When Occupation Is Therapy, Talk Is Not Cheap

I HAVE NEVER been fond of protests. I was inculcated into lefty protest culture at a young age, and it seemed to mean belonging to a marginal subgroup yelling irrelevantly, much like when I had to go to Lakers games and root against the Lakers.

I did not expect, then, that my heart would warm to the Occupy movement as it has. Here in Oakland things have gotten out of hand every possible way, and the local news is often painful. But I also got to watch news chopper footage of the Port with an ant swarm of Oaklanders, publicly agreeing on something quite important. Precisely what that thing is I can't say any more than they can, and I think that is fine. Not everything is articulable, after all.

The agendalessness criticism not only misses but subverts the point. Why must it always be anti-government nuts and right wing media screamers who get to be generally aggrieved, while lefty poindexters are supposed to tiptoe into the halls of power with their briefcases full of bullet-pointed 'demands' in a sensible font?

Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker:

Yes, O.W.S. has 'changed the conversation.' But talk, however necessary, is cheap. Ultimately, inevitably, the route to real change has to run through politics.

And for the very first time I disagreed with him. In a world where Congressional Republicans are three hundred-pound brutes in pads who look plumply ineffectual but prove startlingly strong, and are single-minded enough to block our gallant, lean-muscled president from passing even a bill saying please let's at least keep teachers and firefighters...general shouting may be just the thing.

Rather than being based upon an agenda, Occupy is a manifestation of a feeling, one we all sort of have. When we see those protesters out there, we know what they mean. They don't have to spell it out. That they should make particular demands is great--like financial tranfers tax, awesome. But to focus exclusively on such would be a sign not of maturity but of timid self-limitation.

Occupy is a fresh wind blown in. The recent past has seen America awash in wealth worship. The vast cultural force that is Entertainment News scolds against hating on the rich. It's so flippin cool to be rich! cheer the Entertainment Newspeople, out of whose whitened smile mouths come terrible things. But hateration is about envy. The 99% solidarity ethos is about anger. Anger over wrongness.

Wealth can indeed be unethical, I believe. Hard core 1%-er wealth is inevitably built others' backs. The work of armies of immigrant gardeners and nannies and housekeepers hums along in the background. Regular people turn off lights when they leave rooms, while the fabulously wealthy keep a heated pool at a third home. And of course there's the elaborately choreographed fucking-over of other people that led to the 2008 financial meltdown.

There actually are limited resources in this world, and when they are allocated preposterously it's many ways helpful to yell about it. Even as cold and cops blow Occupy adrift, it does something.

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Paul Krugman Is Driving Me Insane

We get it, Krugman. You, with all your pre-recession Chicken Littling, were right. Must feel pre-tty fri-ckin sweet.

Oh, and thanks a lot, Nobel Committee. You've created a monster. Now everything he says, he says with the arrogance and the imprimatur of a *Nobel-prize winning* economist.

Ever since his ultimate vindication--the sky, and the Dow, have indeed fallen--Krug feels justified, if not downright giddy, shitting all over everything for all time. He has particular contempt for Bernanke's 'green shoots' comment, on which he rained disdain in two columns plus a blog post.

Green shoots? The phrase itself sickens Scroogeman, with its overtones of fresh hope and delicate vernal regrowth. Blech! Don't you just want to rip those shoots right out?

He has become the world's most cantankerous groundhog, scrambling back into his underground lair with joyous contempt. Winter will be here forEVAH HAhahaHA!

"Even in the Great Depression," he taunts in another post, "things didn't [Montgomery Burns fingers-tapping gesture] head down [moohoohahaha] all the time." Naturally this was on a week when things were looking up, and any buzz needed to be promptly smited.

If we do have Depression II, imagine what it will do for Krugman. On the one hand, the devastation of 25% unemployment. But on the other, he called it!

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Paradox of Thrift

Thrift has many paradoxes, the foremost being that if everyone is thrifty, the economy hurts. (The economy being an obligate fiend for consumer spending.) These days I like to go around saying, to anyone who talks about trying to cut back on $3 lattes or $30 sweaters, "In this economy, who can afford it?" (And I'm sort of saying it ironically, although of course no one would ever know that; I have to sometimes indulge my urge to be unnecessarily weird.) You could call the thriftward shift irrational, since the recession hasn't made us all suddenly broker. In fact, Dean Baker has pointed out that our real wages have actually gone up as prices have dropped.

Of course layoffs force some to cut back, and the threat thereof makes us all legitimately cautious. But who says we're rational? (Oh right, economists do.) We also react to the ethereal panic and want to hunker down. The entire economy can be like Wall Street in its self-fulfilling expectations. We think the economy is going to suck, and we thereby cause it to suck harder. Each individual household is responsibly protected, but the economy itself become the collective goat no one wants to feed.

My personal P of T is that the recessional spirit of the times makes me want to thriftify, even though my household income is at historic highs (meaning, middle-class eligible.) It suddenly seems cool to be plucky and resourceful, steadily defrosting my bricks of summer tomato sauce. Whereas in the boom economy, when I was boom broke, I had to make periodic pilgrimages to Payless for some knockoff insensible shoes, just so as not to feel left out. We are social animals, I suppose, listing toward the zeitgeist.

Yet another paradox is that thrift is good, but an Ascetic Mission is bad. (You might be on an Ascetic Mission if...you feel wrong paying $1.75 bus fare when it's raining but you could have biked.) Many forms of thrift are gratifying and fun, but going too far can set up a landslide of thwarted consumer desire. When I heard this story on NPR, I was totally with the newly poor and unemployed heroine, Gigi, as she described her excised spa treatments and her switch to outdoor exercise and her homemade clothes. But then she said she had "downgraded [her] coffee" from Starbucks to Yuban. This reeked of Ascetic Mission. I am a Peet's girl myself, and I appreciate the symbolism of ditching the morning Starbucks, but Gigi: there are less drastic measures. Like good coffee beans at bulk prices. And if that latte is so very sweet, why not make a weekly ceremony of it? The best kind of thrift, after all, makes us really enjoy the good things.



And P.S. Who's got the last laugh now? Could it perchance be the crazy lady who grows vegetables and keeps chickens and makes soap, and sometimes uses the eggs from the chickens as an ingredient in the soap. Oh wait, that's me! Ha! (That was me, having the last laugh.)

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Obama Doubt, Multipliers

I kind of love when people freak out about Obama. The cycles of rising hope and creeping doubt are as predictable as moon phases, and it's fun to watch columnists and pundits churn through another cranky round of PMS, knowing Obama will stay steady and not give a fuck.

A glance at NYT op-eds tells the tale. There's MoDowd making a point of roughing up the president, as she does periodically to prove her crush is not blinding. David Brooks' honeymoon is over--but then he cycles through the Obemotions so fast that no one cares anymore. Paul Krugman secretly resents Obama; read between the lines. (Is it because he's not the president's favorite bearded elfconomist?)

Doubts about Obama have a strong multiplier effect--which is what a stimulus plan is supposed to have. In addition to following the Obamalove tides, a recession-era amusement which I invite you to enjoy is watching Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and his frat brothers in both houses contorting into pretzels trying not to ratify Keynesian economic theory and still avoid blame for national ruin.

Pence cried about the stimulus plan last week, "It included wasteful government spending that has nothing to do with creating jobs!!!!" (My quadruple exclamation.)

Conservatives are into listing things in the stimulus plan that they think are ludicrous. From a CBS News column: "Shipyards get $100 million in handouts; $400 million is diverted to 'farm ownership loans.' [Yeah, whatever that means.] Another $200 million goes to computer centers at community colleges... NASA and the National Science Foundation receive $2.3 billion."

Now I'm not going to go into how farm-ownership, community colleges and science are sort of hate-proof. Because that really isn't the point.

The real point is, it's a stimulus plan. You spend money on stuff; that's how it works. But Republicans pull this disingenuous shit, like, Condoms! schools! art! (ew, art is grossest of all)--what does any of that have to do with creating jobs?

Government spending on any damn thing creates jobs. It's money going out into the economy, buying goods and services and so necessitating hiring.

The hirees then have income to spend, even if they earn that income testing condoms or, worse, educating children. And that money goes out into the economy => more demand for goods and services => more hiring, more income => yet more demand for goods and services, and so on. The alternative is to invite Depression II by allowing the downward spiral of decreased consumer spending and decreased income to continue unabated. And there you have the Clebilicious Pocket Keynes.

The problem for Republicans is that if they acknowledge government spending stimulates the economy in this way, they forsake everything they ever said about the crystal clear purity of the free market. (They also hate anything they can call 'entitlement.' Poor people act so fucking entitled.)
Their pretzely solution is to pretend tax cuts are a stimulus, because tax cuts get the Reagan stamp of approval. This fails on two counts. Republicans get caught acknowledging the concept of economic stimulus, and they also promote an inferior stimulus mechanism. Spending is what stimulates the economy; only a portion of tax cuts become spending, not the whole. When government spends directly, all of it (duh) becomes spending. It's like not believing in birth control but deciding to use some stupid contraceptive sponge just in case.

And about that other downward spiral, in Obama confidence, I agree with Bob Herbert that Obama is underestimated all too often. I think his stock still has room to climb.

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Beards

CAN YOU find the bearded rapper among the bearded economists? (Don't be racist!) And can you name all five?


BONUS QUESTIONS:
1. Which beard won the Nobel Prize this week?
2. Which beard, if any, is a gentile? (If you think Jews are money-changers, that's anti-Semitic!)

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