Monday, Sept. 17
(8pm): The one-year anniversary of
Occupy Wall Street will be marked with an OCCUPY/TEA Summit (hosted by me)
at Muchmore’s (2 Havemeyer St. on the corner of N. 9th St., three blocks east
of the Bedford Ave. L stop, first into Williamsburg from Manhattan). All are welcome, but among the guests will
be:
Andrew Paladino, Danny Panzella,
and Michael Valcic, who’ve done free-market anarchist outreach to
both movements, and Wall Street analyst turned Occupy writer/filmmaker Karanja
“Speshul K” Gacuca. I'll moderate.
•Let us begin my “Month
of Reform” with blog entry #1516 (I’ve been blogging almost-daily for six
years). Fittingly, that number is the
year in which Utopia was published, and reform, after all, tends to be
what people settle for after realizing utopia is not an option.
•And that brings us to the gridlock and bickering between
right and left, a problem which this month I will honestly try to help solve by
hosting the event noted above (being quieter and more diplomatic hereafter) and
also by unveiling my own theory – in essence that the Progressive Era activists
and politicians of both parties wanted
highly centralized collusion between government and corporations and we got
it. And now we don’t like it. And trying to shove the ugly mass rightward
or leftward as if the other team owns it isn’t really going to unravel it, so
to speak.
•You can understand
why such musings – akin to those of historian Marty Sklar, whose work was recommended
to me by Ronald Radosh – might make me more sympathetic to
establishment-fighting radicals across the board. Heck, I might even be more sympathetic to the
group Anonymous today than in years past had they not taken down this blog and
hundreds of thousands of others yesterday.
Civility and
dialogue – gonna aim for those even more as the elections approach and everyone
gets crazier.
•As they do, I admit
that long-term, I will mainly still
be rooting for Sen. Rand Paul to exercise a growing influence in the GOP, but I
may also try to think of that party as his messy problem to solve and ignore it
for at least a couple years unless
something positive happens. Interestingly,
in addition to being almost-completely libertarian, in his new book he calls
himself a “crunchy conservative” (a la Rod Dreher and others on the right
concerned about the environment).
Hawks may still be
getting used to Rand Paul, but, hey, he seems to be the only senator conservative enough to wanna cut off the
Pakistanis due to their punishment of the doctor who helped us get bin
Laden. That should silence both
conspiracy theorists who think the Pauls secretly believe bin Laden wasn’t
responsible for the events commemorated today and the neocons who think the
Pauls are some sort of al Qaeda sympathizers.
Now if only
something would make Paul Krugman shut up about how much he dislikes the gold
standard and something – perhaps more people like Rand Paul who’ve been
hassled by the TSA – would put a stop to the government tracking everything we do.
•Meanwhile, the ex-Republican I actually plan to vote
for for president this year, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, is
also an interesting exercise in hybridization and fusionism (love those,
always) in that he has spoken at both Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party events –
and is known for both budget-cutting and pot-smoking. He has also climbed Mt. Everest.
There has never been
a better time to rack up Libertarian votes and attract the public’s attention
to liberty as an alternative. Let’s do
this. It will matter far more than Obama-vs.-Romney. Whoever sits in the White House in 2013 (and
deals with the legal fallout of the mandatory deficit-cutting measures about to
kick in), we libertarians will trudge on, a bit wiser than we were in
2012.
•And tomorrow on
this blog, a bit of a prequel to how the Progressives got us here, in the form
of the book Yankee Reformers in the
Urban Age, looking at Boston in the final two decades of the nineteenth
century – and finding upper-crust radicalism.
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