Around town I’ve been seeing flyers and signs for quite awhile saying the above, with “vote YES on Feb 7th”.  At the grocery store, in the parking lots of various banks, restaurants, etc.  There were even some in the local brewpub.  I asked the guy at the bar about it, in between swigs of a rather damn good rye IPA, and he mentioned they supported it because of funding for a downtown trolley.  Not much more detail, but it’s not exactly a shock that a bar would heartily approve of something that translates to more people being able to come there without driving, y’know? I just had to find out more about this.

Here’s the gist: the “yes” vote would increase the city sales tax by a half-percent (it is currently 7.75%…) over the next ten years.  The funds from that are supposed to go towards a series of projects (here‘s a list of the projects on the site of the ones promoting this) determined by the city council and an “Economic Development Tax Board”.

Total projected cost: $40,000,000.  Now what I have to say about it:

• My primary concern is the funding of it. Why a sales tax?  Frankly I wonder what the hell has been done with the money they’re already getting from the current rate.  For the amount I get smacked every time I replenish my fridge, I would have expected more improvement than I’ve seen.
• This sounds like the local scale version of a stimulus plan, the idea being (as with the state and federal level) that since people aren’t consuming as much as they were, government must fill the void.  Clearly this ignores reasons why people aren’t consuming (…lack of money, anyone?  Bueller?), and on the local level due to the aforementioned funding mechanism directly makes what people are already buying more expensive.
• The main backers of the plan (who also would be part of the “Economic Development Tax Board”) are the local Board of Realtors & Chamber of Commerce.  So, whose issues do you think would be dealt with first?  The structure of this, even if there are projects that you think would be useful, makes the transparency questionable.  I imagine people voting for what they think is a simple infrastructure upgrade and ending up with an open-ended business handout.
• Just how “temporary” is a tax, ever, in practice?

I read some letters to the editor that were in the paper about this.  Some of them characterized Jefferson City as a “sleepy, government town stuck in the 50′s”.  First of all, yes it is a relatively small town for a state capital, but anyone going on the “stuck in the 50′s” line I humbly invite to spend some time here.  I am not liable in the event that you claw your eyes out.  Second…have you thought through the logic of citing such as a complaint when your response is a government-business partnership and higher taxes?

Though there are a few things mentioned that could be positive detached from the concept as a whole, the funding idea is ridiculous and the planning can’t be trusted.  Mark me down as a No.

So…who’s surprised I brought up a local issue here?

You all remember the old saw that Americans are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal? It means that lots of Americans say they’re conservative and like to believe they’re conservative, but when it comes to specific government programs they turn out to be pretty liberal. They like Medicare and Social Security and federal highways and disaster relief and unemployment insurance and all that. Try to cut these things and you learn very quickly just how operationally liberal most Americans are.

Two assumptions are being made here.  Let’s deal with the first: by pointing out that people tend to like these types of spending in the context of calling them operationally liberal, Kevin is assuming that people approve of such programs for the same reasons he does, which amount to the typical “Good Government” blather.  Yet, if most of this support were due to such a view of the State, then wouldn’t people express much less negativity about it when asked than they do?  Polls showing distrust in the government are so regular that it has become cliche. To assume that this support comes from the same place that Kevin’s does is to obliterate the distinction he himself makes between ideology and practice.  From my reading of public sentiment, it’s more like this:

• Social Security: The gap between wage growth for most people and the cost of living makes actual savings nearly a pipe dream.  The learned dependency due to this has merged with the phasing out of automatic pensions after retirement as part of the reversal of the corporate-paternalism deal (“Big concentrations of the means of production are a-ok long as our insurance & retirement are paid”) that folks like Michael Moore and Ed Schultz wax so romantic over.  Also, not insignificantly…well damn, the tax is taken out of their paychecks anyway, they want that money back.
• Medicare: Factors that make health care artificially expensive in the first place hit the elderly even harder since they tend to have more severe and/or chronic conditions.  The capacity of others to assist outside of government has been nullified due to the above mentioned savings problem, and (again) they pay the tax so they want their money back.
• Federal highways: This is How Things Are Done for most people today, alternatives are generally not thought of and the negatives (eminent domain, the inevitable carving up of poorer neighborhoods to make way for a bypass, tying of highway funds to obedience on other policies) get shoved aside.  Besides, once you build them, they’re going to need maintenance — unless you enjoy potholes and driving over bridges that feel like they’re going to collapse.
• Disaster relief: Once again, How Things Are Done for most people.  Also, it’s an issue that tends to not even come up unless in the midst of a disaster.
• Unemployment insurance: See above with regard to savings. Oh, btw: they pay for it anyway, why not get it back when they need it?  That’s what insurance is.

There’s nothing particularly “conservative” about any of this. Nor is there anything “liberal” about it either.  Generally it’s common sense as deployed within a constrained range of choices.

So, that assumption has been dealt with as unfounded.  The other one is that liberalism is merely a matter of favoring tax-funded benefits (the opposite assertion, that conservatism is anti-spending, is already rendered laughable by the comments and actions of even right-wing opinion leaders, so it’s not even worth focus).  For someone who identifies himself with that “side”, such a view comes off as the philosophical equivalent to a self-inflicted bullet wound.   Where his post was linked, a reply by Tim Kowal taking offense to the cited “old saw” that started all this, I contributed the following comment:

Between the remarks about elderly benefits and the vitriol that they throw at anyone on their “side” ideologically who questions the commitment of the party they tend to support to civil liberties and global restraint, I find myself wanting to ask: How small is American liberalism? Is it really just Managerialism + Medicare?

Consider how much, outside of the Greenwald/FireDogLake faction, the focus has basically been reactive, very narrowly construed towards maintenance and defense of programs from decades ago, meanwhile reminiscing on a mythical golden age.  Pointing out that the period being thought of coincided with things that no one within a mile of capital-L Liberalism should approve of and asking why that’s the case gets you excommunicated.

Tim refers to this for a different reason, being a conservative and all, asserting basically that liberals “won”.  I’d say it’s more accurate to say that the state won.  Winners don’t normally eat themselves.

Coming up so close behind Romney in Iowa he could smell his sweat has former senator Santorum feeling rather cocky and full of himself.  As a result, his initial penetration into New Hampshire, seeking to fill the gap in the polls, involves making people come to grips with his throbbing passion over gays.  So far it’s looking very sloppy, with more friction than he expected:

As he campaigns among the state’s notoriously grumpy electorate, presidential candidate Rick Santorum has spent as much time arguing with prospective voters over same-sex marriage as he has asking them for their support. [...]

“I have a question and it’s about gay people,” asked the first man to be called on at a Santorum town hall meeting here today. “They are children of God too. Do they have the right to marriage? Do they have the right to serve in the military? Should they be treated like any other citizen? Under your presidency, would you protect their rights or would you diminish them?”

Santorum answered that he doesn’t believe marriage or serving in the military are inalienable rights, but “privileges,” adding, “It’s not discrimination not to grant privileges.”

Clearly, Santorum never had a chance of winning this man’s affection.

Undeterred, he sashayed on down the road to press the flesh at a college prep school in Dublin, where the young students came at him with hard questions, prompting Santorum to unleash his passions with a particular thrust:

“You’re robbing children of something that they need, they deserve, they have a right to. They have a right to be know and be loved by their dad or their mom,” he said. “That’s what marriage is about. It’s not about two people loving each other.

“There’s nothing hateful about that. There’s something true about that.”

Rick doesn’t seem to realize how deep he went with this.  He may think he’s simply smearing gays, but unzip this firm statement and you come to see it spreads much further, covering not only the gays that Santorum has his mind so focused on but also adults in positions such as being single parents, or couples that don’t particularly want children.

Ironically for how he approaches the climax of his view on this, to spit that marriage is not about love is to split the meaning of such a connection, hardening it into little more than a three-way contract.  For a stiff expression of values to shrivel down to the cold unloving fist of government…that really screws any semblance of sincerity.

To call with a straight face, in these times, for the state to serve as the hand of god is not a ballsy move.  It is mere demonstration one is not using their head.

[A]s many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiers’ appeal. The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration.

The “liberal” journalists he refers to are Dem partisans, who obviously aren’t going to acknowledge any order to anything that doesn’t funnel itself to Donkey Crip allegiance and the state.  That he follows this by outright stating the similarity between their view of the protests and that of conservatives — while simultaneously acting as if the Democratic Party embraced the entire thing — shows his real intention doesn’t go far beyond the basic political.  Note the claim that “mental cases” are a significant category to the protests; the insinuation is that agitation against the status quo is an inherent mark of insanity — the sane citizen simply does what they are told regardless.

A smaller group of conservatives, however, believes the occupiers are onto something. The banks do have too much power. Wages have been stagnant. The problem, these conservatives say, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t really know what to do about any of the problems it laments. So this smaller group of conservatives, along with the majority of liberals, is more than happy to supply the occupiers with an economic agenda.

I’d like to hear from some of these folks he describes, because other than the types that embrace Ron Paul — who are permanently on the verge of being evicted from the party — I haven’t witnessed that animal.

Matt then brings up the specter of revolutionary anarchism…and traces it to a speech before the U.S. congress.  Really.  Don’t believe me?  Look:

It was February 25, 1825, and the U.S. Capitol was under occupation​—​sort of. Robert Owen, a successful Welsh businessman and socialist, wasn’t standing in the Rotunda holding up a placard. He was addressing a joint session of Congress from the dais of the House of Representatives. President James Monroe and president-elect John Quincy Adams were present for at least a portion of the speech. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, a history of socialism, the elected officials were mesmerized by Owen’s plans.

This would be like claiming that the technique of barbecuing meat was invented by vegans.  Of what use is the government to an anarchist?

Describing the kind of society Robert Owen desired, the “anarchism” root hits a major snag since it’s clearly regimented up the wazoo, based on the idea that utopia is possible if things are designed carefully enough.  The obsession with planning cited in Owens’ example takes the view of anarchy Matt has in mind and throws it against a wall, looking more like the end result of the elites-will-figure-it-out logic behind the modern state as we know it.  Even leaving aside the contradiction inherent in pointing at pseudo-scientific rigorous design of a society and yelling “anarchy!” like how a child may claim that anything with four legs is a dog, there’s a question available for Matt about how he can define as more idealistic a view that no man can be trusted to rule another in comparison with “so’n'so can hold the gun because…shut up”.

Further into the utopianism swamp, the following comes out:

When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. Economics is a zero-sum game. One man holds possessions at the expense of another. For another nineteenth-century French utopian, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, property was theft. (emphasis mine)

Nice job leaving out what else Proudhon said: “property is liberty” and “property is impossible”.  He was making rhetorical distinctions between different forms of property, based on how they are obtained.  But to someone holding a philosophy that theft is A-OK as long as it either took place long enough back or had some form of elite sanction as being for the common good, finishing the statement is out of the question.  Better to make it seem as if the point being made was something obviously implausible like “no one can own anything!!”.  Show me someone honestly embracing such a strawman, and I will join you in laughing at them — until then, it’s you I’m holding up for ridicule.

From anarchy-as-strict-utopianism we go to anarchy-as-regression-to-infancy:

The utopian’s other great hatred is for middle-class or “bourgeois” culture. Monogamy, monotheism, self-control, prudence, cleanliness, fortitude, self-interested labor​—​these are the utopian’s enemies. “Morality teaches man to be at war with himself,” [Charles] Fourier wrote, “to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely.” What were called the bourgeois virtues had been designed to maintain unjust social relations and stop man from being true to himself. Thus, to recover one’s natural state, one “must undertake a vast operation of ‘desanctification,’ beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie,” wrote the twentieth-century utopian Daniel Guérin. “The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people.”  (emphasis mine)

In other words: “Not enough Jesus? You’ll eat each other, defecate in your pants after digestion, and jump off a bridge Because F*ck It. Now prove me wrong.”  Yet, subtract the use of force from the equation, and who cares what anyone chooses to follow as a faith?  As for self-interest, since Matt is deliberately assuming that anarchy is inherently utopian — again, completely ignoring significant foundation on a rational cynicism — I suppose it’s no shock that he claims any questioning of work structure amounts to Commie Crap.  Never mind that a part of such questioning has been for the longest that laborers have interests too.

At Brook Farm in Massachusetts, which lasted from 1841 to 1847, men and women were encouraged to interact as complete social, political, and sexual equals. Residents of the Oneida Community (1848-1880) in upstate New York engaged in “complex marriage,” in which older members of the commune “introduced” younger members to sex. The Oneidans engaged in selective breeding. These practices, radical at the time, have been characteristic of left-wing movements ever since. The free love associated with the New Left and student rebellion in the 1960s, for instance, is today so deeply embedded in American culture that only social conservatives pay it any mind.

You know what?  The contradiction here is so blatantly obvious I don’t feel like pointing it out.  Take a guess.

Throw in a couple Chomsky quotes, leaving out completely his fair-weather anarchism and the fact that views differ, then stir in an unacknowledged return to the same they-don’t-organize-how-I-define-organization critique that was supposed to have been flushed at the beginning:

This permanent rebellion leads to some predictable outcomes. By denying the legitimacy of democratic politics, the anarchists undermine their ability to affect people’s lives. No living wage movement for them. No debate over the Bush tax rates. Anarchists don’t believe in wages, and they certainly don’t believe in taxes. David Graeber, an anthropologist and a leading figure in Occupy Wall Street, puts it this way: “By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.” The reason that Occupy Wall Street has
no agenda is that anarchism allows for no agenda. All the anarchist can do is set an example​—​or tear down the existing order through violence. (emphasis mine)

If “legitimacy of democratic politics” (implied meaning: “there was a vote, dammit! Now shut up!”) were really Matt Continetti’s hangup, then he’d take one look at the makeup of the White House and the Congress, say “eh…wait until next November”, and take his ball & go home.  In a way, we both question the legitimacy, he just questions it on the grounds that he thinks people like himself don’t have enough power over others, while I question it on the basis that a few having power of others regardless of their stated views is itself walking into a trap.

It gets worse…:

Just as hostility to property is inextricably linked to utopian socialism, violence is tightly bound to anarchism. “Anarchists reject states and all those systematic forms of inequality states make possible,” writes Graeber. “They do not seek to pressure the government to institute reforms. Neither do they seek to seize state power for themselves. Rather, they wish to destroy that power, using means that are​—​so far as possible​—​consistent with their ends, that embody them.” What seems aimless and chaotic is in fact purposeful. By means of “direct action”​—​marches, occupations, blockades, sit-ins​—​the anarchist “proceeds as if the state does not exist.” But one who behaves as if the government has no reality and the laws do not apply is an outlaw, not to say a criminal. (emphasis mine)

Well no duh!  Though, when you look at the extent of law as it now exists, who isn’t to some degree in violation of it?  And what about when the lawmakers  and law enforcers break them?  I hear crickets…

When you see occupiers clash with the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, or masked teenagers destroying shop windows and lighting fires in downtown Oakland, you are seeing anarchism in action. Apologists for Occupy Wall Street may say that these “black bloc” tactics are deployed solely by fringe elements. But the apologists miss the point. The young men in black wearing keffiyehs and causing mayhem are simply following the logic of revolutionary anarchism to its violent conclusion. The fringe isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. The exception would be “direct action” that took care to respect the law. (emphasis mine)

…I thought you said the logical conclusion was tightly structured utopia?  Make up your mind.

BTW: the distinction between the “black bloc” morons and others isn’t “respect [for] the law”.  Those that write and apply the law don’t even respect it themselves anyway.  Rather, the gulf is between people that think indiscriminate smashing of everything constitutes a coherent point and those that realize such actions are no different than what is being railed against in the first place.  Hell, if you think violence is valid, why stop at property?  The “black bloc” might as well just start taking shots at people at random — or even more convenient for them, just join the police.

I’m not saying in the least that what OWS represents is somehow ideal.  Nothing is, and I never expected it to be.  There are elements I think make sense, and elements I think do not.  Still, when you consider their opposition…

+4.

-It sounds like some people are missing the point of the occupations and the parks by conflating the park as the point.  The criticism of a rigged system, and the stark contrast shown between people organizing willingly and the load of crap we’re told is “representative” (BTW: onlookers seeing the various assemblies as weird itself tells a story. When most folks’ engagement consists of marking a box every few years and watching the same thing happen regardless of which one they checked, voicing your opinions by voicing your opinions becomes an alien, “rabble rouser” activity.) is the message, while Zuccotti Park and physically being there, along with the other occupations, are symbols.  Hell, Zuccotti Park isn’t even that, it’s a stand-in for a symbol because Wall Street itself was blocked off at the time.  It doesn’t matter where you’re standing if you can get others to stand with you.

-A lot is made of the relative inconvenience of the protests on others, as if that were a decisive talking point against them.  To me, this suggests a lot of people forget what a protest is for.  If you’re easy to avoid, what incentive is there to note your grievance?  The idea is to get people to acknowledge and at least think about what you’re saying.  This doesn’t mean be a jerk about it, just draw attention.

-On a slightly related note, to this by Doug Mataconis, about whether the 1st Amendment applies to installed protests like the one in Zuccotti Park: if anything, the kind of regulations that he brings up remind us of the hidden distinction between truly public property — that is, common areas — and government administered property.  That a city can enforce a rule that the population isn’t consenting to* (and in the actual case of Zuccotti, override permissions granted on non-government property simply to go hippie punching)…well, “whose park?” indeed.   Besides, civil disobedience wouldn’t be what it is without the word “disobedience”.

-By the way: that phrase also contains “civil”.  So, contrary to dumbass here, no that does not include setting a Macy’s on fire.  While obviously this kind of random nuttery is blown up as being representative of the movement as a whole for propaganda purposes, despite the occasional nut being super common to any protest, I would’ve appreciated a simple “dude you’re crazy” punctuating the silence after his mic check broke.

-Will Wilkinson, in the process of latching on to the “ok, now shut up and go be traditional” theme, at least nods at reason for skepticism of the representation myth — if only to dismiss it:

[W]hat if our system is so badly broken that honest democratic politics is no longer possible? This is, indeed, a main theme of the progressive master narrative: the 1% has grown so disproportionately powerful that it, for most practical purposes, owns “the system”. In that case, telling tent-dwelling enthusiasts of participatory democracy to go home and actually participate in our democracy amounts to telling them to surrender to the oligarchs.

Assumption that this is an inherently “progressive” claim aside, he’s only slightly off there.  The 1% referred to hasn’t “grown” to power, it always was in power, from today’s state-corporate alliance and high finance undermining what’s in your pocket, through aristocracy granting each other titles to land that already had people on it, back to when everything was simply run from a blinged-out chair in some stone building: serving connected wealth via robbery was, and is, the purpose of the state.  The uniforms may change, but history repeats itself — at least until we hit Eject.

(* – I remember a poll showing that the residents of NYC actually agreed with the Zuccotti Park protesters at the time.  Not sure now though, tbh.)

When political control holds such deep importance to our lives as to raise the need for constant worry that somebody you deal with happens to disagree with you on something, that in and of itself should be seen as a huge red flag.  All that culture war, in the end, transforms us.  Into what?  Well…ever watch a squirrel eat?  Eyes darting all over the place, nervous something is going to attack them at any second, usually not even finishing what they picked up — doesn’t look like they’re enjoying themselves, huh?

I think I’m probably equal parts liberal and libertarian – a sort of progressive libertarian or market liberal or something of that nature.

On the one hand, I tend to agree with libertarians on markets, incentives, bailouts, and any number of other economic issues. On the other hand, I tend to think that many libertarians are short-sighted when it comes to welfare programs. I think the social safety net enables markets, whereas many libertarians think it hobbles them.

Considering the binary nature of the social programs remark — that either they’re an unalloyed good or they’re pure evil — I can only assume he mostly had vulgar libertarians in mind as his target for this.  Yet, later on within this context he shades towards the 3rd view of state-run social welfare as revolt insurance, that the smoothing out of the market’s rougher edges buys acceptance of the larger system.

Problem: the system people are being paid to accept is not a natural market order.  He acknowledges as much by mentioning the bailouts, which were and continue to be welfare for the rich.  The various inputs placed at the top, between tax subsidies, regulatory favoritism, and the outright full backstopping of the largest players regardless of their behavior, far dwarf even a generous measurement of spending ostensibly to help the poor.  Despite that, look what gets targeted first when the time comes for the political part of the ruling class to mime knowledge of basic math…

Within the rigged status quo, the point of social welfare makes sense, if only because in a rigged system asking “well, where’s mine then?” is inevitable.  If you aren’t going to allow the market to work, people want their rations, and it’d be best for the safety of any remotely sane authority to provide them.  However, stating such as an add-on to enable market order is to call out an animal that isn’t in existence, and prompt a question: how do you get there from here?  If Kain’s vision is of limited, stream-lined social assistance alongside as much spontaneous market order as possible, then the institutionalized robbery (not to mention the rank militarism on display when people dare to point to it) is one huge elephant in the room.  Far as I can tell, the real point of the state is protecting that elephant at all costs.

Sure, if you remove the revolt insurance without yanking the reason for revolt the consequences are obvious.  As for the free market, its simple: we think it would be a good idea.

OWS is not simply a group of like-minded people gathered together to make a point with a show of collective force, though it is that. The difference is that it has developed into an ongoing micro-society with a micro-government that directly exemplifies a principled alternative to the prevailing American order. The complaint that OWS has failed to produce a coherent list of demands seems to me to miss much of the point of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. The demand is a society more like the little one OWS protestors have mocked up in the park. The mode of governance is the message.

Leaderless, direct participation.  This, in contrast to a centralized several layers removed “representative” elite that serves itself by feeding off of their subjects.  No false claims of Empty Suit A being co-signed in every damn thing they do or force others to do on the basis of a strictly controlled pseudo-binary choice, no inherently captured middlemen, it’s I represent myself.  Simple.

Will, after describing an intellectual allegiance* to this alternative as now being practiced, throws some cold water on it.  First, he says self selection makes consensus easy:

Because the participatory democracy of OWS is an ideological endeavour, it can avoid the hard problem of liberal society: the ineradicable diversity of moral belief and the impossibility of consensus. Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in specifically because they already agree with the commune’s founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible—people with very different opinions and values—stay away.

The self-selection factor does say one thing about OWS: that those people chose to be there.  See, that’s kind of the point of self-selection, if you didn’t think joining a protest was a good idea, and you opposed the entire premise of it, then you wouldn’t go there.  Within that understanding though, there is a diversity of opinions, contrary to Will’s description: anarchists are sharing space with relatively standard issue liberals and even a few otherwise apolitical types just airing their frustration. After the overarching “there is a problem: the economy is rigged”, there’s plenty of disagreement on the ground.

Say hypothetically this model of direct consensus were embraced outside of the sphere of protests, and people did bump up against the mentioned depth of disagreement on foundational matters.  Well, the next thing Will points out is that this doesn’t scale well.  In that case though, the 2nd concern pretty much solves the first by existence — smaller, more localized organization obviously implies there being a huge range of possible communities (not sure why he calls them “communes”, honestly).  With so many options, people could just bounce until they found their niche.  It’d be like a, a…market!

As for his remark about charismatic loudmouths wielding disproportionate power, that seems the case right now.  Subtract the force monopoly & make exit easier and easier by way of decentralization, and the odds tilt closer in your favor. Besides, with the status quo those same charismatic loudmouths can have you killed.

I think it says a lot about the times we live in that this is being even remotely discussed seriously.  There’s going to be disagreement, and that’s good.  Intolerance of disagreement is for cults.

(* – The article Will links to apparently overstated Graeber’s influence.)

Turns out the guy has a Twitter account. Having resurrected mine recently, I figured why not directly call him out on the contradiction he served up on national TV?  This is what occurred:

Did I say direct democracy is not a form of government? Obviously not. What I was referring to was clearly the dual conflicting statements on his part that a) wide-open direct engagement is preferable to the current system & b) the current system carries such a degree of legitimacy that to attack it is to attack “us” somehow.  Well, if someone believes the latter, then why bother protesting at all?  The wondrous Representatives of The People have come to a decision, and that decision is that The People will subsidize high finance at gunpoint for the foreseeable future, The People hath spoken & if you don’t like it then you’re just a crank, if not an enemy of The People.

Having scanned his feed since then, I’m not expecting any further response. This guy is a stanch More-And-Better-Democrats type, just about the most grossly misleading public face that could be put forth.  Dems as OWS cavalry?  Yeah, have fun with that, dude…

People are extremely excited about what we are doing. We’re engaging in a direct democracy conversation. I mean, the General Assembly is really the new town hall, and we don’t have filibusters, we don’t have lobbyists, we don’t have a system that can be co-opted. And I invite anybody to come down and talk to us.

The point here is fairly obvious: as close to an expression of genuine “people power” as possible, directly from the mouths of those affected, with no lord/serf relationship in sight. “I appear courtesy of my damn self”.

Next one is a quote about the nature of government:

Our government is a function of our democracy; by attacking our government we are attacking democracy. So to me, yes, I think the government should represent the will of the people, and if the will of the people are demanding action, then they should follow suite.

This is typical “government is US!” jesus talk.  Although throwing in a back-handed acknowledgment to the contrary, this is still equating what government does to a legitimate expression of We The People: “They represent just plain folks, and are intended to”.

If you guessed it was cognitive dissonance time again, you’re correct: both quotes came from OWS protester elevated by the media into a spokesperson role of sorts Jesse LaGreca, on ABC’s This Week.