I think we will never have an honest discussion about race or about whether gestures -- verbal, images and physical -- imply white superiority over people of color. I just don't think it's possible because no matter how hard one might try to keep the discussion neutral, it just degenerates into a defensive, angry pile on the floor.

Megyn Kelly was just breathless and wider-eyed than ever on Monday over the mere suggestion that anyone could possibly think Arizona governor Jan Brewer's finger in the face of the President and disrespect shown to the office, much less the man, could possibly be construed by anyone as racist.

Enter David Webb, creator of Tea Party 365 and BigGovernment.com contributor, who takes a dim view of anyone calling Brewer's contrived gesturing racist. Jehmu Greene rounds out the panel for Megyn, where they hash out the issues.

Greene has a strong point when she points out that whether or not it was overt racism (she doesn't believe Brewer is racist), it had racial undertones that played out for people viewing that image. Combined with Brewer's claim that the conversation left her feeling 'intimidated', there's no question that the dog whistles were sounding loud.

David Webb is Andrew Breitbart in the body of an African-American man. He loves meanness, just like Breitbart does. It's not enough to dislike someone if you're Webb. Dislike is too kind. It must be hateful and mean, spewed with sneer and squinty eyes. I saw him give Sally Kohn a hard time last week, and today he actually managed to get the usually unflappable Jehmu Green close to livid with his repeated references to the "black mafia" and denial that there could possibly be racist overtones to the Brewer incident.

Webb leads off his argument with this question: "Did Jan Brewer's finger have the N-word written on it? That would have made it racist." He follows that up with this: "Or is this a case where the President and his acolytes need to call out the Black Mafia, which is what they are, to turn it into racism?"

I understand the need on these 24/7 networks to be outrageous in order to garner attention, but these comments were stomach-turning to me, not only for their obtuseness, but for the sheer joy he gets in trying to criminalize President Obama and other respected members of the black community like Greene. The fact that he, too, is black doesn't give him free license to spew racism on the airwaves, even if he thinks it does.

This exchange is particularly difficult, starting at about 3 minutes in.

Continue reading »

The Fox & Friends kids' reaction to the Stacey Hessler story was the same sort of predictable nonsense you'd expect from people paid primarily to get outraged over the latest liberal/marxist attack on America. The weekend edition though just might be outdoing their weekday counterparts in hysteria.

According to them, Hessler is (a) an unfit mother of four young kids for leaving them behind in Florida as she lives on the street in Manhattan; (b) who probably wasn't 'putting out' for her banker husband anyway (hmm...oh, nevermind); and is now (c) shacked up with some young waiter from Brooklyn.

BRIGGS: I want to reiterate what Ali mentioned, this 38 year old Hessler, mother of four says, “Military people leave their families all the time, so why should I feel bad? I'm fighting for a better world.” That is more disgusting than any of the filth down there on Wall Street. Equating what she's doing with military service, Joe Biden would be embarrassed by that.

MORRIS: Her husband also works for a bank.

CAMEROTA: He's a banker. He works at a bank.

MORRIS: Why not just protest at home?

CAMEROTA: Maybe she has...

MORRIS: Yeah, maybe that's been part of the problem.

CAMEROTA: Her husband banker used to work at Bank of America and now works for a local bank in Florida. She's clearly having a mid-life crisis of some sort to leave your kids. And she said that she doesn't plan to go home. Actually she's going to stay there for the duration.

MORRIS: So good. A role model.

BRIGGS: Mother of the year.

Jonah Goldberg at The National Review used that as an epithet first. This "unfit mother" though seems awfully committed to her kids. From her Facebook Wall:

I have a plea for my friends. I need your help and support. I want to stay occupying wall st. I feel my presence is very important in the support of non-violent communication and sanitation(keeping the park clean) I am willing to work tirelessly on these efforts. I need help with getting my kids to activities and stepping up with the things I help lead, such as one small village, jr roller derby, bee-attitudes, 4H, for his glory co-op. Please respond if you are willing to help my kids so I can stay here and help this movement. I have a train ticket for tomorrow that I want to change but I need to know I have support from my community back home for my family in order to change the ticket.

Their fantasies run amuck they then turn to an Associated Press poll that they say says 56% of Americans don't support the Occupy Wall Street protests. Except that poll says no such thing. It asks:

OWS1. Do you consider yourself a supporter of the Wall Street protests, or are you not a supporter of the Wall Street protests?

....which is an entirely different question than asking if you agree or disagree with the goals of the movement, or if you oppose, as a recent Gallup survey asked. For comparisons' sake, a recent Time poll had only 6% of the respondents saying they considered themselves members or followers of the Tea Party. But such is life in Foxland, where facts really don't matter if you have another narrative to sell.

Continue reading »

You just knew when the NY Post ran this story the rightwing would be vilifying her in no time flat, and they haven't disappointed. The video from the NY Post above is a fairly straightforward telling of her story, despite the blaring title. Their reporting since then has been anything but.

A married mother of four from Florida ditched her family to become part of the raggedy mob in Zuccotti Park -- keeping the park clean by day and keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn.

“I’m not planning on going home,” an unapologetic Stacey Hessler, 38, told The Post yesterday.
“I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m here indefinitely. Forever,” said Hessler, whose home in DeLand sits 911 miles from the tarp she’s been sleeping under.

Hessler -- who ironically is married to a banker -- arrived 12 days ago and planned to stay for a week, but changed her plans after cozying up to some like-minded radicals, including Rami Shamir, 30, a waiter at a French bistro in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

She swears she’s not romantically involved with her new friend.

The Village Voice has been keeping track of some of the pejorative terms being thrown around by the likes of the NY Post, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh:

The most incredible part of all of this, according to people who find all of this incredible, is that her husband is a banker. The odds! Fox News, who picked up the Post's story, says that Hessler is "keeping herself warm at night with the help of a young waiter from Brooklyn."

The following are a series of colorful terms and adjectives from the Post article used to describe Hessler, who will clearly inspire your wife to leave you and live in a park with a Brooklyn waiter:

"Hippie homemaker"
"Self-described 'vegan freak'"
"Into dreadlocks, roller derby and 'unschooling' her kids"
"Acts like a self-obsessed college sophomore"
"Middle-aged flower child"
Boasted of "California-style beliefs."

California-style beliefs, we assume, are beliefs about cucumber, crabmeat, and avocado.

Support Stacey Hessler Facebook page

via Gothamist:

Occupy Wall Street protesters have been hard at work trying to capture the hearts and minds of the middle class, Middle America, and mid-level talk show hosts. But now it seems they're turning their attentions toward a block with slightly less voting power: children. Tomorrow, there will be a Family Sleepover at Zuccotti Park for the sake of "our children’s futures."

The event, hosted by Parents For Occupy Wall Street, will take place from 4 p.m., Friday until 11 a.m. the following Saturday morning. It was supposed to happen last Friday, except a little stand-off with the NYPD and a last minute cleaning cram got in the way.

Below, check out the announcement in full

Liberty Square, NY — A second try.

The parent founded and run group, “Parents for Occupy Wall Street,” will be hosting a Family Sleepover, from 4 PM, Friday, October 21st until 11 AM the following Saturday morning—a second try after being forced to cancel their planned sleepover last weekend because of a threatened eviction. With the Family Sleepover rescheduled for this weekend, parents and families in the greater New York City area are excited to demonstrate their support for this growing movement creating real change for our children’s futures.

Occupy Wall Street is a place for everyone, including families. At the Family Sleepover, families and children will find arts and crafts, a children’s music sing along, a pizza party, and a bed time story. With the help of various teacher and parent groups, such as the “School for the 99%,” and the Occupy Wall Street Outreach team, the Family Sleepover will have a sectioned off Child and Family Only area at Liberty Plaza.

http://www.parentsforoccupywallst.com/

Chris Hedges in Times Square, October 15, 2011

On October 15th Occupy TVNY met with Pullitzer prize-winning author and journalist Chris Hedges in Times Square, New York City where tens of thousands of people assembled on a global day of action. Chris shares his feelings on where the Occupy movement has come from and where it is heading.

Journalist Chris Hedges pulls no punches in his recent article in TruthDig, "A Movement Too Big to Fail".

There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant. Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.

Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises. These protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional “liberal” establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. And it was deeply moving to watch the corporate rats scamper back to their holes on Wall Street. It lent a whole new meaning to the phrase “too big to fail.”

Liberals will find passages such as the following insulting or infuriating. Or both.

The corporate state forced the liberal class to join in the nation’s death march that began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Liberals such as Bill Clinton, for corporate money, accelerated the dismantling of our manufacturing base, the gutting of our regulatory agencies, the destruction of our social service programs and the empowerment of speculators who have trashed our economy. The liberal class, stripped of power, could only retreat into its atrophied institutions, where it busied itself with the boutique activism of political correctness and embraced positions it had previously condemned.

Although openly contemptuous and disdainful of the "faux liberal reformers", as he calls them, Hedges has nothing but unabashed admiration and praise for the Occupiers.

What took place early Friday morning in Zuccotti Park was the first salvo in a long struggle for justice. It signaled a step backward by the corporate state in the face of popular pressure. And it was carried out by ordinary men and women who sleep at night on concrete, get soaked in rainstorms, eat donated food and have nothing as weapons but their dignity, resilience and courage. It is they, and they alone, who hold out the possibility of salvation. And if we join them we might have a chance.

This interview actually took place last week on the CBC but I just got around to seeing it. Seems they have A-holes up there as well, even on their public broadcasting network. Chris Hedges is probably one of America's best journalists and doesn't suffer fools gladly. At the end of the interview he vowed it would be his last one with that CBC show.

The exchanges between the crypto-fascist venture capitalist/investor O'Leary and Hedges grabbed most of the attention, but Hedges' simple but lucid replies to those questions the media seems to have the most trouble with ("What does OWS stand for?", "Aren't they all just dirty hippies?", "What do they want?") are instructive and persuasive.

via the blog Creekside:

Yesterday CBC continued its ongoing snide, dismissive, and condescending coverage of the third week of Occupy Wall Street with an interview with author/activist/Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges on its "inside the business world" show, the Lang and O'Leary Exchange. After the by now obligatory opening protestations of puzzlement as to what OWS is all about - "low budget" and "pretty nothing burgers" as blowhard host Kevin O'Leary described it - he then responded to Hedges' patient explanation by calling him "a left wing nutbar".

The transcript begins a few minutes into the 7 minute clip and you can skip ahead past the introduction if you like. (Note: Hedges wasn't actually in Canada for this interview, as he was about to speak at OccupyDC in Washington.)

O'Leary : So what exactly is everyone complaining about? And also give me a sense of how much momentum this movement has because it's pretty nothing burgers so far - just a few guys, guitars. Nobody knows what they want - they can't even name the names of the firms that they're protesting against - very weak, low budget.

Hedges : I wouldn't agree with that assessment at all. They pulled thousands of people into the street last night and here in Washington when everyone marched past the Bank of America, they were shouting Shame! Shame! Shame! They know the names of these firms and they know what these firms have done not only to the American economy but to the global economy, and the criminal class who runs them.

Fill-in for Lang : Well Kevin made this point that nobody knows what they want. What do you say to that? We know that this is a very diverse group, there are many different agendas at play ... what is the sense you have of what this movement would like to see happen?

Hedges : They know precisely what they want ; they want to reverse the corporate coup that's taken place in the US and rendered the citizenry impotent and they won't stop until that happens and frankly if we don't break the back of corporations, we're all finished anyway since we're rapidly trashing the ecosystem on which the human species depends for survival. This is literally a fight for life - it's that grave, it's that serious. Corporations, unfettered capitalism, as Karl Marx understood, is a revolutionary force - it commodifies everything - human beings, the natural world which it exploits for profit until exhaustion and collapse. The bottom line is we don't have much time left - we are on the cusp of perhaps another major banking crisis in Europe, defaults in Greece, followed by Spain, Portugal. There's been no restrictions, no regulations on Wall Street - they've looted the US Treasury, they've played all the games that they were playing before and we're about to pay for it all over again.

O'Leary : Listen don't take this the wrong way but you sound like a left wing nutbar. If you want to shut down every corporation, every bank, where are you going to get a job? Where are you gonna work? Where's the economy gonna go?

Hedges : Corporations don't produce anything and

O'Leary : Oh really!?

Hedges : No. Financial corporations on Wall Street

O'Leary : Are you driving a car to the protest?

Hedges : They are speculators. I'm talking about the financial institutions like Goldman Sachs. They don't manufacture, they don't make anything - they gamble, they use money, and they believe falsely that money is real as we dismantle our manufacturing base and send jobs over the border to Mexico and finally into the embrace of China.

Fill-in for Lang : Well I see that you and Kevin could get into an actually huge argument here.

Hedges : Well you know I don't usually go on shows where people descend to character assassination. if you want to discuss issues, that's fine but this sounds like Fox News and I don't go on Fox News. Either you discuss the issues and ... look, you have had very eloquent writers - people like John Ralston Saul in Canada who have laid this out with incredible lucidity - and to somehow attack this critique by calling someone a nutcase engages in the kind of trash talk that's polluted the corporate airwaves.

More transcripts below the fold:

Continue reading »