The Empire Strikes Back

[don]

from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, power responds to the challenges and the opportunities presented. Here's a contribution, albeit near-farcical. Hope to see more meaningful additions by my fellow iTulipers . . .

How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street



Protesters form a wall of signs at the Occupy Portland camp in downtown Portland, Oregon. (AP)

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?

"I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death," said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation's foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism."

Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about "income inequality" and "paying your fair share."

Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do's and don'ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.

1. Don't say 'capitalism.'

"I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either 'economic freedom' or 'free market,' " Luntz said. "The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we're seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."

2. Don't say that the government 'taxes the rich.' Instead, tell them that the government 'takes from the rich.'

"If you talk about raising taxes on the rich," the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But "if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes."

3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the 'middle class.' Call them 'hardworking taxpayers.'

"They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the 'middle class' and the public will say, I'm not sure about that. But defending 'hardworking taxpayers' and Republicans have the advantage."

4. Don't talk about 'jobs.' Talk about 'careers.'

"Everyone in this room talks about 'jobs,'" Luntz said. "Watch this."
He then asked everyone to raise their hand if they want a "job." Few hands went up. Then he asked who wants a "career." Almost every hand was raised.
"So why are we talking about jobs?"

5. Don't say 'government spending.' Call it 'waste.'

"It's not about 'government spending.' It's about 'waste.' That's what makes people angry."

6. Don't ever say you're willing to 'compromise.'

"If you talk about 'compromise,' they'll say you're selling out. Your side doesn't want you to 'compromise.' What you use in that to replace it with is 'cooperation.' It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you're selling out those principles."

7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: 'I get it.'

"First off, here are three words for you all: 'I get it.' . . . 'I get that you're angry. I get that you've seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system."
Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.

8. Out: 'Entrepreneur.' In: 'Job creator.'

Use the phrases "small business owners" and "job creators" instead of "entrepreneurs" and "innovators."

9. Don't ever ask anyone to 'sacrifice.'

"There isn't an American today in November of 2011 who doesn't think they've already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to 'sacrifice,' they're going to be be pretty angry at you. You talk about how 'we're all in this together.' We either succeed together or we fail together."

10. Always blame Washington.

Tell them, "You shouldn't be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it's the policies over the past few years that have created this problem."

BONUS:

Don't say 'bonus!'

Luntz advised that if they give their employees an income boost during the holiday season, they should never refer to it as a "bonus."

"If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you're going to make people angry. It's 'pay for performance.'"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/r...ce=patrick.net

Don't Say Bonus Footnote:

Modest Bonus Year on Wall St., but Stock Could Yield Fortunes

By SUSANNE CRAIG

Buffeted by lackluster profits and turmoil in the global markets, Wall Street is bracing for one of the worst bonus seasons in recent memory. But in the alchemy of high finance, bankers are hoping to turn the slump to their advantage.

Financial firms are preparing to dole out huge amounts of stock at depressed prices, the value of which could rise substantially in a few years.

“This year is the perfect situation where they can say it is a modest bonus season, but in the end, it could end up making many of them zillionaires,” said Jonathan R. Macey, a professor of corporate law and finance at Yale.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/...ef=todayspaper

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Take this Lutz:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...k-hanauer.html

Did it sink in? Didn't think so.

[don]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

To: The Upper Ones From: Strategy Committee Re: The Counterrevolution

As usual, we have much to celebrate.

The rabble has been driven from the public parks. Our adversaries, now defined by the freaks and criminals among them, have demonstrated only that they have no idea what they are doing. They have failed to identify a single achievable goal.

Just weeks ago, in our first memo, we expressed concern that the big Wall Street banks were vulnerable to a mass financial boycott -- more vulnerable even than tobacco companies or apartheid-era South African multinationals. A boycott might raise fears of a bank run; and the fears might create the fact.

Now, we’ll never know: The Lower 99’s notion of an attack on Wall Street is to stand around hollering at the New York Stock Exchange. The stock exchange!

We have won a battle, but this war is far from over.

As our chief quant notes, “No matter how well we do for ourselves, there will always be 99 of them for every one of us.” Disturbingly, his recent polling data reveal that many of us don’t even know who we are: Fully half of all Upper Ones believe themselves to belong to the Lower 99. That any human being can earn more than 344 grand a year without having the sense to identify which side in a class war he is on suggests that we should limit membership to actual rich people. But we wish to address this issue in a later memo. For now we remain focused on the problem at hand: How to keep their hands off our money.

Looming Threats

We have identified two looming threats:

The first is the shifting relationship between ambitious young people and money. There’s a reason the Lower 99 currently lack leadership: Anyone with the ability to organize large numbers of unsuccessful people has been diverted into Wall Street jobs, mainly in the analyst programs at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Those jobs no longer exist, at least not in the quantities sufficient to distract an entire generation from examining the meaning of their lives.

Our Wall Street friends, wounded and weakened, can no longer pick up the tab for sucking the idealism out of America’s youth. But if not them, who? We on the committee are resigned to all elite universities becoming breeding grounds for insurrection, with the possible exception of Princeton.

The second threat is in the unstable mental pictures used by Lower 99ers to understand their economic lives. (We have found that they think in pictures.)

For many years the less viable among us have soothed themselves with metaphors of growth and abundance: rising tides, expanding pies, trickling down. A dollar in our pocket they viewed hopefully, as, perhaps, a few pennies in theirs. They appear to have switched this out of their minds for a new picture, of a life raft with shrinking provisions. A dollar in our pockets they now view as a dollar from theirs. Fearing for their lives, the Lower 99 will surely become ever more desperate and troublesome. Complaints from our membership about their personal behavior are already running at post-French Revolutionary highs.

We on the strategy committee see these developments as inexorable historical forces. The Lower 99 is a ticking bomb that can’t be defused. They may be occasionally distracted by, say, a winning lottery ticket. (And we have sent out the word to the hedge fund community to cease their purchases of such tickets.) They may turn their anger on others -- immigrants for instance, or the federal government -- and we can encourage them to do so. They may even be frightened into momentary submission. (We’re long pepper spray.)

In the End

But in the end we believe that any action we take to prevent them from growing better organized, and more aware of our financial status, will only delay the inevitable: the day when they turn, with far greater effect, on us.

Hence our committee’s conclusion: We must be able to quit American society altogether, and they must know it. For too long we have simply accepted the idea that we and they are all in something together, subject to the same laws and rituals and cares and concerns. This state of social relations between rich and poor isn’t merely unnatural and unsustainable, but, in its way, shameful. (Who among us could hold his head high in the presence of Louis XIV or those Russian czars or, for that matter, Croesus?)

The modern Greeks offer the example in the world today that is, the committee has determined, best in class. Ordinary Greeks seldom harass their rich, for the simple reason that they have no idea where to find them. To a member of the Greek Lower 99 a Greek Upper One is as good as invisible.

He pays no taxes, lives no place and bears no relationship to his fellow citizens. As the public expects nothing of him, he always meets, and sometimes even exceeds, their expectations. As a result, the chief concern of the ordinary Greek about the rich Greek is that he will cease to pay the occasional visit.

That is the sort of relationship with the Lower 99 we must cultivate if we are to survive. We must inculcate, in ourselves as much as in them, the understanding that our relationship to each other is provisional, almost accidental and their claims on us nonexistent.

As a first, small step we propose to bestow, annually, an award to the Upper One who has best exhibited to the wider population his willingness and ability to have nothing at all to do with them. As the recipient of the first Incline Award -- so named for the residents of Incline Village, Nevada, many of whom have bravely fled California state taxes -- we propose Jeff Bezos.

His private rocket ship may have exploded before it reached outer space. But before it did, it sent back to Earth the message we hope to convey:

We’re outta here!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-1...ael-lewis.html

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

I think I may have an inkling where to look for our betters, at least in the future:

http://seasteading.org/

Apparently Peter Thiel's an investor.

Frankly the idea is so repellant. Like a cruise - which always struck me as about as attractive as being locked in a mall for a week - except it doesn't go anywhere!

But never mind that, I always wanted to be pirate and it seems taking to the high seas is only going to get more lucrative. Arrrrgh!

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

I think I may have an inkling where to look for our betters, at least in the future:

http://seasteading.org/

Apparently Peter Thiel's an investor.

Frankly the idea is so repellant. Like a cruise - which always struck me as about as attractive as being locked in a mall for a week - except it doesn't go anywhere!

But never mind that, I always wanted to be pirate and it seems taking to the high seas is only going to get more lucrative. Arrrrgh!

Good idea. oddlots. I expect these places will be zero tax havens. They will therefore have no serious communal defense. Should be easy pickings.

Here is their own statement from their own website FAQ. The Jolly Roger Flag was actually in their FAQ.

What about pirates?

Although piracy receives a lot of press, it is a relatively rare phenomenon. Pirates typically lurk offshore of unstable regions in the world, such as the southern coast of Africa. A seastead can avoid most piracy risk by not locating near one of these regions. Also, relative to other targets such as container ships, seasteads represent a poor risk/reward ratio to would-be pirates. Container ships carry mostly cargo and small crews. Seasteads carry relatively little valuable cargo and large (likely armed) populations. Seastead residents are likely to fight much harder than container ship crews, as they are defending their own homes and businesses, not a corporation's property. Therefore, it will be wise for pirates to avoid seasteads in favor of easier prey.
Much piracy is small-scale theft—for example, of the 335 attacks reported in 2001, only 73 involved guns. Sixteen ships were hijacked, and 21 people killed (all but one in Asian waters). A sea-city will be much too large for this kind of criminal. Even an individual seastead—a concrete tower—will be a much tougher target than a luxury yacht. This type of piracy is mainly notable for being vivid and exciting—it is rare enough that oceans are still full of private pleasure craft. Still, we recommend that small seasteads avoid the pirate hotspots (Southeast Asia and Somalia).
There are larger organized criminal groups involved in piracy that capture entire ships and their goods (often tens of millions of dollars worth). They use forged documents to obtain a new load of cargo from legitimate shippers, and then steal it too. It is worth noting that these groups specifically target container ships, not cruise ships, which is not at all surprising. After all, a container ship has only a few crew and vast amounts of cargo, nicely boxed and ready to be fenced. A cruise ship has far less saleable stuff, and far more people to deal with. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if there was 100 times the "crew per $ of movable cargo" for a cruise ship vs. a container ship, so it’s no wonder that thieves focus on the latter! The cost/benefit analysis just doesn’t work out for this kind of crime.

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

HA! That's funny. Only a libertarian could render a discussion of piracy boring. Ready the plank!

[don]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Ay, Mateys, where there's a will there's a way.

Destitute Somali fishermen made the transition to piracy. Will destitute Americanos?

Plenty of these about.

Or would Yankee ingenuity prevail

All-American maverick - coming aboard

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Bit of a fixer-upper, but I've always been partial to seaplanes:



Air-pirates!

[don]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

I tried mightily to get the China Clipper in a long piece I was writing but unfortunately they were all in-service with the Navy in the Pacific as long-range recon. Post-war the new commercial planes - civilian "bombers" - took their place on the SF Honolulu run. The War and Post-War were my time frame. Curses, Red Baron!

[don]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

peek-a-boo . . .

Japan’s Normally Retiring Rich Smashed Discretion Along With Their Ferraris

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — A botched lane change led to a spectacular traffic pileup in Japan over the weekend that left a highway strewn with the smashed wreckage of eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini and three Mercedes sports cars.

The crash drew international attention not only for its stunning price — the vehicles collectively cost more than $1 million — but also for the rare glimpse of Japan’s superrich, who tend to avoid ostentatious public displays of wealth. Local police officials were quoted as saying that they had never seen so many expensive cars in one place, much less involved in a single accident.

News reports gave no names and few details about the cars’ drivers, beyond quoting police officials as saying their ages ranged from 37 to 60. But they clearly form a select group in Japan, where fewer than 500 Ferraris were sold last year.

The cars appeared to be part of an outing of luxury automobile enthusiasts, traveling north together from the island of Kyushu to a festival in the city of Hiroshima, on the southern end of the main island of Honshu. As the convoy sped through rain in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi, one of the Ferrari drivers, trying to change lanes, struck the median and spun out of control. Evasive maneuvers by other cars, which also included two Toyotas, sent them smashing into each other.

According to The Associated Press, 10 of the people involved in the wreck received treatment for minor injuries.

News reports quoted eyewitnesses as saying that at the time of the accident, the procession appeared to be traveling at 85 to 100 miles per hour, well over the speed limit of 60.

Bloomberg News quoted a traffic official, Mitsuyoshi Isejima, as saying that the driver suspected of causing the pileup, a 60-year-old self-employed man, could face up to three months in prison or a fine of 100,000 yen, about $1,300.

The police closed the highway for six hours as they cleared away the ruined vehicles. Television footage showed several red Ferraris with bumpers or engine hoods torn off, bodies crumpled. One had plowed nose-first into a guardrail.
Mr. Isejima, for one, had little sympathy.

“It was a gathering of narcissists,” Bloomberg quoted him as saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/wo...ef=global-home

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Bit of a fixer-upper, but I've always been partial to seaplanes:



Air-pirates!

OOh, that a Consolidated PBY Catalina - one of my favorites

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Maybe we need some back up, you know, fighter-escort-seplanes. I'm not picky, any Maachi will do:

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

Beautiful seaplane. World speed record holder.

The Italians had some very early jets as well, from Caproni. The have a strong claim for the first PUBLIC flight of a jet powered aircraft, before either the British or the Germans, with the C.C.2



It wasn't a true turbojet, but a hybrid. A reciprocating engine powered the jet's compressor, fuel was added and burned downstream. It was a technical dead end, and it wasn't very fast, but it was propelled only by a high velocity jet exhaust.

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

thanks t&binO... didn't know anything about that history...

[oddlots]

Re: The Empire Strikes Back

That paints quite a picture Mr. Draper, but we know your secrets.

I am green with envy (excepting the small detail of the war.)

I have a kind of underdog love of "failed technologies" and apparent "dead ends." When there weren't airstrips everywhere seaplanes made a good deal of sense: you could vault over the apparent limitation as much of the world's population were adjacent to bodies of water. And who could be certain that the infrastructure would be built out as it was? Seems like a reasonable argument, no?

- hydrofoils
- airships
etc. etc. etc.

But that's obviously rationalisation: they are simply cool.