NYC’s population density is about 26,000 people per square mile; Occupy Wall Street protesters active in the financial district of New York City number about 4,000 with Philadelphia’s Occupy protest a distant second at about 430 protesters

Say the Wall Street Occupiers concentrate their numbers on a few city blocks as tactical and organizational necessity would predict. Based on these numbers they would account for about a 15% increase in population but only in the area that they occupy—well, maybe, because my calculations are rough and based on Wikipedia numbers, and on any given business day the population of New York City’s financial district increases to about 300,000 workers. So in the mornings and afternoons when most of Manhattan rises to its feet to travel along the sidewalks to or from the bus stops, train stations, or parking garages, the Occupier formations would hardly rise to the threshold of most peoples perception unless the Occupiers got deliberately in the way of pedestrian traffic. (This, however, I would notice immediately.)

Here be the numbers of Occupy Wall Street protesters by location as reported by the Washington Post in the form of a table.

Caption: Lost in the crowd

U.S. productivity continues its decline, which means declining wages, salaries, living standards, and revenues at every level

As I wrote before about productivity, you cannot pay workers more than they produce. Nor can you invest capital when it returns a loss, which is what a failure to produce, or a decline in productivity, means on its face.

To use a humble agrarian metaphor, imagine you sowed seed that performed at a 1 to 1 ratio, 1 seed given for 1 seed planted, or even a 1 to 2 ratio. At this level of productivity you would starve, because your stock would diminish with each cycle as you consumed or traded some of it. It is the surplus production–or relatively high productivity–of cereal grains that permits sedentary agriculture to persist. Coda: Our capital stock and labour investment in the aggregate now returns a declining yield, which is what a declining productivity means. Hence, we’re starving, a starvation that takes the form of an economy in a free fall.

This isn’t economic principle at stake; this is an immutable law of physics.

Caption: Desolation is the new black

Michael Barbaro of the NYT: the race [for former Representative Anthony Weiner’s seat in NYC] has become something far more unsettling to Democrats: a referendum on the president and his party that is highlighting the surprisingly raw emotions of the electorate

Caption: Like the amnesiac goldfish continually surprised by its plastic castle, she wanders a world of magic and wonder. 

Surprisingly!? The “raw emotions” of a U.S. electorate enraged by the contradiction of White House priorities disconnected from the concrete conditions of economic decline could be a “surprise” only to the surprisingly insular editorial staff of the New York Times. Michael Barbaro writes in a story aptly titled, In the Race to Succeed Weiner, a Surprising Anger at Obama

objective process of de-globalization continues apace, contradicts White House Policy

Recall our beloved President’s plan to “export our way to stability,” and to call forth from the ethers a manufacturing renaissance by diverting productive capital to research universities and government agencies like the EPA on the basis of decisions returned by round-tables of “really smart folks”, and recall that the growth in the U.S. manufacturing sector over the past several quarters has been all an illusion, so these “policy proposals” are wish-projections void of positive content, based in silhouettes and shadows.

Caption: It was all a dream

Stanley B. Greenberg: “Recently, it has been the conservatives, the Tea Party members and the anti-immigrant groups who understand the anger with government, and rush in to exploit it—Perhaps now, with the debacle in Washington, liberals will become instinctively angry with this illegitimate government and build their politics from there”

So writes Stanley B. Greenberg in a New York Times editorial titled Why Voters Tune Out Democrats.

Caption: Ruins? I can see only possibilities. 

Many, many other centre-lefters harp on this same string ’til heart strings break, e.g.:

[…] Anything can happen, but it appears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history, writes Greg Sargent in a Plum Line blog blog burst titled GOP on verge of huge, unprecedented political victory

Sargent continues

the Obama Interregnum enters its consummation phase

The U.S. Representatives who identify themselves as Tea Partiers are a reaction-formation. But in staring down a U.S. president and an upper house dominated by the president’s party, the reactionaries provoked a fierce intra-party counter-reaction from their party leadership, and more moderate conservative elements, when they threatened to oppose en masse Speaker Boehner’s despairing and probably doomed compromise legislation to raise the debt ceiling. In conceding to the party’s house leadership from a position of strength the Tea Partiers pass from reaction-formation to an issues-based political bloc.

They have proven they can not only influence, but govern.

Caption: Twilight’s last gleaming of a troubled presidency

U.S. President loses the plot: turns down bi-partisan compromise on debt ceiling, again

The struggle of the U.S. political classes and many of their more active clients to suppress popular support for any plan, proposal, proposition, or even premise, that would limit the prerogatives of the welfare or regulatory state as expressed through it’s spending power, has passed into a late-phase irony, which means negation, which means a striking clarity of contrast for the only political formations left standing with a positive position in the form of a proposal, which means that the only leader left standing with any choice, any prerogative, or any agency of any kind, is the person of Speaker Boehner, the basis of whose legitimacy on this question is expressed in the negativity of a primitive refusal, the coercive deficiency of a refusés-caucus united in support of a steadfast “no”.

Caption: Lining up the straw-men

struggle against the U.S. consumer economy continues apace (ii): subjective experience of the new activism of the regulatory state to suppress consumer activity passes into social fact as U.S. CEOs vent their frustrations publicly

CEOs are beginning to appear in the media to denounce Washington, and in particular the White House. Does this indicate a trend line? Or: Are these few cases newsworthy at all because they are so unique?

Caption: The new consumer society consumes itself. 

Here be the CEO rants

struggle against the U.S. consumer economy continues: EPA set to suppress consumer activity by way of rules that will raise dramatically the costs, and even the availability, of conventional sources of energy

The Obama White House’s struggle to suppress the existing U.S. energy sector in favour of a yet-to-be, mostly-speculative next-phase “clean” U.S. energy sector continues apace through the policy instruments of the regulatory state, this despite the decisive defeat of Cap-and-trade legislation in the Democratic Party dominated 111th Congress.

Industrialists and energy-sector industry groups, business leaders, governors, and state governments, are only now beginning to shake off their torpor and organize in their opposition.

The performance of the U.S. economy complicates the White House’s position in the form of a narrative on this issue: to justify so great a new burden of cost on the operations of U.S. capital and consumers in an era of scarcity and decline will be difficult to justify, especially passing into an election year.

Caption: Desolation is the new black. 

Here would be a few discussion points to shore up my weak and tentative position

New York Times not getting the whole production-consumption thing—David Leonhardt calls for the abolition of the consumer economy, which means the abolition of consumers, which means, you

Here be the context, my brothers and sisters:

Gloomy Goldman Sachs sees high unemployment, possible recession, writes James Pethokoukis in his eponymous Reuters blog

The economic indicators have all redlined. The new wisdom: No recovery before the decision to be delivered in the U.S. in November, 2012. Just the opposite is the case.

Caption: Exports! That’s the answer!  

Here be the solution according to the super-geniuses of the upper-strata of the U.S. Political classes, as represented in the New York times in “clichés” often issued by White House spokespeople, if not our beloved President himself