Dear Commons Community,

Paul Krugman in his NY Times column entitled, Oligarchy, American Style, posits:

“We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.”  Furthermore,

… [the] extreme concentration of income is incompatible with real democracy. Can anyone seriously deny that our political system is being warped by the influence of big money, and that the warping is getting worse as the wealth of a few grows ever larger?”

Krugman also states the Occupy Wall Streeters have it right protesting against the 1 percenters. If anything:

“… the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives. Recent research shows that around 60 percent of the top 0.1 percent either are executives in nonfinancial companies or make their money in finance, i.e., Wall Street broadly defined. Add in lawyers and people in real estate, and we’re talking about more than 70 percent of the lucky one-thousandth. “

Thank you, Dr. Krugman, for your insight and analysis.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Occupy Oakland shut down the Port of Oakland but sadly ended in violence when police in riot gear arrested dozens of protesters overnight who broke into a vacant building, shattered downtown windows, sprayed graffiti and set blazes along the way.

At least four protesters were hospitalized Thursday with various injuries, including one needing stitches after fighting with an officer, police said. Several officers were also injured but didn’t need hospitalization.

It is unclear from early reports how the violence started.  Police said that about 7,000 people participated in demonstrations throughout the day that were peaceful except for a few incidents of vandalism at local banks and businesses. Boots Riley, a protest organizer, touted the day as a success, saying “we put together an ideological principle that the mainstream media wouldn’t talk about two months ago.”  However, at some point a group of protesters broke into the former Travelers Aid building in order to, as some shouting protesters put it, “reclaim the building for the people.”  Fires were also set.

I think many of us support the Occupy Wall Street throughout the country, we also support it as a peaceful movement.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Herman Cain sexual harassment story got more legs yesterday when Herman Cain’s  chief of staff, Mark Block, blamed Rick Perry’s campaign for leaking it to the press.  More specifically, it was his belief that Curt Anderson — who worked on Cain’s unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2004 and now serves as an adviser for Perry’s political operation — was behind the leak. Perry campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan denied the claim that the Texas governor’s campaign was involved in the sexual accusations landing in the headlines. Pointing to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s team, however, he said “I wouldn’t put it past them.”

In the meantime, it was reported that another (third) woman has also said that she was the victim of sexual harassment while employed for Herman Cain.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The above picture of President Barack Obama depicted as a kind of zombie with a gunshot wound in the head was distributed by the Loudoun County [Virginia] Republicans in an email to its members.   In an apology, GOP Loudon County Chairman Mark Sell said it  was meant as Halloween “satire”.

While Republicans across the state of Virginia have denounced the picture and have offered apologies, it was an incredibly poor lapse of taste and judgment.

It is not satire but foul and incendiary imagery.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a must-read column entitled, Cain Not Able, today in the NY Times that provides her analysis of the recently divulged sexual harassment charges against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.  It is on target and very much in the Dowd style.  Here is her introduction:

“We have the starchy guy [Mitt Romney]— tall, handsome, intelligent and rich, with a baronial estate — who’s hard to warm up to. And we have the spontaneous guy [Herman Cain], who’s charming and easy to warm up to — until it turns out that he has an unsavory pattern with young women and a suspect relationship with facts.

It’s the Republican primary. Or “Pride and Prejudice.” Take your pick.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s not the scandal that kills you; it’s the cover-up. Herman Cain has added a corollary: It’s not the cover-up that kills you; it’s the cascade of malarkey that spills out when you try to cover up the cover-up.”

She concludes with reference to conservative Ann Coulter:

“Ann Coulter has a point when she says that feminists rewrote their own rules on sexual harassment to support Bill Clinton. It is never right for any boss, especially the president of the United States, to mess with an intern, even if she’s the aggressor.

But Coulter falters when she charges that, like Clarence Thomas, Cain is the victim of a high-tech lynching, that “if you are a conservative black, they will believe the most horrible sexualized fantasies of these white women feminists.”

This isn’t an incendiary story about race. It is the most hackneyed story in Washington — another powerful man who crossed the line and then, when caught, tried to blame the women.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Herman Cain, the leader in the Republican nomination for the presidency, acknowledged Monday that he was accused of sexual harassment while chief of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s, but he denied any wrongdoing.

The allegations against Mr. Cain were reported on Sunday night by Politico, which detailed separate incidents between Mr. Cain and two women on the Association staff.  The incidents, it said, included “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature.”

The NY Times reported inconsistencies in Cain’s responses to the allegations as follows:

“Mr. Cain’s shifting explanations and the gaps in the story made it hard to determine the impact of the revelations on his long-term prospects in states like Iowa, whose crucial caucuses are just two months away.

In the early afternoon, Mr. Cain told a gathering at the National Press Club in Washington that “I am unaware of any sort of settlement” related to harassment accusations, which he called “a witch hunt.” But in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of the Fox News Channel shown Monday night, he acknowledged that in at least one case “there was some sort of settlement or termination,” worth “maybe three months’ salary.”

It sounds like the Republicans are having a “Houston We Have a Problem” moment.

Tony