tv [untitled] November 23, 2011 6:30am-7:00am EST
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arrangement three. three stews three. three broken videos for your media project free media don carty dot com. it's now a three thirty pm on wednesday massacre look at your headlines now thousands of egyptians remain in tahrir square for the sixth day and an immediate transfer of power as they reject a pledge by the military rulers to speed up presidential elections now at least thirty six people have died so far in fierce clashes between protesters and security forces all across the country. the u.n. general assembly human rights committee condemns syria for its violent crackdown on anti-government protests damascus calls it a u.s.
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led plot to topple it's got russia did abstain from voting on the resolution saying dialogue is the only solution to the crisis. and five years after the death of former. alexander litvinenko from polonium poisoning in the u.k. the case remains unsolved and a thorn in the side of russian british relations london now wants the main suspect to be extradited but russia has refused saying that it is against the constitution to hand over citizens to foreign governments. those are the headlines here and next they do stay with us. discuss what's behind the whole occupy movement and who really are the so-called ninety nine percent crosstalk is now on arts. take a. listen to.
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the lonely welcome across the uk i'm curious about what's next for the occupy movement across the u.s. after police use strong arm tactics to disperse protesters should the movement seek a way to join the political process and to insert itself into legislative procedures or would eventually fragment into protests for protest say. ok. crosstalk the ongoing protests in the us i'm joined by my guests in new york james livingston he's a professor of history at rutgers and author of against thrift why consumer culture is good for the economy the environment and your soul published yesterday patrick bradley and he is a writer and the william f. buckley fellow at the national review institute and francis fox pavan she is a distinguished professor of sociology and political science at city university of new york graduate center all right folks crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it but first is this
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movement actually going anywhere i think that's the main question right now is that over the two months that the occupy wall street movement has existed it's turned into a juggernaut of civil disobedience that has plowed through cities across the world but just as the movement is growing in scale and scope it is also grappling with more and more criticism crackdowns and facing growing questions about its tactics and strategy the movement's advocates still insist that occupy is an important voice for public frustration that has succeeded in raising awareness of staggering income and wealth inequality there is a movement brewing in america not just the occupy wall street but the two thousand encampments occupy around america and also the sense that suddenly the ninety nine percent of americans who have not been heard from are being heard from. and heard in the media which is not paid attention until now. the extent to which occupy has gathered steam and resonated across the us and the globe does say something about a collective sense of discontent and disillusionment with the economy but whether
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that sense can be applied to all of the ninety nine percent of americans that the protests claim to represent is another story and this is shown in a recent opinion survey conducted by public policy polling which found that not only does occupy appeal to nearly a handful of the ninety nine percent but it's a poor ratings have sounded over the last month is growing awareness of occupy probably stems from the real or perceived notion that the movement's outlook is redundantly utopian while its members are yet to make forth clear and specific policy goals and here in the protestors chief task proving they can convert their momentum into targeted action but even occupy were to recede into the annals of social resistance it would not like when we behind the idea that the movement came to represent and then leave that there is a y disconnect between the government and on the ground reality and that reality shows the western economic system experiencing a deep systemic crisis so perhaps the main purpose has already been served we'll see about that first round as i'd like to go to you in new york where you wrote i
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think we desperately need a popular uprising in the united states is this the uprising you were hoping for and where is this approach if it is where is the south where and where is this uprising growing. this this uprising is raising the issue of extreme unequality in the united states in the quality of both wealth and income has increased steadily over the past thirty five years. and somehow it did not find real expression and in the american political process i didn't find strong expression in the american political process because the very fact that wealth has become more concentrated has meant that the wealthy can play. more money into our electoral system so even democrats did not forcefully express the fact think any quality and people were left without even
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a clear articulation of what the problem was what the problems are and occupy wall street began it began not the small and new york city it was the first clear and all the expression big problem who center was financial capitalism ok patrick what do you think about that i mean it one of the things i find very interesting is that and we just report was i mean is it really about the ninety nine percent or is it about a certain percentage of the type of person that is being disenfranchised in america's democratic system because i mean if it's ninety nine percent why don't you just all register to vote in kick the bombs out but that's not what's happening you know it's very clear that it really doesn't represent ninety nine percent of america and if you go down to zuccotti park it doesn't look like ninety percent of america to me and i think the polls bear that out just yesterday there was it in our poll that came out in support of your start least thirteen percent in support
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of married thirty percent against the fact is that it was a great piece in new york yesterday that brought out one of the origins of the movement and it's essentially. a movement believes in this but it's essentially an archaic anti-capitalist movement and while many americans are not happy with their economic situation i don't think that the blame that on the nature of capitalism i think that's a pretty pretty rare sense of it in america today and so in that sense it was already good cow dance capitalism and so i'm not sure that really i mean that's a fair enough geez if i can go to you i mean a lot of people would say capitalism isn't working for them. that's right i think that's exactly right i think there are two questions here one is the nature of politics. register and vote and vote for what what happens in congress if you vote for whomever nothing to say that that this movement has to get political is to me just laughable because the political process is so broken it is so not just
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a bipartisan partisan but put ridiculously dysfunctional. so that's one thing the other thing is the nature of capitalism americans have always been ambivalent about capitalism the nature of it sure yet i think the ninety nine percent are deeply deeply worried about what's happening under this system that we call capitalism like it or not i think the one percent of our people want to see from zuccotti how you can be a bill or capitalism if you're so for a consumer society and how do the consumer society with capitalism. james you would feel that well. sure i'm going to have a lot about capitalism because i think consumerism is a way of transcending or superseded capitalism i think it's a way of reducing corporate profits for example if we redistribute income away from you know i don't think religion has made raising the issue of things happen although some go ahead francis jump in the movement. the movement to not raise the issue of capitalism every race the issue of concentrated wealth and income.
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it doesn't really our against capitalism and. it speaks about corporate financial wealth that has greatly concentrated and not only the top one percent the top tenth of one percent in our society and it is certs actually pretty close to correctly that most of the rest of the society is to play viewed as a result of the crest of wealth upward in the united states it doesn't say capitalism most of the chances i think this is a serious thing here and he's very interesting here my three guests here we can't even decide really what this movement's all about and james i'd like to quote something that you wrote in something called occupy wall street isn't the same old political crap it's much much more and we read a sentence from here the response to occupy wall street tells us more about the limits of our political discourse then about the content of the protest or movement
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can you elaborate on that because it's very very interesting and you mentioned something else in the article about eastern europe and i studied the solidarity movement very very carefully when i was a graduate student you're drawing parallels here so it's very interesting go ahead yeah what i see it is it has something to do with the limits of our discourse i mean what is the what is the limits or what is the nature of politics it seems to me vaclav havel got it right he said dissidents opposition is not all there is to politics in fact what he said was living within the true. ruth is a creep political space that's what i think is happening in zuccotti park. so so yes we might be able someday to translate this into political programs but for the time being that is not the point the point is simply to allow these words to make more sense to more people than i mean i percent versus the one percent if those words if that vernacular of these if these these verbs and nouns get into the
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language we have a way of thinking about the future that right now we don't ok patrick if i go to you it seems to me this movement knows what he doesn't like it doesn't like an oligarchy it doesn't like concentration of wealth i go on and on what does it want what is it like because it's all telling us what they don't like and that's why it's so it's such a dual use group. i think that i think the dreams was getting what probably unifies the movement more than anything is the idea of sort of this kind of a political utopia consensus consensus based democracy and so that's that's the whole movement revolves around these general assemblies and their sort of wonderful ideas and basically you know liberal commentators like and so that is beautiful you know fortunately it isn't like tahrir square because it was a professional political protest political aims but they said you know the six already this beautiful and unfortunately it doesn't represent anything that's particularly politically practical and it's not it's not an example of american democracy that isn't what democracy looks like you know having. acquiring consensus
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and you know paint it all viewpoints isn't really want to marx it looks like it isn't what's made functional democratic societies work. but that is i think what it what ties all together is this is this raising consensus which ok fred francis of france were ranters go jump in there because an actual history ok you know actually social movements that look something like occupy wall street have been very very important in american history and you mark an evolution and came out of a social movement in the united states it wouldn't have been it would not try him without that social movement the abolitionists set in motion the political currents which led to civil war and the emancipation of the slaves the labor movement that flared up in the one nine hundred thirty s. these did not look like. electoral representing the politics they have the
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distinctive dynamics of movements movements look and talk to front like. campaign politics or elected politicians and when you when you're so dismissive of the movement because it hasn't put out a series of legislative or programmatic goals. you're not comparing it to other movements this movement has an incredible symbolic power because it has cut through the fog of jibberish and propaganda that has upset the french i'm going to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and out of any short break we'll continue our discussion on the occupy movement stay with our. kids can. you think it's called.
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that is the complement and logo is to create the creation of the bill the food system the global food system is not created to feed the people of the world is created to maximize the profits. you're not trading the actual cash physical grain you're trading promises for grain to be delivered a month or six months or twelve months or eighteen months in the future. for reasons modern regulated silver or gold that can be negotiated in order to some degree in. place. yet or. possibly it's not traded now but it could be in the future. mission
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free could you take three months for a church free commitment free. free. free. download free both can plug in video for your media projects supreme leader. john darche dot com. if you. still. want to. welcome back to cross talk about remind you we're talking about the protests sweeping across the united states and beyond. the k.k.k. . ok james i want to go to you because you were very pure very very complimentary to francis's last comment before we went to the break and i
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don't want to i want to i'm again i don't want to i want to see if i can put you guys on the spot here james and francis personal go to james here i mean if the system isn't a solution need it you can't work within the system because the system is so dysfunctional how do you create a new system without being systematic and creating something because again this consensus i mean i like the rhetoric i'm very interested in that regard this reminds me of eastern europe fighting communism in the 1980's and it's all really nice to hear but you know even solidarity had a very had to build a strong organization to finally defeat the communist regime eventually you have to do that you have to have leaders you have chapters and you have runners and all these types of things here i mean how do you how do you square the circle i think i think it's a great question and i think patrick was right as well the question is when do those social movements that francis cites when do they become political in the sense that we now would recognize here if you look at the american revolution for example in seven hundred seventy two would anybody say there was
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a revolution going on no i mean the thing died in seven hundred seventy eight with the boston massacre and it didn't get reconstituted with seven hundred seventy three to the abolitionists actually make the revolution the second american revolution we call the civil war reconstruction no there had to be a translation from abolitionism to political anti-slavery we're not at that stage yet. it seems to me anyway intellectual inquiry in a logical education that's where we should be we don't know the future yet and we're going to have to work it out but obviously yes we're going to have to do something political now because it's seems to be completely pointless live in france or kind of begs the question what do you do why where do you go i mean i can't say i'm very sympathetic to you but i mean i don't see how you get from point a to point b. let alone get from a to z. well first you're trading movements as they occur at a single point in time and all the movements all the great movements in american history have occurred have unfolded over
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a fairly long period of time the labor movement unfolded over probably twelve years the civil rights movement began in the one nine hundred fifty s. hadn't subsided even by the early one nine hundred seventy s. the movement then creates. a kind of fewer of communication it introduces new messages into the political system that regular politics suppresses and the movement also introduces new forces into the political system that interact with existing forces the movement doesn't create its own outcome the outcome is the result of the angle fred francis dream the resister be fair to be fair to all go to patrick air on this one i mean again i mean if the movement isn't focused on what it wants to accomplish and how to accomplish it how does it get there because all the other social movements have been mentioned on
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this program here evolution the red american revolution i mean these were very political ok these from this movement now that we see occupy wall street is extremely economic ok it's how the system functions and for whom the how do you connelly functions and for home users it's very different than the social movements that we've had in the past. well i think even if you called it a good story of the american revolution but it was some research and economic movement because you are just looking for a large part economic indicators surveillance but i think that the difference to your really looking at is that there's been sort of simmering revolution or the abolition or even the labor movement those represented fundamentally american ideals and if there's something that sort of personifies to the. wall street movement it's generally the idea that government in the state in some way will be able to transform our society reduce inequality there's no you can really be actively join in in a political process to reduce inequality and i don't think that's most americans
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believe misery forty percent of total are on the rise or do as a result of this francis go ahead well this movement is distinct it's actually from the movements of the twentieth century because it's very skeptical of government that's what it's emphasis on the general assembly on reaching consensus. total democracy free flights free flights it's disappointment that skepticism of the way government has functioned in the twentieth and twenty first century things that government or israel is an instrument of capitalism a james go ahead jump in can i can i step in here i mean to cite the evolutionist movement or to cite the american revolution that's fine but the abolitionists were explicitly and very self consciously anti political they refused to enter the electoral arena because they thought it would corrupt they were right it did corrupt but the anti-slavery movement it did get electoral between eight hundred
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forty eight and eight hundred sixty one made a huge difference the point is the abolitionists were political just like it seems to be occupy wall street only some of them some of them were in the center of the united states. ok i think in a charles sumner i might agree yeah ok patrick i mean i want to pick up on something you said earlier and i want to just be clear for you is the occupy wall street movement un-american in your opinion. yeah i believe it is i don't think it's i don't think it represents the way that american democracy works the idea of consensus that is american democracy is american democracy working is it working for the average person today. well the average person or in our economic system i want i want to know that it's it's our economic system isn't treating average american very well right now with the doesn't say that the system is fundamentally flawed and our political process and democracy democracy takes time and so even though our political process is stalled right now that isn't sitting well in harlem
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if i can go to james if i can go to james on the banks were in trouble the congress got together pretty fast and bailed them out then they mean really matter of weeks ok it goes move very quickly as they censor invested interest are at stake here but the very principle of a representative democracy seems to be pretty low on the priority list right now because this is the whole reason why people are opting out of it because it didn't work for him i think out by wall street is quintessentially american because its fundamental question is how do we achieve equality patrick may be right democracy is ugly and it works slowly and it doesn't work on consensus even so it seems to me that bad the fundamental question they're asking is how do we achieve equality that there's nothing more american than. francis i mean i don't know if it's to create equality but i think what you are people are saying they want to fair playing field i think that's that's fair to ask isn't it i mean when you look at all of these graduates coming out of university terribly in debt and they have to go back and move in with their parents and get you know hourly get paid an hourly wage and i
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just creates a vicious cycle of debt that you'll never get out of and i think that's a good enough reason for a lot of people to protest i mean the system doesn't help them the system helps the people that are have vested vested interest in keeping the system the same way is it is today by the way i think that most of the participants in occupy wall street would agree the issue is extreme inequality and the political economy that isn't functional for fourteen million unemployed for. millions of young people. graduate from college only to find themselves deeply in debt and unable to get a job for the people who eat don't even get help from the tattered safety net in the united states and meantime and everybody knows this now as a result the spandrel that the scandals that emerged during the financial
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crisis mean time lots of big companies hardly pay taxes we bail out wall street we bail out general motors and the banks refuse to write down the principle of inflated mortgages so that the system isn't working all right i want and i wanted one something that states such accounts are closer than the euro i think is interesting you're talking about the occupy wall street movement their food system does seem to encapsulate quite neatly their vision for how the world should work free high quality stuff should appear for their consumption what do you mean by that. well i mean i think that it was a particularly funny thing because that's why guys like order to go ahead. they're going to cite high quality. then a couple of their coats are actually employed at blue hill street expensive restaurant was just a county and he just some of us well it's it's not really ninety nine percent of america out there it's these it's for the large extent unemployed college graduates
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just basically who are over educated a well educated every want to call it. who you know sort of get out there and do their their democratic things but those really are the people that are hurting in america and i did this did represent the those who are present and just let me finish i mean the college if we're going to if we're really if it's really about say writing down student loan debt for college graduates are unemployed now because graduates are the only segment america right now they're actually doing very well the unemployment rate among them something like four or five percent and there you'll want to use incomes have grown over the last twenty or thirty years i mean that's that's a perfect example of why occupy wall street is really representing sort of the the limitations of the of the chattering classes in not of the you know the middle americans who are really really hurting james you want to jump in there the chattering classes i had yes yes i i i have to say that the guy that ridiculous permanent residents of zuccotti park might well fit the demographic that you're
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citing unemployed college graduates but if you watch what happens. after hours after people have gone to work it's very very different if you watch the demonstrations if you watch the marches if you participate in them you'll see that the labor movement is there you see that all kinds of people there in fact the mail that i got after i did an interview for rockers on this question came from people who said to me i can't get there i work for a living what do i do i want to support this movement i cannot because i'm working nine to five what do i do so i think that's a mischaracterization at least ok happening frances i want to give you the last word on this program a year from now where is this movie going to be. i think a year from now this and the men will have found out from the parks and plazas where there are relatively small in countenance the people by the way all movements begin with relatively small groups the civil rights movement didn't start out as
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a majority harry in movement nor did the american revolution this movement is in that sense. it all right tyrants i'm going to have the campaign here are very very interesting discussion folks many thanks my guest today in new york and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time remember crossed off. anything. you can.
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