OWS progress report: the sound of one hand clapping

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Hope where there was cynicism; solidarity where there had been suspicion. The occupations are more effective as a launch pad than a destination. Nobody knows where this is going. It's just great to be on the move. Gary Younge - The Guardian

Winter is coming and the bitter cold of the island of Manhattan and the NYPD may finally empty Zuccotti park. What has been accomplished by the occupation of Wall Street?

Some people would say little or nothing.

They are totally wrong.

Implanting in the broad public consciousness the idea, in slogan form, of "we are the 99% facing the one percent who own everything", is the major and perhaps the most enduring achievement of the Occupy movement and its importance is capital and should not be underestimated for a minute.

The slogan, "we are the 99%" is like one of those Zen Buddhist "koans", similar to "does a dog have Buddha nature?" or "what is the sound of one hand clapping?": they are riddles that if meditated upon long and hard enough will produce the flash of intuitive understanding the Zen masters call "Satori". In this case meditating on "99%" will soon produce a complete and instantaneous intuition as to the nature of society and the firm dedication to changing it.

The idea of the 99% versus a tiny minority that dominates them is at the heart of every popular revolution that ever was. If this simple idea illuminated the consciousness of enough people it would be possible to unravel the system like pulling on a loose yarn of a sweater.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" still resonate as much at this moment as they did the day they were first pronounced, just as "the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God" does.

There are 7,000,000,000 of us now and we will survive or perish together

The idea of equality is based on our common humanity. I admit I haven't done any field work on this, but I imagine that when Her Majesty, the Queen of England, Defender of the Faith, goes to stool, the aroma of her efforts differs little from that of a humble barmaid and the most expert coprologist would have trouble telling the difference between them. And if you cared to take the trouble to make a similar analysis of Lloyd Blankfein and the person who cleans his office, you would probably obtain the same result. At bottom, people are people.

The idea of gross and exploitative inequality offends the most basic, intuitive, understanding of our species.

An entire new situation will be created by spontaneous generation if the slogan "we are the 99%" continues to resonate.

That the American middle class now support this concept is truly new and if it continues, revolutionary in every sense.

The American Dream has received an indefinite rain check and Americans don't seem prepared to tolerate that.

No-one should ever underestimate the importance of "we are the 99%". DS

Is "freedom" just another word for nothing left to lose?

David Seaton's News Links

There is a world, a universe, of pain in the following quote from the Financial Times:

If you want something to get angry about, I wouldn’t look at tuition fees. I’d look at a little graph produced by Leon Feinstein of the Institute for Education, which shows tests of cognitive development given to almost 2,500 children at the age of 22 months, 42 months, five years and 10 years. The very brightest 22-month-old working-class kids were inexorably overhauled by the very dimmest children of professional or managerial parents – apparently by the age of about seven, and emphatically by the age of 10. -  Financial Times

If this is true about Great Britain, which still has some scraps of its once fine welfare state intact, it is surely doubly or triply true of the United States of America. Has a study similar to Leon Feinstein's  even been done in America yet? I imagine so, studies like Feinstein's seem to roll off of America's back like water off a duck.

Just the other day a judge in Virginia declared president Obama's minimalist health care bill, "unconstitutional", meaning that millions of Americans are to be condemned to pain and early death, because of a document written over two hundred years ago by an assembly of wealthy men living on land stolen from the Indians (all of them) worked for them by African slaves (many of them). These men gave a lot of thought to "freedom", but I would argue that their idea of freedom was an aristocratic one, a worship of the sacred "individual" similar to the slave-based economy that fostered the philosophy of ancient Greece. Such individualism is postulated on a great mass of invisible "half-people", who may, as is often the case in America today, not even be needed or fitted for productive work, not even recruits for Marx's "reserve army of labor".

We are talking about human beings with one life to live, whose potential to contribute, to be useful to themselves and to society is being thrown, flushed, away. Common sense and common decency reel from this thought.

In America, when we talk about poor education for poor children, we may quite possibly be talking about physical hunger too. Conservative estimates put the figure at about 13 million hungry children in the USA. Here is how "Bread for the World" breaks it down:

--36.3 million people--including 13 million children--live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten 0households in the United States (11.2 percent). This is an increase of 1.4 million, from 34.9, million in 2002.

--3.5 percent of U.S. households experience hunger. Some people in these households frequently skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day. 9.6 million people, including 3 million children, live in these homes.

--7.7 percent of U.S. households are at risk of hunger. Members of these households have lower quality diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they cannot always afford the food they need. 26.6 million people, including 10.3 million children, live in these homes.

One blogger confronted with these statistics, did a little math and wrote the following:

Think about this. Recently 20 billion dollars was given to Bank of America to bail them out. With that amount every hungry child in America could eat for a year

The judge in Virginia that struck down the gelded health plan would probably call that "socialist demagoguery". Maybe it is: I'm cool with that.

Many think that nothing will happen, that America' poor of today are to degraded to react. An "anonymous" reader wrote this in response to a recent post of mine, speculating about the possibility of civil strife similar to Europe's in the USA:

It's hard for me to imagine the unemployed rebelling. It's not that people are necessarily apathetic, but they're unarmed (I mean in things like useful education, intelligent political discourse) and bombarded with jingoism and bread and circuses nonsense. And beyond the deficit in political awareness, there are the practical problems of always being cold and tired and sick and having all your energies taken up with just getting by.

I would reply that many of those soon to be out of  a job, out of their homes, with no savings, or their saving eaten up, and soon to be destitute are "armed" with an education and even armed without quotation marks and that history shows that peoples in this world even more brutalized, hungry, alienated and empty handed than today's Americans, have risen up before and rebelled. DS

Coming up empty

"I'm very sad to say that for very many people in the world, the symbol of America today is not the Statue of Liberty, which is one of the first things I saw as a child when approaching the shores of the U.S, but (the U.S. detention facility at) Guantanamo (Cuba). That legacy will take time to undo." Zbigniew Brzezinski - VOA

David Seaton's News Links
This is the first time since the pre-Voltaire/Rousseau days that the world is without any utopia at all... Let that sink in for a moment. What an immense and incalculable loss!

The Soviet Union stopped being a model or path to utopia, long before the Berlin wall came down. Most observers date its fall from grace back to 1956, a year that marked Khruschev's exposure of Stalin's crimes against humanity and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution. Certainly by the "Prague Spring" of 1968 the Soviet Union had ceased to be any one's idea of a desirable future. Now it is America's turn to let humanity down.

For better or worse, what distinguishes the USA from such dull, but user friendly countries like Canada and Australia, is its explosive mixture of the puritan ethic with the French ideas of the enlightenment. You could make an allegorical monument to the intellectual foundation of the United States of America by erecting a huge sculptural group with John Calvin embracing Jean Jacques Rousseau over the cadaver of an American Indian, with a prostrate African slave embracing their feet... on a ground littered with tools.

If you amputate this intellectual legacy and stomp upon it as heavily as the Bush administration has done, you are committing a gross cultural crime and depriving humanity, including the Chinese and the Indians, of something that belongs to all of us... Just like Michelangelo's Pietá, Hiroshige's wood cuts or Bach's fugues... or clean air.

Having a prison which violates every norm of international law and every ancient tradition of English common law, precisely on a piece of land, Guantánamo, stolen from Cuba and then lecturing the Cubans as Bush has done on, I quote, "the importance for Cuba to be a free society, a society that respects human rights and human dignity, a society that honors the rule of law." is like taking a hammer and breaking off the marble noses of Jesus and the Virigin of La Pietá.

The problem with the USA at this moment is that, because of its power, it is still the belly button of the world... and everybody is staring at it, but America just can't seem to produce, can't cut the mustard... This decadence has worldwide repercussions, because Europe seems completely neutered intellectually by now and the rising powers like India and China don't seem to have any ideological content or any project for the future other than raising the levels of carbon dioxide.

I find it a clear symptom of this emptiness, how little music, how few good films, books, paintings and essays are coming out of either Europe or the States at this point.... Compare the situation today to the fertility of 1960s and 70s.

There is a famous bird, whose name I have forgotten, that flies in ever decreasing, concentric circles, till at last it disappears up its own rectum... Is this the "black hole" we are facing? DS