Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Mark Steyn notes some of the farce in Occupy Wall Street.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Ben & Jerry’s, the hippie-dippy Vermont ice-cream makers, have come out in favor of “Occupy Wall Street.” Or as their press release puts it:
“We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity.”
Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unilever. What’s that? It’s an Anglo-Dutch multinational (stand well back) corporation!! They produce a big chunk of everything in your kitchen and bathroom. Twelve of their brands have annual sales of over a billion euros per product, and, as I’m sure I don’t need to point out, a euro is well north of a buck these days. Unilever’s various billion-euro brands include Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Sunsilk shampoo, and Flora margarine. They’re the biggest ice-cream manufacturer not just in Vermont but on the planet: They have a zillion factories churning out Popsicle and Breyers and brands you’ve never heard of but which are the biggest-selling cones and sundaes in Singapore, Pakistan, Belgium, and Lithuania. Unilever is about as corporately corporate as you can get.
They brought in a Unilever guy from Norway to be Ben & Jerry’s CEO, and neither Ben nor Jerry holds an executive position with the company, any more than Uncle Ben (no relation) and Aunt Jemima do with their respective corporate masters. I suppose they could have renamed the operating unit UniBen or JerryLever, but instead they decided to keep the whole tie-dye peace-pop cherry-Garcia vibe going. One might think this inherently preposterous, in the same way that one would assume even gullible music fans would guffaw at a label called “Maverick Records” that is, in fact, a subsidiary of Warner Music Group. …
Dem pollster, Douglas Schoen is aghast at the administration’s decision to throw in with the flea party.
President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election.
Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that “the protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules.” Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message.
Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.
The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York’s Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion. …
Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor tosses out some ideas on why Obama would want to align with OWS.
So what explains Obama’s decision to align himself with such a cretinous assemblage? I can think of several, not mutually exclusive, alternatives:
1. Given the objective economic conditions, Obama feels desperate politically, and knows that he cannot win using a conventional campaign. So he is throwing in with a disruptive force that could upset conventional political dynamics and calculations. A go-for-broke, put himself at the head of the mob strategy. These strategies can work, but they are very risky–and often end up devouring the would-be leaders–for once destablizing forces are unleashed, they are extremely difficult to control. [Update: I note that the pivotal moment in Obama's 2008 victory was the Lehman collapse and subsequent panic. He was fading before that, but the crisis propelled him to victory. He benefited from chaos in 2008: why not create his own in 2011-2012?]
2. A realization that the ultimate result of a success of this movement would be to strengthen the government’s power–and not coincidentally strengthen the corporatism from which the Daleys etc. profit.
3. A recognition that this is a way to shakedown Wall Street for campaign contributions which have been less forthcoming than in 2008. Remember Obama’s “my administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks” remark in 2009? Translated: pay up or I’ll get out of the way.
2012 was already shaping up to be an ugly and angry campaign. By going all in for a class warfare, us against them, strategy, Obama is making it all the uglier. One interpretation is that he is choosing the Sampson option: If I go down, I’ll bring everything down with me.
Mickey Kaus thinks maybe the president is over the top with his rhetoric.
Obama has been accused of feeling smugly superior to the conventional pols around him, especially those in Congress. He has now responded with this jobs-bill pitch:
“We’re going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing,” Mr. Obama said as he began a three-day bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia. “Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole thing all at once, so we’re going to break it up into bite-sized pieces so they can take a thoughtful approach to this legislation.” [Emphasis.Added.]
That should put the “condescension” charge to rest. …
Jonah Goldberg says don’t lose sight of the fact these people are leftists.
.. Meanwhile, I think it’s important not to lose sight of the political import of Occupy Wall Street. Even if this was a campground for modern day Horatio Algers—which I do not believe—the OWS movement is lending its voice to institutions and personalities who are fundamentally opposed to capitalism. One needn’t call the full roll of speakers at Zuccotti Park and its sister protests to know that I am right. But when Francis Fox Piven, the American Communist Party, Slavoj Zizek, et al are being greeted with cheers or at least open arms or when surveys of actual protesters show that a third advocate violence to advance their cause, I for one do not find much solace in the fact that they’ve done yeoman work creating a water filtration system.
Speaking of leftists who can’t give it up, Justice Stevens gets a once over from Richard Epstein.
… What is so sad about Justice Stevens’ recent extrajudicial outbursts is that they go in exactly the opposite direction, by lashing out at decisions that he does not like, without worrying much whether or how they fit in with the original constitutional scheme.
The first example in this regard is his statement that he regarded the position of the Bush team in Bush v. Gore as “frivolous.” According to Politico [4],
Stevens recalls that he bumped into fellow Justice Stephen Breyer at a Christmas party, where the two men discussed the issue.
“We agreed that the application was frivolous,” Stevens writes. “To secure a stay, a litigant must show that one is necessary to prevent a legally cognizable irreparable injury. Bush’s attorneys had failed to make any such showing.”
“Frivolous” is a fighting word. But just what was Justice Stevens thinking? Clearly the statement is a cheap shot at those who took the opposite side in Bush v. Gore. As a matter of decorum, it seems wrong to invoke Justice Breyer’s name while he is still sitting on the Court, and wrong as well to take potshots at those like Justices Scalia and Thomas, who are also on the Supreme Court, or Chief Justice Rehnquist, who is dead. Put otherwise, all sitting justices are subject to all sorts of institutional constraints that make it inappropriate for them to respond to Justice Stevens. Knowing that, it seems wise for him to leave the harsh words to others.
On substantive matters, the picture is no better. The last thing that should be said about the decision in Bush v. Gore is that there is “no legally cognizable irreparable injury” when the presidency of the United States is at stake. To be sure, one could take the position that the recount should be allowed to go forward before its legality is decided. But what would have happened if a highly disputed recount had gone forward only for a divided court to decide that the recount should never have been allowed at all? Indeed, if Justice Stevens’ Christmas party observation was that obvious, it is passing strange that no one bothered to raise it in Bush v. Gore to begin with.
Worse still is the dismissive attitude that Justice Stevens takes toward those who disagree with him. I quite agree that the equal protection argument adopted by the five-member majority in Bush v. Gore was, to say the least, something of a stretch. But I have long believed that the three-justice opinion signed by Chief Justice Rehnquist, and Justices Scalia and Thomas, carried a lot of weight. The Florida Supreme Court had made a complete mess of the recount provisions of contested elections in a political effort to remove the control of that decision from Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, in whom the power had been vested under state law.
To my mind, the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court applied bore no relationship to the one that the Florida legislature had enacted to govern election disputes. Under those circumstances, it was more than credible to argue the opposite position that the Florida recount was unconstitutional because it did not meet the requirement of Article I, Section 1 that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature may direct, a Number of Electors” who then cast votes for president. The sad point here is that Justice Stevens simply bypasses the arguments that cut against his position. …
Andrew Malcolm has some good news and some bad news. Good news is he has late-night humor wrap up. Bad news is they found Obama’s teleprompter.
First, the bad news: They recovered President Obama’s teleprompter.
So, anybody going to his speeches on the current Darth Vader armored bus tour through North Carolina and Virginia is still going to get the full 22-minute monty about how he’s there to listen.
The Real Good Talker’s top speech aide was in a truck stolen from a Richmond hotel parking lot early Monday morning and recovered in another hotel parking lot about 12 hours later. …