A woman grad student from TAA took the DN camera around to show different parts of the occupation with information boards, food center, some donated from inside and outside the state including Egypt and Haiti(?). Amazing. At a guess the latter might come from egyptian and haitian small businesses and or students in the US, in the name of their homelands...
Meanwhile on AJE you can watch Friday afternoon mass demos in Tunis, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Iraq. In Basra, the crowds pushed down several sections of concrete wall that blocked access to where the government hides.
Robert Fisk's column today covered his impressions of arrving at Tripoli airport and driving around Tripoli in a sullen and drizzling night with pro-G milias at side street intersections. Food supplies were running low. The airport was in chaos and stank of feces and urine.
Since I've spent most of my time following AJE, Juan Cole, Fisk, and DN, I haven't been listening to US political figures, except through AJE reporters. Saturday morning I usually watch what Shield and Brooks had to say on Friday, just as a measure of what goes on in Washington.
I am astonished, which I shouldn't be, at the vast chasma that has opened up between reality and Washington's life in a bubble. The official cover for a CIA agent caught in Lahore after killing two men, was a demand for diplomatic immunity? The disconnect between economic realities and Wall Street is also a study of life in a bubble.
Unlike Wisconsin, states like California are directly in debt to Wall Street banks, who are in a position to make demands on state authorities to cut wages and benefits or they won't get loans, extensions, and reasonable interest rates. And I have to remember these assholes have free money, given to them by the US Treasury and Federal Reserve.
These disconnects remind me of those across North Africa and the Middle East. Frankly, I am not sure what I am seeing in the US and EU. I think what I am watching is a massive spin doctor campaign to save the neoliberal project that has caused social, economic and political conditions that are central to these protests. I am watching the WH spokesman babbling on about reviewing their options, holding perpetrators of violence and violations of human rights responsible... How is that going to work when you are the suspects you're looking for?
The WH, political and economic elites are operating on perceptions, in a transcendental world of illusions that have become disjoint from actual material and concrete processes and conditions. This disconnect has the alarming effect of blinding the elite who run the society. The consequence is that a society in crisis can not protect itself by doing the right thing, that is following policies and actions that correct the conditions that are on the road to complete ruin. Haiti and New Orleans are prime examples.
One function of free speech is to alert the people when its governance system is breaking down so that the people can take corrective action and restore governance. This is a critical social function, a culture of whisleblowers, has nothing to do with opinions or debates. It is a social survival process.
Wisconsin fits in this systemic crushing and collapse as the state government breaks itself by destorying its own governance infrastructure. How is that supposed to work?
Here's a quote from AJE on Egypt:
To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak's Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201122414315249621.html
The whole article is worth reading because it links up all the connection