“I recently learned about a revolutionist pamphlet published last year in Spain called La Carta de los Comunes. It begins with an intriguing conceit. Set in 2033 in a magical-realist Madrid, it tells of a population whose bodies became physically hunched over in submission to a wealthy few. At last, with their livelihoods nearly eviscerated, the people rise up and take over their city. They resurrect the medieval notion of the commons, creating a domain of shared resources apart from the market and bureaucratic oversight. They learn to stand upright again. The pamphlet then presents a Magna Carta for their new society.

I can’t resist applying a similar futurism to Occupy Wall Street, the phenomenon whose origins I describe in the February 2012 issue of Harper’s. Even the most hopeful young occupiers are starting to realize that their revolutionary dreams might take longer to achieve than a semester’s leave from school—and justly so. As I noticed during the planning process, and have continued to see in the movement thus far, even those most centrally involved are constantly discovering for themselves where it is leading.

The question of what Occupy Wall Street is really about has been notoriously thorny from the outset. The movement’s attempts to craft agreed-upon “demands” have generally fallen flat. Nevertheless, a set of quite interesting but rarely discussed texts have withstood the consensus-building process at local general assemblies. Reading them closely, and with an eye to the praxis in the occupations themselves, I see no quick-and-easy legislative, executive, or judicial patches for the problems the movement means to confront. I came to think, instead, that the movement’s lasting contribution could be something substantially more ambitious: a wholesale rethinking of political life, more akin to the promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in revolutionary France than, say, the introduction of a financial-transaction tax or the revocation of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in the United States. (Unlike the Declaration of the Rights of Man, mind you, the Occupy documents rarely refer to property, law, or patriotic sentiment. They don’t even mention borders.)

It isn’t crazy to think the time has come to go back to the drawing board, politically. The constitutions of most Western nation-states were dreamed up during the late Enlightenment, long before anyone could foresee such realities as globalized mega-corporations profiting from chronic personal and national debt, Internet companies possessing more private information than the average diary, and undeclared wars being fought by drone aircraft—which have all contributed to what Occupy Wall Street describes as a “feeling of mass injustice” in its Declaration of the Occupation of New York City, approved on September 29 and now available as an attractive pamphlet. Our familiar, Lockean governments have come to seem inept, powerless to oppose the incorporeal profit machines that can, as the declaration adds, “achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.” The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments—no hope there—but rather “to the people of the world,” urging communities everywhere to “assert your power.”

“We are creating an exemplar society,” states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation. That being the case, let’s attempt some Occupy sci-fi: What would the world look like if the Occupy revolution were carried through to completion?

“No one’s human needs go unmet,” continues the Boston declaration. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy—except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but “autonomous political beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.” Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well-coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s “participatory as opposed to partisan,” adds the Statement of Autonomy, suggesting that the aim on Planet Occupy is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with “inherent privilege” defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners.

The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about Planet Occupy’s economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for “redefining how labor is valued,” which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighborhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy—food, especially—remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy.

Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy. (The movement’s conference-call network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising.) Following the urge in the Principles for “the broad application of open source,” all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money—if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay.

Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions “a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone.” When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through “non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love,” in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global.

Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there. Perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. “We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual,” explains “Communiqué 1,” an article in the movement journal Tidal. “We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.””

murkavenue:

CLUE 1:
“went to short dogs house,
they was watching Yo MTV
RAPS”
Yo MTV RAPS first aired:
Aug 6th 1988
CLUE 2:
Ice Cubes single “today was a good day” released on:
Feb 23 1993
CLUE 3:
”The Lakers beat the Super
Sonics”
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release…

Ryan McCarthy

bbcoutlooksucks@gmail.com

Education:

* More time and indulgence for idiosyncratic interests than you previously thought possible. 

Experience: 

* My subtle hints over the years—the dogeared copy of Dubliners, the selection of Altman for movie night, Chekov’s Peasants, others—had done nothing. In fact, if she actually did read the books, or understand the intent of the movies, or articles, or conversations, or reactions, she would have been forced to accept the ridiculousness of her present claim that she was just > a JCPenny gal in a country club world. > That’s insane. > No it’s not. > Jesus. | And onward we dive into the deep-end of trying to situate our lives in some kind of understandable bubble. It was an extension of the previous evening’s conversation about her not being cool. She most certainly wasn’t, but the word itself was too cheap and wasn’t getting the point across. Hip became the next attempted qualifier. Also not very effective—probably because of some holdover taste from the sixties. Hip meant something dark—literally and figuratively. So that conversation was left to marinate and we slept without conclusion. 

The next evening I attempted to use examples of different jazz compositions to illustrate what and how free-jazz worked and how timbre is an essential character in the emotional landscape of the compositional world. I played one particular example of a Swede creating the image of crying through a series of reed-bites and melodic runs—bobbing in and out of coherency; a man having uncontrollable fits. She understood the idea, in a way. At least could agree it sounded like crying. She doesn’t like to be too confronted with the difficult. At least, nothing too sad and truthful. It’s too much for her to bear. But I used this idea to move the scale one step further: cool -> hip -> sophisticated. That seemed to hit the mark. And to be fair, I couldn’t have popped out that word until now. Until the conversations had marinated. Until she had been forced in the black of bed and near sleep that, perhaps, she wasn’t who she thought she was. Acceptance. It wasn’t going to change the way she felt, or approached anything, but it may change her idea of why I do things that I do. And that’s all I’m really trying to get across. I’d like to say that I want her to be a better person. My kind of better. But really I just want her to understand that I’m the better person. That I’m the sophisticated one. Poor and sophisticated. Something, I think, she thinks is contradictory. I’ve often heard her cross-pollinate a judgement with class as a catch-all for style, sophistication, wealth, and status. As in > you know, they just have a certain—class. > I certainly understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure the word is being used how you’re intending. > What do you mean? > Well, when I hear the word “class,” I think of divisions between people based only on money. There are other words for sophistication, style, and status. > But there’s a certain class to people. > Sure. But what I’m trying to tell you is that certain class is just wealth. > Well fine, but you know what I mean. > I do, but that’s because I know you. And semantics mean a lot to me. I think they define the vagaries of our collective dialectic. They are the root of generalizations and stereotypes. 

My eyes were getting tired. Or had been tired. Is this coffee decaf? I have a headache. These stupid fucking nicotine lozenges are terrible. And unsatisfying. They were at church and I was waiting in the kitchen, with my computer plugged into a tabletop stereo placed (by me) on the kitchen table. I faced the back yard. A stone patio extending ten feet to the brick skirt wall, and forward into tasteful landscaping. Rows of little round bushes interspersed with bald reddish trees that appeared to have been striped. The yard continued up at a steep incline, the grass brown, dormant, peppered with trees (elms?) and up up up to a line of larger bushes marking the end of the property. It could have been fun to be a young boy here. Maybe. At night, climbing the hill on your belly. A a a a a a an adventurer, a discoverer inching toward the top of the hill to what splendor on the other side! Perhaps a great valley, deep as the south rim of the great canyon, a river flowing far below the sight line. Or, a great pasture of golden wheat, swaying in the late afternoon sun, or, if feeling particularly inventive, the edge of space. The edge of the world—which you always believed to be flat anyway. On your belly, chin resting on knuckles, and gazing into the ever-reaching blackness. God, what’s out there. You reach your hand out and and and infinity embraces you. Maybe the indulgence would turn comic. Most likely it would—an appropriation of nostalgic video games and books. Maybe a restaurant, or a diner/spaceport. Is that why I always liked diners? Like some exotic cyber cafe where you could charter a ship, or get into a scuffle with a pig-nosed nightmare, or simply have a drink, translucent and glowing, but traditional in some way. Like whiskey straight, but here, in the never-ending ether, a bright neon blue is normal. That’s when you have to make a choice. Am I going to create more structures and designs in space? or crawl back down the hill and into reality. Let’s have that drink first. Like a patron of any kind. Waiting. Waiting out time, or thoughts—waiting for a friend to show up—waiting on a random lover—waiting for action; for entertainment; for distraction. 

The door to the cafe swings open with a flourish. Bang. The room looks. The music, of course, stops for a moment. Like an old joke of a western. Except the bang was an accident. The poor fool who entered so violently had actually just stumbled on his way through the swinging entrance and the attempt to correct his balance had resulted in the flinging of the door against the wall. The music had cut out because the bartender had had enough of that particular atonal composition and had pressed skip on the remote panel coincidentally at the same time. So now we were looking at this poor little guy. His skin bursting into crimson as he met pair after pair of eyes of all kinds. Irritated. Pitying. Warm. And then the next track would come on and everyone would realize they didn’t know the guy and would focus back on their drinks and hopes for more distractions. He sits near me. Naturally. Because I’m telling this story and he’s just made an entrance. We think he’s bumbling. And that’s a natural response. And he might be, but he’s nervous. Not just because of the poor entrance. He seems a twinge scared. Intriguing. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just the callow type that can’t process the accidental spot-light. His entire week might be ruined now. But that’s not all of it. It’s in his eyes. A deep-set fear. A vibration—near crying. He orders a simple beverage. Something resembling an adjunct domestic grain fermentation. And looks around nervously. We make eye-contact and I give him a wry I feel bad for you smile. He looks away without changing that same scared expression. The bartender turns to me after serving our nervous man his beverage. > What are you up to, tonight? > You’re looking at it. | A nod to say yeah, life is a pile of shit. > Can I get a couple shots for me and my friend here? | I chin at our nervous man. > Oh, no thanks. > You can just let it sit there then. > I wouldn’t want it to go to waste. > It’s all poison man, it’s all a waste. | The bartender pours three. Him and I raise, clink, knick the bar, and pour down our respective throats. Nervous guy watches us both. Then quickly grabs the glass and pours it down. On the spectrum of probability, he chokes and coughs and we laugh. But not a hearty laugh—just a guttural response to someone choking. > What’s your name? > Me? > Yeah. | He looks over my shoulder, then back to my eyes. > Iz. > James. Good to meet you. > Yeah. | Iz. Poor guy. What’s he waiting for? I catch myself before asking because it strikes me as a particularly stupid thing to ask. What the fuck am I waiting for? Caspar was probably dead. And Her, she was probably dead too. Caspar. That piece of shit. > How late is this place open? > Forever. | We both look back at our drinks. The screen embedded in the surface of the bar was broadcasting images of a great mobilization of people somewhere. An entire planet evacuating. A ticker across the bottom explained that they would most likely emigrate to a nearby sphere who’s PM was declaring that they did not have the resources and infrastructure to support such a large number of people. He was calling on regional planets to provide assistance. > Good luck. > What’s going on? > Everyone from that planet needs to go somewhere else. > Why? > Because they fucked everything up and now the place is uninhabitable. > Why? > Because they’ve poisoned everything. > Oh. | The bartender hit the skip button on the console again.

Miscellaneous: 

* Proficient in gaming, speaking of esoteric Modern European literature, working while legally ‘impaired’, cuddling. 

references available upon creation of flattering personas

“Our February cover story, “Killing the Competition,” by long-time contributor Barry C. Lynn, is on the emergence of new digital monopolies. “Because of the overthrow of our antimonopoly laws a generation ago,” Lynn notes, we “find ourselves subject to the ever more autocratic whims of the individuals who run our giant business corporations.” The piece has been excerpted here, and the full story is available to subscribers here.

Harper’s has been reporting on monopoly capitalism almost since the magazine’s founding in 1850, criticizing the system whenever it appeared to be concentrating too much power in the hands of a greedy few, and sometimes spurring change. Our first significant piece on the subject was a two-part essay by Richard T. Ely on railway trusts, which ran in 1886. (Subscribers can read part one here, and part two here.) “I propose to show in these articles,” Ely wrote, “that our abominable no-system of railways has brought the American people to a condition of one-sided dependence upon corporations, which too often renders our nominal freedom illusory.” The following year, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which created the Interstate Commerce Commission and placed it in charge of railway regulation, in turn paving the way for the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

More famously, our sister periodical, Harper’s Weekly, published a multi-part series by Louis D. Brandeis shortly before the First World War on the subject of monopoly capitalism. The articles, based on revelations from the congressional Pujo Committee, were collected as Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It,which is available at the website of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at Louisville University. As the school notes, Other People’s Money remains in print nearly a hundred years after it was first published. Brandeis’s biographer, Melvin Urofsky, suggested why this is so in an op-ed for the New York Times, linking the conditions about which Brandeis was writing to the financial system of 2007:

Our current crisis, after all, was in part fueled by bankers making big gambles with other people’s cash…. This was exactly the kind of behavior that Brandeis despised…. [H]e saw the bankers of his time dodging failure by manipulating the marketplace at the expense of smaller entrepreneurs and consumers.

Brandeis, who was Woodrow Wilson’s economic adviser when the book was published, was instrumental in Wilson’s antimonopoly efforts, notably the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, an overdue update to Sherman.

Urofsky notes that Brandeis’s Harper’s work became relevant again during the Great Depression, when Other People’s Money was reissued at a low price. “Many of those who came to Washington to work on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal read it,” he writes. “The New Deal laws, particularly the Glass–Steagall and the Securities Exchange Acts, imposed long overdue regulation of the banking system, required the separation of banking from stock brokerage, and established the Securities and Exchange Commission to regulate the stock markets.”

The monthly edition of Harper’s continued to publish anti-monopoly pieces through the Depression and afterward: Saul Nelson’s deconstruction of the term monopoly, in 1938; “How Big Is Too Big?” by renowned management theorist Peter Drucker, in 1950; Milton Viorst’s “Gentlemen Prefer Monopoly: The impotence of the antitrust laws” in 1972; and “Busting the Media Trusts,” by Kevin P. Phillips, in 1977. And in advance of the Justice Department’s 1999 antitrust suit against Microsoft, we tweaked Bill Gates’s beard specs with “Selling Windows to the World,” a Reading tracing a UCLA undergraduate’s attempts to buy a PC with an operating system other than Microsoft Windows.

“Killing the Competition” follows from this concern with the tech economy, scrutinizing Apple, Amazon, and other digital titans. In the past decade we’ve published three other pieces by Lynn as well, one of them, on the antitrust case against Wal-Mart, available for free here. “I was able to write these pieces,” Lynn told us, “only because Harper’s exists.””

“Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. “[Obama] says one thing and does another,” Nader says. “Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail.” On foreign policy, Nader says, “I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms.”

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We are joined right now by Ralph Nader to talk more about President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate, former presidential candidate. His latest book is Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win.”

Ralph Nader, your response to the State of the Union address? It could be President Obama’s last. It could be the beginning of a new President Obama for a second term. What do you think?

RALPH NADER: Well, I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. I mean, he was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms, force projection in the Pacific, and distorting the whole process of how he explains Iraq and Afghanistan. He talks about Libya and Syria, and then went into the military alliance with Israel and didn’t talk about the peace process or the plight of the Palestinians, who are being so repressed. Leaving Iraq as if it was a victory? Iraq has been destroyed: massive refugees, over a million Iraqis dead, contaminated environment, collapsing infrastructure, sectarian warfare. He should be ashamed of himself that he tries to drape our soldiers, who were sent on lawless military missions to kill and die in those countries, unconstitutional wars that violate Geneva conventions and international law and federal statutes, and drape them as if they’ve come back from Iwo Jima or Normandy. So I think it was very, very poor taste to start and end with this kind of massive militarism and the Obama empire.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And on the economy, Ralph Nader, on the economy, your response to what Obama said last night?

RALPH NADER: A lot of good-sounding words. He’s very good at that. I’m glad he focused on Wall Street abuses on more than one occasion. I’m glad that he focused on renewable energy. But notice that he just mentioned climate change but didn’t go anywhere on that one. He still is not able to use the word “poverty.” It’s always the middle class, which is shrinking into poverty. But you’ve got 60, 70, 80 million people living in poverty in the United States, and child poverty.

And the most amazing gap was his promise in 2008 to press for the raising of the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 by 2011. So, he went for equal pay for equal work for women, but millions of people in this country, one out of every three full-time workers, are earning Wal-Mart wages, many of them not far over the $7.25 rate. Now, the $9.50 minimum wage would still be less in inflation-adjusted terms than it was in 1968, when worker productivity was half of what it is today.

So, a lot of his suggestions, like the attitude toward foreign trade—well, he said that in 2008 he wanted to revise NAFTA. He didn’t lift a finger. So how credible are his words vis-à-vis China, for example, in the trade area and importing hazardous products into this country? How credible are his words? How credible are his words when he says he wants to start a financial crimes unit in the Justice Department? I mean, what does that mean, unless he demands a much larger budget for prosecutors and law enforcement officials against the corporate crime wave? Maybe he needs a subscription to the Corporate Crime Reporterto tell him that we’ve been through these kinds of rhetorics before by prior presidents. They’re going to establish an enforcement unit here and there, but without a major budget, it’s going to go nowhere.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me play President Obama’s announcement last night of a new unit devoted to investigating major financial crimes.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We’ll also establish a financial crimes unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments. Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count. And tonight I’m asking my attorney general to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama announcing that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will head this unit. I’m going back to the—to August, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman being kicked off a 50-state task force negotiating a possible settlement with the nation’s largest mortgage companies, the move coming just a day after the New York Times reported that the Obama administration was pressuring Schneiderman to agree to a broad state settlement with banks over questionable foreclosure tactics. Ralph Nader, your response?

RALPH NADER: Well, that’s the double standard that he’s such an expert at, Obama. He says one thing and does another. Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail. So, it is important to strengthen the corporate criminal laws through congressional legislation, but what has he done? This financial crimes unit, that’s like putting another label on a few doors in the Justice Department without a real expansion in the budget.

But then, when he said to the American people, “no more bailouts, no more handouts, and no more cop-outs” — but that’s what’s been going on. And it’s going on today and it went on last year under his administration. Washington is a bustling bazaar of accounts receivable. They’re bailing out and they’re handing out all kinds of subsidies to corporations—handouts, giveaways, transfer of technology, transfer of medical research to the drug companies without any reasonable price provisions on drugs, giveaway of natural resources on the federal lands. You name it, it’s still going on. And as far as a cop-out, how about his deferred prosecution gimmicks with these corporations under the Justice Department, where they never have to plead guilty, they never have to make themselves vulnerable to civil lawsuits so they pay back the American people what they’ve stolen from them?

So, obviously, State of the Union speeches are full of rhetoric, they’re full of promises, but it’s good to measure them against the past performance of the Obama administration and what his promises were in 2008. They don’t really stand up very well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ralph Nader, I want to turn to the Republican response to the State of the Union address. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a former budget director under President George W. Bush, delivered the response to his address, to Obama’s address. He slammed Obama for halting the Keystone XL pipeline project that would transport oil from Canada to Texas, equating the move to a, quote, “pro-poverty policy.”

GOV. MITCH DANIELS: The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy. It must be replaced by a passionate pro-growth approach that breaks all ties and calls all close ones in favor of private sector jobs that restore opportunity for all and generate the public revenues to pay our bills.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ralph Nader, your response?

RALPH NADER: Well, first of all, the XL pipeline is basically shipping very dirty Albertan oil down through the United States, over very, very sensitive aquifers and other environmental conditions, down to the Gulf in order to ship it abroad. That’s the big farce of this pipeline project. It’s not going to be brought to make this country more reliant on Canada instead of the Middle East. It’s basically an export pipeline.

And the second is, Mitch Daniels would have done the public a great service, in his speech, if he would have urged the corporations in this country, who are sitting on $2 trillion of cash, like Cisco and Apple and Google, to start giving some of that cash back to shareholders in terms of dividends and to pension funds and mutual funds, which would increase consumer demand and create more jobs, just the way a minimum wage increase would increase consumer demand to create more jobs. Instead, he didn’t say that. And Obama has constantly restricted any kind of stimulant to tax breaks, to tax incentives, to tax reductions, which of course will not do much to build up the government’s resources for a major job-producing public works program in every community, good-paying jobs repairing America— schools, bridges, public transit, drinking water systems—jobs that cannot be exported abroad. So, we need to develop a very concrete critique of these politicians’ statements up against what they could do if they had the courage of their office.

Imagine Obama never mentioning the Occupy movement. Imagine Obama never mentioning the Occupy Wall Street movement, the main citizen awareness movement to be coupled with his alleged concern with Wall Street abuses. And yet he talks about advancing human dignity for all people abroad, and he never talks about a major human dignity initiative, the Occupy initiative, based on peaceful resistance to oligarchy and plutocracy. He’s a political coward. He’s got to repair back to the Oval Office and ask himself why he can’t stand for the people in this country who are really aware and trying to improve our democracy and advance justice and make government and corporations accountable.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph, you have written a new book calledGetting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win. People may be listening to you right now and agreeing with a lot of what you are saying, and also saying, “What is the alternative here? Mitt Romney? Newt Gingrich?” What is your response to that?

RALPH NADER: Well, this is the book, and I’m going to drop it off at the White House soon. I think he should read it, because the left is not making any demands on Obama because they’re so freaked out by the Republicans and their crazed rhetoric on their debates. Well, if that is going to continue for 2012, that means the corporations are pulling on Obama and the Democratic Party. The Republicans are pulling on Obama and Democratic Party, because they’re getting all the media, because they have a vibrant primary process, and there’s no primary challenge to Obama, so the progressive agenda is not getting any media at all, week after week.

So the alternative, Amy, is for the left, such as they are — progressive, liberal people, I like to call them “justice seekers” — to make demands on Obama, to make demands for improving the rights of labor, improving the rights of small farmers, improving the rights of small business, the environmental demands that need to be made, the crackdown on corporate crime, a whole panoply of corporate reform agenda, the kind of crackdown on these global corporations that have abandoned America and shipped jobs and industries to fascist and communist regimes who know how to keep workers in their place.

But there is no pull, because they’re so freaked out by the Republicans. So, one can really say the Republicans could sit around in a smoke-filled room and say, “Let’s be even more crazed. Let’s be even more corporatist.” This will create a good vacuum for the Democrats to move into, because both parties are dialing for the same corporate dollars, and it will bring the left to their knees, because they’ll say, “We’ve got nowhere to go.”

Well, the reason why this speech was so failing, especially in foreign and military policy, the reason why it was so failing is because Obama doesn’t have to worry about tens of millions of people who call themselves progressives or liberals, because they have signaled to him that they got nowhere to go. Well, I think if they believe they got nowhere to go, that they don’t want to vote for a third party or Green Party, they can at least, in April, May, June, hold his feet to the fire and present him with a set of progressive demands, in order to tell him that they do have a place to go: they can stay home. And that’s what hurt the Democrats in 2010. People can just stay home.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is called Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win.”

“It’s tough times in the Windy City. Unemployment’s high, especially for black youth. The church-run social-service agencies are jumping. Conditions are ripe for recruitment to the mayor’s new army of rent-a-protesters to counter the growing mass resistance to neighborhood school closings. Chicago political machine hustlers like Englewood’s Rev. Roosevelt Watkins III, do the mayor’s dirty work in exchange for control of poverty funds and side money from the mayor’s wealthy pals and charter school patrons.

Watkins’ job is to fill buses with hungry men like Thaddeus Scott, 35 who come to his HOPE Organization looking for financial help with their energy bills only to be promised $50 if they will attend school-related “rallies” at the board of education. The slick Watkins, pastor of Bethlehem Star M.B. Church and founder of Pastors United for Change denies they were paid to protest, saying money paid was “for training”.

Scott and other recruits say they didn’t realize until the last minute that they were supposed to support school closings. One said he was promised $50 to speak at a rally “for schools,” but was stiffed $25 after Watkins complained he had publicly revealed at the hearing he was “compensated” for speaking. Many of the recruits end up switching sides and join the community protests in speaking out against the closings. Others earn their money by trying to start a brawl and disrupt the legitimate protests.

“I don’t want the $25 he owes me,” Scott, 35, told the Sun-Times. “He can keep his dirty money. You can quote that. “Why am I speaking out? Because I am in support of Crane [the high school whose closure he says he was supposed to support]… .“They thought for a few dollars they could get us to say whatever they want… . We were preyed upon.”

“After a decade of No Child Left Behind and three more years of Race To The Top, Black and Latino teenagers in U.S. schools are performing at academic levels equal to or lower than those of 30 years ago. According to a studyby the Education Trust (one of the main supporters of NCLB), reasons for the low performance include:

• Lowered expectations for students of color
• Growing income inequality and lack of resources in low-income school districts
• Unequal access to experienced teachers
• An increased number of “out of field” teachers instructing minority students in subjects outside their area of expertise
• Unconscious bias” by teachers and administrators.

“Young people of color are overrepresented in the poorest schools and the poorest neighborhoods,” says Dominique Apollon, research director of the Applied Research Center. “There is a cumulative and compounding effect of structural deficiencies in many schools.” 

The study points out that low-income minority students are also more likely to have newly minted teachers, many of whom aren’t equipped to help under-performing students get on track.

Florida SOS tweeter, Rita Solnet @ritacolleen makes similar points in response to latest Florida school district rankings. Tweets Rita: “FL’s top ranked Sch District [St. Johns County] has lowest % of poor children. We need a study to tell us that?” She adds, “FL’s worst ranked District [Madison County] had highest % of poor children (at 78%). Again, we needed a study for this?

You’re right Rita. We certainly don’t need another look at FCAT scores to tell us that poverty and racial segregation and isolation continue to have a major impact on measurable student learning outcomes in Florida and elsewhere, despite the denials by many corporate school reformers who continue to brush off these factors as “excuses.” These latest studies should sound the alarm that current administration policies are not working. The continued use of student standardized test scores as the main basis for teacher evaluation, “merit” pay and closing and punishing schools in poor communities, will only continue to reinforce this shameful trend.

If you need more evidence that these issues transcend the classroom, take a look a how Florida’s 67 counties stack up on the deliverance of health care. Once again we find wealthy, white St. Johns County near the top (3) and largely poor and black Madison County near the bottom (65).”

“In 1905 Robert Walser packed his bags and left behind his native Switzerland for the bustling metropolis of Berlin. The fledgling author, twenty-seven years of age, had just published his first book of fiction, Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Fritz Kocher’s Essays), and moving to Berlin was the obvious next step for him to take in the pursuit of a proper literary career. Just a year before he had been supporting himself as an on-again-off-again bank clerk and copyist, but now he was looking to become a proper novelist, an endeavor that would require all his strength. When he arrived in the German capital, he moved into the apartment of his brother Karl, a painter, who had made the pilgrimage to Berlin the year before and quickly established himself as the foremost stage set designer of the age.

Walser soon discovered, however, that his brother’s high-society lifestyle was not to his liking. The fancy soirées they attended made him feel like a bumpkin, and he soon developed a reputation for uncouth conduct. Karl would receive invitations to dinner specifying he could bring Robert “only if he wasn’t too hungry.” It may well have been this gentrified arts scene in which artists and their patrons socialized together that made Walser decide to enroll, only a few months after his arrival, in Berlin’s Aristocratic Servants School. Here he studied the art of waiting on table, polishing shoes, and shaking out carpets. When he graduated, he took a job as an assistant butler at a count’s castle in Silesia, where he spent the better part of the winter. His publisher was instructed to send him letters only in unmarked envelopes, since he didn’t want his employers to know he was a writer.

He was a writer, though, and remained true to his craft. Over the next three years he would write and publish three novels: The Tanners, The Assistant, and Jakob von Gunten, as well as producing scores of short pieces for publication in magazines and newspapers. Berlin Stories collects all the short work Walser wrote in Berlin about Berlin, as well as a selection of later pieces in which he looks back on his life in the metropolis. These stories are the record of a city in the throes of modernity. Berlin was already a vast metropolis, one of the great cities of Europe. It got its first subway in 1902; thirty-five different streetcar lines converged at Potsdamer Platz; and automobiles zipped in and out among hackney carriages on its crowded streets.

If the city was on the move, so was Walser. He walked the streets collecting impressions. He was a fast writer, and liked to write about things in rapid motion. In “Aschinger” he describes a Berlin-style fast-food restaurant, and his walk stories—like “Good morning, Giantess!”—show us the city as a blur of glimpses. “In the Electric Tram” talks about learning how to sit when riding in this newfangled vehicle, and “Full” features a monologue by a disgruntled omnibus conductor.

“A metropolis,” Walser writes, “is a giant spiderweb of squares, streets, bridges, buildings, gardens, and wide, long avenues […], a wave-filled ocean that for the most part is still largely unknown to its own inhabitants, an impenetrable forest, an opulent, overgrown, huge, forgotten, or half-forgotten park, a thing that has been built up too extensively for it to ever again be oriented within itself.” A fire breaking out in the city produces a “thick, seemingly incessant rain of small, light sparks and embers [that] flies out of the dark air and down into the crowded street, sowing a crop of glowing snow.” The wonder that the city and its life inspired in him is evident in the vibrancy of his sentences, and I have taken pains to let the vividness of his impressions enliven the prose of my translation as well.

Finally, Berlin was also a city of the theater for Walser, something he experienced both as an audience member and through his brother’s work and friends. The young author had started out dreaming of becoming an actor, even auditioning once for the celebrated Josef Kainz (who pronounced the teenage enthusiast devoid of thespian talent). Throughout his life Walser maintained his love of the stage and wrote a great deal about performances in Berlin, including both high art (“On the Russian Ballet”) and low (“Cowshed”). My favorite of his theater texts here is the one entitled “An Actor,” devoted to a lion in Berlin’s Zoological Garden; this actor is a cousin to Rilke’s famous panther.

Walser left Berlin in 1912, never to come back. His Berlin Stories offer a wonderful kaleidoscopic portrait of this city that both entranced and overwhelmed him, a mixed response that made its way into these stories—at times he describes the advent of modernism’s technologies as almost hostile. For him, city life is best perceived not from the back seat of an automobile but by walking the streets, whether first thing in the morning or late at night. These stories are records of a quite particular time and place, but also of a very unusual sensibility, one whose quizzical shaping gaze presents the city as a terra incognita of intoxicating possibility.”

The equation is simple. In sector after sector of our political economy, there are still many sellers: many of us. But every day, there are fewer buyers: fewer of them. Hence, they enjoy more and more liberty to dictate terms—or simply to dictate.

Over the past four years of financial collapse, many of us have come to view markets as a fantastical scam: a giant mechanism geared to transfer our hard-earned dollars into the hands of a few select bankers. And when it comes to the Wall Street markets we rely on to trade our equities and debt and commodities, this sentiment is not all wrong.

But as every previous generation of Americans understood, a truly open market is one of our fundamental democratic institutions. We construct such markets to achieve some of our most basic rights: to deal with whom we choose, to work with whom we choose, to govern our communities and nation as we (along with our neighbors) choose.

And so, as every previous generation of Americans also understood, monopolization of our public markets is first and foremost a political crisis, amounting to nothing less than the reestablishment of private government. What is at stake is the survival of our democratic republic.

This rush back to the feudal past is nowhere more evident than in that region of California we have so long viewed as the incubator of our future.

Until recently, few places in the world could boast of markets as open as those of Silicon Valley. Yes, large corporations thrived here for decades. But true denizens of the Valley would rarely let themselves get caught inside those walls. Why should they? Their skills were portable, venture capital was abundant, and California refused to enforce the “non-compete” agreements that tech firms elsewhere often used to control their employees.

It was in Silicon Valley that America’s entrepreneurs seemed to rediscover their roots—or rather, their primal rootlessness. Serial founders staked out tech venture after tech venture, in much the way Daniel Boone once cleared homesteads as he wandered from Carolina to Kentucky to Missouri. And behind these pioneers swarmed freelance engineers and cowboy coders, hardly distinguishable from the first-generation entrepreneurs and soon in direct competition with them.

These days the Valley is once again abuzz. Headlines report bulging wallets and a smorgasbord of new perks. Venture capitalists hum down Route 101, and angel investors lurk and listen in the bars. But instead of a disruptive melee like that of the late 1990s, with its diversity of players and voices, the overwhelming tendency today is a further consolidation of power by the already powerful.

During the past decade, a few giants have managed to fence in market after market for hardware, software, and content. Some did so simply by buying up their competitors. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison once said that acquiring another company was “a confession that there’s a failure to innovate.” But Ellison himself decided to opt for the more reliable profits that come from buying one’s competitors, which in Oracle’s case included PeopleSoft, Siebel, BEA, Sun Microsystems, and more than sixty other firms. During the same period, Google—even while branding itself as the dreamiest of inventors—vacuumed up close to a hundred companies, including such core components as YouTube, DoubleClick, and ITA.

John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil ruled the energy industry for decades, liked to present his predations as acts of altruism. “We will take your burdens,” he would tell his target. “We will unite together and build a substantial structure on the basis of cooperation.” But all understood perfectly the ultimatum hidden in the honeyed words: Join or be crushed.

So, too, today’s lords of the Valley, who enjoy the power to choreograph competition among the latest generation of upstarts and then buy whom they please, when they please. Yet this de facto license to govern a trillion-dollar industry—and with it, entire swaths of the American economy—appears to have left these high-tech headmen unfulfilled. Or so we learned when the Justice Department complained in 2010 that senior executives at Apple, Google, Intel, Pixar, and two other corporations had “formed and actively managed” an agreement that “deprived” the engineers and scientists who work for them of “access to better job opportunities.”

Even in those reaches of society long accustomed to the rule of the few, the fact that some of the biggest and the richest had agreed not to poach one another’s workers managed to shock. In an editorial, the New York Times wondered “What Century Are We In?” When all six companies settled with the DOJ in September 2010, they denied any legal wrongdoing, and simply agreed to abstain from such labor practices for the next five years.¹1. This sentence was added to the online version of the story, to clarify a later reference. Yet in the Valley itself, from those most directly affected, we’ve heard only the rarest of whimpers. The anger is there. But it’s tamped down by fear.

To see how these employees react to their bosses getting busted for running a labor cartel, I recently toured Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, California. I strolled the Infinite Loop, the road encircling the six edifices at the heart of the empire. I wandered the side streets lined with low-slung buildings adorned with discreet Apple logos. I ambled down North De Anza Boulevard to the center of town. All around I saw Apple employees, easily identifiable by the white badges dangling from their necks or clipped to their pants pockets. And I approached many of them to ask what it felt like to work in the company’s town.

An older fellow named Steve, with scraggly white hair, told me he had read all about the settlement, and that the news had come as no surprise. “They treat us like dirt,” he said before unleashing a string of curses. “Market capitalism should be a two-way street, no? If they get to make us compete against one another, then they too should have to compete.” At this point Steve walked off. He’d like to talk more, he said. But his contract renewal was coming up, and someone might see him with me.

At a crossroads just south of Apple headquarters, in front of a Valero gas station, I caught up with John, who was speed-walking to the dentist. “Of course I don’t like it,” he told me, and proceeded to recount the facts of the settlement in detail. “But what can we do? It’s not like anyone ever dares to speak about it. I mean, they actively encourage us not to talk to one another. It’s all taboo.”

Outside the Bagel Street Café, in the lines for the shuttle buses that carry employees north to San Francisco, at BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse, I come upon the same urge to talk, followed by the same mumbled apologies as prudence takes hold. Sometimes the fear kicks in almost instantaneously. One employee actually spun on his heel, jumped back into his pickup truck, and sped away, though not before hissing that “even if I did know anything, I wouldn’t ever be able to talk about it.”

Eventually I did find one employee willing to speak up. Last spring, a San Francisco law firm announced plans to file a class-action lawsuit against Lucasfilm and the six corporations named in the DOJ settlement. Such lawsuits require at least one person to publicly represent the class, and finally a former Lucasfilm software engineer named Siddarth Hariharan stepped forward. After some back-and-forth with his lawyers, Hariharan (who also goes by the name Neil Haran) agreed to discuss how the masters of these estates treat their tenants.

Over lunch in San Francisco, Hariharan, dapper in a stylish sport coat, starts by telling me all the reasons he loved his job, especially the opportunity to take part in sprawling, complex projects. Sure, the pace was grinding, the hours crazy. One team, he recounts, worked for 110 hours per week for nine months straight. But “everyone believed they were making something important.”

Hariharan says his attitude began to sour after Lucasfilm completed a particularly ambitious project. The very next day, he says, shaking his head, executives came in and “fired almost everyone.” These were employees who hadn’t had a day off in months. “People were running around the office,” says Hariharan, whose own job was not affected. “They were running around crying. It was a bad sight.”

He pauses, and looks at me. “Then, on top of that, I hear they were conspiring to lock people in a box?” It was the allegations about the labor cartel, Hariharan says, that angered him sufficiently to join the lawsuit. “It’s simple,” he says. “If you do something bad, you should be punished.”

Many entrepreneurs and workers in Silicon Valley want to speak out, Hariharan believes. Many would love to restore the open job market of the early 1990s. But for most, “it would be career suicide.” Even Hariharan might have thought twice if he hadn’t already established himself as an independent entrepreneur. “I’m not rich,” he says, “but I never have to work for anyone else again. So I felt I had to do something. I had to stand up for those who couldn’t.”

ayjay:

My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations.
But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, a swallow
Performs its rite of the second. That boy, does he already suspect
That beauty is always elsewhere and always delusive?
Now he sees his homeland. At the time of the second mowing.
Roads winding uphill and down. Pine groves. Lakes.