Beautiful Horizons

Occupy Wall Street- It's About Time

While there is an argument to be made that Occupy Wall Street has inspired some protests around the world, in some countries it's probably more accurate to say that they have reinvigorated protests.

When Mércia and I were in Portugal in May, we noticed any number of encampment style protests and organized demonstrations. Here's an encampment in Praça Rossio, one of Lisbon's main squares:

While this photo does not show the encampment (it was taken from a moving vehicel), the sign says it all. It's in Porto near a government minister's residence. The sign says "You won't let us dream, so we won't let you sleep!"

Organized rallies took place in strategic locations designed to draw attention. This was the tail end of one in Porto's Ribeira district, a popular area by the Douro River filled with bars and restaurants:

I work at 120 Broadway, which as you can see is across the street from Zucotti Park:

 

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I walk by the area two to three times a day. I have not been harassed, intimidated or otherwise interfered with. I have not seen any acts of violence or anything uncivil.

What I have seen is a great deal of frustration and anger, which is finally being channelled into something however imperfect. For the past several years we've been fed a steady diet of panis et circenses. The circuses are no longer distracting us and the bread is running low. Time for some new beginnings.

Some Links and Some Comments

What Kevin said. This is especially hypocritical of Romney, as he, as a Mormon, presumably adheres to the Word of Wisdom's dietary restrictions. As we know, however, hypocrisy is Romney's metier.

Mike Huckabee is still butt stupid.

Jonathan Zasloff comments on Jeff Zeleny's puñeta of Newt Gingrich and quotes this portion:

“To a surprising degree, we are in a situation similar to Poland’s in 1979,” he told the audience.

As I said in comments: "He does have a point only he’s off by a year: members of an independent labor union in Poland in 1980 fought an oppressive government seeking their destruction."

Jersey Shore - Snookered into fiscal crisis

New Jersey's GOP Governor Chris Christie is generally hailed as a hero by "conservatives" - even the rational and authentic ones, few as they are - for his taking an ax to the state budget, while public employees are increasingly portrayed as the villains in media narratives of the fiscal crunches plaguing too many states, including rather notoriously New Jersey. 

But the facts regarding Republican stewardship of New Jersey's finances tell a quite different story.  The roots of the current crisis are mismanagement by governors, mostly high-profile Republicans, going back to the '90s. Naked Capitalism has the background HERE - background that you won't read in most of the "conventional wisdom" narratives that hail the GOP heroes of  faux "fiscal conservatism."  The truth is that New Jersey's budgets have for years been sleight-of-hand and cooking of books, robbing pensions to pay "Paul," with "conservatives" at the center of the scam.  Check it out - the whole piece isn't long and well worth your time.

Via Atrios.

Trend obscured by Culture Wars demagogy...

The birth rate among teenagers has dropped to the lowest ever in the 70 years that such data has been reliably collected.  Take a look at this map distributing the higher and lower teen birth rates by state and try to recall another demographic distribution map of the states that it fairly closely parallels (hint - you see it emblazoned as a huge backdrop on news shows every other first week of November. Apparently a high concentration of hysterical right-wing culture warriors politicizing teen pregnancy doesn't have much impact on their real world.)

Fundamentals of the economy

The problem clearly is lack of demand, and certainly not that corporations or the wealthy are in danger of being over-taxed, of "uncertainty" or some such confabulation.  A useful compendium charts and graphs on the current state of the economy, HERE.

What this moderately liberal, "free-trade", pro-globalization academic economist - who worked for Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors - says...

Here.

Taxes, wealth distribution and Tea Partiers

A thoughtful and informative meditation on delusions vs. reality by David Cay Johnston at tax.com, via Mark Thoma.

 

The mortgage mess

Bad. Very bad. Or not as bad as some fear. Nobody really knows.

FUBAR Mortgage Mess

For those who have been astounded by the escalating foreclosure documentation scandals as emblematic of the insane bundling of crap mortgages into "securities" - or some such - Felix Salmon has the best explanation I've seen to date of just how deep and how rotten this crisis actually is - HERE.  Very much worth wading through to understand just how corrupt the "financial services" sector has become.

Radicals who "want to destroy the credit of the US government"

Who are they ?  The Financial Times' Martin Wolfe calls them out - the "Tax Cuts Uber Alles" GOP.  Money quote from the "Communist" FT's chief economics commentator: 

To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy, we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: “supply-side economics”. Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets. Supply-side economics said that one could cut taxes and balance budgets, because incentive effects would generate new activity and so higher revenue.

The political genius of this idea is evident. Supply-side economics transformed Republicans from a minority party into a majority party. It allowed them to promise lower taxes, lower deficits and, in effect, unchanged spending. Why should people not like this combination? Who does not like a free lunch?

How did supply-side economics bring these benefits? First, it allowed conservatives to ignore deficits. They could argue that, whatever the impact of the tax cuts in the short run, they would bring the budget back into balance, in the longer run. Second, the theory gave an economic justification – the argument from incentives - for lowering taxes on politically important supporters. Finally, if deficits did not, in fact, disappear, conservatives could fall back on the “starve the beast” theory: deficits would create a fiscal crisis that would force the government to cut spending and even destroy the hated welfare state.

Read the rest of Wolfe's piece, The Political Genius of Supply-Side Economics, here - it's an excellent debunking of the phony "tax-cutting deficit hawks" of contemporary "conservatism."