Author Archives: christofpierson

Liberals Are Terrified of #OccupyWallStreet

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TNR: Liberals should be nervous

Picking up where we left off yesterday, The New Republic has now offered its official two cents on the protests on Wall Street and, as one would expect of the stuffy self-appointed organ of the liberal power elite inside the Beltway, it disapproves.

[T]o draw on the old cliché, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Just because liberals are frustrated with Wall Street does not mean that we should automatically find common cause with a group of people who are protesting Wall Street. Indeed, one of the first obligations of liberalism is skepticism—of governments, of arguments, and of movements. And so it is important to look at what Occupy Wall Street actually believes and then to ask two, related questions: Is their rhetoric liberal, or at least a close cousin of liberalism? And is this movement helpful to the achievement of liberal aims?

This task is made especially difficult by the fact that there is no single leader who is speaking for the crowds, no book of demands that has been put forward by the movement. Like all such gatherings, it undoubtedly includes a broad range of views. But the volume of interviews, speeches, and online declarations associated with the protests does make it possible to arrive at some broad generalizations about what Occupy Wall Street stands for. And these, in turn, suggest a few reasons for liberals to be nervous about the movement.

The Editors responsible for the unsigned editorial then go on to outline the differences between #ows’s radicalism and TNR’s proper liberalism (the former is dreamy, “group-thinky” and utopian, the latter skeptical, pragmatic and pro-capitalist) , before urging liberals to stay the hell away. Continue reading →

#TeaParty Terrified of #OccupyWallStreet’s New American Revolution

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Dress-up rebel doing the bidding of the corporate class.

James Oliphant of the Los Angeles Times quotes prominent self-anointed leaders of the Tea Party movement on their reaction to the recent sprouting of Occupy America encampments in dozens of cities across North America from Boston and New York to Seattle and L.A. Clearly the Tea Party bosses don’t get it Continue reading →

Right Wing Americans Need to Wake Up And Get Real

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A blogger calling himself Mark America demonstrates the fear-sodden ideology of the right that is disabling many conservatives’ ability to think clearly about what is really going on:

On Saturday, the “Occupy DC” contingent of the greater “Occupy Wall Street” movement clashed with guards and police outside the National Air and Space Museum.  At least one was pepper-sprayed, and one was arrested.  They’re now combining with the even more radical October2011 group, the object of which is to overturn our system of government.  All of these groups have direct ties to Barack Obama from his years in the left-wing community organizing movement, and to the Democrat party structure reaching back two decades.  Let’s be honest:  These are the shock-troops of the communist movement in America.

For those of you who don’t yet understand what this is all about, it’s time to clear it up.  These people aren’t protesting for reform.  They are protesting for the absolute destruction of the United States of America of any description by which you’ve known it.  I once thought that to believe this, a person would need the tin-foil hat and the basement computer terminal and be a conspiracy kook, but this is simply not the case any longer.  These people have powerful, well-heeled backers, and they are acting in concert with Barack Obama and the extreme leftist fringe of American politics.

They  make the mistake of believing the Republican Party is the United States. Big, big mistake. It misleads them into making mistakes of thinking all around. Continue reading →

Jeffrey Sachs Supports #OccupyWallStreet

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This is what democracy looks like when it works: media dialoguing with a rational person telling the truth about what’s wrong and what needs to change:

This is just over 22 minutes, but it’s 22 minutes well spent.

Info from the YouTube video on Sachs:

Watch Jeffrey Sachs, leading environmentalist and economist, and a respected Professor at Columbia University, speak out at the growing, inspiring Occupy Wall Street movement. Sachs is one of many professors, celebrities, community leaders, spiritual leaders and public figures who are speaking out in support of the OWS movement and what it stands for.

The Burnett Rule: If You Buy Something, Don’t Say Something

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Erin Burnett’s snide putdown of #OccupationWallStreet on her new CNN platform OutFront included some sniffing over the fact that the protesters (like other Americans) drink bottled water, eat “catered lunch,” (actually slices of pizza from a local pizzeria, probably courtesy of anonymous online supporters), wear designer clothes, use Apple computers and Blackberries. The implicit “argument” in Burnett’s patrician sniffs, which we’ll no doubt be hearing over and over from the protest’s sideline critics in the days to come, is rendered explicit in this ironic photo art found on Twitter:

http://twitpic.com/6wh19u via @ForceMajeure_

So on this account, if you consume any of the products of corporate capitalism, it’s hypocritical to protest against corporate capitalism. What, then, do the Burnettists think is the correct attitude of consumers toward corporate capitalism? Obedience? Submission? Worship?

We are not only consumers–not only economic animals, but also political animals. The fact that we consume the products of the predominant economic  system doesn’t disqualify us from criticizing the political system that serves the interests of the “captains” of the system at the rest of our expense, does it? The protest is not about the economic behavior of corporations–not about capitalism per se, in other words–but about their social, political and moral behavior.

Burnett pretends to be a journalist, which of course she is not. (Seriously, Erin, a journalist?!) She is an apologist for the 1%. But anyone who is not in the role Burnett has chosen to play ought to pay closer attention to what the occupation is about, ought to use their minds to examine what the occupiers are actually saying.  I think most Americans will tend to get it if they give it a little thought, because I think most Americans can see that the system does not favor their own interests any more than it favors the protesters.

What Does #OccupyWallStreet Stand For? Read This.

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The media have repeated over and over that the protesters in Zuccotti Park have no coherent position. Belying that common narrative, the group’s General Assembly put the document below up for a vote as representing the sense of the occupation’s aims and it was accepted. I found it here, but am posting it in full on my blog as I consider it both historic and newsworthy enough that it belongs to the world now, not just the document’s authors. Is it worthy of a revolution? I think so. I think it makes clear that #occupywallstreet understands who our King George is and they intend to speak truth to the actual power. Continue reading →

Hank Williams Jr and the Sad State of American Discourse

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I will try not to spend a lot of time on the latest overblown media spectacle to distract from what really matters. It probably won’t last long anyway. But the Hank Williams Jr. incident does say something about what’s wrong with the way Americans talk to (or around, at, or through) each other about America. Continue reading →

I was hacked.

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Some soulless creep who nicked my password from Twitter has exploited a security weakness of mine (advice to all: mix up your passwords!) to hack into several of my accounts and use it as a base for his spam.

Gods help you if you followed that link:

l espritd  ecordoue.o rg/com.frie nd.php?a gluck y=76i1 ←This is what it looked like. (I’ve disarmed it. Don’t follow it!) Continue reading →

Disunite the States of America?

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They could have everything south of the 40th parallel between the 100th and 80th latitude. And Alaska.

Eric Alterman in his Nation column this week sighs over the stupidity rampant among high-power journalists–he names Meet the Press‘s David Gregory, for one–that makes them bend over backwards to be “balanced” in their coverage of left and right. It’s a “balance” that actually lends undue gravity to right-wing idiocy. Recently, Alterman says, Gregory equated the left’s alarm over Rick Perry’s secessionist noises with the right’s over “socialist” health care reform as examples of what Gregory implied was understandable outrage over the other side’s extremism. As Alterman puts it, “To treat the potential destruction of the United States via the secession of its second most populous state and the provision of affordable healthcare to its citizens with privately provided health insurance as somehow morally and intellectually equivalent—well, ‘stupidity’ is actually too kind a word.” I couldn’t agree more.

And yet, I was reminded while reading Alterman’s essay of an idea that began to make tremendous sense to me a few weeks ago when the president delivered his jobs speech to the joint session–or actually just after, when the pundits immediately agreed that, no matter how powerful Obama’s words were, they were almost certainly all wasted, if action and not just reelection really was what was motivating him. Continue reading →

Random Double Feature: Imitation of Life and Anna Lucasta

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A few weeks ago, after reading an obituary of underground film legend George Kuchar in the New York Times, I watched Jennifer M. Kroot‘s 2009 documentary It Came from Kuchar, a very enjoyable film in its own right, about the delightfully weird hand-made movies of George and his twin brother Michael. The Kuchars of the Bronx made over-the-top satires with their friends and family on, first, a wind-up action DeJur 8mm camera (the kind I loved making films with as a kid) and then a Bolex 16mm (the kind I always wished I had). Unlike their underground peers Andy Warhol or Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar’s were primarily interested in Hollywood-style narrative (though their movies are far stranger than anything Hollywood could ever dream up) and were heavily influenced in particular by Douglas Sirk, whose melodramas they watched over and over at local movie houses.

From my days of interest in New German cinema, I knew Rainer Werner Fassbinder was also a Sirk fanatic, and I was intrigued by the homages he paid Sirk in films like Lola and Veronika Voss–not the narrative influence so much as the visual influence, the use of  primary color light gels and art design components to telegraph emotion. These visuals also clearly appealed to the Kuchars. In It Came from Kuchar, you can see that George was still practicing Sirk-style lighting in his film classes at San Francisco Art Institute. (Sins of the Fleshapoids, which is available in multipart on YouTube, is a good example of an original Kuchar epic employing Sirk-inspired lighting techniques.)

I only knew about Sirk as an auteur worth investigating from my interest in Fassbinder. So far as I know, I had never seen a Sirk until just the other night. It was the Kuchar films that piqued my interest anew, so when I saw Imitation of Life available on Netflix, I queued it up. By coincidence, my own twin brother Erik recommended I see the remake of Philip Yordan’s Anna Lucasta (directed by Arthur Laven) with Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr just that day, so when Imitation of Life was over, I went right into Anna Lucasta, which is also available for instant streaming on Netflix. They make for an interesting double feature. Continue reading →