays but also on Sundays. Today Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the last states to restrict shopping on Thanksgiving, and Paramus, N.J., the site of several major malls, may be unique in banning shopping on Thanksgiving and Sundays.

“The blue laws began in Massachusetts with the Pilgrims, so I guess it’s fitting that we still have them,” Jon B. Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, said. “Christmas is sacrosanct. But there’s been a bill proposed to permit shopping on Thanksgiving. It hasn’t moved. We endorse it every year, but do I have members beating down my door to push this? No.”

and tho there's few things i like about the blue laws in MA, this time of year i think they serve a purpose. eye also think it funny to the point of suspicious that its target getting 'the walmart treatment' here, but thats another issue...

Among national retailers, Target is hardly the worst offender. Although some Target stores are open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thanksgiving before reopening at midnight, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, has been open all day on Thanksgiving for years, and this year moved up its Black Friday door-buster specials to 10 p.m. Thursday. K-Mart and many Gap and Old Navy stores are also open all day, and a wave of stores, including Macy’s and Best Buy, opened this year at midnight on Friday with special holiday promotions. Some retailers are now talking about “Black Thanksgiving.”

?

i guess in another era that term would've been somewhat un-PC, but i guess these daze its ok....

BAH HUMBUG to this whole news item/topic (shoppin til ya drop) - the bread and circus strategy has clearly won, in spite of the feeble protests to the contrary, and the ny times is just as big of a media hippycritter as the rest of em....

but i digress - in the 'spirit' of keeping this thread on the topic of paradigm shift, i offer this one:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...542307600.html

• THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
• NOVEMBER 26, 2011

'The New Tammany Hall'

The historian of the American city on what Wall Street and the 'Occupy' movement have in common, and how government unions came to dominate state and local politics


By MATTHEW KAMINSKI

New York
'What has the country so angry," says Fred Siegel, "is the sense that crony capitalism has produced a population that lives off the rest of us without contributing. They're right. It's not paranoid."

The economic historian of the American city has spent a lot of this autumn on Wall Street. He met many of the protesters who camped out at Zuccotti Park, before the city's finest cleared them out last week. He also knows the bankers and finds the theater of the Occupy movement ironic.

"They're on the same side of the street politically," he says. "They're both in favor of big government. The Wall Street people I talk to, they get it completely." What he means is that the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the large banks, and that economic stimulus and near-zero interest rates kept them flush. "Obama's crony capitalism has been very good for New York's crony capitalism," he says. Over at Zuccotti Park, "there are a few people there who do get it, but very little of their animosity follows from this."

One can appreciate why the "we are the 99%" militants might resist Mr. Siegel's logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today's crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union.

For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it.

A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 "The Future Once Happened Here." He calls his hometown "the model for cross subsidies" in America. "Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York."

Thanks to union clout, he notes, salaries and benefits for teachers, bus drivers and city secretaries have outgained the private sector during this sluggish economy. "Spending is never ratcheted down. It's unconnected to productivity. That can only be sustained by a boom or these extraordinary subsidies we're getting now from the Federal Reserve. But that's gonna stop at some point. And then what happens?"


Other countries have managed to find a way out. During its own "lost decade" after 1993, Canada shaped up its finances and it has weathered the latest economic crises well. New Zealand's Roger Douglas in the 1980s and Germany's Gerhard Schröder in the early 2000s cut into expensive welfare states. In all these cases, Mr. Siegel notes, center-left parties carried out painful reform. "They did this out of necessity." Sooner or later, American politicians will face the "unavoidable" reckoning, he adds. "It's not the mean tea partiers who force this. It's the facts on the ground."

And the ground may already be moving. Many American localities are already at the crisis point. Rhode Island's legislature last week sharply cut retirement benefits for current and retired public workers. "A 300% Democratic state!" marvels Mr. Siegel, who was one of the first to sound the warning on the public pensions crisis.

While new Democratic Governors Dan Malloy of Connecticut and New York's Andrew Cuomo are tinkering with reforms, Mr. Siegel calls them "cosmetic" and argues that both men "are playing for time [and] counting on a recovery, which will solve their problems for them." California's Jerry Brown has dealt with his budget shortfalls by pushing the costs down to cities and counties. New Jersey governors used the same tactic before Republican Chris Christie came in. He has been able to persuade enough local Democratic politicians sensitive to the budget problem to win some concessions.

In Mr. Siegel's estimation, only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has tried the needed fix after last year's elections. "Part of the reason Walker has become such a lightning rod" is that he pushed "straight up, unambiguous structural reform." His move to restrict collective bargaining for state employees isn't as important, says Mr. Siegel, as ending the requirement that state workers pay union dues. On his first day in the governor's mansion in 2005, Indiana's Mitch Daniels also stopped deducting dues automatically; most workers chose not to pay. "The union has a guaranteed flow of income, which they then use to lobby the government," says Mr. Siegel. This reform, he adds, "evens the playing field."

Dues money is the coin of political influence for organized labor. So not surprisingly, it is bankrolling the pushback. Mr. Walker faces a recall campaign. Ohio voters this month overturned Gov. John Kasich's legislation to limit collective bargaining for state workers. Mr. Kasich should have eliminated the dues "check off" instead, according to Mr. Siegel, and worked harder to connect with voters. "Too many Republicans treat workers as if they are their employees," he says. "The virtue of Ronald Reagan is he talked to workers as one of them."

Born in 1945 and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Siegel got his first political education by listening to feverish debates at home about Bundists and Bolsheviks. His grandfather, a militantly anti-Communist socialist, was vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and a strong influence on him. In 1972, Mr. Siegel worked on the McGovern campaign—"you shouldn't print that!"—and calls his discussions with the Democratic candidate "enormously consequential" in shifting his world view. "I like to say I was center left before I became center right," he says.

It is often forgotten how many New Deal Democrats were skeptical about public-sector unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the idea of strikes by government workers "unthinkable and intolerable." New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said, "I do not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold among city workers." But union organizers would eventually tap into the language of the civil rights movement to present collective bargaining as another overdue "right."

New York Mayor Robert Wagner extended collective-bargaining rights to government employees in 1958. He saw early that, says Mr. Siegel, "public sector unions are displacing political machines as the turnout mechanism for the Democratic Party. They are the new Tammany Hall." Coming off a nail biter of an election, President John F. Kennedy saw this future as well. In 1962, he signed Executive Order 10988 to give federal workers the right to unionize, though not to collectively bargain. By 1980, half of all delegates to the Democratic convention worked for the government. Government-employee rolls kept growing through the Reagan years. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the number of government workers who belong to a union surpassed the number of unionized private workers.
Mr. Siegel observes that public-sector unions have "become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it's the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there's no connection between effort and reward. You're guaranteed your job. You're guaranteed your salary increase. There's a kind of bureaucratic equality."

In turn, he continues, "this vanguard becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get."

The future of his city worries Mr. Siegel. Forty years ago, New York had the most manufacturing jobs in America. But as the finance sector's share of the national economy grew to 23% in 2007 from 7% in 1980, New York turned almost into a one-company town. Meantime, the growing claims on the public purse by those who make little to no contribution to the economy have driven up taxes and the costs of doing business. The city creates jobs in tourism, hotels and restaurants at the lower end of the scale. "What we don't create are private-sector middle-class jobs," says Mr. Siegel. "We have a ladder with the middle rungs missing."

Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."

Democrats have been shut out of the mayor's office since 1993.(even tho Hizoner is a RINO) Even so, spending lobbies have held their dominant position and, with the exception of the police, efforts to reform government are stillborn. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who tinkered with the civil service, was distracted by personal problems in his second term, says Mr. Siegel. His feelings about Mayor Mike Bloomberg come unfiltered. He chose to court rather than confront the teacher unions and "the race racketeers" (in Mr. Siegel's phrase) like Rev. Al Sharpton. "[Bloomberg] had the leverage. He didn't have the guts. Instead of being influenced by interest groups, he buys the interest groups. The outcome is the same. The interest groups get what they want."

The institutional barriers to change have grown, too. The Working Families Party, founded in 1998, is the political arm of government unions and a driver of turnout in local elections. Though little known outside New York, the influence of this third party can be seen on the City Council, which has come to tilt heavily left. So far, says Mr. Siegel, the party has a better political track record than Tammany. "With the exception of Giuliani, they've never lost an election. No matter who wins, they're OK."

He adds: "We are what the tea party fears for the rest of the country. Crony capitalism, and low-end work, and the loss of mobility, and no place to do business if you're a small business."

These symptoms call to mind the crisis-ridden European Union economies weighed down by debt and held hostage by their own public-sector unions. "We are becoming France-ified," says Mr. Siegel, who once spent a year teaching at Paris's Sorbonne. "Comes with the yuppie food."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...542307600.html

yep - and it wont be long before another symbol of france becomes part of the lexicon of 'the movement'
(hint: the big cheese slicer...)

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"The New Tammany Hall"

Fred Seigel is a broken record. He's been writing the same article over and over for years. I know the by-line is Kaminski, but Kaminski is just quoting Seigel while the same readers chime in with the usual refrain: “It's getting hard to tell public sector unions from communism.”

The first four paragraphs are so muddled, I read them three times and then burst out laughing.

OWS anger at the banks is misplaced. OWS should be angry at government workers. Hoo-ha.

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"The New Tammany Hall"

Fred Seigel is a broken record. He's been writing the same article over and over for years. I know the by-line is Kaminski, but Kaminski is just quoting Seigel while the same readers chime in with the usual refrain: “It's getting hard to tell public sector unions from communism.”

The first four paragraphs are so muddled, I read them three times and then burst out laughing.

OWS anger at the banks is misplaced. OWS should be angry at government workers. Hoo-ha.

wont argue with this - tho writing as a 2nd gen irish american (of boston extraction), its just a bit hilarious that we have a new yawker named siegel using tammany hall as an example to 're-direct the anger' away from the denizons of wall st.....