2012 is Here: Looking Back and Looking Forward, Will The World End?

December 31st, 2011 - by: danny

New Year’s Eve/Day. Times Square Packed as Usual For Ball Drop

Mayor Mike Bloomberg dances on camera–(he can’t dance)–with his girl fiend and some celebs….TV shows all the Smiles and Kisses as the public cheers in a New Year that promises to be worse than the last one.

Downtown, Occupy Wall Street tries to reoccupy Zuccotti Park…43 arrested as of Midnight. Livestream at http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution..

CLG: Protesters Surge Back Into Zuccotti Park –At least one police officer fired an arch of pepper spray into the crowd behind the barricades.

More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the familiar slogan, “We are the 99 percent” – and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers. Just after 10:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, officers carried a person out of the park, prompting protesters to follow behind them, shouting “Shame!” About 20 minutes later, a group of protesters grabbed some of the metal barricades that surround the park and began piling them inside. As they gripped the barricades, police officers took hold as well, and a shoving match began, the silver bars trapped in between.

NYT: City Blog, Police Clear Out Protesters

This event reinforces an anti-police narrative, raises or reinforces no new issues. A New Year’s Party leads to a pushing match and arrests. It is unlikely to inspire more public support or respect for a movement that speaks in the name of The 99% who were focused on Times Square! What was achieved?

So far, there have been 5683 arrests at Occupy Events.

CLG: Magnitude 7.0 quake hits eastern Japan, felt at Fukushima

An earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale on Sunday rocked eastern part of Japan and its vicinity in Honshu Island of Japan, said the Japan Meteorological Agency. The epicenter of the quake, which occurred at 14:28 local time (0528 GMT), was off Torishima Island, south of Tokyo, at a depth of 370 kilometers. Strong tremors were felt in Tokyo where Xinhua’s office building swayed for a while. The jolt was also felt in northeastern prefectures including Miyagi and Fukushima.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy….

My Final Dissection of the past year on reading the New York Times via Skype for the NYTexaminer.com

I did not see this headline in the NYT Business Section did you? Number of Major Bank CEOS sent to prison: 0

Watch for Al Jazeera’s new TV Special Report Series on the US election. I was on the inaugural program, taped Saturday. I was on remote from Syracuse, New York, my old stomping ground decades ago.

Welcome to 2012

Yes, the new year is already here, celebrated in Sidney Australia and Asia and now sweeping the world,

Is it “another year, same shit” or or can we expect something really new? If we want it, we will have to fight for it. Hats off to all the occupiers who responded to the call in 2011 and are still at it. Remember: “It’s So Not Over!”

Here it is your money chart thanks to the xkcd blog

NoBama News from The National Journal: The Latest from Our President, The Law Professor and Constitutional Scholar–Obama Signs Homeland Battlefield Bill Into Law

Sayeth Mr. Courage: “I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists.”

BBC: New Law Includes tough new sanctions against Iran.

The law cuts off from the US financial system foreign firms that do business with Iran’s central bank.

Iowa Agonistes

The Latest Poll from The Hill: Romney holds slim lead over Paul in final Iowa poll, Santorum surging

“Mitt Romney holds a slim lead over Ron Paul in the final Des Moines Register poll before the Iowa caucuses, but Rick Santorum has continued his surge in the last days of the race.
Santorum took third place with Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann rounding out the field.”

This election hype for the 2012 election has been underway for months, perhaps because elections—not voting or issues—are a subject that TV News knows how to cover with the same well honed routines it brings to the horse race.

It’s mostly blablabla about who is ahead, and who is behind. and the media heads seem to love it because it resembles sports coverage. Gail Collins of the NY Times nailed the insipid quality of this spectacle as it pretends to significance. The Iowa caucus is not a significant bellweather of a national election that only gets serious in its last weeks, but it, nevertheless receives far more attention that it merits.

She writes:

“Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous…

Iowa caucusgoers are supposed to be particularly committed citizens who can make informed choices because they’ve had an opportunity to personally meet and interact with the candidates. Some of that does happen. In 2008, at the Democratic caucus I attended in Des Moines, there was unusually high support for Bill Richardson, mostly from people who said he had been to their house….

To summarize: On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching. The cookies will be excellent.”

Mark Engler reports in the new Daily Progressive Populist:

As caucus craziness reaches its peak here in Iowa, the Occupy movement has not been left out. As the Des Moines Register reported Wednesday in a notably favorable top-of-the-front-page story:

About 250 protesters from at least 11 states turned out Tuesday night for the first event of Occupy Iowa¹s most aggressive attempt to influence the presidential campaign.

The protesters ramped up for demonstrations at the candidates’ local headquarters and the offices of the Republican and Democratic parties. They were prepared to be arrested en masse, and they were fired up.

Des Moines happens to be my hometown, and so I’ve watched OccupyDSM for months. The impressive strength and resilience of local activists there is one of the things that first convinced me that this could be a movement with truly national reach.

Marching Down Memory Lane

Instead of looking forward, lets look back to other developments in the 12th year of some past centuries.

1712 was the year of the first slave revolt in New York, and took place not far from Zuccotti Park, the one-time base of the Occupy Wall Street Movement:

According to the websitefor the the Africans in America TV series.

“The stage was set for an uprising. First, the city had a large population of black slaves — the result of many years of trade with the West Indies. Secondly, communication and meeting among enslaved persons was relatively easy, since the New York City’s inhabitants lived in a small area on the southern tip of Manhattan. Thirdly, living in such a densely populated area also meant that slaves worked in close proximity to free men, a far cry from the situation on the plantations to the south.

Perhaps after meeting in a tavern, twenty-three blacks gathered on the night of April 6, 1712. It was midnight. Armed with guns, hatchets, and swords, the men set fire to a building in the middle of town. The fire spread. While white colonists gathered to extinguish the blaze, the slaves attacked, then ran off. At least nine whites had been shot, stabbed, or beaten to death; another six were wounded.

Militia units from New York and Westchester were mustered, as were soldiers from a nearby fort. Twenty-seven slaves were soon captured. Of these, six committed suicide. The rest were executed, some by being burned alive.”

How quaint: “Burned Alive”—a new practice in the new world.

1712 was also the birth year of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher

Now let’s fast forward another l00 years to 1812

It was a great year for wars, Naooleonic Wars, British and French Wars, Indian Wars. Russo-Turk wars, including a US invasion of Canada:

It was a year of music, as Wikipedia records, “the Year 1812, Festival Overture in E flat major, Op. 49, popularly known as the 1812 Overture or the Overture of 1812 is an overture written by Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1880 to commemorate Russia’s defense of Moscow against Napoleon’s advancing Grande Armée at the Battle of Borodino in 1812.”

1812 was a year of war in the USA. The White House Was Burned. The Star Spangled Banner was later written in poetic form even as “the flag that was still there” was not there for long since the British won that battle.

Let us remember that it was in that year that political manipulation got underway when
Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry invented gerrymandering, the political art of engineering electoral outcomes.

It was the year that New York State chartered City Bank of New York, which later became Citibank.

And last but not least: James Madison defeated DeWitt Clinton in the U.S. presidential election. The High School I attended would later be named after DeWitt Clinton, a Governor of New York. Eat your heart out James.

A Century later, suddenly, it’s 1912.

The African National Congress of South Africa is born. It will take them most of the century to liberate their country under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. (I have been invited to their l00th birthday party on January 8th but really can’t afford to go. Viva ANC, Viva!)

On January 12th of that year, Thirty thousand workers walk out of textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, beginning the so-called Bread and Roses strike, the most dramatic and successful strike in American labor history.

In April, the unsinkable RMS Titantic sets sail for New York from Britain, hits an iceberg and sank. The White Star Line and the ship’s captains were later blamed for the accident. To mark the event. and cash in again, James Cameron is reissuing his movie in 3D.

Imperialism is off and running. The US. Marines landed in Cuba. No 3D movies planned for that event.

1912 was an era of trustbusting with which President Obama recently referenced in his “I am like TR” speech comparing himself, falsely, to a Republican president. But TR did not win reelection that year. It was a four way context between Dems, Republicans, The Bull Moose or Progressive Party and the Socialist Party led by Eugene Victor Debs.

Notes Wikipedia: Attention Occupiers

In the early part of his political career, Debs was a member of the Democratic Party. He was elected as a Democrat to the Indiana General Assembly in 1884. After working with several smaller unions, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, Debs was instrumental in the founding of the American Railway Union (ARU), the nation’s first industrial union. When the ARU struck the Pullman Palace Car Company over pay cuts, President Grover Cleveland used the United States Army to break the strike. As a leader of the ARU, Debs was later imprisoned for failing to obey an injunction against the strike.

Debs educated himself about socialism in prison and emerged to launch his career as the nation’s most prominent socialist in the first decades of the 20th century. He ran as the Socialist Party’s candidate for the presidency in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920, the last time from his prison cell. (He won a million viotes)

Noted for his oratory, it was a speech denouncing American participation in World War I that led to his second arrest in 1918. He was convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 and sentenced to a term of 10 years. President Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence in December 1921. Debs died in 1926 not long after being admitted to a sanatorium.

in his memory, Happy New Year to my daughter: Sarah Debs Schechter (SDS)

Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson Wins Presidency. A year later, he signs off on the Federal Reserve Bank, later calls it his biggest mistake. Forms League of Nations that fails, Sends Us Troops into Wall War 1 because “it won’t be over until its over, over there.”‘

Armistice and Peace Deal of First Wold War leads inexorably to the second.

Will the World End As Mayans Supposedly Predicted?

And now its 2012, another election year, with many fearing a Mayan prophecy that in fact did not predict the end of the world, according to National Geographic:

“It’s remotely possible the world will end in December 2012. But don’t credit the ancient Maya calendar for predicting it, say experts on the Mesoameri

It’s true that the so-called long-count calendar—which spans roughly 5,125 years starting in 3114 B.C.—reaches the end of a cycle on December 21, 2012.

That day brings to a close the 13th Bak’tun, an almost 400-year period in the Maya long-count calendar.

But rather than moving to the next Bak’tun, the calendar will reset at the end of the 13th cycle, akin to the way a 1960s automobile would click over at mile 99,999.9 and reset to zero.
“We, of course, know that really means a hundred thousand [miles] and not zero,” said William Saturno, an expert on Maya archaeology at Boston University.

“So, is [the end of Bak'tun 13] a large period ending? Yes. Did the Maya like period endings? Yes,” Saturno said.

“Would this have been a period ending they thought was wicked cool? You bet. The biggest period endings they experience are Bak’tun endings.”

But “was it predicted to be the end the world? No. That’s just us.”

Instead, for the Maya, the end of the long count represents the end of an old cycle and the beginning of a new one, according to Emiliano Gallaga Murrieta, the Chiapas state division director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

“It is like for the Chinese, this is the Year of the [Rabbit], and the next year is going to the Year of the Dragon, and the next is going to be another animal in the calendar,” Gallaga said.”

Far Above Cayuga’s Waters

I am writing from Ithaca New York where Occupy Ithaca faces eviuction from a local park even as a segment of the occupiers have already moved from DeWitt Park to the property of the First Baptist Church, according to a report by the appropriately named Liz Lawyer in the Ithaca Journal which also caries a lead “guest viewpoint by one C.J. Kilgore 111 who attacks the Occupiers for lack of focus and message. He suggests that the occupation is not allowing him to enjoy his park,

The Nation: Frances Fox Piven on What The Occupy Movement Should Do For The Poor

And speaking of occupations, Michael Moore reminded us last Friday:

“??On this day, December 30th, in 1936 — 75 years ago today — hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them.

The workers couldn’t take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime — it was do as you’re told or get tossed onto the curb.

So on the day before New Year’s Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave.

They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in.

But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers.

The Nation: Katha Polilit on Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, my colleague for twenty years, was clever, hilarious, generous to his friends, combative, prodigiously energetic and fantastically productive. He could write with equal ease about Philip Larkin, capital punishment, Henry Kissinger and having his balls waxed.

I used to wonder, enviously, how he could write so much, especially given his drinking, his travels, his public appearances and his demanding social life. He told me once that a writer should be able to write with no difficulty, anytime, anywhere—but actually, not many writers can do that. I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth. For a man who started out as an International Socialist and ended up banging the drum for the war in Iraq and accusing Michelle Obama of fealty to African dictators on the basis of a stray remark in her undergraduate thesis, he seems to have spent little time wondering how he got from one place to another, much less if he’d lost anything on the way.

After he left The Nation he said he had a “libertarian gene.” It’s a rum sort of libertarianism, and a rum sort of gene, that expresses itself first as membership in a Trotskyist sect, and then as support for the signal deed of an administration that stood for everything he had spent his life fighting, from economic inequality to government promotion of religion.

So many people have praised Christopher so effusively, I want to complicate the picture even at the risk of seeming churlish. His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled.

But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. And so, I’m betting, were the cruder manifestations of his famously pugilistic nature: as F Scott Fitzgerald said of his own alcoholism: “When drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.” It makes me sad to see young writers cherishing their drinking bouts with him, and even his alcohol-fuelled displays of contempt for them (see Dave Zirin’s fond reminiscence of having Christopher spit at him) as if drink is what makes a great writer, and what makes a great writer a real man.

Roasting Tom Friedman who Deserves it

Robert Birnbaum (Our Man in Boston blog) writes

Journalist Belen Fernandez’s new opus Imperial Messenger (Verso) effectively eviscerating the NYT’s Thomas Friedman (whom Alexander Cockburn, not one to pull punches, has called “the silliest man on the planet”) strikes me as an example of the kind of book that a supine establishment,mainstream media herd must exert some effort to avoid paying even minimal attention.

Friedman, a three time Pulitzer Prize winner (meaning he has been well-celebrated by his supposed peers) perfectly represents the kind of gobbledegook that has allowed political discussion (such as it is) become a morass of bemuddlement And befuddlement.

World Journal: Putin’s Pathetic Reaction To Russian Movement

OK, that’s News Dissector.com for the year. I was pleased to welcome into your life. We have some plans to do a better job in 2012 with a new version of the Mediachannel as Mediachannel1.org.

I will have details for you soon on downloading my new new book OCCUPY on the Occupy movement, and other work in a long pipeline.

If what I do interests you, please get in touch and tell me if you can help. Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org

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Congrats to all who protested and killed Verizon’s new fee. Consumer pressure can work!

Happy News Year

Danny Schechter
News Dissector

The News Dissector