When you enter the alternative universe of Politico, it’s always a good idea to steel yourself against infantile false equivalencies, stunningly obvious conventional wisdom, and drearily repeated Republican talking points.  That way, you’ll suffer through far fewer poorly written articles that, like watching Fox News, will make you dumber than if you’d spent your time lighting farts.

Naturally, I go to Politico a lot, because, every once in a while I’ll happen upon something so transcendently idiotic that it makes the whole trip worthwhile.  Just now, the top story announces, without a race of irony, that Sarah Palin is Newt Gingrich’s “secret weapon.”  Given that Newt is plummeting in the Florida polls and all the Republican moneymen are openly after his scalp, one wonders what, exactly, Palin is going to do about his flagging political fortunes.  Shoot a moose?  Better yet, the “writer” quotes ol’ Caribou Barbie at some length, effectively refuting the whole premise of her story by reminding readers that the woman is, well, dumb as a post:

In her latest appearance, Palin stated: “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him via the establishment’s attacks,” she said, though the original question was about Ron Paul. “They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.”

Palin then called conservative writer Peggy Noonan “hypocritical” for recently calling Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it.”

“But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

News Flash:  Palin has picked up some new words, and has chosen to start using them, repeatedly, without grasping their, uh, meaning.  “Subscribe.”  “Via.”  “Articulate.”  “Verbiage.”  As Paul Krugman said about Gingrich, “He’s a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”  Palin, on the other hand, is what four-year old sounds like when they’ve learned a new word.  Some secret weapon: idiotic word salad blurted out by an addlepated harridan way past her political, if not Fox, sell date.

Romney must be quaking in his Gucci loafers.

It’s fairly easy to see how such astonishingly authoritarian, anti-democratic  thinking, worthy of any kleptocratic dictatorship, has become mainstream enough to be casually bandied about by serious presidential candidates.  This imperial disdain for the lower orders has been quite aggressively sold to us by a lazy, insecure, and compromised media owned by some of the world’s most ruthless and degenerate corporations.  Mrs. Alan Greenspan, an ol’ cocktailhag also known as Andrea Mitchell, marveled at how Mitt channeled the the beauty of the mythical Saint Reagan, when, to most observers, he churlishly sneered at an uppity 99%er, “America’s right and you’re wrong.”  Morning in America seems to have, in this case, awakened to a nasty hangover; Mitt may not drink, but releasing those hundred-page tax returns could cause a headache, too.  And it hardly needs mentioning that simultaneously fellating the rich while pissing on the poor (or dead Afghanis, as the case may be…) is the whole point of Fox News; they just throw in the racism and chest-thumping to bring in the rubes.  A good offense is always the best defense with that crowd, and South Carolina seems to have awakened that instinct in the usually robotic Mitt.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand why Americans, especially those on the right, for whom “freedom” and “liberty” are supposedly so sacrosanct, not only acquiesce, but actually cheer, when a few hundred obscenely wealthy people get together and tell their candidate to go out and inform Americans that whatever happened to all the money is simply none of their business.   For a person like Romney, who has lived his life blissfully free from the prying ears and eyes of the little people, it must be deeply annoying to suddenly have to hear the words of a non-underling; no wonder he got so crabby.  For a normal person, however, who has to endure the slings and arrows of everyday existence, I wouldn’t expect such a thing to sell.

But sell it does, and I think the reason is as obvious as it is depressing.  Even in the heyday of the “liberal media,” when media ownership was much more diverse and competitive, both newspapers and TV networks could still often be stymied by powerful and corrupt interests, be they corporate or governmental.  But the governmental ones were, by definition, public, and therefore less completely opaque, so it was less arduous and dangerous to expose their misdeeds.  The corporate ones, on the other hand, are able eschew all accountability,  armed as they are with legions of expensive lawyers and, when that doesn’t work, somewhat less expensive hired thugs.  Sadly, the corporate model is now being adopted by what we used to think of as our democratic government, a bleak coda to an era when corporations became people and actual people became, well, the help.

The last vestige of flesh and blood people having any power great enough to tame gigantic and rapacious corporations, our federal government, has decided, quite recently, to just admit that it isn’t really ours, no matter how much it costs us.   In this sense, Romney is only ratifying what was a “bold” step by President Bush, a “pragmatic” one by President Obama, and by the time Romney came along, Reaganesque:  Corporations are right; we (the people) are wrong.  Glad that’s been cleared up.

Last week the New York Times bothered to run a two-page foldout on the preposterous “policy positions” of the candidates, which are, except for Ron Paul, exactly the same.  None believe in Climate Change, and all fall over each other endorsing policies that will radically exacerbate it.  All would further cut the absurdly low taxes on the rich while cutting programs for everyone else.  None would produce anything that approximates a balanced federal budget, though they all risibly claim to be fanatically opposed to  runaway “spending.”  All are opposed to Obama’s mild and incremental health care reform and see socialism lurking in the pathetically weak Dodd-Frank banking law.  All are opposed to environmental protection of any kind, and on social issues, all are somewhere to the right of the Taliban.  All, except Paul, are in favor of war with Iran and increasing our destructive support of an increasingly belligerent Israel.  All, except Paul again, think torture is the greatest thing since high-fructose corn syrup, of which they naturally are all in favor, too.

In short, every one of these “candidates” is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake, and yet the media treats them as though they are, well, fit to run for office.  Paging David Gregory…..  They’re not.   Romney, presumed to be the “electable” one, is thought of as such for no reason other than that he is blessed with the backing of the Republican Money Machine; no American has ever admitted to actually liking the guy.  It must be dispiriting to be a Fox-addled bible-thumper and come to the dawning realization that your party doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your opinion; vote for Romney or be saddled with the Kenyan commie for four more years.

No wonder they flocked to such buffoons and cretins as Cain, Perry, Bachmann, Trump (!), and on and on.  When you’re both frothingly angry and willfully stupid, poor decision making comes with the territory.  The latest flavor (heh) is Santorum, the most universally despised and pathetically hopeless of them all.  Nonetheless, today the media is treating as worthy of discussion his momentary bounce into third place, as though his 18 point loss, kooky obsession with sex, and creepy stillborn fetus story aren’t inherently disqualifying.

Of course, it is nothing more than the deep conflicts of interests that plague our corporate media that force them to pretend to believe this is some sort of contest; they’re going to be buried in billions of dollars of advertising revenue even as they get to avoid tedious, expensive reporting on anything that actually matters.  Romney will, of course, be the nominee, and despite the fact that Obama is a lousy President, he’ll still lose.  But he’ll do so by a disturbingly small margin, owing to lazy reporting and the shallow, idiotic “balance” that favors the biggest liar in every race.

Despite the fact that Romney, in the eyes of the media, anyway, is seen as “moderate,” the positions he’s been forced to take in order to appeal to the looney “base” of the Republican party are indistinguishable from any other denizen of the Clown Car, but that is probably not why he’ll lose, unfortunately.  Nor will he lose because his tax returns will reveal that he pays less tax than a WalMart greeter, although in a just world, that too would be a deal-breaker.  Sadly, Romney will lose because A) He’s a Mormon, and B) He’s a Massachusetts “liberal.”  Rush Limbaugh said so.

That’s the bed Republicans, with a healthy assist from a brain-dead media, have made for themselves, and Romney is destined to lie in it.  The rest of us will just have to put up with ten months of unadulterated horseshit to get there.  Happy New Year.

As we approach the 2012 elections, I have to admit grudgingly sympathizing with the poor Republican contenders on  some level; everywhere you look, one (hilarious) presidential aspirant after another has to deal with the fact that large blocs of their party hates them, for one reason or another.  The reasons, to a sane person at least, often seem a bit unfair:  the party of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay “hate” Newt Gingrich for being a corrupt Washington Insider with a tenuous connection to reality?  The party of David Vitter and Rudy Giuliani “hate” Mitt Romney for (barely) straying from Christianist orthodoxy, fully clothed?  What the hell?

Well, let’s call it what it is, an embarrassment of riches.  Long ago, before Fox News (!) and 24/7 hate radio, conservatives realized that the only reason, given their relative wealth, that they didn’t bestride the world like a Colossus was that their ideas were both dumb and detrimental to most Americans, let alone other humans on earth.  In his infamous 1970 Memo, which led a bonkers, elitist ideologue to a Nixon lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell spoke for fellow plutocrats in saying that, essentially, the far-too-comfortable rabble has caught on to our scams.  We’d better have a Plan B, but fast.

That plan, of course, was to flood the public discourse with propaganda from think tanks, media outlets, and newly endowed “professors” to spout the plutocrat line, which, as you might expect, wouldn’t be too successful if other opinions were heard.  Thus, the strategy’s practitioners, chief among them Nixon himself, decided that rather than bothering wih refuting liberal ideas, still a somewhat tall order to this day, they would focus on refuting liberal people, whom, duly discredited, would finally shut up once and for all.  The Hate Campaign was born.

This wasn’t the easiest proposition, understandably, given that the poorer and less educated group they were attempting to persuade would undoubtedly be harmed by their ultimate goals.  They had to go for hate, and go big, before anybody wised up.  To this end, taxes, which largely went, than as now, to support the military and (then, anyway) beloved entitlement programs for white people, had to be re-branded as extravagant cash transfers to shiftless Darkies; wars had to be sold as rare opportunities for vicarious triumph to an increasingly marginalized and powerless populace, and respecting foundational civil liberties had to be portrayed as dangerous capitulation to treacherous hordes abroad and at home.

It’s a neat trick, really….  Convincing the dumbest and most resentful in any society that everything, and I mean everything, they don’t like is somehow connected. Once you’ve done that, you’re off to the races.  You see, most people, particularly in the hard times Republican policies invariably create, are left looking around for solutions to what ails them; the key to eliminating such dangerous receptivity is to have the most reasonable, but unwanted, solutions pre-tainted by painstakingly encouraged cultural biases.

With Nixon, this meant a whole lot of industrial-grade hippie punching, and it worked so well at he time that it’s still in wide use despite its often tinny, anachronistic feel.  It may be both dumb and insultingly cheesy to lots of people, but the fact that the hippie’s modern-day equivalents want to, say, protect the environment, reliably creates a massive call amongst rank-and-file righties for more pollution has become, for polluters, anyway, the gift that keeps on giving.  That the (now proven correct) resistance to our retarded, failed adventure in Iraq was advanced by  our younger and less conservatively attired Americans means that Fox News “culture warriors”  will dutifully scream for more wars until kingdom come, sooner rather than later.  And on and on.

As I’ve said many times before, this is a project that has become a victim of its own success.  Hopelessly saddled with a befuddled band of followers whose hate, like a 1960′s Alabama firehose, must constantly be turned  on something, the Republicans are finding that even their own bespoke suits might get unseemly wet spots.  Just mention without utter disdain an idea that at some point a “liberal” might have ever endorsed, no matter how mundane, and the fury is unleashed.  George Bush found this out when he tried to hand his anti-labor supporters an immigration bill, John McCain was similarly chastened when he said, from experience, that torture wasn’t okay, and Ron Paul, who is momentarily leading the polls in Iowa, was nonetheless almost booed off the stage for the impermissible effrontery of talking about pointless, costly wars like they were a bad thing.

In their relentless pursuit of hate-driven infallibility, Republicans have painted themselves into an interesting corner when it comes to sewing up a presidential election….  Their people have been taught, carefully, you might say, to hate so much that they can no longer love.  Even their own candidates.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

To arrest one foreign car-making executive under Alabama‘s new tough immigration laws may be regarded as a misfortune; to arrest a second looks like carelessness.

A judge has acted to put a Japanese employee of Honda Motor Company out of his misery by dismissing immigration charges against him, three days after he was booked under Alabama’s new immigration laws that have been billed as the most swingeing (sic) in America. Ichiro Yada is one of about 100 Japanese managers of the company on assignment in (the) southern state.

Aside from the mystifying Anglicisms and sloppy editing, the Guardian’s rather easy reporting shows that the American media is, as usual, making utter asses of themselves by ignoring such a significant story.  Oh, we’ve heard here and there about crops rotting in the fields, children fleeing schools, and families escaping this racist hellhole under a cover 0f darkness, but any indication that the whole law, and the politicians profiting from it, are another depressing example of how contemptible bigots are cynically used for political advantage by those with nothing better to sell, is striking in its absence.

In a more enlightened era, it was said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels, but after the excesses of the Bush era, patriotism as an excuse for every domineering outrage is pretty much played out.  So racism has inevitably become the new patriotism, since its practitioners are even more dumb and desperate than the flag-wavers, and are thus that much more unquestioningly  loyal to their overlords.  In the grinding, dire, and endless recession they’ve deliberately created, and aren’t through exploiting, the 1% and their concubines must plunge ever deeper into untapped sociopathology to find, well, Dittoheads.  Why not blame the Darkies and Mexicans for all of your growing problems, when you’re the sort of dumb redneck predisposed to watch (and worse, believe) Fox News?  It isn’t a strategy so far tainted by failure, after all.

It’s a neat trick, really, with the caveat of its lack of relationship to reality.  Like other southern states, famous for their appalling schools and lack of rudimentary government services, Alabama unwittingly embraced the Global Economy by luring international manufacturers with the promise of docile, dumb, workers who would work for shit and thank you for it.  Naturally, Galtian CEO’s from socialist dystopias like Japan and Germany knew a good thing when they saw it; their countries had wantonly abandoned slavery a century or so before Alabama went to war to preserve it; indeed, they want to bring it back.  There’s money to be made from people that stupid.

Of course, both Germany and Japan are rightly infamous for their past (and current) xenophobia, and like all perpetrators of racist authoritarianism, they’re not so keen on being subject to it.  Given that, it’s too bad they picked Alabama.  What they didn’t realize was that in a place rife with cousin breeding, you only need an accent and a slight shift in pigment to be seen an a “furriner.”  The Germans found, much to their chagrin, that being white wasn’t enough; the Japanese found that being relentlessly industrious wasn’t enough, either.  Alabamans, or at least their police, evidently only recognize the legitimate citizenship of those to whom they’re directly related.

Doesn’t matter if you’re an executive; doesn’t matter if you’ve fired a lot of uppity people.  If you’re not a drawling, tooth-shy piece of white trash, then it’s off to the hoosegow with you, fancy-schmancy boss or not. This isn’t exactly going over.   When Jessica Mitford wrote about how Deep South places like Alabama in the 1060′s, by closing public amenities to avoid integrating them, were cutting off noses to spite faces, she didn’t know the half of it.  The Germans and Japanese are now finding out about the other half.

It’s too soon to tell whether Occupy Wall Street’s drive to appropriate public spaces will entirely obscure its protests of economic injustice, but the dangers of its morphing into an ineffectual Occupy Whatever movement are already evident. Occupation is more exhilarating and instantly gratifying than the hard slog of advancing political and social change, and so far, one of the movement’s primary achievements has been a remarkable judicial ruling implying a new First Amendment right of occupation.

“New?”  As usual, it’s those “activist judges” again.  Everyone knows that free speech is only for those who can pay for it.  That’s what  Jesus told the Founders, and those lazy hippies should just shut up and get jobs, so they can buy their own politicians, presumably.

What if a group of Christian nationalists set up camp in a public park and excluded all non-Christians from their encampment in order to demonstrate the possibility of a purified Christian America? What if they purposefully chose a park across the street from a mosque or synagogue, claiming that the location was essential to their message? What if a group of White Supremacists set up a tent city in a public space that admitted only white people?

Evidently Wendy hasn’t been told that Christian crazies have been “occupying” abortion clinics, for instance, non-stop for decades, often to the point of violence,  all white militias are forming heavily armed “communities” all over the country, and many elected Republicans routinely call for all kinds of discrimination against Muslims.  I guess she hopes her readers haven’t noticed these things, either.

If you believe that rights enjoyed by Occupy Boston should not be extended to the Christian nationalists and White Supremacists, among other private groups that discriminate based on race, religion, or other protected categories, then you’re endorsing content-based discrimination against speech — a fundamental violation of First Amendment freedoms. If the right to disseminate a particular message is contingent on popular or official approval of its content, then it’s not a right at all. It’s an unreliable, arbitrary privilege. Occupy Wall Street and its satellites are supposed to represent the interests of the unprivileged many; they should perhaps refrain from demanding occupational “rights” that can only be extended to a privileged few.

The fact that no one at OWS, or anyone outside the right wing noise machine is actually making any such argument, of course, is immaterial, since the point is they might.  And, that thing they haven’t done makes them not just hypocrites, but, get this, “privileged” ones; the few against the many.  If this is the best they can come up with, OWS has already won.

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

UPDATE:  (4:00pm)

Reinforcements have been brought in from enlightened places like Salem, and the cops are really rolling up with rubber bullets, tear gas, and what not.  Another busload of cops is heading in.  More news later; the protesters are heading right here to Park Ave.

Bowing to the bleatings of The Oregonian and the same dozen or so cranky Dittoheads that fill their letters section, Mayor Sam Adams decided to, well, make a complete ass of himself.  Clearly taking cues from authoritarian Democrats in other cities, he went ahead and announced that Occupy Portland would have to vacate Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, located on either side of the elk statue above.  As elsewhere, Occupy had essentially become “home” to Portland’s legions of homeless youth, with all the disorder that entails, giving the city and the police all the excuse they needed to shut down the camp.  Of course, having an excuse to do something isn’t the same as having the ability, and even with the entire police force on hand, the task proved laughably impossible.

Though the camp had dwindled over the last few days to barely more than a hundred souls huddled in pelting rain by Saturday afternoon, when we arrived about fifteen minutes before the “deadline,” thousands of people filled not just the parks themselves, but the sidewalks on both sides of the surrounding streets.  Aside from a few drunken frat boy types jeering at the “hippies,” the mayor and police were clearly about as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  It was so glaringly obvious that any attempt to reclaim the parks was doomed to failure, we could have left right then, but stayed because the whole thing was just so much fun.  Though the neighborhood bars were all (foolishly) closed for the evening, relinquishing what would have been land office business in favor of completely unfounded fear, the atmosphere was not unlike Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

Clearly relishing playing  Bugs Bunny to Mayor Sam’s Elmer Fudd, we protesters quickly realized we weren’t protesting, but celebrating.  Circling motorists honked and waved their support as a hundred or so cyclists rode lazy circles around the parks on typical Portland tall bikes and fixies; a group of National Lawyers’ Guild representatives chatted and laughed amongst themselves, confident their services were wholly unnecessary, which they were.

Even the weather cooperated; heavy evening rain dwindled to barely a mist, all but inviting the less committed to take a stand with the stalwarts, and certainly diminishing somewhat the grumpiness of the cops.  Though two news choppers hovered uselessly overhead (the cover of trees made aerial shots all but impossible), it was abundantly clear they weren’t going to get any tape that would make it into the news. The “reporter” from the local Fox affiliate, a glamorous young thing in pancake and parka, looked both bored and disappointed, which naturally pleased me no end.

After an hour or so, more people were still arriving, so we felt like it was safe to slip away; this morning when I woke up the first thing I heard was choppers (don’t those things ever run out of gas?) and I knew that #Occupy’s victory was as complete as was Mayor Adams’ humiliation.  The Oregonian glumly confirmed it.  Well, boo f*cking hoo.  Yes, the grass looked like hell, but democracy survived to fight another day.

“Really?”  my friend Denise asked, “there’s only going to be 37 people?”  I assured her that for any lefty event, even in the crappiest weather, we always get at least 5000, but maybe we ought to head down anyway.  I grabbed my sign, which said “Let Them Eat Koch,” and we set out.  To kill a little time along the way, I took her over to the penthouse to check on the plants for the owners.  In the elevator there, we saw a dire warning the association had evidently posted about the dangers of the protesters, evidenced by the “violence” and “hundreds of arrests” in New York.  Please.  The warning was issued by “Clean and Safe Portland,” a public/private rent-a cop outfit whose spokespeople seem pretty Fox-addled, if this dire warning was any indication.  “Don’t want any respectable condo dwellers mixing with that scary bunch” was the obvious message, but at least on Denise and I, it had the opposite effect.

Walking along the waterfront, I thought the volume of people was about twice what it normally would be, but quite a few people seemed to be going in the opposite direction.  Two women explained that they had to get back to work, and perhaps the younger hipsters were just cruising back and forth to pass the time before things started.  When we got there, not long after the noon start time, there were already a lot of people, with more arriving steadily.   I was a typical Portland crowd; hipsters, geezers, and families, all jumbled together, with a few striking examples of why it’s entirely unnecessary for people to “Keep Portland Weird.”  It is weird, and that’s why we like it.   It was impossible to hear the speakers from where we arrived, so we proceeded to circle the perimeter, in hopes of at least some good wide views, to no avail, so we decided to get up on the Burnside Bridge, overhead, to estimate the size of the crowd.  Naturally, trees and structures blocked the view even from up there, but we did run into Teddy from FDL and his partner, Patrick, so the 2-block trek wasn’t a total loss.  More is always merrier when you’re doing the hippie thing.  By the time we got back, the crowd had grown considerably; and a large contingent was across Naito Parkway near the Skidmore Fountain, where there is a spacious open plaza for the Saturday Market.

As we began walking, it was immediately apparent that the crowd was much larger than it appeared in that segmented landscape, and I’m sure Naito was shut down for at least half an hour as the throngs poured across it diagonally.  As we moved west, I assumed we would turn left toward Pioneer Square, the announced destination, but instead we headed right toward Burnside, the only major east-west arterial through downtown.  Now we were blocking essentially all of the MAX trains and bus lines into downtown from the north, and we were just getting started.  As a polite Portland protester, I felt a little guilty blocking all those buses and trains, but when we turned onto Broadway I was heartened to see that we had a lot of support from the locals, particularly the girls at Mary’s Club, but also from office workers, many of whom popped their heads out windows to watch and wave, or even climbed on fire escapes to shoot pictures.  All along Broadway, sales clerks and store managers lined the sidewalks, along with subtle, suited security guards at Union Bank of California, where I mounted a landscape terrace to snap some shots of Broadway.   At that point, Burnside was still blocked, and by now Westbound MAX Trains were stopped as well. Both Denise and I were struck by how many in the crowd were busily taking pictures; the camera phone era seems to have turned all of us into a passel Japanese tourists.  After all, had I not been covering this event for CHNN, I’d have rather had a drink in my free hand.  (Someone did ask whether there would be a beer garden at Pioneer Square, and he had a point.) Denise had to get on the road to get back to Bend, but we did manage to make a loop around the square, where, quite inexplicably, there was sort of a beer garden occupying about a quarter of the square, but without the beer, just a fenced-off area preventing the square from filling up fully.  The Eastbound Max trains had been kept running throughout, and it appeared that Burnside had reopened by this time, so cops were lined up to keep the crowd from blocking he just-released northbound trains and buses. 

Westbound trains, as you can see, still weren’t going anywhere for awhile.  Now, a couple of hours later, the news choppers that eagerly plied the skies hoping to catch the mayhem they were wishing for, seem to have finally gone away disappointed.  Portland does protests, even really big ones, peacefully, despite what the media might wish.  Certainly there were many masked young would-be anarchists in this younger-than usual group, but what I mostly found, as I always do, was the same mixture of earnestness, civility, and easy fellowship.  Portlanders aren’t, typically, window-smashers, and we also know who the real criminals are, or at least this guy did.

(From Media Matters)

Schiff: “One Of The Most Anti-Poor People Rules Is The Minimum Wage.” On the September 21 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade hosted author and businessman Peter Schiff, who claimed that minimum wage rules negatively affect employment for young and poor people. From Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: All right, so let’s look at what you think we should do. How to encourage job growth, according to Peter Schiff: abolish the minimum wage. People think that’s anti-poor people.

SCHIFF: Well, one of the most anti-poor people rules is the minimum wage. It keeps people poor. What the minimum wage does is says that if a person that has very little skills, and generally they’re young or they’re poor, you can’t hire them unless they can produce –

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: — $7.25 worth of value, but it’s not just that. It also has to compensate you for all the mandatory benefits and taxes and risks associated with hiring people.

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: And people that have no skills, it’s not just worth it to hire them –

KILMEADE: Peter, I want to get through, too -

SCHIFF: -- maybe $3 or $4 an hour, if that’s what they’re worth – (emphasis mine!)

KILMEADE: — I understand what you’re saying. You also say – you say to repeal – hold on a second.

SCHIFF: — and you wouldn’t have all this red tape, maybe after a year or two, they would be earning $10 or $15 an hour -

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: The problem is they never get a chance. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/21/11, via Media Matters]

 

Now, nothing’s going to be better at making the poors mend their wicked, greedy ways than to pay them $24 a day.  That’s 121 bucks a week!  How much is a hot bunk in a trailer housing fourteen and some ramen, anyway? Clearly, the Republicans are going where the money is this time.  Taxing these fat cats some more, the great majority of whom we are told bask in the alarming luxury of flush toilets and home refrigeration, is currently the plan to balance the budget, so the first thing we have to do is cut their pay so they’ll get used to it, I guess. They’ve been riding that $7.25 gravy train long enough, the righties would have it, and it’s time for them to go all Bangladeshi on us or the rich might have to fly commercial, and America as we know it is all over.

The most insidious implication of this more than usually repellent exchange is the blandly accepted notion that, sadly, a lot of our fellow humans are only “worth” a wage, say, 1/200oth of what some other, undoubtedly better dressed but dubiously more productive fellow human is.  Nothing to be done about it; they ought to eat less.  You know how fat the poors are and all, wasting their money on rent and gas instead of personal trainers; they’d surely be less unsightly if only couldn’t afford to eat.

Not wanting to sound like a broken record, but when I hear exchanges like that, I do see why Obama is so overconfident about being reelected.  He could even go ahead and “compromise” with the Republicans, deciding that, say, five bucks and some change might be alright, and Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and the entire WaPoo op-ed page would sing Hosannas to the heavens. Better yet, the Servant Problem would be solved, once and for all.