Time's up for the Occupiers
The global Occupy Wall Street movement has outstayed its welcome and is likely to peter out in the next few days.
Acting on instructions from mayor Michael Bloomberg, hundreds of police in riot gear moved in before dawn to arrest about 200 protesters and clear Zuccotti Park for sanitation workers to begin a major cleanup.
While the protesters pledged to continue their two-month campaign, city authorities elsewhere in the US carried out similar operations to remove illegal occupiers.
Some high-profile protests, such as the one outside St Paul’s Cathedral in London, look likely to continue despite eviction notices being served some weeks ago. Reuters reports new legal actions are under way.
"We are getting reports about vulnerable people, cases of late-night drinking and other worrying trends, so it's time to act. It will clearly take time but we are determined to see this through," says Stuart Fraser, policy chairman of the City of London Corporation.
In New Zealand, no forcible actions have been taken yet, despite attempts to persuade the protesters to move on in Dunedin and Wellington. Auckland Council says the costs of the small tent city in Aotea Square has hit $200,000, so the price of freedom is rising.
Myths about the rich
Unlike Wall Street, the local Occupy movement has attracted little sympathy or public support, perhaps because of its lack of imagination in being largely a copy-cat exercise.
Certainly, it lacks the data to prove its contention that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In the US, such statistics have attracted much debate.
The Congressional Budget Office's just-published Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 found an increasing concentration of income over that period, ranging from 275% income growth for the top 1% of households and 65% growth for the rest of the top 20% down to 18% growth for the lowest 20% of household incomes.
But as Gary Galles points out in an analysis for the Von Mises Institute, the timing of the data in a year of a housing bubble and stock boom says little about inequality in the current, very different post-bubble world.
But there is a bigger issue that makes CBO figures less than useful. Professor Galles quotes economist Thomas Sowell to back this up:
Although such discussions have been phrased in terms of people, the actual empirical evidence cited has been about what has been happening over time to statistical categories — and that turns out to be the direct opposite of what has happened over time to flesh-and-blood human beings, most of whom move from one category to another over time.
Another US study, by the Treasury on income mobility in 1996-2005, was based on individuals’ tax returns. This found that those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of 1% — had their incomes halved by 2005.
In other words, people moved out of the top category later in life. This, Professor Galles observes, “hardly shows a class of rich growing ever richer at the expense of other classes.”
Funny money men
A side-effect of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been its embrace by a clutch of funny money theorists and wacko economists.
Having dispatched New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as a dangerous neo-liberal a few weeks ago, Kim’s Club on Saturday morning radio welcomed a couple of dotty ideas men and provided them with generous air time.
First up was Ravi Batra, who advocates Proutism (PROgressive Utilizsation Theory), which depicts speculative financial capitalism as a highly destructive force that threatens the planet.
Batra has written in support of the OWS movement, saying it backs his earlier predictions of a revolt against Wall Street greed and crony capitalism.
In a series of doomsday-style books, Batra links concepts based in Hindu idealism about the need to be in harmony with nature, each other and other life forms to ways that could reduce the gap between rich and poor.
He says he isn’t anti-capitalist or anti-market – he predicted the demise of Soviet communism – but he does promotes raising incomes with the sole purpose to increase their consumption.
Next up was Christchurch man Raf Manji, who has founded the Sustento Institute. Again, Manji says the OWS movement is a phenomenon he foresaw with his diagnosis of economic ills:
Our current system externalises as many costs as possible, has institutions corrupted by money, and has lost any sense of meaningful values, other than monetary gain. Not only has our economy become monetised, so has our society.
More solutions seeking problems
These ideas are not new and belong to a long tradition. Manji, for example, is an enthusiast for monetary reform that wants to socialise debt. That idea goes back to CH Douglas’ Social Credit, which launched an influential political movement that achieved power in Canada and was popular here well into the 1980s.
Another alternative theory about money can be found in Monetary Circuit Theory, which was popularised by Italian economist Augusto Graziani and based on ideas developed in Austria and Germany during the 1930s.
Then there’s Chartalism or New Monetary Theory, which has been described by Brad DeLong as less than a theory and more of a tautology. Nevertheless, NMT has attracted some heavyweight advocates, known as post-Keynesians, who see little problem with government deficits.
Mr Friedman's fellow columnist at the New York Times, Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, has challenged their ideas and says
It matters whether the government can issue bonds or has to rely on the printing press. And while it may literally be true that a government with its own currency can’t go bankrupt, it can destroy that currency if it loses fiscal credibility.
A disturbing common thread among these monetary theories is a strong conspiracy flavour about the role of banks. In some cases (like Douglas), it verges on anti-Semitism.
Mr Friedman has confirmed he is still coming for next year’s Writers & Reader’s Festival in Wellington. It remains to be seen who will next be ushered on to the air waves with heterodox solutions to conventional problems.
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Comments and questions5
Err... and... There's no such thing as global warming either. Mr Gibson, you are an economic dinosaur.
We are the 99%. Expect us.
In response to Anonymous | Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - 9:42pm
ACORN and Soros funded 'Occupy' is pure astroturf manufactured opposition to the TEA party.
Occupy represents the 'give me your stuff' segment of Gen Y'ners and 'Wadical' unelectable professional activists (yeah...Craig's list has an Ad on Sep 27th PAYING for protesters).
Given that redistribution is a marxist tenet I'd say you were the dinosaur.
Now go and have a shower you naughty naughty economically illiterate sheep.
Remember to read Von Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' if you are genuinely interested in anti-totalitarianism.
...oh... and www.democratsagainstunagenda21.com might interest you...as it debunks your anti-freedom tendencies...from the left no less....
As Paul Watson of Greenpeace said" It doesn't matter what is true...only what people think is true"...haven't you read the memo? Global warming is now called climate change ( to get around the issue of cooling)...
...Also seems like another 5000 dodgy eco-loon emails have been revealed over the last couple of days exposing more post-normal pseudo-science eco fascist loonery and lies :p
OWS...WHAT DO WE WANT? WE DON'T KNOW! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!!!
In response to: Anonymoustachio Antonioni | Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - 10:27am
Here are some of them!
<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.
Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be.
In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism. This, it seems, is what motivated the whistleblower 'FOIA 2011' (or "thief", as the usual suspects at RealClimate will no doubt prefer to tar him or her) to go public.
As FOIA 2011 puts it when introducing the selected highlights, culled from a file of 220,000 emails:
“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”
“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”
“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.
“Poverty is a death sentence.”
“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”
Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.
FOIA 2011 is right, of course. If you're going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you're going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you're going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
You'll find the full taster menu of delights here at Tall Bloke's website. Shrub Niggurath is on the case too. As is the Air Vent.
I particularly like the ones expressing deep reservations about the narrative put about by the IPCC:
/// The IPCC Process ///
<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]
<4755> Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out.
<3456> Overpeck:
I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about
“Subsequent evidence” [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been
an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?
And here's our friend Phil Jones, apparently trying to stuff the IPCC working groups with scientists favourable to his cause, while shutting out dissenting voices.
<0714> Jones:
Getting people we know and trust [into IPCC] is vital – hence my comment about
the tornadoes group.
<3205> Jones:
Useful ones [for IPCC] might be Baldwin, Benestad (written on the solar/cloud
issue – on the right side, i.e anti-Svensmark), Bohm, Brown, Christy (will be
have to involve him ?)
Here is what looks like an outrageous case of government – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – actually putting pressure on climate "scientists" to talk up their message of doom and gloom in order to help the government justify its swingeing climate policies:
<2495> Humphrey/DEFRA:
I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a
message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their
story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made
to look foolish.
Here is a gloriously revealing string of emails in which activists and global warming research groups discuss how best to manipulate reality so that climate change looks more scary and dangerous than it really is:
<3655> Singer/WWF:
we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the
public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and
b) in order to get into the media the context between climate
extremes/desasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and
energy
<0445> Torok/CSIRO:
[...] idea of looking at the implications of climate change for what he termed
“global icons” [...] One of these suggested icons was the Great Barrier Reef [...]
It also became apparent that there was always a local “reason” for the
destruction – cyclones, starfish, fertilizers [...] A perception of an
“unchanging” environment leads people to generate local explanations for coral
loss based on transient phenomena, while not acknowledging the possibility of
systematic damage from long-term climatic/environmental change [...] Such a
project could do a lot to raise awareness of threats to the reef from climate
change
<4141> Minns/Tyndall Centre:
In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public
relations problem with the media
Kjellen:
I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global
warming
Pierrehumbert:
What kind of circulation change could lock Europe into deadly summer heat waves
like that of last summer? That’s the sort of thing we need to think about.
I'll have a deeper dig through the emails this afternoon and see what else I come up with. If I were a climate activist off to COP 17 in Durban later this month, I don't think I'd be feeling a very happy little drowning Polie, right now. In fact I might be inclined to think that the game was well and truly up.
http://www.thepeoplescube.com/current-truth/occupy-wall-street-embraces-lord-of-the-flies-label-t7976.html
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