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Occupy Wall Street began one year ago today and, although we might not agree on what they’re about, they have succeeded in getting millions of people off their asses and out from behind their computers to join a movement to say that something’s gotta change. Just what it is that has to change and how that change will be accomplished.. well, that’s another story entirely.
This morning on the show, I spoke with Jesse LaGreca – one of the few to emerge from the leaderless movement as a voice worth listening to. Interestingly, Jesse is not on the streets of NYC with #OWS today. Instead, he’s in Washington DC with his girlfriend to view the US Constitution on this Constitution Day.
Listen to the interview yourself.. but Jesse seems to be saying what I believe – which is that OWS needs to do what it, for the most part, opposes and come up with a mission statement and get involved in electoral politics.
I also spoke with a current member of the Occupy movement. Nick Mirzoeff, whose day job is Professor of Media, Culture and Communications at NYU, has been involved from the beginning. His main area of concern is debt (student and more), and believes people can decide on their own whether or not to vote and, if, for whom.
Either way, I’m glad people are out in the streets to day exercising their first amendment rights – and I wish the NYPD would just leave them the fuck alone.
It’s Monday, that means another edition of Fools on the Hill with Nicole Belle of Crooks and Liars. Here’s what she brought us today:
We are in a strange sort of transitional stage in America. This next election will somewhat point us in one direction or another, but we have a larger endemic problems. As Chris Hayes so astutely pointed out in his book, we no longer trust almost any of the institutional pillars yet we have done little to remedy that. I’d argue that our distrust comes directly from the fact that there is little to no accountability to those of us who put them in office. As I type this, it occurs to me that the same could be said of the media as well. We hear these media and political figures talking about ways to hold teachers accountable for doing their jobs and yet these exact same people have worked in concert to perpetrate something as inhumane as a war of opportunity and have never, ever been held to account for it.
So that’s why we have Liz Cheney, whose tenure at the State Department during the Bush administration should automatically disqualify her from any further punditry rights, complaining that President Obama abandoned “Czechoslovakia”, which would be difficult, since there hasn’t been any such country since 1992, sixteen years before Obama took office.
And John McCain, who inflicted Sarah Palin on an unsuspecting nation, can tell a straight-faced Bob Schieffer that President Obama has considerably weakened America’s standing in the world.
And Brian Ross—who has been amazingly bad in his investigative reporting—announces that Iran is only two to four weeks away from a nuclear weapon which Christiane Amanpour had to quickly correct (apparently he has some super secret source that even the IAEA doesn’t have)
And Peter King, who can’t open his mouth without saying some sort of inflammatory Islamophobic statement, told David Gregory that it was the Iraq withdrawal that brought about the embassy attacks.
And why Paul Wolfowitz, who should be in front of an international tribunal in The Hague for his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, should never be asked his opinion on what President Obama “should have said” in response to the Egyptian embassy attacks.