coldhearted scientist وداد

I am supposed to go home but I am in the office reading the news.  I hear the Partido Popular won in Spain with the help of some indignado vote. In Cairo I hear Tahrir Square is full of tear gas and the Cabinet is offering its resignation. Back to Madrid I am posting this video of October 18 just because the city is so beautiful at night:

I read an article on OWS by Gleen Greenwald, actually one of several pieces in Salon, with delicious links. Here is an excerpt, with emphasis added by me:

That last phrase is the essence of why I hope OWS, at least for now, remains a movement that refuses to reduce itself into garden-variety electoral politics. What is missing from America is a healthy fear in the hearts and minds of the most powerful political and financial factions of the consequences of their continued pilfering, corporatism, and corrupt crony capitalism, and only this sort of movement — untethered from the pacifying rules of our political and media institutions — can re-impose that healthy fear. When both parties are captive to the same factions, then — by design, as AIPAC has so effectively shown — one can’t subvert the agenda of those factions simply by voting for one party or the other.

Moreover, what happens with fundamentally corrupted political systems is that even well-intentioned candidates — or discrete pieces of legislation that are good in the abstract — become infected and degraded when inserted into that system; if you believe that the wealthiest class anti-democratically controls political institutions (an indisputably true premise), then it makes little sense to expect specific new bills or even individual candidates inserted into that system to bring about much change. This was the same debate I had with transparency advocate Steven Aftergood when he argued that it was better to bring about transparency with anti-secrecy legislation than with the insurgent approach of WikiLeaks. As I argued then, even if one entertained the fantasy that strong, well-crafted transparency legislation could be enacted, the fact that it would be implemented within a political system controlled by Generals and intelligence community officials, and overseen by CIA-and-Pentagon-revering members of Congress, meant that any statutory framework would be so watered down (if not outright ignored) in implementation that it would be virtually irrelevant. Given how fundamentally corrupted and secrecy-obsessed the National Security State is, only a force for transparency that remained outside of that secrecy-preserving system — WikiLeaks — could bring about meaningful disclosures. That’s what I think about our oligarchy-drenched political process.

I read some suggestions for OWS from Rolling Stone. I think these proposals could be the project of one (large) working group. It would take a lot to get them done, but it’s true this would be a good project. Then there would be other projects. I think it would be fine for Occupy to be a big old think tank with working groups.

I would not have studied Occupy to the extent I have, given how over busy I am, had I not heard as much as I have about how they must organize differently. But then I look up opinions, and I keep being convinced by those who say the non traditional structure still serves them best.

Axé.