Bailout fails in Congress; Dow falls; Wall Street eerily silent. Now what?

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

I paid a second, shorter visit to Wall Street today, in the midst of the sharp crash that followed the House of Representative’s surprise rejection of the financial bailout bill. It was just plain quiet. Only two, fairly sectarian-looking representatives of public protest stood at Wall and Broadway, amid a tableau of tourists and television cameras, slack-jawed business people and an unearthly calm.

It’s hard to believe that the alarms of emergency sounded by both parties and much of the media didn’t push the package through, but they didn’t. The House roll call shows that this wasn’t a resistance of the left, but of the bottom, of people across the country and the political spectrum who didn’t want to be pushed into a massive government buyout of junk debt. Oponents included people I respect like antiwar maverick Barbara Lee and former Black Panther Bobby Rush and people I disdain like Cuba hawk Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and anti-immigrant zealot James Sensenbrenner.

Meanwhile some people on the supporting side, including Nancy “Does she really represent San Francisco” Pelosi, have been inspired by the crisis to speak of principles if not act on them, saying this before the vote:

They claim to be free market advocates when it’s really an anything-goes mentality: No regulation, no supervision, no discipline. And if you fail, you will have a golden parachute and the taxpayer will bail you out. Those days are over. The party is over.

With the express train to a quick bailout now derailed, we may have time to do some collective thinking about the future of our economy. A list of big ideas begins here:

  • Economist Dean Baker (who among other things, called the housing bubble back in 2004) argues things aren’t so urgent after all: “the worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money.” (“Why Bail?,” Huffington Post)
  • Bailout Main Street is compiling a list of counter-proposals.
  • Former CIA analyst turned critic of empire Chalmers Johnson notes the government’s long term financial crisis (read potential bankruptcy) boils down to war. (“We Have the Bailout Money–We’re Spending It on War” The Nation)
  • Katrina vanden Heuvel & Eric Schlosser echo protesters’ call for a “New Deal for Main Street” (America Needs a New New Deal, The Nation, op-ed in Wall Street Journal)
  • Jeremy Jacquot asks “What About the Climate Crisis?“

Bailout Protest on Wall Street

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Responding to an open call circulating in the city, some 300 protesters against the bailout plan gathered in New York’s financial district and marched to the New York Stock Exchange at Wall St. and Broad yesterday afternoon. The crowd was loud, diverse and fed up. Video coverage of the rally is part of today’s Democracy Now! The Indypendent has a live blog archive of the protest. Click on the picture below for more Indymedia photos.

Facing the New York Stock Exchange, protesters filled the intersection and the steps of Federal Hall
Facing the New York Stock Exchange, protesters filled the intersection and the steps of Federal Hall

Apparently, we weren’t the only people pissed off, either. TrueMajority.com is hosting a bulletin board for coordinating protests, with over 250 planned or carried out already, as covered her by CNN.

Being on the streets, there was a happy thrill to be back in force, in a protest taking over Wall Street for my first time since the J18 protest against the G8,* when a Reclaim the Streets protest flooded that intersection for nearly an hour. Of course, this time, our connection to most Americans was much more organic, as everyone from New York anarchists to Montana’s governor are raising big questions about this handover of government loans for junk securities.

What was strange, though, was to look so many Wall Street traders in the eyes. While many waded into the crowd to snap photos with their IPhones, others were visibly unnerved at the display of public opposition. And is the unfortunate nature of public protests we weren’t being the most articulate in our chants (see Tom Tomorrow from 1992 below), even if we were some times hillarious saying things like: “You break it, you bought it” and “You fucked up. Suck it up.” Above all, we needed to be loud and unequivocal in just the right physical space. Thankfully the media was the outlet for my desire to be articulate, and apparently for others desire if you listen to Democracy Now!

How we have to protest when the media and the two parties speak in unison
How we have to protest when the media and the two parties speak in unison

*Some of you may remember I worked on another more recent protest there, but I spent the morning working phones off-site.

The dangers of financial shock therapy…

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A week ago Saturday, when the preparation of Sarah Palin to be vice president seemed like the central political issue, I heard Naomi Klein, among others talk about the presidential campaign. Like any good writer with a recent book, she offered a capsule summary of the shock doctrine. Instead of getting into the detail, I let the amazing director Alfonso Cuarón do it for you.

Whether or not you’ve caught up with the details of the crisis in the financial markets or the Wall Street bailout, keep one eye on the political game being played here. After a week of downtown Manhattan traders whipsawing the market (with a net loss of less than 1%), an emergency measure is proposed, on a scale larger than anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetime (think the full price of the Iraq war being proposed up front). This is classic shock politics. And it doesn’t end today, it transfers the risk and the loss from Wall Street banks to the US Treasury in the form of new debt. Klein argues on Real Time with Bill Maher:

The disaster is far from over. They’ve actually just relocated the disaster. The disaster was on Wall Street and they have moved the disaster to Main Street by accepting those debts. … The bomb has yet to detonate, the bomb is the debt that has now been transferred to the taxpayers. So it detonates when — if John McCain becomes president, in the midst of an economic crisis, and says, “Look, we’re in trouble, We’ve got a disaster on our hands. We have to privatize social security; we can’t afford healthcare; we can’t afford food stamps. We need more deregulation, more privatization. You know the thesis of the Shock Doctrine is that you need a disaster to rationalize putting through these policies.”

And it’s not just McCain who might try some kind of emergency pullback around the debt. Those of us who were hopefully watching the president from Hope, Arkansas, saw this whole story in 1992:

It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”

The narrative is from Klein again, who warns that Barack Obama has his own Chicago Boys advising his economic policies. And right on cue, Mr. Hope is announcing the bailout “will likely postpone his sweeping proposals on healthcare, education, alternative energy, and other priorities.”

Primer on the financial mess…

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Okay. No one can claim that the vortex of disappearing money is not confusing. Those of us who spend our days buying mere things with services thrown in for a bonus, are bound to be confused by the array of ways in which money, currencies, debt are bought, repackaged and sold. Not to mention the ways in which the possibility of any of those “things” fluctuating in value is then remade into a commodity in and of itself.

So, I’m assembling here (stay tuned to this post) as much background as I can on how this happened…

First up, is This American Life‘s collaboration with NPR on The Giant Pool of Money, an hour-long radio documentary on how excess cash begat a housing boom, a mortgage collapse, and the credit crunch. Ignore the bit from early this summer when they speculate that everything will only get as bad as the 1970s. As Lehman Brother’s understated last dispatch declares:

This episode of financial crisis appears to be much deeper and more serious than we and most observers thought it likely to be. And it is by no means clear that it is over.

Smart and graph-heavy expert Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer gives his take in two parts (1|2) as the crisis evolves.

The New York Times, which has had to start a blog called Freakonomics (after a book, but imagine the great grey paper running that title in stabler times), offers summaries of the crisis by David Leonhardt, “Bubblenomics,” and John Steele Gordon, “Greed, Stupidity, Delusion — and Some More Greed.”

$700B! WTF? New York to talk back to Wall Street THURSDAY

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A do-it-yourself protest is gathering to counter the rush “do something” by bailing out Wall Street. More thoughts from me soon on how “we” got into this mess, and what options there are, but here’s one place to pull the emergency brake on the train to spending $700 billion of our money to buy bad debt. Seems to me all the times we’ve asked for our money for something useful, we’re told there isn’t any…

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the “therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children, perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below). We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,” and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want, whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us. Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start!

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout
Who: Everyone!

Just in: French Opposition end support for “Occupation” of Afghanistan

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

A major crack in the Euro-USAmerican consensus…

The Taleban are fast regaining territory and the allies are losing the support of the Afghan people because of poor American tactics, said Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist parliamentary leader. “We do not accept this slide towards a war of occupation,” he told Parliament. “Our troops are manifestly lacking in equipment,” he added.

…

Public opinion was against Mr Sarkozy’s decision to send more combat troops last spring. Emotion over the August ambush has raised demands for an immediate pullout, an option now backed by more than 60 per cent of the public, polls show.

Soldiers’ families have been stirring passions with public attacks on the President and the military for sending young soldiers to their deaths. Wives of soldiers complained that they could not stand the strain of knowing that their men were in possible combat. “If he doesn’t phone by 8pm I start worrying myself sick,” said one. (more from the Times of London)

Antiwar GI’s go on Denver’s streets today

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Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization of more than 1,200 soldiers who survived tours in Iraq, is joining this week’s protests outside the Democratic National Convention. IVAW is demanding that Barack Obama sign on to their three-point vision of a responsible withdrawal:

1. The immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces from Iraq. 2. Full and adequate health care and benefits to all returning service members and veterans. 3. Reparations made to the Iraqi people for the destruction caused by the U.S. war and occupation.

One aspect of their presence is Operation First Casualty, a public re-enactment of daily life in US-occupied Iraq on the streets. You can see in this video what OFC looked like here on the streets of New York City. 

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The video is a creation of the Meerkat Media collective. Meerkat encourages collaborative video production among activists/artists, and hosts a monthly community mixer to help nurture that collaboration and show off the results.

“Eco” Opponents of Immigration Really Concerned about Brown People, Not Green Issues

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Writing in the SF Chronicle (“The changing face of America poses risks”), Californians for Population Stabilization cites recent Census projections on US racial demographics to expose his, the group’s and allegedly white America’s fears about losing control of the country.

the increasingly rapid erosion of the white population in America raises the stakes considerably no matter who wins the White House. The question transcends what the occupant of the Oval Office looks like and becomes whether whites are ready for the accelerating changes that will result in an America that no longer looks like them, sounds like them or necessarily embraces their cultural tastes.

The author, Mark Cromer is a “senior writing fellow” for CPS, a group spun off from Zero Population Growth, and descended from the efforts to use the Sierra Club to oppose immigration to the United States on ecological grounds. Perhaps the Earth isn’t exactly their top priority. With current projections showing the U.S. will no longer have a non-Hispanic white majority in my generation’s lifetime, Cromer is focused on so-called stability of racial divides:

In just over 300 of [3100 U.S. counties], ethnic minorities are now the majority population. The effect has often been the real-world elimination of hard-won racial balances, with traditional working and middle-class black and white communities effectively disappearing. In many places throughout Southern California, the white flight that marked the efforts at integration in the 1960s and early 1970s struck again in the 1990s, turning into a middle-class Anglo exodus from the state in the face of massive immigration from Mexico, helping create the first minority-majority state in the union.

In essence, he’s saying those whites who agreed to “tolerate” a certain level of black faces are not okay with black and brown people together outnumbering. The result he predicts is this…

This demographic upheaval has spawned another phenomena among the white middle class that has become iconic: the gated community.

Knowing the white folks in my own family who fled for the far suburbs when their neighborhood became “too ethnic,” I’m hesitant to dismiss this explanation. Such frankness on the anti-brown-immigrant, pro-white-flight side is very rare. But when it comes to policymaking, Cromer is calling for a racial compromise that means racial planning of immigration policy:

to begin any new round of negotiation on immigration reform with an understanding that any effort to legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants will be matched with a commensurate reduction in legal immigration into the United States, spread out over years. This would go far in ameliorating the pervasive sense among whites that America is being overrun.

Read that again. More legalization of brown people must be offset less legal immigration of brown people. The presence of people of color feels like “America” is “being overrun.” Of course not all people have this racist perspective, but important thing is to compromise between other values and racism:

Failure to seize the opportunity to build a real national consensus – one that can only be obtained through what surely will be a hard-fought compromise – is to risk further alienating a white majority that will ultimately insist on having its voice heard on these issues, one way or the other.

The question is: do racist fears deserve a seat at the table in planning our cities and policing our borders, or should we act beyond racism and let our neighbors be whoever moves into the houses and apartments next door? Fortunately the answers will come with the free decisions and political lives of my generation. I want to ask my white peers whether this represents you, your friends, or your cousins. I’m really curious, and will strive not to be judgmental:

it’s not the end result that most white Americans probably find troubling today, but rather the factors that are fueling those projections [of a white non-majority], namely unrestrained immigration and the increasingly bitter sense that they’ve had little to no say about this matter.

Oh, and if this doesn’t represent you, consider dropping a line to the writer at Mrcromer@aol.com.

Trawling for terrorists… aggressive prosecution, racial profiling, one million names

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For those of you as curious as I am how exactly the Justice Department has pursued its so-called terrorism cases (the sketchy Liberty City 7 case has been discussed here in the past), there’s now a fascinating look at one of the few “successful” prosecutions thus far: the Justice Department’s prosecution of the Detroit Sleeper Cell case. This American Life devoted an entire episode to Richard G. Convertino’s prosecution of four men of Middle Eastern descent for an alleged plot to attack Disneyland. Leaps of logic and imagining the worst appear to have combined with a zealous effort at prosecution. The case unraveled not due to any search for justice, but, it seems, due to internal Justice Department politics, which raise huge questions about public accountability. Reporter Petra Bartosiewicz’s The Best Terrorists We Could Find should make an interesting read when it comes out next year.

Meanwhile the FBI is proposing to let race and travel schedules tell them who is a terrorist, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights:

The proposed guidelines would give the domestic intelligence agency authority to investigate American citizens and residents without any evidence of criminal acts, relying instead on a “terrorist profile” that would include race, ethnicity and “travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity” to spark an initial “national security investigation.”

These proposed guidelines would also allow, according to the reports, for FBI agents to ask “open-ended questions” about the activities of Muslim or Arab Americans, or investigate them if their jobs and backgrounds match other criteria considered to be “suspect.” Once this initial investigation stage was completed, a full investigation could be opened – allowing for wiretapping of phone calls or deep investigation of personal data – all guided merely by a “terrorist profile” that openly relies on race, ethnicity, religion and community connections.

Do something about it by pressuring Attorney General Mike Mukesey.

Also, the “terrorist watch list” is now over a million names. More on who’s on it from the ACLU.

Now screening on the East Coast: In-depth look at Anti-war Shutdown of San Francisco

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SF Chron Cover on Day X
SF Chron Cover on Day X

SHUTDOWN: The Rise & Fall of Direct Action to Stop the War is an in-depth documentary exploration of a piece of the continuous struggle towards
social justice. Using the March 20, 2003 occupation and disruption of the San Francisco Financial District as a case study, the film casts a thoughtful eye on one of the most successful actions of the current anti-war movement, facilitated by Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW). Created to gain insight, inspire, and draw lessons the movie tells the story of how social justice organizers and everyday people came together to plan and shut down the financial district of a major US city.

Created by people directly involved with the organizing, SHUTDOWN utilizes on-the-street footage, news clips and interviews with 17 key participants. It is a people’s history made in support of the movement against war and
empire, aiming to galvanize resistance and further critical analysis in cities and towns throughout the country.

Join the film makers for a presentation & discussion on the future of mass direct action strategies to end the war.

**Upcoming East Coast Screenings**
Wednesday, July 09 7:00 PM
Bluestockings Booikstore, NYC
172 Allen Street between Stanton and Rivington

Thursday, July 10 7:00PM
St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality, Rochester
402 South Ave.

Saturday, July 12 7:30PM
Wooden Shoe Bookstore, Philadelphia
508 s. 5th street

Monday, July 14 6:00 – 9:00 PM
Hartford, CT
Location TBA

For a promotional flyer, preview, and more
check out the website at www.shutdownthemovie.com.
For more info or questions please send an email to daswvideo@riseup.net
[Full disclosure: I’m one of the “17 key participants” interviewed in the film]

More background on the SF antiwar movement in 2003-04: From Piece Movement to Peace Movement: San Francisco Self-Organizes to Implode Empire by Patrick Reinsborough