For --- ------, who commented in a seeming heartless manner

to an earlier Occupy Wall Street post.  I didn't click to publish your comment because it revealed a heartlessness that was surprising in the context of the comments you make frequently at P T's.  So it seemed more likely you hadn't yet had the opportunity to be more informed,

Look at this article, please.  Your assessment of who is part and parcel of these Occupy camps and protests is mostly wrong.

This, from an e-mail, came to me from a friend in MD this morning, in response to my earlier post below about Friendship and Lukács, which again, is more about the people being pushed into these camps and movements, due to the decades' long policies and activities of the corps, aided and abetted and enabled by the politicians.

[ "There's a family of five down the block from me. They don't have electricity. They were taking it from an empty house next door that was on the market and then sold. But an interfering neighbour found out they were doing that and told the seller so the seller had the electricity cut off. Now the family doesn't have electricity. I thought the house had been sold anyway, and who was it hurting that they were borrowing some electricity. They shouldn't have been tattled on. You're right. This winter is going to be cruel. " ]

What this meaness by the neighbors means is that when the freeze comes the family will try to keep their children from freezing by other means, means which could all too easily not only burn down their home, but all the homes around them.  Meanness spreads in every widening circles of remorse -- except among those who are just plain mean, like the 1%, who are immune to remorse for the consequences to people of what they do.

And there is this -- and by golly it is in the NY Times today, the Times which has turned completely around on the Occupation movement.  You can find a great deal of food for thought in this piece by Bernard E. Harcourt, "Occupy Wall Street's Political Disobedience."

In the meantime the clean up eviction of the occupiers of Zuccoti Park has been postponed, pissing off the mayor majorly. He is so SICK AND TIRED of these people. Who are ruining tourism and the rep of NYC as being a secure citadel for the class of the obscenely wealthy from all over the globe, a member of which, natch he is (though I am going to say this about the pouting mayor who really can't stand not getting his way and lashes out when he does: he, unlike most of the obscenely wealthy class, achieved his obscenely wealthy status pretty much by lifting his own bootstraps).
In another meantime, early this Friday morning in Milan, the Italian Occupiers managed to occupy the cathedral-like hall of Goldman Sachs, which is near to La Scala Opera House. Also, extremely polluted, going by the times I've been in Milan. They have no gas emmisions regulations or anything like that in Italy. I've literally become ill in Milan from the automotive pollution. This is how the Too Big To Fail Or To Punish demand to have it, you all.  Can anyone be surprised that the Occupy movement in whatever form is demonstrating globally today?

Off With Their Heads! Screamed the Red Queen

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/told-to-leave-protesters-talk-pre-emptive-strategy/?hp

So this is how it ends. As soon as there was actual media attention, and the attention showed that there were millions of people who are impacted by this long corruption of collusion between the corps and the politicians, and damned angry about it – out they go. It was OK as long as everyone laughed at them. But when it could not longer be denied they had some influence and attention – off with their heads! as screamed the Red Queen!

My Heart & My Head Get Full of Friendship and Lukács

Two amigas from C'town roused themselves in the 4:30 of the dark AM yesterday, met each other and drove in the pouring rain to the town where one catches the bus that takes passengers to NYC.  We ate a lovely lunch at Tea and Sympathy (one of them lived a long time in London, and her husband's mother is English), wandered and shopped and talked and talked and talked.  We walked so much that when I got home bout 6 AM I felt crippled. I had gone over the edge of what I can do.

Crashing hard I was able to curl up with Georg Lukács (have you ever heard anybody employ that locution in connection with Lukács before?).  It's not quick reading, reading this theorist's study of the historical novel.  Last night's reading in this work was the chapter focused on the predecessor foundations of the historical novel and the18th century view of history and historigraphy.  One of the passages that bounced me into calling out to el V, "Please, listen to this!" was this one:

[ " It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience {itals translator-Lukács's}, and moreover on a European scale.  During the decades between 1789 {me -- two years after the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention} and 1814 {two years after the U.S. declares the war with England called the War of 1812, the Napoleonic wars affecting this nation's part of the globe -- particularly in the part of this nation from when my C'town friends and their forebears were born and still live -- which claimed then as consquence all these lands that immediately became the heart of the slaveholders' Cotton Kingdom} each nation of Europe underwent more upheavals than they had previously experienced in centuries.  And the quick succession of these upheavals gives them a qualitatively distinct character, it makes their historical character far more visible than would be the case in isolated, individual instances: the masses no longer have the impression of a "natural ocurrence".  One need only read over Heine's reminiscences of his youth in Buch le Grand, to quote just one example, where it is vividly shown how the rapid change of governments affected Heine as a boy. Now if experiences such as these are linked with the knowledge that similar upheavals are taking place all over the world, this must enormously strengthen the feeling first that there is such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted process of changes and finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of the individual. " ]

We are in one of those eras in which the global masses realize there is such a thing as history that affects each of us individually. This was one of the many topics of the talk talk talk with mis amigas yesterday, via the Occupy Wall Streets and the Arab Spring, how the economic perception the youth of the world has digested that their future has been eaten by the collusion of corporations and politicians.  As both of my friends are grandmothers you don't need to think a moment of how much in sympathy they are with the Occupiers whereever they are located.  But that's only one reason they are in sympathy.  As Lukács points out, back in Russia, in the winter of 1936/7, history affects all of us in personal ways that we see and evaluate.

As part of this subject we spoke of how much we are fearing the winter, not only the weather, which if as bitter and long as last year will eat my friends' budget to heat their homes, but because there are so many destitute people, and the price of food and shelter continues to increase rapidly, while the banks are instituting new ways to squeeze us nearly every week, and our politicians give them all assistance.  The three of us are reminded of scenes of many a novel of Louisa May Alcott, in most of which are characters who are actively attempting to alleviate some of the winter miseries of the destitute classses. What I didn’t know back when I first read these books as a girl is how often those miseries were caused by the financiers’ and the greed, competition and corruption of these new corporations that exploded in the wake of the Civil War, causing financial panics, shutting down credit, going bankrupt, foreclosing, with the additional victimization of inflation and ever-spiraling costs of food and other necessities. Not to mention the labor-capital clashes, the racism against the emancipated and the hostile anti-immigrant exploitation.

So why does it help us to cast what’s going on within the perimeters of Little Women and Rose in Bloom? But it does. It’s also history.  In novels. Couched in terms of personal, individual cause and affect.  Novels didn't do this prior to Scott, whose first historical fiction was published in 1814.

My friends are no tbaggers and never have been -- always staunch dems.  But no longer.  They too know that neither party is an answer, and that both of them are actively enabling the misery of the 99%.  That my friends see this clearly and understand that the Occupiers do as well, says a great deal about the effectiveness of this movement, despite the mediapundocracy superiors instruct us their actions are meaningless.

The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Mi amiga, who analyzes in depth new historical fiction, with an emphasis on romantic historical fiction though not always, on her blog, Romantic Armchair Traveller, last month posted a thoughtful entry titled, "On the Matter of Historical Accuracy in Fiction."

She makes a strong argument as to why twisting history, getting the culture as well as the historical facts wrong, matters.

*1493* -- Because Yesterday Was Columbus Day in the USA

I have both audio and print versions of this follow-up to Charles Mann's 1491.
First I read, then I listen to the same text soon after.

Among the many excitements of this book is how much I am bringing to the work from my own / our research work within the Atlantic framework of knitting together all the continents of the world that were populated -- the Columbia Exchange -- except, until much later, Australia. Much of what he talks of we already had dealt with extensively from Cuba and Its Music, because it is Spain-Portugal and Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America -- and these last years, North America too. Thus there is no problem over here sailing right along with Mann and his run-down that the voyages of Columbus initiates the greatest change that has ever happened so far in the history of the word and its biology: the Homogenocene, which is why we now speak constantly of globalization in everything from economics to pathogens.

So far, among what I did / do not know until dealing with this work, the most unexpected bit of information hitherto entirely unknown to me is that this hemisphere did not have earthworms.* They came, of course, almost immediately, in the ballast of rocks (which play a role in The American Slave Coast) and the earth balls around European plants and trees. They helped destroy the North American Atlantic forests as they used to be. I'd not a clue about that.

Go thou now and read thineselves, and if you're contemplating writing fiction of any kind that involves first contacts with a pristine, hitherto isolated from the rest of the world, this work is fundamental as is Braudel, in another way. This collision of two heretofore excluded continents with the flora and fauna of all the other inhabited continents was the authentic global singularity event of the homo saps.

* If I'd spent a second thinking about it, which until now I had not, there are scientific periodicals dedicated entirely to earthworm studies and research.

Does Your City Do This?

Does your city have this kind of relationship between the financial and other corporate industries and the city's tax-payer funded police department? Or does this happen only in NYC? This is a serious question.

Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?

From Counterpunch: "Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll" by PAM MARTENS

 { "If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002." }

There is much more to this article.

Occupy Wall Street Occupied Washington Square Park This Afternoon

As they say, this is a conversation, not a demonstration.

As with conversations with more than one participant, there are many conversations going on at once. And there were tourists who had never heard of this movement, entirely bewildered The Blue Shirt Cops seemed pretty bored. So were the NYPD horses, fully tacked up, but kept in their trailers when they clearly wanted to be outside in the beautiful weather as much as the hordes of people crowding the outdoors wanted to be.

Presumably the inhabitants of the swarms of helicopters over this part of the city weren't bored though. It must have been perfect flying weather.

I was fairly impressed with the entire thing. It really was a conversation not a demonstration. That there are cadres present who like dressing in costumes and doing the street theater version is just fine. And there are others who are very articulate in the hand gestures and broadcasting of the texts being delivered in waves, since you need special permits from the city to use amplifiers and so on in public -- and so, they don't. Again, great bafflement on behalf of the out-of-towners who pay no attention to anything. Though these young people are dressed like students dress pretty much everywhere, the hand signs and so on, made them freaks in the eyes of these people. There ya go.

Again, the participants are overwhelmingly young, as you must expect, when the student loan ponzi scheme is such a focus of the anger with the financial institutions. There are discussions about the best way of going about just reneging on the lans all together since the other end of the bargain, the job that enables you to pay off the loans you took out to get the education to get you that job will never materialize. There is a lot of discussion of how best to close down your checking account and taking whatever money you have out of the banks, and if you have a job, how to get paid without using a bank account. That's the hurdle, isn't it? That's how the banks hold a gun to all our heads: if we get paid for anything there's always a bank involved. We've been trying to figure out this one for several years now, and so far have failed.