Mildly Revolutionary

I've laid down in the rain before
hoping I would drown and wake up upon your shore.
But even God can't hire everyone any more.
Even God can't hire everyone any more.

-- The Mild Revolution "Working Man Blues"

In this week's sift:

• Liberal Media, Conservative Manipulation. Everybody knows that journalists are (sort of) liberal. So why does so much coverage slant to the right?
• Where Occupy Goes Next and other short notes. Should Occupy Wall Street support a legislative agenda and candidates to carry it out, or would that just corrupt and co-opt the movement? Plus: The pepper-spraying cop becomes iconic. The world's lightest material. Do conservative policies promote conservative values? And Mitt Romney gets a taste of his own medicine.
• Last week's most popular post. At last count, Now Look What You Made Me Do had 699 views, making it the sixth most popular post since the Sift moved to weeklysift.com in July.
• This week's challenge: Listen Local. If you're trying to eat local and shop local, you really ought to check out your local music scene too. (That's where I picked up this week's quote.)

Refraining From Violence

I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.

-- President Barack Obama,
January 28, 2011

In this week's sift:

• Now Look What You Made Me Do. When police attacked peaceful protesters in cities around the country this week, the media's unwillingness to "take sides" insured that Middle America would blame the protesters.
• Will the Court Throw Out Obamacare?The Supremes will rule on the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality sometime between now and June. Two conservative appellate judges just gave us a preview of what they might do.
• Paterno and the Bishops. Comparing the Penn State scandal to the Catholic Church scandal, it's clear that the public attitude towards sexual abuse has changed.
• Last (two) week's most popular post. Jobless Recoveries Are Normal Now had 322 views.
• This week's challenge. At your church, business, club, or other institutions, raise this question: Where do we do our banking? Many institutional accounts might be ineligible for credit unions, but could your institution move to a local bank more likely to keep your money in the community?

The length of this week's main articles crowded out Short Notes. As compensation, I offer this amazing photo from Iceland: The full moon illuminates a waterfall, the moonlight creates a rainbow in the spray, and between the foreground of the bow and the background of the starry night sky shine the Northern Lights.

As the Christmas carol says: "O, that we were there."

Seemingly Moral

No Sift next week. The Weekly Sift returns on November 21st.

There's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt -- above all, because it immediately makes it seem like it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

-- David Graeber
Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011)

In this week's sift:

• Jobless Recoveries are Normal Now. One very instructive graph and the disturbing conclusion you can draw from it: The fundamental nature of recessions has changed, and most of the policies we fight over have nothing to do with it.
• The Cain Scandal After a Week. Scandals just have entertainment value until they start driving your supporters away. So far that's not happening.
• The Death of the Follow-up Question and other short notes. Herman Cain's China problem, a food-industry insider defects, a true blue supporter of the family is a deadbeat dad, the iPod of government, SB-5 is going down tomorrow, the importance of the smart grid, a couple particularly stunning scenes from nature, and more.
• Last week's most popular post. Nonviolence and the Police, with 329 views.
• This week's challenge. Remember to vote in your local elections tomorrow. Also, Saturday was Bank Transfer Day, when people all over the country closed their accounts at too-big-to-fail banks and moved their money to community banks or credit unions. If you missed, it's not too late. AlterNet's Lynn Parramore gives a step-by-step.

The System's Game

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system's game. The establishment will irritate you: pull your beard, flick your face to make you fight. Because once they've got you violent then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don't know how to handle is nonviolence and humor.

-- John Lennon
[it took me forever to source this;
for the longest time I thought it must be misattributed]

In this week's sift:

• Nonviolence and the Police. If the recent police attacks on Occupy protesters either enrage or discourage you, take some time to remember how nonviolence works, and the important roles the police play in that strategy.
• It's Mitt Romney's Economy. Vast inequality? Paper profits and no jobs? It's all part of a revolution in corporate behavior that started in the 70s. And one of the major revolutionaries was Mitt Romney.
  
• Three-eyed Fish and other short notes. Somebody really did catch a three-eyed fish near a nuclear power plant. My Halloween column. Occupy Mordor's statement. Perry's flat tax. Some very pretty pictures of the northern lights. Bad Lip Reading does Herman Cain. And more.
• Last week's most popular post. For the third week in a row, Turn the Shame Around, with 352 views (7400 total). The most-viewed new post was Eliminate the Work Penalty(183). (Whenever I report such a low number, somebody reminds me that the blog page views don't count the readers who get the Sift via email or RSS feeds. That's around 300 people total, as best I can figure.)
• This week's challenge. Lots of state and local elections are happening a week from tomorrow. These elections are won on turnout, so make sure to turn out. The headline vote is in Ohio, where a No on Issue 2 will repeal the anti-union bill passed by the legislature. They could still use your help.

Vampires

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.

-- Karl Marx

In this week's sift:

• Eliminate the Work Penalty. I don't know why liberals let conservatives dominate the tax-simplification issue. The Right's regressive flat-tax idea doesn't simplify anything. But there's an obvious progressive reform that would.
• Koch-Funded Study: "Global Warming is Real". Climate-change deniers expected a new study by a blue-ribbon group of scientists from outside the usual climate-science circles to show that global-warming statistics were either a mistake or a fraud. Instead, it provided independent verification of their accuracy.
• Shoot-out at the MSNBC Corral. Friday, Rachel Maddow looked straight into the camera, addressed the Koch brothers by name, and told them to "man up" and face her rather than go after her staff.
• Gracious Statesmanship and other short notes. Why can't Republicans be as gracious about President Obama's successes as Democrats were in 2003? We have Blackwater to thank for getting our troops out of Iraq. Meteor Blades says that the Iraq War was a crime, not a mistake. Still no End of the World. A vertical forest in Milan. Bra-burning in Japan. Where Occupy Wall Street has already succeeded. OWS humor. And Bad Lip Reading's Mitt Romney video.
• Last week's most popular post. For the second week in a row, Turn the Shame Aroundgot the most views (1400 last week, 7000 total). The most popular new post was Suck It Up, with around 350 views.
• Expand Your Vocabulary: metaphor shear. It's the moment when a sudden confrontation with reality makes you realize that you've been thinking inside a bogus metaphor. Anybody who takes a serious look at economics is going to experience a lot of metaphor shears.

Manipulations

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

– Eric Hoffer

In this week's sift:

• Suck It Up: Using Our Pride Against Us. Last week I talked about how the economic system uses our shame against us. This week I focus on the flip side of that phenomenon: pride.
• A View From Dewey Square. I visited Occupy Boston the afternoon after the police had dropped by. Too bad we missed each other.
• Blood and Teeth on the Floor and other short notes. Molly Erdman's parody captures everything I love about Elizabeth Warren. I couldn't make myself watch the Republican debate, so I let other people fact-check it. Plus, I whole bunch of other fact-checking and lie-exposing about Occupy Wall Street and the economy.
• Last week's most popular post. Turn the Shame Around (5700 views at last count) had the second most popular first week in weeklysift.com history.
• This week's challenge.Woody Tasch presents an interesting challenge: What if ordinary people who were doing well enough to have savings stopped investing it all in financial institutions and instead invested in local businesses they can see and use and understand? Especially in local food enterprises: "I'm talking about investing with your friends and neighbors in small organic farms, grain mills, creameries, small slaughterhouses, seed companies, compost companies, restaurants that source locally, butchers and bakers and, sure, a bee's-wax candlemaker or two. Take 1 percent of your money out of the stock market and put it into food hubs, community kitchens, community markets, school gardens, niche organic brands, makers of sustainable agricultural inputs, and more." Doing this right is more than a one-week challenge, but how would you start?

Public Shamelessness

The Weekly Sift has moved to weeklysift.com

Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.

-- Benjamin Franklin, Sayings of Poor Richard

In this week's sift:

• Turn the Shame Around. It took Herman Cain to teach me what Occupy Wall Street is about: casting off shame and putting it where it belongs. The Powers That Be would have us be ashamed that we weren't good enough to crack the top 1%. But what is really shameful is an economy that only works for the top 1%.
• What Kind of King Do You Want To Be? Wednesday I had to explain to a teen-ager why the news is important. I told him that in a democracy the People are King, and the children are in training to be King. Whatever we need to know to be a good King, that defines what news is. And when we're a bad King, people die.
• Palin's Big Con and other short notes. Did Sarah Palin bluff running for president just to con money out of her fans? Jon Stewart thinks so. Stephen Colbert apologizes to a ham that looks like Karl Rove. The secret "kill list" for American citizens. Hank Williams Jr., Scott Brown, and Rick Perry deal with PR problems. Occupy Sesame Street. And more.
• Last week's most popular post. It was a slow week. For the second week in a row, the short notes were the top new post. The Brilliance/Pointlessness of Occupying Wall Street and other short notes garnered 127 views. Meanwhile, Six True Things Politicians Can't Say (from September 19) got 193 views. At 67K, it has accounted for about half of the page views since this blog moved to weeklysift.com in July.
• Expand Your Vocabulary. A new feature, which will alternate with This Week's Challenge. This week I want to call your attention to the term composition fallacy: assuming that what works for one person will work if everybody does it. (The classic example is standing up to get a better view at a football game.) In politics, composition fallacies are used to make structural problems in the economy look like individual moral failings. One unemployed person can network and pound the pavement and retrain until he finds a new job. Does it follow that unemployment would go away if all the unemployed tried harder? No.