INFOGRAPHIC: ACCEPTABLE FORMS OF NYC CAMPING

On Thursday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Occupy Wall Street protesters would have to vacate Zuccotti Park, their place of occupation, so the park could be cleaned. After that, they would not be permitted to re-enter the park with sleeping bags, tents or other necessary occupation supplies.

The Occupiers refused to move, delaying their eviction. They suspected a trap: after all, having watched Boston police swarm protesters in riot gear and drive them out with all the subtlety of Hungary in '56, the smart play for Bloomberg and the NYPD would be to lure the protesters out, then keep them locked out. A decidedly non-aggressive tactic such as that would provide few stirring images of victimization. Then, in the streets, protesters on the move could be arrested, as they have been for weeks.

However, one particular group of campers is more than welcome on the streets of New York. My friend Robert even worked up a handy graphic to explain it:

Al Davis and the Media's Poison Jobs

Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis died yesterday at 82. For most of you, that means the end of the scabby creature who ran the Raiders and leavened seasons of humiliating losses with employee firings suffused with Nixonian paranoia and loathing. Skimming Twitter reveals pretty much exactly what you expect from the internet: "jokes" linking Davis to Lovecraft monsters, fantasy monsters, sci-fi monsters, other permanently arrested-development genre monsters.

I can't claim to have done much better. Years ago, I wrote out a kind of silly thought-experiment likening Davis to Hitler. I didn't mean to sincerely equate the two, nor to rehabilitate Hitler in any way. At the time, it was funny to compare the Raiders' hermetic and endlessly back-biting front office with Hitler's last ten days:

Davis' ending has yet to be written, but it's currently playing out with the same drama of palace intrigue.... Messages go out from the Davis bunker: this is the year!—we are winning! Like Hitler's movement of paper armies in the face of the Soviets' overwhelming forces, the gestures are empty and futile. Conflicting reports emanate from underground: this one is out of favor. This one shall be the successor. No!—we were presumptuous: the leader has not named a successor. Davis has taken to issuing public comments to pressure head coach Lane Kiffin to resign...; the gestures echo Hitler delusionally promoting Paulus to Field Marshal to drive him to suicide.

This wasn't an obituary, though, and was never meant to be. This was clowning around with gossip and strange newsbites.

I still feel a little ashamed of it, because it sounds like a slightly less boneheaded version of the "he was a crazy skin-cancer goblin who sucked!" narrative I've spent the day reading on message boards and the last few years pushed by a lazy and easily sated media. I felt like I was re-pimping an already cartoonish pimp job offered on behalf of Paul Tagliabue and Roger Goodell in exchange for ample buffets and token opportunities for "access."

Scholarships and Compensation: The Intercollegiate National Lie

Aside from reminding Americans for the next 15 minutes that history has actual value, Taylor Branch's devastating article, "The Shame of College Sports," finally fully legitimized the discussion of paying college athletes for their performance. It certainly didn't approve the notion by fiat, but simply allowing it to enter the conversation as an equally reasonable proposition was triumph enough.

Prior to its publication, it sometimes it took actual effort to find someone willing to entertain the idea. Proposing that college players take home paychecks usually provoked reactions that ran the gamut from mocking laughter to intense moral outrage. It's hard to explain why. In a country where you can monetize your Twitter feed, exploit your pop-star child, and have people applaud the commodification of virtually anything, college football has nestled in a protective embrace of absurd reverence for amateurism, swaddled in flimsy excuses for innocence.

Rick Scott Can't Stop Doing You Favors

Since the last one personally cost him over $70 million, Rick Scott could use an inexpensive win right now. Two weeks ago, a PPP poll revealed that, in a do-over election, he would lose to Democratic candidate Alex Sink by nearly 20%, a mammoth number for such a high-profile position.

Then, just a week ago, he was booed lustily by Tampa Bay residents while throwing out the first pitch at the Rays home opener. Although the FOX-owned Sun Sports network muted the crowd reaction, its intensity was unmistakable in the stadium. Insignificant and isolated cheers — in part due to planned attendance from a St. Petersburg conservative group — were drowned out by the packed house. People in line buying hot dogs and beer booed him on the concourses, and the crowd noise was loud enough that it was easily identifiable even in the restrooms.

Perhaps stuffing a war chest to buy another victory lies at the heart of Scott's plan to introduce mandatory drug testing for all state employees, close public health clinics and farm out state Medicaid to private HMOs. Scott, of course, founded Solantic Corporation, which runs a chain of 32 urgent care centers across the state and which stands to profit handsomely from managing former public Medicaid-related responsibilities as well as the burden of thousands of regular drug screens.

Admittedly, Scott went to the farcical effort of transferring his investment in Solantic to a trust held by his wife and also professing that Solantic would not profit from the state during his governorship, but both gestures are absurd and meaningless. No married person can hear the myth of "isolated" and "personal" income in a marriage without descending into a fit of giggles, and it's a foregone conclusion that Scott's policies can benefit Solantic even peripherally, long before his mantis-shaped exoskeleton gets booted out of office.

Picket Lines: Maine Murals

Any lingering suspicion that the anti-union actions of Ohio Governor John Kasich, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Florida Governor Rick Scott were merely coincidentally simultaneous sops to far-right voters and their anti-government sentiment was dispelled last week when Maine Governor Paul LePage's office announced the removal of a mural of Maine's labor history from the state's Department of Labor. The rights of laborers need to be so anathematized that even depicting the exercise of them becomes publicly offensive.

As with any GOP decision this extreme and senseless, the satirical responses outweigh any credible explanation. Just off the top of one's head, for a party obsessed with pushing the creeping influence of "Shariah Law" as a 2012 talking point, you have to adore the sudden need to remove forbidden graven images of humans in art. Just minutes ago according to the Republican clock, the only people in America hellbent on suppressing art were The Left's fifth-column political-corrections officers — the moral screws from Manhattan and Mecca — who were bending forward and eastward to make sure that artistic representations didn't offend anyone. Somehow this kind of protectionist pandering to interests is more dignified for being about money instead of something so shallow as religion.

But this decision supposedly reflected none of the negativity above. It was fair and balanced, according to Acting Labor Commissioner Laura Boyett (emphasis mine):

We have received feedback that the administration building is not perceived as equally receptive to both businesses and workers — primarily because of the nature of the mural in the lobby and the names of our conference rooms. Whether or not the perception is valid is not really at issue and therefore, not open to debate. If either of our two constituencies perceives that they are not welcome in our administration building and this translates to a belief that their needs will not be heard or met by this department, then it presents a barrier to achieving our mission

(The complaints sent to the LePage administration initially were described as faxes, in dozens of journalistic organs. Only after releasing an alleged complaint fax that looked nothing like a fax did LePage and personnel claim that the complaints they received were letters and counter the fax talk. It doesn't really matter what kind of complaints they were, though, since apparently valid complaints and specious, invalid bullshit must be weighed with equal consideration.)

At first glance, this might seem like reasonable stuff, making sure the Department of Labor doesn't evince an allegiance to any side in the eternal Labor vs. Management debate — that is, until you understand what a Department of Labor is actually for. Take this quick-and-dirty explanation, which admittedly about the federal labor department, but which says that it is

responsible for occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, re-employment services, and some economic statistics.

In short, those are all things won by labor, at the expense of ownership, through striking and aggressively campaigning for pro-labor legislation. These were not terms born out of Management Zeus' head but rather rights brutally deferred or denied by employers and strikebreakers, demanded and agitated for, for decades, by people with little income or safety nets. These are profound things, and they are all fundamentally labor.

To have these things and ascribe them to anything other than labor requires a personal dictionary where words are whatever you hope they will be when you look them up. You can't have a Department of Labor that is equally about ownership or the investor/developer class, because otherwise it would not be a Department of Labor and would probably be called the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development. Or the Chamber of Commerce. The Department of Labor's mandate is in its name. Nouns exist.

LePage and Boyett's claims are patently absurd. Business hardly needs pro-business illustrations in the Maine government when it already has the governor and his cabinet. The stuff on the walls of a mansion are irrelevant if the owner already signed you up for direct deposit from his bank accounts. When someone hands you a check, you hardly feel any necessity to take a photo of the exchange and make that person hang it in his home. Doing so doesn't create Super More-Real Bucks.

Consider how nitpickingly comical it would seem if the GOP demanded that federal departments ignore the mandates for their creation and stagily orient themselves to be "equally receptive to both sides" to make sure "that either of the two constituencies are... welcome." Consider a Department of Defense whose mission statement remained "Death Neutral." Or a Department of Transportation that tore down murals of planes, cars, boats and trains to devote thirty expansive and intimidating feet of canvas to "all those folks who just kinda like to stay put." The last thing we should do is affiliate the Department of Education with a first-class public school system. And if the GOP can just de-fund it more, we won't have to worry about that happening again anyway.

The entire gesture is just so callow and petty and mean-spirited. It's not enough to divest unions of their power, crush them with corporate governmental influence and reduce groups of like-minded people to mere individuals less able to pool their meager resources and seek a redress of grievances: now we have to eliminate even their nostalgia. It's as if someone determined to legislatively walk back the ferment of the 1960s also attached a rider to a bill that mandated destroying every extant copy of the Beatles' discography.

Yankee Fans Boo Rick Scott?

I promise to write about something other than Rick Scott soon, but this struck me as interesting. Political boos at baseball games are pretty commonplace; in fact, finding a way to tie them to Barack Obama is apparently a cottage industry at the National Review. And most of the time, their origins are simple. A recent tax hike or hiring cutback sends fans jeering a governor or president when the policy might well have been the legislature's. Even by those uncritical standards, though, these boos seem a little odd, for four reasons:

Teaparties, Race and a Union Rally in a Tiny Tampa Park

Over the last few years, I've accrued pageloads for mocking mean-spirited teapartiers and their misspelled signs, slovenliness and ideological self-contradiction, going back to that well again and again and again and again. It's a cheap and easy recipe for attention-getting stuff. Take one (1) group of nasty people, add lots (lots) of photographic evidence of their being nasty, then add one (1) comment per photo about how they suck.

I've never posted any sort of counterpoint. The most obvious explanation is that reasonable people aren't very funny. You can't run dozens of photos of civil human beings and gin up a laugh. Less obviously: most liberal activists stayed home these last two years. Vindicated by winning an election, they stupidly abandoned the physical realm of protest to the teaparty. While teaparty goons shouted down town hall discussions on healthcare, liberals enjoyed the warm-crotch sensation of watching them on Youtube, from their laptops. They relied on a few people to attend these events and upload teaparty protest photos and fussy personal diaries on Daily Kos. Liberal public agitation has been token, intermittent, ethereal and impotent.

Thanks in part to union demonstrations and outrage in Wisconsin, as well as Florida Governor Rick Scott's criminal and imperial dismissal of the obligations of office, bizarre disdain for even bipartisan legislation and ruthless de-funding of public services, even Floridians have evinced anger strong enough to drag them out in public. Last Tuesday, thousands of citizens organized in dozens of cities across the state for simultaneous protests against Scott's fiscal war against the Florida school system and his ideological war against unions and collective bargaining.

Florida, like the rest of the south, has historically declined most unionization, never approaching the north's membership. Despite the AFL and CIO engaging in expensive unionization campaigns in the middle of the 20th century, the south didn't bite. Historians and anthropologists have furnished a host of reasons, from racism (northern unions were integrated) to an atavistic quasi-Scots-Irish tribalism, to "Cavalier" individuality. (Readers of Malcom Gladwell's non-science and non-history might remember his bastardization of David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed in the last example.) Economic context also played a part. Union proselytizing in the south, funded by unions' ascendency, was bound to be less persuasive because of that ascendency: when the worker was doing well in America, unions just didn't seem as necessary. That attitude worked doubly well in Florida, a state without an income tax, where lower wages were offset by lower tax obligations and where the bill for today's state services could be tied to tomorrow's home purchases or tourist taxes and fobbed off on the next influx of suckers.

Given the above, the protest turnout was stunning. A group called Awake the State — which was created via a partnership amongst Progress Florida, Florida Watch Action and America Votes — managed to get pro-labor Floridians outside and in front of government buildings even after work and during the dinner hour. In the public imagination, and frequently in reality as well, only teachers seem to march or gather in Florida union protests. But this time manual laborers and public-service workers showed up in force.

Picket Lines: Wisconsin, Unions—and a Nation of Immigrants Unsurprisingly Forgets Where It Came From

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article was co-written by a real, live person. Idi Amin Dada has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. Since his exile at the hands of imperialists, he has busied himself researching topics ranging from politics to philately. In the coming days, he hopes to explore labor issues in America in "Picket Lines," and he invited Mobutu Sese Seko to pitch in. Neither author has eaten anyone since 1980.


Solidarity, 2011
by IDI AMIN DADA and MOBUTU SESE SEKO

It's extraordinarily upsetting that so many Americans broadly oppose unions without giving much thought to the reasoning behind their opposition. In the case of Wisconsin, critics of union workers are especially difficult to understand. Newly elected Governor Scott Walker wants to use a budget crisis to not only crush the take-home pay of unionized state workers, but to strip public employees of the right to collective bargaining.

His supporters assert that Wisconsin public-school teachers net much more in salary and benefits than private-sector teachers. And despite the fact that this is not true, and that Walker's initiatives to give out generous corporate welfare actually caused significantly exacerbate the crisis he's attempting to capitalize on, public sector employees have already agreed to tough concessions with respect to pay and benefits. Even these concessions are not enough for Walker, who refuses to budge on stripping collective bargaining rights, a move that would have no impact on the state's finances whatsoever, but would effectively destroy unions as a force for the middle and labor class.

One could argue that in the long-run, Walker's stance saves the state money, as public unions periodically negotiate contracts to obtain higher wages and more benefits at the state's expense. Two polls regarding this issue are available at the moment. The first comes from the firm Clarus Group and shows 64% of Americans think that government employees should not be represented by labor unions. However, the firm admits that its phrasing may have swayed responses with language seemingly mirroring that of deficit hawks.

Another poll, this one conducted on behalf of the right-leaning group "We Ask America" shows that those in Wisconsin actually oppose the bill by 51%, with 43% supporting it. However, this same poll also shows that 55% of Wisconsinites want Democratic senators — who fled to Illinois to avoid giving the bill a quorum — to return to the state to vote on the bill anyway; only 36% of those polled disapprove of the idea. Such an action would make the bill pass, as Republicans seem unwilling to compromise, already have the votes they need, and Walker's disdain for those opposing him remains unwavering.

His attitude might make sense if not for conservatism's twin enemies of history and math. Wages for American middle and lower class workers have been all but stagnant since the 1970s, compared to the actual productivity and output of their work; meanwhile, profits for corporations and bonuses for CEOs annually reach record highs. At a time when many states desperately need funds — and corporations reaping record profits pay little to nothing in taxes — the acceptable course of action, according to a vast majority of Republicans, most Independents and some Democrats, is to point to the household working paycheck-to-paycheck and say, "Their desire to negotiate for fewer sleepless nights might hurt the state's finances. It's belt-tightening time."