OCCUPY WALL STREET

[AtLast]

These anarchists in black had nothing to do with the Occupy movement. They were there just to cause mayhem and destruction. You can see here that the Occupy protestors were trying to stop them without much luck.

86XhCwHhwn8


And they always show up at these kinds of things. I think it was really great that Occupy people even made signs yesterday telling this group to knock it off. It is really important for Occupy demonstrators to let people know that they do not agree with the anarchist groups that simply want to use a protest to their advantage.

Lots of Occupy people are making points today about not supporting destruction of property or violence. It is really important that this movement recognize all "walks" of the 99%. I think they are doing a good job overall with this.

[atomiczombie]

Some great pictures of the general strike in Oakland yesterday:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=t.100003010185115&type=1

[Greyson]

It is frustrating, however, to see the local anarchist group come into the protest and break windows and throw rocks/bottles, things like that. Those people wearing black and hiding their faces weren't part of Occupy. They were there just to cause trouble. What is even more frustrating is that some of the media called them "protestors" when reporting on those incidents of violence and destruction. They didn't make a distinction, and that gives a totally wrong impression of Occupy. Violence and destruction of property is usually the first and biggest stories that the media seizes on, so that tends to overshadow the message and victories of the general strike.

Drew, thanks for your thoughts and actions you are taking for the 99%. I watched the ABC, CBS, and KRON news shows early this morning before coming into work and I thought the coverage of Occupy Oakland was balanced. I understood clearly by their reports that the anarchist were not part of Occupy Oakland. I also saw video of the the Occupy people assisting in the clean up of some of the anarchist vandalism.

I work in downtown Oakland and me and most of my coworkers are real people with responsibilities to our families and community. I do understand peaceful civil protest but I will never understand the violence. Much of the property and people that get destroyed are not the Fat Cats with no sense of humanity beyond their next take over, buy out, financial scam.

[atomiczombie]

By Jessica Firger

Police arrested at least 16 people, including journalist Chris Hedges and performance artist Reverend Billy Talen, during a rally Thursday outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in lower Manhattan.

The rally was held after a mock trial at the nearby Occupy Wall Street encampment, in which Goldman’s alleged misdeeds were weighed in a “people’s hearing.” The event, led by author and activist Cornell West, was broadcast live on a radio station and drew hundreds of protesters and spectators, many of whom then marched down Trinity Place towards Goldman’s skyscraper.

“The banking system has been shot through with greed,” said West, a professor at Princeton University. He marched arm in arm with several protesters, whom he referred to as his “brothers and sisters.” Some protesters held signs that read “Out of Your Ivory Tower” and “Don’t Feed the Bull.”

Reverend Billy, dressed in his signature white suit, called the Occupy movement “real, physical, actual hope,” and he blamed President Barack Obama for “drain[ing] all meaning from the word ‘hope.’” Talen added: “He’s no less corrupt than George Bush. He’s been unable to regulate these people,” referring to financial institutions.

At the entrance to Goldman’s headquarters on West Street, protesters read their verdict aloud: “Guilty of felony fraud, violating security laws, perjury before a Senate commission and the theft of $78 billion in taxpayer money.”

Several people then sat down in front with the building with their arms linked. As police handcuffed each person one at a time, some used nonviolent resistance tactics such curling up on the ground. The final protester to be arrested made her body limp and was carried away by several police officers.

Ann Shirazi, 66 years old, attended the rally with her husband Ahamad as a member of the Granny Peace Brigade, an activist group. “We’ve lost money and our children have trouble finding work,” she said. “But the personal issues are not what’s important — everyone’s been affected.”

–Tamer El-Ghobashy contributed to this report.

Link: http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/11/03/16-arrested-after-protesters-march-on-goldman-sachs/?mod=google_news_blog

[atomiczombie]

Drew, thanks for your thoughts and actions you are taking for the 99%. I watched the ABC, CBS, and KRON news shows early this morning before coming into work and I thought the coverage of Occupy Oakland was balanced. I understood clearly by their reports that the anarchist were not part of Occupy Oakland. I also saw video of the the Occupy people assisting in the clean up of some of the anarchist vandalism.

I work in downtown Oakland and me and most of my coworkers are real people with responsibilities to our families and community. I do understand peaceful civil protest but I will never understand the violence. Much of the property and people that get destroyed are not the Fat Cats with no sense of humanity beyond their next take over, buy out, financial scam.

Thats great to hear, Greyson. I guess the news sources I was watching on the internet weren't reporting on it the same way. I am glad local news is getting it right.

[atomiczombie]

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
Public Citizen 40th Gala
Washington, DC
October 20, 2011

I am honored to share this occasion with you. No one beyond your collegial inner circle appreciates more than I do what you have stood for over these 40 years, or is more aware of the battles you have fought, the victories you have won, and the passion for democracy that still courses through your veins. The great progressive of a century ago, Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin – a Republican, by the way – believed that “Democracy is a life; and involves constant struggle.” Democracy has been your life for four decades now, and would have been even more imperiled today if you had not stayed the course.

I began my public journalism the same year you began your public advocacy, in 1971. Our paths often paralleled and sometimes crossed. Over these 40 years journalism for me has been a continuing course in adult education, and I came early on to consider the work you do as part of the curriculum – an open seminar on how government works – and for whom. Your muckraking investigations – into money and politics, corporate behavior, lobbying, regulatory oversight, public health and safety, openness in government, and consumer protection, among others – are models of accuracy and integrity. They drive home to journalists that while it is important to cover the news, it is more important to uncover the news. As one of my mentors said, “News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.” And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of “real news”, he answered: “The news you and I need to keep our freedoms.” You keep reminding us how crucial that news is to democracy. And when the watchdogs of the press have fallen silent, your vigilant growls have told us something’s up.

So I’m here as both citizen and journalist to thank you for all you have done, to salute you for keeping the faith, and to implore you to fight on during the crisis of hope that now grips our country. The great American experience in creating a different future together – this “voluntary union for the common good” – has been flummoxed by a growing sense of political impotence – what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who believe “the dogma of democracy” on a superficial public level but who no longer believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to – a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate – and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray – yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political equality – yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

So if belief in the “the dogma of democracy” seems only skin deep, there are reasons for it. During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains a century after the Constitution was ratified, the populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed: “Wall Street owns the country…Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us…Money rules.”

That was 1890. Those agrarian populists boiled over with anger that corporations, banks, and government were ganging up to deprive every day people of their livelihood.

She should see us now.

John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup, and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. GOP once again means Guardians of Privilege.

Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats”, then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.

That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The President has raised more money from banks, hedge funds, and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.

Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy.
Democratic deviancy defined further downward. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy – fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.

Why New York’s Zuccotti Park is filled with people is no mystery. Reporters keep scratching their heads and asking: “Why are you here?” But it’s clear they are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied the country. And that’s why in public places across the country workaday Americans are standing up in solidarity. Did you see the sign a woman was carrying at a fraternal march in Iowa the other day? It read: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.”

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want. They know that if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying,

…you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors… In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed. . .

The article is much longer, but it won't all fit here lol. You can read the rest here:

http://www.truth-out.org/how-did-happen/1320278111

Here's the keynote speech itself:

uOIQ5-W1Epw

[SoNotHer]

Moyer is a person of light and conscience. I've been following him since the Joseph Campbell interviews for Parabola. Thank you for posting this, Drew. :-)

The article is much longer, but it won't all fit here lol. You can read the rest here:

http://www.truth-out.org/how-did-happen/1320278111

Here's the keynote speech itself:

uOIQ5-W1Epw

[Cin]

Study proves many U.S. corporations pay zero taxes


Dozens of US corporations paid no federal taxes in recent years, and many received government subsidies despite earning healthy profits, a new study showed Thursday.

The report by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which examined 280 US firms, found 78 of them paid no federal income tax in at least one of the last three years.

It found 30 companies enjoyed a negative income tax rate — which in some cases means getting tax rebates — over the three-year period, despite combined pre-tax profits of $160 billion.

“These 280 corporations received a total of nearly $223 billion in tax subsidies,” said the report’s lead author, Robert McIntyre, director at Citizens for Tax Justice.

“This is wasted money that could have gone to protect Medicare, create jobs and cut the deficit.”

The study looked at 280 corporations from the Fortune 500 list, all of which were profitable in each of the last three years and provided sufficient data to analyst profits and taxes.

It found the average effective tax rate for the 280 companies in the study over the three years period was 18.5 percent, well below the statutory rate of 35 percent.

The study concluded that 78 of the companies had at least one year in which their federal income tax was zero or less.

Thirty companies had a negative income tax rate over the entire three year period on their combined pre-tax profits of $160 billion.

The study said banking giant Wells Fargo topped the list of corporations receiving the most in tax subsidies, getting nearly $18 billion in tax breaks in the last three years.

The report comes as US lawmakers are struggling to find ways to curb a bulging US deficit and are looking at possible revenue sources, despite opposition by conservatives to any tax increases.

[ruffryder]

Can someone point me in the direction of some clear, easier to understand information about the OWS movement? I support OWS, but I want to understand it more.

Thanks!

:hk1:


I'm seeing this a lot. Today I heard someone say, "I don't think some of these people know what they are protesting." He said, "I don't know what they are protesting."

I think it becomes confusing when people are arrested and police have to take action against unpeaceful protests and violence. That is a sad situation when some want to resort to violence to get their own ideas across and it may not even have to do with the "american dream" or jobs, healthcare, taxes, etc..

Very interesting what is playing out in Oakland and Denver. I look forward to seeing what develops with those two cities over the next couple weeks. I would hate to see this OWS movement turn into something of domestic terrorist attacks somewhere. I hope.. I can't reiterate it enough, I HOPE it doesn't come to that. I hate to be cynical but I also can see the daily violence and the bigger picture. I also do see some changes, for the OWS movement too though, in a positive way.

[ruffryder]

BTW cara, there is a lot of youtube videos and FB pages concerning Occupy Wall Street.

[nowandthen]

https://www.facebook.com/index.php?lh=4b429ca224cf9e7208fa504acd0a9f60#!/notes/w-mae-singerman/5-tips-for-white-allies-in-the-occupy-movement/10150510640029018

5 Tips for White Allies* in the Occupy Movement
by W Mae Singerman on Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 12:10pm

Pay attention to who is talking in working groups: Speak less. Take on a role of supporting the development of people of color (POC) leadership in your group. Use progressive stack: a tool that encourages those who are traditionally marginalized to speak more often. Regularly discuss how to make the group more accessible for POC and how to get the group more involved in struggles that affect POC. Research and propose anti-oppression training for the group.

Listen from love: If a person of color tells you that they’ve experienced racism, listen to them. A negative experience that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you could be a very big deal for someone who feels marginalized at Occupy. It may be the last straw before they decide not to come back. Focus on listening and supporting the person; ask if there is any way you can help.

Share information and resources: Don’t assume that everyone knows the terms, acronyms and history of the Occupy Movement. Likewise, do not assume that anyone doesn't know. If you start a conversation with anyone who is new, make an effort to answer questions, spell out acronyms and lead them to information sources. People, especially those who feel marginalized, will be relieved that someone cares about plugging them in.

Make it clear when there is a risk of arrest: If there is a risk of arrest, let people know. The legal system is much harder on POC; mistakes can even mean deportation for undocumented immigrants. When promoting an event, be open about if arrest is a potential. If you hear people pressuring anyone to risk arrest, let everyone know that there are many valuable roles people choose to play. Arrest does not have to be one of them.

Support POC created events: Attend these events! At events organized by POC, focus on listening. Don’t jump in the spotlight. Be alert for white people who might be rude or aggressive at the event. If possible, ask them to stop their behavior and give them more information about the purpose of the event. Have this conversation away from the event, so they don’t disrupt it any further.

*Allies are people who recognize the unearned privilege they receive from society’s patterns of injustice and take responsibility for changing these patterns. Allies include men who work to end sexism, white people who work to end racism, heterosexual people who work to end heterosexism, able-bodied people who work to end ableism, and so on.

[tazz]

i think this link says a thousand words about the ppl of Oakland. i really like it.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/occupy-oakland-protesters-pitch-cleanup/nFT4s/

[Cin]

37 Giant Corporations Paid 0 in Taxes Last Year -- Who Are the Cheats?

Most Americans can rightfully complain, ‘I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.’

November 3, 2011 |

In 2010, Verizon reported an annual profit of nearly $12 billion. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, so theoretically, Verizon should have owed the IRS around $4.2 billlion. Instead, according to figures compiled by the Center for Tax Justice, the company actually boasted a negative tax liability of $703 million. Verizon ended up making even more money after it calculated its taxes.

Verizon is hardly alone, and isn’t even close to being the worst offender. Perhaps most famously, General Electric raked in $10.5 billion in profit in 2010, yet ended up reporting $4.7 billion worth of negative taxes. The worst offender in 2010, as measured by its overall negative tax rate, was Pepco, the electricity utility that serves Washington, D.C. Pepco reported profits of $882 million in 2010, and negative taxes of $508 million — a negative tax rate of 57.6 percent.

Altogether, according to “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10,” a blockbuster new report put together by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that will have you reaching for your hypertension medicine before you finish reading the third page, 37 of the United States’ biggest corporations paid zero taxes in 2010. The list is a blue-chip roll-call.

As the authors acidly note, “Most Americans can rightfully complain, ‘I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.’ That’s an unacceptable situation.”

The “high taxation” lie

Reading through this report, you will find yourself seized by an irresistible desire to hurl yourself headlong into the nearest OccupyYourLocalCity protest. In an era of crushing government deficits and mass unemployment, corporate America is not only skating blissfully free of its civic responsibilities, but continues to complain that it is paying too much in taxes. Even worse: Congressional Republicans and many Democrats agree! Listening to our politicians talk, you would imagine that corporate America’s neck is permanently under the tax man’s steel-tipped boot. When, in fact, the exact opposite is the truth.

The list of companies that paid zero taxes is only the beginning of the travesties documented by the report. The authors looked at the tax filings from 2008-2010 of 280 of the nation’s biggest, most successful corporations. These companies reported $1.4 trillion worth of profit during a period when most Americans were struggling to stay afloat. The authors discovered that the average effective tax rate — what the companies really paid after government subsidies, tax breaks and various tax dodges were taken into account — was only 18.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate. Fully a quarter of the 280 companies paid under 10 percent.

Remember that fact, the next time someone tries to tell you that American corporations pay the highest income taxes in the free world. The only number that counts is the “effective tax rate.” One of the interesting tidbits provided by the authors is that in many cases, the tax rate on foreign income for many of these companies is actually higher than the effective U.S. rate.

The most distressing part of the tale is the big picture: The overall trend line is pointed in exactly the wrong direction. If you break out just the years 2009-2010, the effective tax rate was 17.3 percent. “In 2008, 22 companies paid no federal income tax, and got $3.3 billion in tax rebates. In 2010, 37 companies paid no income tax, and got $7.8 billion in rebates.” When measured as a percentage of total GDP, over the last three fiscal years, “total corporate income tax payments fell to only 1.16 percent of the GDP … a new sustained record low since World War II.

Corporate taxes paid for more than a quarter of federal outlays in the 1950s and a fifth in the 1960s. They began to decline during the Nixon administration, yet even by the second half of the 1990s, corporate taxes still covered 11 percent of the cost of federal programs. But in fiscal 2010, corporate taxes paid for a mere 6 percent of the federal government’s expenses.

How have these companies managed to cut their tax liabilities so far? The answer includes a mixture of targeted tax breaks that impact specific industries or companies, accounting games that corporations play with stock options, and sweeping adjustments to tax law such as changes in the rules in how companies can write off the value of depreciating equipment. The accounting rules for so-called accelerated depreciation are now so accommodating that companies can write off 75 percent of the cost of new equipment immediately.

A look at the list of the 10 corporations receiving the biggest tax-subsidy breaks from the U.S. government will defeat the ameliorating effects of anymedication: Wells Fargo, AT&T, Verizon Communications, General Electric, International Business Machines, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, PNC Financial Services Group, Goldman Sachs Group, and Procter & Gamble. “56 percent of tax subsidies,” write the authors, “went to four industries: financial, utilities, telecom, oil/gas/pipeline.”

The companies that pay

However, not all companies are tax dodgers. Of the 280 companies analyzed by the authors, about 25 percent of the total paid close to the statutory rate, a little over 30 percent. But there’s no rhyme or reason to who pays or who doesn’t.

DuPont and Monsanto both produce chemicals. But over the 2008-10 period, Monsanto paid 22 percent of its profits in U.S. corporate income taxes, while DuPont actually paid a negative tax rate of –3.4 percent. Department store chain Macy’s paid a three-year rate of 12.1 percent, while competing chain Nordstrom’s paid 37.1 percent. In computer technology, Hewlett-Packard paid 3.7 of its three-year U.S. profits in federal income taxes, while Texas Instruments paid 33.5 percent. FedEx paid 0.9 percent over three years, while its competitor United Parcel Service paid 24.1 percent.

The authors conclude on a wistful note, with a list of what Washington could do to bring sense and reason to corporate taxation, while providing the government with desperately needed revenue. But as the authors themselves readily acknowledge, their recommendations exist in an alternate universe from the one that we actually happen to live in.

Unfortunately, corporate tax legislation now being promoted by many in Congress seems stuck on the idea that as a group, corporations are now either paying the perfect amount in federal income taxes or are paying too much. Many members of the tax writing committees in Congress seem intent on making changes that would actually make it easier (and more lucrative) for companies to shift taxable profits, and potentially jobs, overseas. Meanwhile, GOP candidates for president are all promoting huge cuts in the corporate tax or, in several cases, even elimination of the corporate income tax entirely.

And that, ultimately, is the most enraging fact about the new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. It won’t make a darn bit of difference.

[Cin]

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) appealed to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement to respond to state legislatures that have passed voting restrictions.

According to a recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice, changes to voting laws could suppress up to five million votes during the 2012 elections, particularly among young, minority and low-income voters, as well as those with disabilities.

“I hope and pray that the Occupy movement takes this voter suppression effort up as an issue of theirs,” he said.

“I’m not trying to invade on their prerogative, but I think it would be a very good idea as they fight for a greater level of justice in America, to think about how this voter suppression movement is trying to curtail their rights.”

This following is my opinion and not to be confused with the opinion of Rep Ellison.

I'm not one for changing the constitution but not having a clear statement in the constitution about a universal right to vote is a glaring problem. I think an amendment that gives all citizens the right to vote is necessary.

I also believe that elected officials, rather than concerning themselves with who individual citizens chose to partner with in their personal lives thereby defining marriage as only being between one man and one woman, I think they should focus on an amendment that will define citizenship as being between one human being and one government.

Citizenship should be a relationship that can only exist between a singular breathing individual sentient being and his or her government. Maybe a defense of human citizenship act.

[persiphone]

37 Giant Corporations Paid 0 in Taxes Last Year -- Who Are the Cheats?

Most Americans can rightfully complain, ‘I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.’

November 3, 2011 |

In 2010, Verizon reported an annual profit of nearly $12 billion. The statutory federal corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, so theoretically, Verizon should have owed the IRS around $4.2 billlion. Instead, according to figures compiled by the Center for Tax Justice, the company actually boasted a negative tax liability of $703 million. Verizon ended up making even more money after it calculated its taxes.

Verizon is hardly alone, and isn’t even close to being the worst offender. Perhaps most famously, General Electric raked in $10.5 billion in profit in 2010, yet ended up reporting $4.7 billion worth of negative taxes. The worst offender in 2010, as measured by its overall negative tax rate, was Pepco, the electricity utility that serves Washington, D.C. Pepco reported profits of $882 million in 2010, and negative taxes of $508 million — a negative tax rate of 57.6 percent.

Altogether, according to “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10,” a blockbuster new report put together by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that will have you reaching for your hypertension medicine before you finish reading the third page, 37 of the United States’ biggest corporations paid zero taxes in 2010. The list is a blue-chip roll-call.

As the authors acidly note, “Most Americans can rightfully complain, ‘I pay more federal income taxes than General Electric, Boeing, DuPont, Wells Fargo, Verizon, etc., etc., all put together.’ That’s an unacceptable situation.”

The “high taxation” lie

Reading through this report, you will find yourself seized by an irresistible desire to hurl yourself headlong into the nearest OccupyYourLocalCity protest. In an era of crushing government deficits and mass unemployment, corporate America is not only skating blissfully free of its civic responsibilities, but continues to complain that it is paying too much in taxes. Even worse: Congressional Republicans and many Democrats agree! Listening to our politicians talk, you would imagine that corporate America’s neck is permanently under the tax man’s steel-tipped boot. When, in fact, the exact opposite is the truth.

The list of companies that paid zero taxes is only the beginning of the travesties documented by the report. The authors looked at the tax filings from 2008-2010 of 280 of the nation’s biggest, most successful corporations. These companies reported $1.4 trillion worth of profit during a period when most Americans were struggling to stay afloat. The authors discovered that the average effective tax rate — what the companies really paid after government subsidies, tax breaks and various tax dodges were taken into account — was only 18.5 percent, less than half the statutory rate. Fully a quarter of the 280 companies paid under 10 percent.

Remember that fact, the next time someone tries to tell you that American corporations pay the highest income taxes in the free world. The only number that counts is the “effective tax rate.” One of the interesting tidbits provided by the authors is that in many cases, the tax rate on foreign income for many of these companies is actually higher than the effective U.S. rate.

The most distressing part of the tale is the big picture: The overall trend line is pointed in exactly the wrong direction. If you break out just the years 2009-2010, the effective tax rate was 17.3 percent. “In 2008, 22 companies paid no federal income tax, and got $3.3 billion in tax rebates. In 2010, 37 companies paid no income tax, and got $7.8 billion in rebates.” When measured as a percentage of total GDP, over the last three fiscal years, “total corporate income tax payments fell to only 1.16 percent of the GDP … a new sustained record low since World War II.

Corporate taxes paid for more than a quarter of federal outlays in the 1950s and a fifth in the 1960s. They began to decline during the Nixon administration, yet even by the second half of the 1990s, corporate taxes still covered 11 percent of the cost of federal programs. But in fiscal 2010, corporate taxes paid for a mere 6 percent of the federal government’s expenses.

How have these companies managed to cut their tax liabilities so far? The answer includes a mixture of targeted tax breaks that impact specific industries or companies, accounting games that corporations play with stock options, and sweeping adjustments to tax law such as changes in the rules in how companies can write off the value of depreciating equipment. The accounting rules for so-called accelerated depreciation are now so accommodating that companies can write off 75 percent of the cost of new equipment immediately.

A look at the list of the 10 corporations receiving the biggest tax-subsidy breaks from the U.S. government will defeat the ameliorating effects of anymedication: Wells Fargo, AT&T, Verizon Communications, General Electric, International Business Machines, Exxon Mobil, Boeing, PNC Financial Services Group, Goldman Sachs Group, and Procter & Gamble. “56 percent of tax subsidies,” write the authors, “went to four industries: financial, utilities, telecom, oil/gas/pipeline.”

The companies that pay

However, not all companies are tax dodgers. Of the 280 companies analyzed by the authors, about 25 percent of the total paid close to the statutory rate, a little over 30 percent. But there’s no rhyme or reason to who pays or who doesn’t.

DuPont and Monsanto both produce chemicals. But over the 2008-10 period, Monsanto paid 22 percent of its profits in U.S. corporate income taxes, while DuPont actually paid a negative tax rate of –3.4 percent. Department store chain Macy’s paid a three-year rate of 12.1 percent, while competing chain Nordstrom’s paid 37.1 percent. In computer technology, Hewlett-Packard paid 3.7 of its three-year U.S. profits in federal income taxes, while Texas Instruments paid 33.5 percent. FedEx paid 0.9 percent over three years, while its competitor United Parcel Service paid 24.1 percent.

The authors conclude on a wistful note, with a list of what Washington could do to bring sense and reason to corporate taxation, while providing the government with desperately needed revenue. But as the authors themselves readily acknowledge, their recommendations exist in an alternate universe from the one that we actually happen to live in.

Unfortunately, corporate tax legislation now being promoted by many in Congress seems stuck on the idea that as a group, corporations are now either paying the perfect amount in federal income taxes or are paying too much. Many members of the tax writing committees in Congress seem intent on making changes that would actually make it easier (and more lucrative) for companies to shift taxable profits, and potentially jobs, overseas. Meanwhile, GOP candidates for president are all promoting huge cuts in the corporate tax or, in several cases, even elimination of the corporate income tax entirely.

And that, ultimately, is the most enraging fact about the new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. It won’t make a darn bit of difference.

i'm not sure how other companies get around it but i know that GE has a financial arm to it's business which deals with lending money in some aspect or financing in some way. which is why they paid no taxes, turned a profit, AND was the recipient of bailout money even AFTER showing a record profit. it's absolutely absurd. but this is just one example. on the face FedEx and UPS might seem exactly alike. but for some reason one pays higher taxes. it's possible that FedEx has some other aspect to their business or is structured differently. it's easy to believe that some companies know the magic handshake to get a free pass, but that's just not the reality. getting a free pass while turning a profit is still wrong, but they are getting around it somehow. meanwhile, the ones that are in manufacturing don't manufacture anything here anymore either. so they have the jobs, the cash, AND getting comped. what do we have? empty homes, joblessness, no places for the homeless to pee, and mountains of debt at dizzying interest rates while US companies pay nothing into a system that they are draining and the bipartisanship points fingers at each other all day before going home to their comfy mansions. it's all wrong.

[Toughy]

I'm seeing this a lot. Today I heard someone say, "I don't think some of these people know what they are protesting." He said, "I don't know what they are protesting." I think it becomes confusing when people are arrested and police have to take action against unpeaceful protests and violence. That is a sad situation when some want to resort to violence to get their own ideas across and it may not even have to do with the "american dream" or jobs, healthcare, taxes, etc..

Very interesting what is playing out in Oakland and Denver. I look forward to seeing what develops with those two cities over the next couple weeks. I would hate to see this OWS movement turn into something of domestic terrorist attacks somewhere. I hope.. I can't reiterate it enough, I HOPE it doesn't come to that. I hate to be cynical but I also can see the daily violence and the bigger picture. I also do see some changes, for the OWS movement too though, in a positive way.

My comments are about Occupy Oakland because I am most familiar with them. I bolded the things I want to address.

Frankly they are very clear about what they stand for and why they are protesting....it's economic injustice. Anyone who does not understand what economic injustice means should get their head out of the their ass.

No one in Occupy Oakland is in favor of violence. All the Occupy people across the country are organized around non-violent priniciples. It does no one any good to use the term 'protestors' when talking about the anarchist assholes (and other assholes) who intentionally reeked havoc in downtown Oakland. They wanted tear gas and riot geared police to come after them. It is how they operate. It has nothing to do with Occupy Oakland or any other Occupy group. Opportunists always appear with any populist movement.

I don't understand AT ALL how anyone can equate the Occupy movements with domestic terrorrism. Violence is not part of the Occupy movement.

I will make one comment about breaking windows............I really don't give a shit if big bank windows get broken or if big banks are shut down for a day or an hour. What does piss me off is small business getting windows broken and taggers spray painting all over downtown. I'm not to upset about dumpsters on fire in the middle of the street. I have helped set a few of those in my time....but we set the fires and then drummed and danced in circles around the fires..... It was done to draw attention to HIV/AIDS.

ALL populist social movements in the US have had violence show up. It is the hardest thing to understand and/or control in these movements. Fringe folks hellbent on chaos and anarchy always get the press. Violence breeds fear and make the corporate media very happy. They can show the violence and mayhem with the caption of 'protestors get violent' and guess what? People believe that the Occupy folks are violent in spite of having at least 7,000 people peacefully gather and march in the streets and shut down the Port of Oakland.

[Toughy]

a couple or three things are going on in Oakland now....

First......(and I think he is a big fat liar) The Oakland Chamber of Commerce is saying Oakland has lost many many jobs because of Occupy Oakland. He (spokesman) says 3....yes count them 3.....business folks have decided to take their business and jobs elsewhere. He has not named the business folks who have decided to not bring their business and jobs to Oakland.

Second....Much is being made of the economic impact of shutting down the 5th largest port in the US. Money lost, middle/working class folks not getting paid....blah blah blah.

I know I can be damn stupid sometimes however I cannot figure HOW the Oakland port or the longshoreman are losing money. All those goods stopped during the shutdown WILL be dropped off and/or picked up. The longshoreman might just get some overtime to catch up with the backlog from a max 18 hour shutdown of the Port. I can see some impact on truckers because time really is money for them. So.....can somebody explain how shutting down the Port has caused an economic impact?

Small business around City Center (where the Occupy Oakland folks have set up camp) are saying they are losing business. I know for damn sure that ALL the food establishments and newstands and little markets open on Strike Day did HUGE business........7,000 people hungry and buying food. Maybe half of them brought their on food or enjoyed the free food Occupy Oakland offered. Somehow I think that is more business than normal for a week day.

The Mayor and the City Council have an obligation to small business in downtown Oakland. That obligation is to start a big campaign to come to downtown Oakland and buy from small local business. The Occupy Oakland folks are not dangerous....they will not beat you or rob you or hurt you in anyway. If you walk around Oscar Grant Plaza (the name activists picked and it's fitting as far as I am concerned) folks will offer you carrots or bread or some other kind of food. They will engage you in conversation about economic injustice. They WILL NOT accost you or threaten you in any way.

So..........smart person........tell me how shutting down the Oakland Port for less than 18 hours creates a negative economic impact for the Port and Oakland.

[Cin]

I came across this article by Noami Wolfe that I really liked. She wrote about something I have been talking about to anybody who would listen. I believe strongly that we have a unique opportunity at this time to attempt as one world to reach a philosophical unity and begin to create true change, global change as we move together toward liberty and freedom for all.

Here is some of her words and a link to the article for anyone who might be interested. I'm sure it's not everyone's cuppa, but...

We May Be Witnessing the First Large Global Conflict Where People Are Aligned by Consciousness and Not Nation State or Religion

They're fighting a "corporatocracy" that has bought governments, created armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

http://www.alternet.org/vision/152932/we_may_be_witnessing_the_first_large_global_confli ct_where_people_are_aligned_by_consciousness_and_n ot_nation_state_or_religion/

[Cin]

a couple or three things are going on in Oakland now....

First......(and I think he is a big fat liar) The Oakland Chamber of Commerce is saying Oakland has lost many many jobs because of Occupy Oakland. He (spokesman) says 3....yes count them 3.....business folks have decided to take their business and jobs elsewhere. He has not named the business folks who have decided to not bring their business and jobs to Oakland.

Second....Much is being made of the economic impact of shutting down the 5th largest port in the US. Money lost, middle/working class folks not getting paid....blah blah blah.

I know I can be damn stupid sometimes however I cannot figure HOW the Oakland port or the longshoreman are losing money. All those goods stopped during the shutdown WILL be dropped off and/or picked up. The longshoreman might just get some overtime to catch up with the backlog from a max 18 hour shutdown of the Port. I can see some impact on truckers because time really is money for them. So.....can somebody explain how shutting down the Port has caused an economic impact?

Small business around City Center (where the Occupy Oakland folks have set up camp) are saying they are losing business. I know for damn sure that ALL the food establishments and newstands and little markets open on Strike Day did HUGE business........7,000 people hungry and buying food. Maybe half of them brought their on food or enjoyed the free food Occupy Oakland offered. Somehow I think that is more business than normal for a week day.

The Mayor and the City Council have an obligation to small business in downtown Oakland. That obligation is to start a big campaign to come to downtown Oakland and buy from small local business. The Occupy Oakland folks are not dangerous....they will not beat you or rob you or hurt you in anyway. If you walk around Oscar Grant Plaza (the name activists picked and it's fitting as far as I am concerned) folks will offer you carrots or bread or some other kind of food. They will engage you in conversation about economic injustice. They WILL NOT accost you or threaten you in any way.

So..........smart person........tell me how shutting down the Oakland Port for less than 18 hours creates a negative economic impact for the Port and Oakland.

I think the powers that be are struggling to find ways to disrupt the movement. Anything negative even if it is falsehood attached by a tiny thread of reality will do.

I read an article that talked about a method being used against Occupy Tucson that includes handing out citations that carry fines up to $1000 and 6 months in jail. They hand these citations out to every person in Armory Park after 10:30 every single night. Occupy Tucson activists refer to these tactics as financial and legal attrition to kill the movement.

The potential for criminal misdemeanor charges which would effect anyone who needs to pass a criminal background check for employment presents a real hardship not to mention not many can afford a $1000 a night fine. The growing concern is that this is stifling participation.

The movement is also distracted from their original goals by these daily citations. Instead of concentrating on economic inequality and corporate financing of politicians they have to focus on defending first amendment protected activities. This tactic is financially bleeding the movement and overwhelming the handful of attorneys volunteering their time who are swamped by the sheer volume of citations.

Occupy Tucson has been unable to sway city council members to change the citation policy. Members of the legal group are in the process of filing a lawsuit against the city.

All in all this seems to be pretty effective. And it has the added advantage of not attracting attention with all that tear gassing and non lethal weapon shootings.

[ruffryder]

People are occupying the banks. Is anyone occupying Verizon or AT&T businesses? Are we as Americans willing to get rid of our cell phones? hmmm...

[greeneyedgrrl]

People are occupying the banks. Is anyone occupying Verizon or AT&T businesses? Are we as Americans willing to get rid of our cell phones? hmmm...

i think you have a point... and i think that cell phones and other mobile devices have been critical to the movement. using technology (mobile devices in particular) has allowed for the rapid dissemination of information and organization, which has helped the movement grow exponentially in a short period of time. i think tho it is worth looking at the dependence of the movement on the very companies we are rebelling against. it would be fantastic to find a way to use the technology without paying into the companies that are helping to cause the international economic crisis and social inequity.

[SoNotHer]

Just beautiful, and I agree. I love that the why and how of this movement.

I came across this article by Noami Wolfe that I really liked. She wrote about something I have been talking about to anybody who would listen. I believe strongly that we have a unique opportunity at this time to attempt as one world to reach a philosophical unity and begin to create true change, global change as we move together toward liberty and freedom for all.

Here is some of her words and a link to the article for anyone who might be interested. I'm sure it's not everyone's cuppa, but...

We May Be Witnessing the First Large Global Conflict Where People Are Aligned by Consciousness and Not Nation State or Religion

They're fighting a "corporatocracy" that has bought governments, created armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

Suddenly, the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting, not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines, but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic democracy. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.

http://www.alternet.org/vision/152932/we_may_be_witnessing_the_first_large_global_confli ct_where_people_are_aligned_by_consciousness_and_n ot_nation_state_or_religion/

[SugarFemme]

http://www.occupylasvegas.org/


Mission Statement-Final Version
Submitted by ginagrrl on October 13, 2011 - 6:58am Tags:mission statement

Mission Statement: Occupy Las Vegas


The first questions that come out of anyone's mouth whenever a new political movement arises are, “Who are they?” and “What do they want?”
They are good questions that should be answered.
WHO are we?
We are the 99% of Americans who have not benefited from the various financial bailouts, tax breaks, and other subsidies that the dominant 1% of the population have gained over the past several years.
We are students, veterans, homemakers, workers, the unemployed, those on Social Security benefits, those whose savings and investments were either wiped out or greatly diminished by the economic fluctuations starting in 2007.
We are those who have had our homes foreclosed upon, those whose homes are about to be foreclosed, those whose homes are now worth a fraction of what we paid for them, and those who have never owned a home and don’t expect to ever be able to.
We are the newly poor who wonder how everything for which we worked hard vanished so quickly and how we and our families are going to survive.
We are the long-time poor, who have never had much of a chance, let alone a voice, to make our own way in our current social and economic system.
We come from all backgrounds, races, and religions.
We are concerned about and more than a bit scared by the directions in which we see our lives, and the lives of our families, friends, neighbors going, the directions in which we see our nation and the whole planet going, and we are angry with those who have taken us in those directions.
We are part of a much larger global and national movement that wants real changes in how the world is run.
In short, we're you, and you are one of us.
WHAT do we want?
We want an end to corporate money's influence in politics, whether through campaign donations, PACs, or other groups. Money is not speech.
We want truly effective campaign finance reform, so that corporations and other interests have no overwhelming advantage over the rest of us in any part of American politics.
We want far greater legal accountability for public officials and corporate executives, and we demand that, if found guilty of committing crimes while in office, they are made to pay for those crimes in full, like anyone else.
We want our justice system to treat everyone equally regardless of origins or social class, at all levels and at every stage, from investigations to trials and sentencing.
We want an end to the continual attacks on our social safety net and on the rights of workers to organize themselves and, if need be, to strike to get better pay, benefits, and working conditions.
We want secure and sustainable investments and improvements in our social infrastructure, like schools and libraries, and to create an America where everyone may actually live in a decent and dignified manner, an America where everyone's rights count and are respected by all.
This is who we are and what we want. We ask for no more and shall take no less.
We are the 99% and we will not be silenced.

[Dominique]

A little over 650,000 people have left banks and moved to Credit unions since banks first announced the new fee for useage of debit cards.

72,000 have pledged to move accounts today.

The banks can deny all they want, this figure came from the National Credit Union Association. It also will mean better membership benefits!

YES! We the people, For the people.

[persiphone]

I think the powers that be are struggling to find ways to disrupt the movement. Anything negative even if it is falsehood attached by a tiny thread of reality will do.

I read an article that talked about a method being used against Occupy Tucson that includes handing out citations that carry fines up to $1000 and 6 months in jail. They hand these citations out to every person in Armory Park after 10:30 every single night. Occupy Tucson activists refer to these tactics as financial and legal attrition to kill the movement.

The potential for criminal misdemeanor charges which would effect anyone who needs to pass a criminal background check for employment presents a real hardship not to mention not many can afford a $1000 a night fine. The growing concern is that this is stifling participation.

The movement is also distracted from their original goals by these daily citations. Instead of concentrating on economic inequality and corporate financing of politicians they have to focus on defending first amendment protected activities. This tactic is financially bleeding the movement and overwhelming the handful of attorneys volunteering their time who are swamped by the sheer volume of citations.

Occupy Tucson has been unable to sway city council members to change the citation policy. Members of the legal group are in the process of filing a lawsuit against the city.

All in all this seems to be pretty effective. And it has the added advantage of not attracting attention with all that tear gassing and non lethal weapon shootings.

ugh....there needs to be fund raisers dangit. i detest hearing that the people are being silenced by the very people that were voted in. it's tyrannical.

[Cin]

ugh....there needs to be fund raisers dangit. i detest hearing that the people are being silenced by the very people that were voted in. it's tyrannical.
I know it's horrible. But diabolically effective and it happens quite under the radar. No war veterans getting shot and attracting media attention. I hope it doesn't catch on with other cities.

[DapperButch]

A little over 650,000 people have left banks and moved to Credit unions since banks first announced the new fee for useage of debit cards.

72,000 have pledged to move accounts today.

The banks can deny all they want, this figure came from the National Credit Union Association. It also will mean better membership benefits!

YES! We the people, For the people.

Hi, Yellow band.

I believe that today, Nov 5 is the National "leave your bank for a credit union day". I still need to do this. Now that my bank is no longer a local bank I want to make the switch.

I am a member of a credit union via my father's old employer and I have the option to join one through my employer. I will compare/contrast and then make the switch.

[persiphone]

ugh....there needs to be fund raisers dangit. i detest hearing that the people are being silenced by the very people that were voted in. it's tyrannical.


i have faith that the people will find a way. there is always a way. what ever happened to citizen's arrests? and there's always, of course, violence. i'm afraid the people are being pushed that way. we're reentering a dark time where lawmakers and politicians will start being targeted. i feel like we're on the verge of all hell breaking loose.

[SoNotHer]

BART police let the driver who ran down two protestors go:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=8419953

Uem-ysNjyog&feature=related

[greeneyedgrrl]

does anyone know what happened there? i hadn't heard about this.

BART police let the driver who ran down two protestors go:

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=8419953

Uem-ysNjyog&feature=related

[greeneyedgrrl]

does anyone know what happened there? i hadn't heard about this.

nm... i followed the link :) thanks SoNotHer!

[greeneyedgrrl]

omg... even after seeing the video thay're calling it an accident??? an accident?? seriously? wow. they don't seem to be taking it very seriously. they're tossing occupiers in jail for petty shit...and this guy goes free?? scary shit.

[ruffryder]

A little over 650,000 people have left banks and moved to Credit unions since banks first announced the new fee for useage of debit cards.

72,000 have pledged to move accounts today.

The banks can deny all they want, this figure came from the National Credit Union Association. It also will mean better membership benefits!

YES! We the people, For the people.

I can't wait to hear the numbers about Nov 5th.

[nowandthen]

Native Perspectives on the Oakland Occupy General Strike 11.2.11 - YouTube

Native Perspectives on the Oakland Occupy General Strike 11.2.11 - YouTube

[Ebon]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneywisewomen/2011/11/04/will-bank-transfer-day-really-change-anything/

Will Bank Transfer Day Really Change Anything?

Nearly 80,000 people are currently signed up on Facebook to attend Bank Transfer Day, Google returns over 400 news articles headlined “Bank Transfer Day,” and today in San Francisco, at least three spray-painted faces of BTD—the patriotic rendition of the V mask—smiled triumphantly at me on my way to work.

But will Bank Transfer Day accomplish what it seeks to do, which, according to the Facebook event, is to “send a clear message that conscious consumers won’t support companies with unethical business practices”?

How It May Win A Battle…

If awareness is the goal, then supporters of Bank Transfer Day can pop the champagne already.

Bank Transfer Day is an orchestrated call to action for consumers to switch from their for-profit bank to not-for-profit credit unions before November 5. With its media bullhorn and measurable results of credit union growth, Bank Transfer Day is arguably not just a one day event; it signals the start of an on-going movement from which we may see ripple effects in the coming year.

And so far, at least 650,000 consumers nationwide have joined credit unions and helped add $4.5 billion in new savings accounts, reports CUNA. With four in every five credit unions reporting noticeable member growth since the end of September, the waves of consumers moving their money out of big banks seems to be a combination of consumer reactions to the now-rescinded debit card fees as well as Bank Transfer Day. If you are thinking about making the switch to a credit union as well, be sure to research credit union reviews before moving your money.

With the sheer volume of media coverage and credit union mobilization, Bank Transfer Day is finally providing fed-up, frustrated consumers with what they need: a real course of action.

*not the full article*

[ruffryder]

I'm not so sure Bank Transfer Day will have a great impact. OWS is still in the beginning stages. Lots of Americans do not even have a clue what "occupy" means. I think, with anything people are trying to change, it needs to be constant and ongoing. There needs to be more awareness, more understanding and more days like this in order to have a impact on these companies or banks. I will say it is a good start!

[persiphone]

i think moving 4 billion bucks out of banks and into credit unions is a pretty big impact. LMAO! also, the fees that banks planned to charge for using debts cards came to a screeching halt. BINGO! big impact!

i like giving credit where credit is due. i'll give mine to credit unions. and it only cost me 5 bucks to join!

[SugarFemme]

I'm not so sure Bank Transfer Day will have a great impact. OWS is still in the beginning stages. Lots of Americans do not even have a clue what "occupy" means. I think, with anything people are trying to change, it needs to be constant and ongoing. There needs to be more awareness, more understanding and more days like this in order to have a impact on these companies or banks. I will say it is a good start!


How can moving 4 billion dollars not have an impact?? What you are saying sounds like the rhetoric the banks are trying to feed us so that people don't take their money and move it. Trust me, banks ARE afraid right now. To me and I'm sure the banks, four billion dollars is a significant amount of money to lose out on, and it is about time. I'm tired of banks using my money to put more money in their pockets while paying out paltry interest rates. I'm tired of banks being bailed out only for the top people to get HUGE bonus payouts. Enough is enough already. Sometimes I think it is better just to do banking the old fashioned way, in a coffee can or under the mattress LOL

[Toughy]

I'm not so sure Bank Transfer Day will have a great impact. OWS is still in the beginning stages. Lots of Americans do not even have a clue what "occupy" means. I think, with anything people are trying to change, it needs to be constant and ongoing. There needs to be more awareness, more understanding and more days like this in order to have a impact on these companies or banks. I will say it is a good start!

Did you move your money? Did you talk to your family and friends? Did you ask them to move their money to a credit union or a locally owned bank?

Occupy is a worldwide movement started with the Arab Spring. Occupy will continue until something dramatic changes in terms of economic injustice. Dissolve the Fed and the World Bank. Regulate Wall Street and how paper is bundled and moved. Raise taxes in a big ass way on folks who have over a million bucks.

Donate money, food, supplies, etc to your local Occupy folks.

also.........

www.movetoamend.com Get money out of politics and political campaigns at all levels. Money is not speech. Corporations are not people. Public financing of ALL political campaigns with NO non-public money allowed to advertise or do mailings or anything related to elections. End the money/power based corruption of our democracy.

[nowandthen]

Oakland General Strike | LeftBay99 - YouTube

[AtLast]

Did you move your money? Did you talk to your family and friends? Did you ask them to move their money to a credit union or a locally owned bank?

Occupy is a worldwide movement started with the Arab Spring. Occupy will continue until something dramatic changes in terms of economic injustice. Dissolve the Fed and the World Bank. Regulate Wall Street and how paper is bundled and moved. Raise taxes in a big ass way on folks who have over a million bucks.

Donate money, food, supplies, etc to your local Occupy folks.

also.........

www.movetoamend.com Get money out of politics and political campaigns at all levels. Money is not speech. Corporations are not people. Public financing of ALL political campaigns with NO non-public money allowed to advertise or do mailings or anything related to elections. End the money/power based corruption of our democracy.

To be honest, public financing of elections (every single part of elections) to me is the single most important way to finally have a voice that is heard. If the Occupy movement dropped all other issues and focused on this in a way that grew and grew- I would be very happy!

I honestly don't see much of anything changing as long as the US continues with election/campaign financing as it is- especially after corporations became people via the SC.

Talk about unequal distribution of wealth!

And if and when folks change to another bank or credit union- please don't be snotty to bank tellers- they are not the BIG BAD BANK! In fact, tellers don't make much at all and are very much part of the 99%.

[ruffryder]

my opinion only.. a big impact would be closing down the banks or perhaps one to start this Bank Transfer Day. 4 billion dollars is alot yes, but to a bank?? seriously, it's a dent if even. All I was saying is it's a start and MORE people need to be aware of what "occupy" is. People don't even have a clue. As Toughy put it people need to talk to family and friends and be involved. It is a good thing although. I'm glad people did it. I would just like to see it done again, and again, and again. Turn 4 billion into 400 billion.

[SoNotHer]

I know, right. It's complete BS.

omg... even after seeing the video thay're calling it an accident??? an accident?? seriously? wow. they don't seem to be taking it very seriously. they're tossing occupiers in jail for petty shit...and this guy goes free?? scary shit.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/05/unemployed-benefits-most-_n_1077640.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C110308

WASHINGTON — The jobs crisis has left so many people out of work for so long that most of America's unemployed are no longer receiving unemployment benefits.

Early last year, 75 percent were receiving checks. The figure is now 48 percent – a shift that points to a growing crisis of long-term unemployment. Nearly one-third of America's 14 million unemployed have had no job for a year or more.

Congress is expected to decide by year's end whether to continue providing emergency unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. If the emergency benefits expire, the proportion of the unemployed receiving aid would fall further.

The ranks of the poor would also rise. The Census Bureau says unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people from slipping into poverty last year. It defines poverty as annual income below $22,314 for a family of four.

Yet for a growing share of the unemployed, a vote in Congress to extend the benefits to 99 weeks is irrelevant. They've had no job for more than 99 weeks. They're no longer eligible for benefits.

Their options include food stamps or other social programs. Nearly 46 million people received food stamps in August, a record total. That figure could grow as more people lose unemployment benefits.

So could the government's disability rolls. Applications for the disability insurance program have jumped about 50 percent since 2007.

"There's going to be increased hardship," said Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute.

The number of unemployed has been roughly stable this year. Yet the number receiving benefits has plunged 30 percent.

Government unemployment benefits weren't designed to sustain people for long stretches without work. They usually don't have to. In the recoveries from the previous three recessions, the longest average duration of unemployment was 21 weeks, in July 1983.

By contrast, in the wake of the Great Recession, the figure reached 41 weeks in September. That's the longest on records dating to 1948. The figure is now 39 weeks.

"It was a good safety net for a shorter recession," said Carl Van Horn, an economist at Rutgers University. It assumes "the economy will experience short interruptions and then go back to normal."

Weekly unemployment checks average about $300 nationwide. If the extended benefits aren't renewed, growth could slow by up to a half-percentage point next year, economists say.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that each $1 spent on unemployment benefits generates up to $1.90 in economic growth. The CBO has found that the program is the most effective government policy for increasing growth among 11 options it's analyzed.

Jon Polis lives in East Greenwich, R.I., one of the 20 states where 99 weeks of benefits are available. He used them all up after losing his job as a warehouse worker in 2008. His benefits paid for groceries, car maintenance and health insurance.

Now, Polis, 55, receives disability insurance payments, food stamps and lives in government-subsidized housing. He's been unable to find work because employers in his field want computer skills he doesn't have.

"Employers are crying that they can't find qualified help," he said. But the ones he interviewed with "weren't willing to train anybody."

From late 2007, when the recession began, to early 2010, the number of people receiving unemployment benefits rose more than four-fold, to 11.5 million.

But the economy has remained so weak that an analysis of long-term unemployment data suggests that about 2 million people have used up 99 weeks of checks and still can't find work.

Contributing to the smaller share of the unemployed who are receiving benefits: Some of them are college graduates or others seeking jobs for the first time. They aren't eligible. Only those who have lost a job through no fault of their own qualify.

The proportion of the unemployed receiving benefits usually falls below 50 percent during an economic recovery. Many have either quit jobs or are new to the job market and don't qualify.

Today, the proportion is falling for a very different reason: Jobs remain scarce. So more of the unemployed are exhausting their benefits.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has noted that the long-term unemployed increasingly find it hard to find work as their skills and professional networks erode. In a speech last month, Bernanke called long-term unemployment a "national crisis" that should be a top priority for Congress.

Lawmakers will have to decide whether to continue the extended benefits by the end of this year. If the program ends, nearly 2.2 million people will be cut off by February.

Congress has extended the program nine times. But it might balk at the $45 billion cost. It will be the first time the Republican-led House will vote on the issue.

[AtLast]

i think moving 4 billion bucks out of banks and into credit unions is a pretty big impact. LMAO! also, the fees that banks planned to charge for using debts cards came to a screeching halt. BINGO! big impact!

i like giving credit where credit is due. i'll give mine to credit unions. and it only cost me 5 bucks to join!

Yup- and wars are won, one battle at a time.

[Ebon]

6z9vCg01lVo

God I love Angela Davis.

HlvfPizooII

[Ebon]

k5kHACjrdEY#!

[greeneyedgrrl]

not directly ows... but i think related and inspiring
Oakland State of Mind - YouTube

[ruffryder]

Today I heard about arrests in Orlando and in Hawaii. Glad to know people are getting out in these two areas and occupying.

[Ebon]

A little OWS humor courtesy of Stephen Colbert.

http://occupywallst.org/article/ketchup-and-justin-foil-colbert-optation/

[DapperButch]

I can't believe that NOW is the time that Wells Fargo is announcing their new bank for the "super rich". You only need to have 50 million to invest. Coming to a location near you (the first one open in Chicago in April)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/06/abbot-downing-wells-fargo_n_1078513.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C110362

[SoNotHer]

What? You don't have at leat $50M to invest?

:-)))

I can't believe that NOW is the time that Wells Fargo is announcing their new bank for the "super rich". You only need to have 50 million to invest. Coming to a location near you (the first one open in Chicago in April)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/06/abbot-downing-wells-fargo_n_1078513.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C110362

[persiphone]

k5kHACjrdEY#!


i love all the stories of stuff videos

[persiphone]

I can't believe that NOW is the time that Wells Fargo is announcing their new bank for the "super rich". You only need to have 50 million to invest. Coming to a location near you (the first one open in Chicago in April)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/06/abbot-downing-wells-fargo_n_1078513.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C110362


did you read the comments under this article? this one made me laugh....

"They are naming this after some carriage maker that catered to silly aristocrat­ic wannabees. A bank that serves only poor folks should be created and the name should be 1917 Revolution­ary Pride or Bastille Guillotine First National."

hahahahhahaa @ Bastille Guillotine First National

[AtLast]

Something that has been on my mind about Bank Transfer Day is that there are so many people in the US that have had their credit completely ruined by the recession that they can't even get a bank account of any kind in either a bank or a credit union. And if they have been able to hang on to a checking account in a bank, they don't dare lose it. They will endure all the fees just to keep an account so they can pay bills from it, etc. and use a debit card to purchase goods.

Talk about entrapment! And the alternative to these people is pre-paid credit cards with large use fees or if they have an emergency, pay-day loans with over 400% in interest!!

Tell me, how the hell are these people going to get their credit back? What the hell are they going to do? this group is growing in leaps and bounds in the US. People that have been laid off and at the end of their UE benefits and any extensions are one month away fromfalling down this black hole.

[Dominique]

I did some reading on this, as I wrote letters to my Republican senators for
voting No on the American Jobs Act. That would have brought 18,000 highway jobs alone here. We have horrible roads (they are just crumbling and always under construction) and the bridge situation is even worse. I guess it's going to take a major bridge to collapse with traffic on it before something gets done. Pittsburgh has 944 highway bridges. This amount does not include the train bridges. They are in just as bad of shape. (Obama and Biden were both here last month)

So anyhow, back to unemplyment. At the end of Decemeber, 5 million Americans will have exhausted tier four of UC. Thats 50 weeks of Unemployment compensation. The average check being $300. Can you imagine what the economy will look like when 5 million people stop spending a measly $300. Also, don't forget Obam's promise to have all of the Soldiers out of Iraq. Where are all of the jobs? There will be less, when that spending comes to a stop.

Extending UC has been seperated from the Jobs act, and has been given to the special committee to find a way to pay for an extension. MUM is the word.

[atomiczombie]

Something that has been on my mind about Bank Transfer Day is that there are so many people in the US that have had their credit completely ruined by the recession that they can't even get a bank account of any kind in either a bank or a credit union. And if they have been able to hang on to a checking account in a bank, they don't dare lose it. They will endure all the fees just to keep an account so they can pay bills from it, etc. and use a debit card to purchase goods.

Talk about entrapment! And the alternative to these people is pre-paid credit cards with large use fees or if they have an emergency, pay-day loans with over 400% in interest!!

Tell me, how the hell are these people going to get their credit back? What the hell are they going to do? this group is growing in leaps and bounds in the US. People that have been laid off and at the end of their UE benefits and any extensions are one month away fromfalling down this black hole.

I don't really know about that. When I opened my new Patelco credit union checking account, they didn't ask me to verify income or do a credit check at all. All I had to do was give them 20 bucks, and that went directly into my new account. They said I have to have a savings account too, however, they opened it for me and THEY put in $1.00 themselves (I still have my $20 in my checking). There is no minimum balance I have to keep in either account. I am allowed to have 6 overdrafts a month before they ding me with a fee for it!! Can you imagine Bank of America doing that???

[Greyson]

I don't really know about that. When I opened my new Patelco credit union checking account, they didn't ask me to verify income or do a credit check at all. All I had to do was give them 20 bucks, and that went directly into my new account. They said I have to have a savings account too, however, they opened it for me and THEY put in $1.00 themselves (I still have my $20 in my checking). There is no minimum balance I have to keep in either account. I am allowed to have 6 overdrafts a month before they ding me with a fee for it!! Can you imagine Bank of America doing that???

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.

[persiphone]

Something that has been on my mind about Bank Transfer Day is that there are so many people in the US that have had their credit completely ruined by the recession that they can't even get a bank account of any kind in either a bank or a credit union. And if they have been able to hang on to a checking account in a bank, they don't dare lose it. They will endure all the fees just to keep an account so they can pay bills from it, etc. and use a debit card to purchase goods.

Talk about entrapment! And the alternative to these people is pre-paid credit cards with large use fees or if they have an emergency, pay-day loans with over 400% in interest!!

Tell me, how the hell are these people going to get their credit back? What the hell are they going to do? this group is growing in leaps and bounds in the US. People that have been laid off and at the end of their UE benefits and any extensions are one month away fromfalling down this black hole.



i was able to open a credit union account with a 5 dollar deposit into a savings acount and a 20 dollar deposit into the checking account. both accounts are free in the sense that i don't get dinged monthly for having the accounts and my checking account has no minimum balance. i can use my debit card from them, which they gave me on the spot instead of having to wait for it to be mailed, again, with no fees for usage. also, i don't get dinged for having automatic utility payments come right out of my checking account. i didn't have to be a teacher or in any type of special field to open it and they even gave me a free beverage cooler for opening the account. yay!!! there was no credit check or anything like that either.

also, as far as credit cards go, the green dot cards are pretty nifty. but i have a debit card so i have no need for them anyway. plus, i don't use credit anymore and haven't for quite some time, back around the time *I* felt that the credit card companies were getting way out of hand and that was long before there was a mass movement that put a spotlight on their horrible business practices.

additionally, the FICA system is designed to work against you. ever wonder why it takes absolute years to build your credit and just a month to destroy it? that's not an accident. the FICA system is designed to rate you on how much interest businesses (banks, lenders, corps, etc) can charge you. it's in their best interest to make your score as bad as possible to extract higher interest from you for as long as they can. homie don't play that. so i choose not to participate in that bullshit. is it hard? yes. but if i can't buy it outright, i just don't buy it. i don't see the sense in buying something that costs a dollar and spending 2 dollars just so i can have it sooner and thus lining the pockets of a bunch of faceless paper pushers with my hard won dough. i got into this argument with a prof of mine who debated that the interest you pay is offset by tax refunds and when i broke down the interest you pay on an average credit card and/or a car payment, the amount of money you ended up spending on interest could almost fund your retirement when added up over the lifetime of the loan. i mean, it's not hard to add up the bucks so you can see for yourself. and the worse your FICA score is, the more interest you pay. FICA is total bullshit and needs to be shit canned. worse system evar.

[persiphone]

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.


i have mixed feelings about unions as well and i'm glad you brought this up because i'm torn on this issue. i feel like unions had their place when working conditions were bad and there was a movement, not unlike this current one, to change that in America. i think the unions did a great job of making working conditions for Americans way better and i'm all for that.

however, that has not been my experience of unions in my lifetime. as a kid, my stepdad was the secretary treasurer of a huge union (i won't say which one or where) and when the pres of that union announced that he was going to retire, my stepdad ran for that position. i remember having security living at the house and having a security person escort me to school and stay with me at school all day because of the severity of the death threats and attempts of violence on our family. it was pretty scary. when the election happened, hundreds of votes came up missing and my mother threatened divorce if my stepdad chose to challenge the vote. so he let it go. he was then out of work for almost 2 years because no one would give him a job, not even any of the union houses.

fast forward to my very early 20s and i had gotten my CDL. i joined the union to get a good local job driving trucks and i was rerouted to hanging curtains at the convention center instead. my rep guy or whatever his official position was, told me that i could move faster through the A, B, and C "lists" and that i should go to dinner with him to "discuss my future." i left the union. i find lots of things about the current unions distasteful and corrupt.

that being said, i can't deny that unions have helped wages for all of us go up. there are industries that have lost their unions all together and are now fast becoming, if they aren't already, horrible jobs with little pay in dangerous working conditions (slaughterhouses jump to mind) and i feel like....where will we be with NO unions? we're going back to the times in our workforce that spawned unions to begin with. i don't know what the answer is or if there is an answer. i have this love hate feeling about unions and i haven't been able to make a decision on my position about them one way or the other.

[atomiczombie]

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.

If I have any trouble with Patelco, I will keep everyone here updated about it.

As for labor unions and mismanagement, yes there is definitely a history of some unions getting corrupted and working against the interests of their members. Not all labor unions are perfect. That is something that needs to be addressed too, because even a union go back on it's democratic principles and values of worker's rights. But not all unions are like this, and in general having strong unions does benefit all workers, union or not.

[persiphone]

If I have any trouble with Patelco, I will keep everyone here updated about it.

As for labor unions and mismanagement, yes there is definitely a history of some unions getting corrupted and working against the interests of their members. Not all labor unions are perfect. That is something that needs to be addressed too, because even a union go back on it's democratic principles and values of worker's rights. But not all unions are like this, and in general having strong unions does benefit all workers, union or not.



actually, i have lots more 'unions behaving badly' stories, i just posted the two that involved my personal experience. in fact, i have not seen, been involved with, or had friends that were in various unions that didn't have a horror story about it. there is clearly SOMEthing wrong with our unions across the board. but again, i feel like NO unions are equally as bad if not worse.

[WickedFemme]

I moved my B of A accounts to a credit union in San Francisco. It's called the San Francisco Fire Credit Union. sffirecu.org
they are great! They don't charge fees and the only requirement if you are not a firefighter or spouse of is that you reside in SF.

As far as the OWS movement; I highly support it and see a need for some major changes. I have seen things decline slowly over a period of time. I have worked my whole life and have never seen the job market as bad as it is now. I also haven't seen workers treated as badly as they are now either. The greed that exist in this society is disgusting to me. I don't dislike people because of their earnings regardless - what I dislike is the lack of accountability and equality across all lines.

[AtLast]

It feels like nothing that ever begins as a fair and honest enterprize ever escapes some form of corruption in the US. Unions are no exception. And I believe that they do not play as significant roll in worker's rights and treatment as they did during the Industrial Age- very different set of safety variables, for example. There are many very wealthy union "bosses" that really don't differ much than the Wall Street tycoons.

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.

Talk to some former Detroit assembly-line workers about the role of unions and job loss- and their stories are not always on the side of the union. many feel that unions played a large role in the decline of jobs because they did push wages and benefits out of bounds. Although, I have a problem with this in terms of the "Big 3" being "public" corporations that pay dividends to stock holders over and above the difference between gross receipts and obligations (including payrolls). Those "profits" we hear about are after all costs of doing business are paid and far and above a usual and customary profit margin that a private, independent business calculates and is required (by law) to stay within. The public corporations do not have the same rules to adhere to.

[Dominique]

I waited with baited breath for the oganizational meeting of Occupy Pgh.
Much to my disappointment, I found out quickly how involved the unions wanted to be. They arranged for the sign paintings to take place at the union halls. They were setting up the Parade. I wasn't liking this. I didn't want to be a voice of the union. The unions were a big reason the Steel mills are no longer here and the entire reason coal mining hasn't been here for 25 years. I almost walked away.

However, the organizers of Occupy Pgh (appreciative of the unions help)
also didn't want this to be a union statement and somehow, someway, the semblance of Occupy took place and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Opportunism, just what I have grown to dislike about unions, in general,taking selfish advantage of circumstances with little regard for principles.

[Toughy]

As a veteran, I am looking to figure out which of the many military credit unions I will join. I did take what money I have out of Wells Fargo. I am stuck with Wells Fargo because I need a bank in New Mexico as well as in Oakland. However, I can move my money every month to a credit union.

Any military/veterans out there who can make a credit union recommendation?

[Corkey]

As a veteran, I am looking to figure out which of the many military credit unions I will join. I did take what money I have out of Wells Fargo. I am stuck with Wells Fargo because I need a bank in New Mexico as well as in Oakland. However, I can move my money every month to a credit union.

Any military/veterans out there who can make a credit union recommendation?


go to iBelong.org to figure out which cu you like best and fits your needs.

[Toughy]

I am not a fan of unions for a myriad of reasons. Most have to do with the mandatory monthly dues regardless of work status, as well as calling for strikes when there is a no strike clause in the agreements.

I do however vehemently support collective bargaining.

If anyone wants to hear a union story and how much that particular union hated my outspoken ass....I will tell the story....blah blah blah no strike clause....dishonest....blah blah blah...liquor store clerks in WA.....teamsters will support not delivering booze in a state controlled booze enviornment??? blah blah blah.....attempted recruitment as a union organizer over rusty nails in a bar with men in 1000 dollar suits and me in boots and levis.....blah blah blah.......

However much like my opinion on abortion I am radically different today...well most days until I remember union dues (on a 20-30 hour work week) of 11 bucks per 2 week pay period....in the 70's.

Unions are corrupted by money in exactly the same way politicians are corrupted by money.

[atomiczombie]

George Carlin nailed it when he talked about bankers:

FeLLR3LWtv4

[CherylNYC]

I'm having trouble with all this union bashing. There are corrupt politicians, corrupt CEOs, welfare cheats, corrupt U.S. Army Officers, people on disability who have no actual disability, and there are corrupt unions and/or union reps. If it's possible to steal money from a government program or to violate the trust of people whose money you manage, someone will find a way to do so. To say 'I'm not a fan of unions because they can be corrupt' is a lot like saying we should abolish welfare or disability payments because there are welfare/disability cheats. It's myopic to ignore the greater good because someone is cheating somewhere.

I belong to two unions. While the first union I joined isn't quite overrun with pervasive corruption, it is a hotbed of cronyism and is a perfect picture of how the good ol' boy network still works it's magic. I actually have evidence that two business agents sold out the contract at a theatre where I worked about 25 yrs ago. Even with all that, this union has the power to sit down at the table with very wealthy and powerful producers/managers to get and keep a decent middle class wage for it's members, as well as providing health insurance, pension and other benefits. We're freelancers. There is NO WAY that I or any of the other people I worked with in that jurisdiction could EVER have gotten any of the above for ourselves. If the union wasn't sitting at the bargaining table we would have been paid like crap, would have never received overtime payment, would have no official days off, would not have health care coverage, or a pension to retire with. How can I be so sure of this? Because I didn't always have a union card. The difference between the wages I was able to earn plus the benefits for which I became eligible once I had a union card, and how I lived before I was represented by this union, even with it's questionable ethical standing, is astonishing. I say that as someone who has no family connections whatsoever, and as someone who only was allowed to become a member because that union was under court order to allow women in. Yeah, they sucked in a lot of ways, just like corporate culture would have sucked and would have kept my female ass out of every position except the housekeeping staff had they been allowed.

I haven't worked in that jurisdiction since 1990. I was able to join a related union that represents scenic artists, and never looked back. I get paid by the hour to be a sculptor. Not only do I get pension benefits, a 401k, a safety specialist who shows up to make sure we're not getting poisoned and health insurance, I make an even better hourly wage. Once again, none of us would have had the smallest chance of negotiating these pay scales, working conditions, or benefits packages on our own. Frankly, I wouldn't even know where to start negotiating benefits. The formulae are waaaaay too complex. My specialty is sculptural scenery, not managing funds and benefits. And guess what? This union is freakin' squeaky clean. Not one of the people in leadership positions in this union has even the whiff of corruption or of cronyism around them. Even those who have emotional disagreements with the leadership about some issue or other never think to accuse anyone of corruption, because there just isn't any. This union once had a suspect business agent in the mid 1990s and we were were all pretty disgusted. Frankly, if it was true his corruption was incredibly minor compared to my previous union, and he looks like an angel compared to your average corporate shark. But everyone else in a leadership position in this union is so darned ethical that he looked bad enough to be heaved out.

For those who think that unions are no longer needed, consider Wallmart. 'Nuff said. And once again drawing from personal experience, unions continue to set the industry standard even when they don't have jurisdiction in that workplace. A major entertainment company that I'll only refer to as Mauschwitz has a pervasive anti-union corporate culture. But their in-house artists benefit greatly from the gains our union has made. They routinely get offered any new benefit which our union secures for our membership. Why? Because the Mauschwitz Corporation knows that they can only keep their artists from joining us by making sure that they get nothing less than we do. The next time you're tempted to bash unions, stop and ask yourself if Ford/Chrysler/GM wouldn't immediately start paying Wallmart wages and imposing Wallmart conditions if they were allowed abrogate their union contracts and obligations.

OK. I'm done now.

[Bard]

just a chime on the unions. I am not a member of our union because I am a first line supervisor. I support our Union because my guys need the protection but I worry that will the union show up if the guys need them they already had to swich to a diffrent due to corruption. I belong to the FOP and that gives me support. As a police officer we need the union protection

[Toughy]

I don't see Union bashing. I see pointing out that Unions are not perfect and there are long-standing issues that Unions have never addressed.

I still completely and totally support collective bargaining.....the real point of Labor Unions. I have huge issues with bad ethics........signing an agreement with a no-strike clause and then going on strike. Union bosses getting paid full salaries while folks on strike are missing house payments. Union bosses dumped in cement. It's not all myth.

None of that is Union bashing. It's simply pointing out the reality. I cannot, with any kind of ethics, rant and rave about money in politics, corruption, inequitable salary ranges from top to bottom, and all the other blah blah blah without calling Unions to task also. Unions do the same things. Unions should be forced to clean up their act. We need them to be ethical if they are going to be a viable force for social change. They need to put their money where their mouth resides....and posters are not money....

As I said.....not a big fan of standing labor unions, but a die-hard unflinching supporter of collective bargaining.

[Corkey]

While I have never belonged to a union, and have never needed to, the cronyism in some unions is rampant, such as the longshoreman's union which an ex of mine belonged to. They did nothing for her when she was injured on the job. So while some may have need, I would question wether or not they actually do any good for the money one spends.

[greeneyedgrrl]

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.



i worked as a public employee... and our union was seiu (huge corporation that is taking over monterey bay and in my experience has not had the workers best interest in mind and has been in the midst of controversy on more than one occasion). maybe we're the exception and not the rule... but i suspect this is happening all over.

[Cin]

It’s a matter of morality.

The Right loves to spout off about morals, about the morality behind their leadership. Perhaps, finally, the rest of us have figured out it’s all a sham and a scam. There’s nothing moral about what they do to the majority.


The War Against the Poor
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality
By Frances Fox Piven

We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99%” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top 1% over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80%.)

The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages -- for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.

Being Poor By the Numbers

A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%.

Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3% of the population, or 47 million people -- one in six Americans -- were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.

Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them “debt poor.” Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.

Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it’s clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.5% in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49% higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.

In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.

Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor’s share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn’t earn even a poverty-level livelihood -- and even that’s not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.

Campaigning Against the Poor

This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.

As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services, and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics “poverty,” along with “welfare,” “unwed mothers,” and “crime,” became code words for blacks.

In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous “war on drugs” that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale “reform” of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.

This was not only war against the poor, but the very “class war” that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don’t like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks, and financial institutions.

The poor -- and blacks -- were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations, and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations, and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.

Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan “end welfare as we know it.”

A Movement for a Moral Economy

The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty, and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences -- welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.

The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when “recovery” arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1% of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.

The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program,” it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program’s funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.

The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.

The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping -- and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.

[Cin]

It is in the best interest of the 1% to keep us divided along any lines available. We are encouraged to divide ethnically and religiously and we have always been taught to look below us on the socio-economic scale for the cause of any financial difficulties we might encounter. Now we are being encouraged to consider an intergenerational division. Whatever it takes to keep us divided and at each others' throats

Here they come again with a new approach to get at Social Security. And since income greater than $90,000 is not subject to Social Security taxation I can feel comfortable making the claim that the money comes from the 98%. And not just SSI will be at risk if they succeed in turning us against ourselves. This new report, as well as some purposely misleading articles I have read recently, will supply ideal fodder to encourage changes in Medicare. Or reforms as they will be called. Unfortunately the “reforms” sought after will do nothing to lower the cost of healthcare and instead redirect more of the burden onto the backs of seniors.

Check out this article about a new and very misleading report.


Pew Report on Young-Old Wealth Gap is Misleading and Divisive; Could Fuel Intergenerational Class War


Those gunning for Social Security are already using the study to divide the "other 99 percent."

http://www.alternet.org/economy/153012/pew_report_on_young-old_wealth_gap_is_misleading_and_divisive%3B_could _fuel_intergenerational_class_war/?page=3

[AtLast]

While I have never belonged to a union, and have never needed to, the cronyism in some unions is rampant, such as the longshoreman's union which an ex of mine belonged to. They did nothing for her when she was injured on the job. So while some may have need, I would question wether or not they actually do any good for the money one spends.

I'm sure your friends experience is true, however, the Longshoreman strike of 1934 on the West Coast (San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington- the "Albion Hall group") was a significant union movement helping thousands of these workers.

It is hard for me at times when talking "unions" because so many of the early (post WW I) work of labor unions for blue collar workers ans well as women and childrens worker rights is so important in terms of changes in safety and health for US workers. Work weeks, breaks, child labor laws, the advent of the "week end," etc. are things we take for granted today and there were bloody (as was the 1934 Longshoreman strike and all of the women killed in the "Triangle Shirtwaste Fire" of 1911) strikes and demonstrations by and for very hard working people being treated like dirt.

I do see a huge difference in what early union fights were about and what goes on today. There is a lot of cronyism and corruption at the top of union organizing. I can't help but feel thankful for early union organizing and what this has mean't for the US worker. Yet, I can see where members today are not fairly represented by them at all. And also when unions have hurt worker job security in the long run by not working with industries during times in which major economic changes have caused huge shrinkage in numbers of available jobs simply based upon supply and demand.

On the other hand, large companies (including the Big 3 in Detroit) failed to adjust their factory output during these times and did not re-tool factories for production of the kind of cars that became more popular during fuel shortages and with the influx of Japanese cars into the US. These trade agreements were known by these companies, yet they made no adjustments. Unions continued to bargain from obsolete positions which I think hurt workers deeply during the decline of the industrial age and the start of the US expanding into world markets. And the information age began and this has changed the face of the US workforce forever as well as expanded global economies that we have to compete in.

I'm not sure that union organizers made adjustments as well- there are differences in the kinds of health and safety variables within the information age than in the earlier manufacturing economy in the US.

I don't think it is all about the "good" or "bad" about unions. I think it is more about work force and union adaptations to what is best for workers in a very different world of work. So often, it just feels like apples and oranges being compared to me.

[Kätzchen]

I've been rather quiet lately, but with good reason: I like to take my time in processing whether information presented is in the best interest of those who are affected most by social inequality. I want to use my power wisely and to help faciliate, participate in the orchestration, and unite of the voice of the many who suffer egregious conditions of social inequality (at an OWS movement level).

I want to say thank you so much to the author of this thread (AZ), the collective voice of members who contribute toward the ongoing conversation in progress and to Miss Tick - who recently posted an article published by the organization called The Pew. I respect the authorship of articles from The Pew because of neutral scientific process that is inductive, quasilateral by design and inspects highly dialogical process in dialectical fashion. SoOoOOoOo, Kudos to The Pew!!!

I leave tonight for a national conference to present my graduate work on the Aristotelian canon of Memoria: Connecting Elie Wiesel’s voice to modern day accounts of whose voice counts most toward a credible accounting of the intelligentsia, the legitimatia, of memory. The same rubric of methodology in pedagogic form is, in my opinion, crucial to the OWS movement and already I see a way, as a Communication scholar, to connect present day accountings of whose voice counts most in OWS public discourse. The elements of indexicality & iconicity of the OWS movement points solidly toward the current trained incapacity of a US-centric condition - the disparity between those who have and those who have not (+/- variables of sets of data which may or may not be completely accurate due to reporting mechanisms that do not capture all sets of data needed for this process due to human based parameters within, currently held and socially constructed, human policy, etc.).

Here at home, in the paper (was it yesterday or the day before?) our Mayor, Sam Adams, has been instrumental in diffusing and redirecting and reassessing on a 24/7 basis in support of OWS and although there are not as many people participating in the first weeks of the movement, we still have people devoted to the cause -- they actually chained themselves to a barrel with bike locks! I stop by daily and visit with people and support this cause, whether it's first thing in the morning or on my way home.

Please know I appreciate each and every one of you here who have the time and energy to keep this conversation moving and igniting the hearts of those who have yet to find ways to support this cause.

*Thank You, to each and every one of you*

~D

[Cin]

I found this article to be humorous and horrifying in equal measure.


The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt
by George Monbiot

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes. [(Illustration by Daniel Pudles)] (Illustration by Daniel Pudles)

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

[Cin]

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

[AtLast]

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

Thanks for posting this. I have seen countless images of what these so called "non-lethal weapons" do to people and it makes me sick. Sicker that they are used against our own citizens exercizing Constitutional rights. I may not agree with some of the tactics used by demonstrators that I feel end up hurting the very people the Occupy movement is viewed as representing. But, I just cannot abide by this.

It is one thing when a crowd is armed and out of control, but quite another when unarmed anda agitated. Sometimes, I think that it would be best for police to just have a perimeter established around demonstrations (no fences or anything- just identify by landmarks) for obervation only and have emergency vehicles available at certain points with EMTs and fire personnel and just stay back and let the crowd find its own way to calm. Yes, some graffiti and probably smashed windows will happen, but I have yet to see in all of the coverage of the OWS instances where the bulk of demonstrators that have been out there for 9over 50 days not try to calm others down. There are several videos I have watched where the 98/99ers are very clear with not wanting outside groups to turn this into something is not- an anarchist revolution. These are people trying to be heard that feel like our systems do not represent the common good.

I am in no way any expert in crowd or riot control, but do know something about human behavior. Even with agitated group think going on, good sense arises among groups and people see that others can be hurt and that will not help their cause. People will self-regulate to bring about calm. Also, OWS folks are in constant conversation with factions all across the US (and the world) and it certainly looks to me like non-violence is at the core of this movement.

Don't even get me started on how I feel about how the manufacturers present the "non-lethality" of these kinds of weapons, including stun guns/Tasers. They can kill and they do mame people permanently.

Also, some of this footage brings me back to watching the military and the people in Egypt during Arab Spring. The soldiers did not want to hurt their own people. There have been reports by police officers here stating that using force on people at the OWS protests just does not feel right to them. They are in the 98/99% too.

[atomiczombie]

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

Yeah I saw it on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night. Disgusted and horrified me.

The thing that is most disgusting about this is the videographer was asking the police if it was ok for him to be filming them at that distance and as the video clearly shows, instead of answering him with words, they shot him with a rubber bullet. Grrr...

[SoNotHer]

Great articles, posts and videos - thank you all.

I heard an interview this morning on WBEZ Chicago with author Richard Wilkinson. It feels like there's a growing groundswell of people calling for a more just and equitable society. Wilkinson offers some good reasons why in Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better.

http://www.releasedates.com/pics/books/the-spirit-level-why-greater-equality-makes-societies-stronger.jpg

The way we live now

A hard-hitting study of the social effects of inequality has profound implications, says Lynsey Hanley

We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks' holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we'd trust each other more.

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don't soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources.

Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years' standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.

They use the information to create a series of scatter-graphs whose patterns look nearly identical, yet which document the prevalence of a vast range of social ills. On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country's level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable "low" end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable "high" end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.

This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world's richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence - murder, in particular - that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality - within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging.

The graphs also reveal that it is not just the poor, but whole societies, from top to bottom, that are adversely affected by inequality. Although the UK fares badly when compared with most other OECD countries (and is the worst developed nation in which to be a child according to both Unicef and the Good Childhood Inquiry), its social problems are not as pronounced as in the US.

Rates of illness are lower for English people of all classes than for Americans, but working-age Swedish men fare better still. Diabetes affects twice as many American as English people, whether they have a high or a low level of education. Wherever you look, evidence favouring greater equality piles up. As the authors write, "the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance".

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of reading this book is the revelation that the way we live in Britain is a serious danger to our mental health. Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Wilkinson and Pickett's description of unequal societies as "dysfunctional" suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain's "happiness tsar" Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be "fixed" or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management.

There's an almost pleading quality to some of Wilkinson and Pickett's assertions, as though they feel they've spent their careers banging their heads against a brick wall. It's impossible to overstate the implications of their thesis: that the societies of Britain and the US have institutionalised economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of their respective populations are mentally ill. What kind of "growth" is that, other than a malignant one?

One question that comes to mind is whether the world's most equal developed nations, Japan and Sweden, make sufficient allowance for individuals to express themselves without being regarded as a threat to the health of the collective. Critics of the two societies would argue that both make it intensely difficult for individual citizens to protest against the conformity both produced by, and required to sustain, equality. The inclination to dismiss or neuter individuals' complaints may, Wilkinson and Pickett suggest, go some way towards explaining the higher suicide rates in both countries compared with their more unequal counterparts. Those who feel wrong, or whose lives go wrong, may feel as though they really do have no one to blame but themselves.

What Japan and Sweden do show is that equality is a matter of political will. There are belated signs - shown in the recent establishment of a National Equalities Panel and in Trevor Phil lips's public pronouncements on the central place of class in the landscape of British inequality - that Labour recognises that its relaxed attitude to people "getting filthy rich" has come back to bite it on the rear.

Twelve years in power is long enough to reverse all the trends towards greater social and economic stratification that have occurred since 1970; instead they have continued on their merry way towards segregation. Teenage pregnancy rates have begun to rise after a period of decline; there is a 30-year gap in male life expectancy between central Glasgow and parts of southern England; and child poverty won't be halved by next year after all (though it wouldn't make as much difference as making their parents more equal).

There are times when the book feels rather too overwhelmingly grim. Even if you allow for the fact that it was written before Barack Obama won the US presidency on a premise of trust and optimism, its opening pages are depressing enough to make you want to shut it fast: "We find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, driven to consume and with little or no community life." Taking the statistics broadly, they may be correct, but many readers simply won't feel like that.

However, the book does end on an optimistic note, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making sick societies more healthy. A society in which all citizens feel free to look each other in the eye can only come into being once those in the lower echelons feel more valued than at present. The authors argue that removal of economic impediments to feeling valued - such as low wages, low benefits and low public spending on education, for instance - will allow a flourishing of human potential.

There is a growing inventory of serious, compellingly argued books detailing the social destruction wrought by inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a companion to recent bestsellers such as Oliver James's Affluenza and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety . But The Spirit Level also contributes to a longer view, sitting alongside Richard Sennett's 2003 book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality , and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome , from 2005.

Anyone who believes that society is the result of what we do, rather than who we are, should read these books; they should start with The Spirit Level because of its inarguable battery of evidence, and because its conclusion is simple: we do better when we're equal.

[AtLast]

Well wishes can be sent to Scott Olsen via this website-

http://www.scottolsen.org/thanks-and-best-wishes-for-your-recovery

[*Anya*]

From Long Beach, CA

9:15pm | In the largest show of civil disobedience in Occupy Long Beach's one-month existence, about 40 group members disrupted Tuesday night's city council meeting in an attempt to force the council to address OLB's request that Lincoln Park be fashioned temporarily into a 24-hour-per-day "free-speech zone" that allows for the use of tents.

Interspersed between speakers during an open public comment period near the beginning that included requests that the City entice the Rainforest Cafe to set up shop downtown and ratify the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, three members of OLB spoke before a fourth, Tammara Phillips, asked the council whether it was "prepared to hear the 40 or so speakers that we have [here] this evening to discuss a free-speech zone."

When informed by Vice-Mayor Suja Lowenthal (presiding over the meeting in the absence of Mayor Bob Foster) that the issue was not on the evening's agenda, Phillips addressed the gallery.

"Occupy Long Beach," she began, "do you request a resolution establishing free-speech zone . . ." — at which point Lowenthal cut her off.

Phillips then led the group in a sort of pledge, over which Lowenthal admonished her that "this is no way to have your item agendized. You are out of order." When the pledge continued, Lowethnal called for the police officers present to escort Phillips away from the microphone. Chants of "The whole world is watching!" followed, and when Lowenthal's attempts to restore order were unsuccessful, the vice-mayor recessed the meeting.

As most of the council members vacated their seats (only council members Robert Garcia, Gerrie Schipske and Rae Gabelich remained in the room), roughly a dozen police officers streamed into the room as OLBers chanted "We are the 99%!" and "Your silence will not protect you!"

One officer could been holding dozens of zip ties, indicating that the police were prepared to make arrests if need be, but no protestors were detained at any time, and most of the officers present seemed relatively relaxed, one of them even engaging in cordial conversation with the protestor nearest the front of the chamber. At one point the protestors even broke into a chant of "Cops need a raise!" which elicited smiles from several officers.

But it was the chant of "Put us on the agenda!" that spoke specifically to why the OLBers were there, and when the councilmembers returned to the chamber roughly 15 minutes later, Councilmember Rae Gabelich defused the situation by offering to agendize the issue for the November 15 council meeting. Satisfied, the protestors filed out of the chamber.

Apparently what was the last straw in making the OLBers mad as hell and not willing to take this anymore stemmed from what may have been a misunderstanding involving Gabelich, as OLBers say they had understood her to have promised to agendize the "free-speech zone" issue for Tuesday's meeting. However, Gabelich claims this was a misunderstanding; and various city staffers have stated that some members of the council received OLB's "resolution" only Monday, while others had not received it at all.

While the matter is to be agendized for next week, Gabelich stated unequivocally that "the ordinance [prohibiting camping in the park] is not going to change," and that OLB should "look for an alternative site. … I believe in the Occupy movement. I think the message is a good one. But we have to find creative alternatives."

Even as OLBers succeeded in getting themselves on next week's city council agenda, some outside the group feel they did not do themselves any favors. One person in attendance was overheard to say that OLB could have gotten its resolution on the council agenda via means that would not have been as alienating to the city council, while another complained, "These leeches who don't work and offer nothing to society are going to destroy everyone's rights. … They only care about their own free speech."

What is clear is that the 40 OLBers in attendance were quite prepared to face arrest if they had not gotten what they wanted — even if exactly how the evening's events transpired was not completely scripted. "We had talked about what we were going to do beforehand," Demos told me after the meeting, "but once these things get going, they sort of go their own way."

Call it the joys and perils of a leaderless movement. And at least as far as the Long Beach goes, says Demos, it's a movement comprised mostly of persons with little experience in political protests.

Perhaps that's fitting, considering that Long Beach is not exactly the most experienced city when it comes to this sort of thing.

[dykeumentary]

http://i1143.photobucket.com/albums/n634/dykeumentary/photo-8.jpg
I'm glad to see this for myself. ! Go OWS !

[dykeumentary]

http://i1143.photobucket.com/albums/n634/dykeumentary/photo-9.jpg
Queer table at OWS in NYC!
The pink sign says "Trans-form the Occupation"

[SoNotHer]

Missoula Voters Say Corporations Are Not People, Demand Constitutional Amendment


November 8, 2011

By: Keila Szpaller

The Missoulian

Corporations aren't people, an overwhelming 75 percent of Missoula voters said Tuesday, and they don't want corporations treated like people either.

"I'm over the moon about it," said Councilwoman Cynthia Wolken, who brought the referendum to the Missoula City Council to place on the ballot.
The measure - similar to others across the country - calls on the U.S. Congress and state leaders to amend the U.S. Constitution to say that "corporations are not human beings." It earned 10,729 votes in favor and 3,605 against.

The resolution isn't binding, but it does send a message that's gaining momentum nationwide. Wolken said she planned on being satisfied to capture more than 50 percent of the vote, "really happy" with more than 60 percent, and "over the moon" with anything more.

"Basically, it affirmed what we were all seeing on the streets, which is the average Missoulian wanted to have their voice heard ... and they want their elected officials to fix the problem of corporate personhood," Wolken said. "So I hope this message is heard and we get started on fixing the problem."

As she sees it, corporations have been given too much power, and as stated in the Missoula resolution, their "profits and survival are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings." The movement to amend the U.S. Constitution launched in earnest in January 2010 after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, overruling two precedents. It stated the government can't ban campaign spending on elections by corporations because that would be unduly regulating speech.

According to the local resolution, the ruling on Citizens United corrupts one foundation of democracy by "rolling back legal limits on corporate spending in the electoral process."

"(The decision) ... allows unlimited corporate spending to influence elections, candidate selection, policy decisions and sway votes," reads the Missoula resolution. Councilwoman Wolken said the Missoula city clerk likely will prepare a letter to send to state and national leaders urging the amendment once the office has finished work on a more pressing priority, replacing the Municipal Court judge. She also said she expects action from state legislators as well.

"I have no doubt that when the legislative session starts back up, that this will be on the top of the list," Wolken said.

Read more: http://missoulian.com/news/local/missoula-voters-say-corporations-are-not-people-ask-for-constitutional/article_f90f0f06-0a8b-11e1-99bf-001cc4c002e0.html#ixzz1dBmlCZqE

or at-
http://movetoamend.org/news/missoula-voters-say-corporations-are-not-people-demand-constitutional-amendment

[Cin]

nb73zqY6lZM&feature=player_detailpage

Rep. Joe Walsh yells at constituents: Don’t blame the banks

Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois became noticeably upset during a meeting with his constituents in Gurnee over the weekend after it was suggested that financial regulatory reform would be beneficial.

One person in the UNO Bar & Grill pointed out that people in the banking industry often occupied positions at federal agencies charged with regulating the financial sector.

“I agree with you about that,” he yelled. “That’s not the problem!”

“The problem is you’ve got to be consistent,” Walsh said. “And I don’t want government meddling in the marketplace. Yeah, they move from Goldman Sachs to the White House, I understand all of that. But you gotta’ be consistent. And it’s not the private marketplace that created this mess. What created mess this mess is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home. And we’ve made it easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules.”

“Don’t blame banks, and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now,” he continued. “I am tired of hearing that crap!”



The problem is you've got to be consistent he says. Well he certainly is that as is the republican party in general. They are still spouting the same old bull shit about people buying homes they can't afford being the cause of the financial crisis being heard around the world. I'm sure pressed he would explain about it being the fault of minorities buying those houses they couldn't afford.

I wonder what he means buy saying "your government". Is it no longer his government? He's washing his hands of it I guess.

[atomiczombie]

nb73zqY6lZM&feature=player_detailpage

Rep. Joe Walsh yells at constituents: Don’t blame the banks

Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois became noticeably upset during a meeting with his constituents in Gurnee over the weekend after it was suggested that financial regulatory reform would be beneficial.

One person in the UNO Bar & Grill pointed out that people in the banking industry often occupied positions at federal agencies charged with regulating the financial sector.

“I agree with you about that,” he yelled. “That’s not the problem!”

“The problem is you’ve got to be consistent,” Walsh said. “And I don’t want government meddling in the marketplace. Yeah, they move from Goldman Sachs to the White House, I understand all of that. But you gotta’ be consistent. And it’s not the private marketplace that created this mess. What created mess this mess is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home. And we’ve made it easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules.”

“Don’t blame banks, and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now,” he continued. “I am tired of hearing that crap!”



The problem is you've got to be consistent he says. Well he certainly is that as is the republican party in general. They are still spouting the same old bull shit about people buying homes they can't afford being the cause of the financial crisis being heard around the world. I'm sure pressed he would explain about it being the fault of minorities buying those houses they couldn't afford.

I wonder what he means buy saying "your government". Is it no longer his government? He's washing his hands of it I guess.

OMG what a %@*#&@!! <--- ain't gonna say the word that actually came to mind.

I hope this video goes viral and he is hated and picketed for this. He needs to be voted or kicked out of office for verbally abusing his constituents.

[AtLast]

OMG what a %@*#&@!! <--- ain't gonna say the word that actually came to mind.

I hope this video goes viral and he is hated and picketed for this. He needs to be voted or kicked out of office for verbally abusing his constituents.

Walsh makes me sick and I think he is unstable, I really do. Plus, he ran out on his kids and wife and owes over 100K in back child support. Real family values kind of guy! So tired of GOP/TP hypocrites!! He is more than an arrogant jerk- he's on the edge.

[Cin]

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

[atomiczombie]

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

Great article. Can you please provide the link to where it's published on the net? Thanks.

[Ebon]

Senior Citizens at Occupy Chicago out and about to fight for their SS and Medicare.

N2SYvBGB5as

Then later on that day. The old folks get carried off to jail.

ZfIb9VlKzeQ

[SoNotHer]

The OWS stuff is starting to get to them - and he's a hot mess.

In another part of the state, how cool that seniors got arrested in Chicago!

Thanks for the videos Miss Tick and Ebon.

nb73zqY6lZM&feature=player_detailpage

Rep. Joe Walsh yells at constituents: Don’t blame the banks

Republican Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois became noticeably upset during a meeting with his constituents in Gurnee over the weekend after it was suggested that financial regulatory reform would be beneficial.

One person in the UNO Bar & Grill pointed out that people in the banking industry often occupied positions at federal agencies charged with regulating the financial sector.

“I agree with you about that,” he yelled. “That’s not the problem!”

“The problem is you’ve got to be consistent,” Walsh said. “And I don’t want government meddling in the marketplace. Yeah, they move from Goldman Sachs to the White House, I understand all of that. But you gotta’ be consistent. And it’s not the private marketplace that created this mess. What created mess this mess is your government, which has demanded for years that everybody be in a home. And we’ve made it easy as possible for people to be in homes. All the marketplace does is respond to what the government does. The government sets the rules.”

“Don’t blame banks, and don’t blame the marketplace for the mess we’re in right now,” he continued. “I am tired of hearing that crap!”



The problem is you've got to be consistent he says. Well he certainly is that as is the republican party in general. They are still spouting the same old bull shit about people buying homes they can't afford being the cause of the financial crisis being heard around the world. I'm sure pressed he would explain about it being the fault of minorities buying those houses they couldn't afford.

I wonder what he means buy saying "your government". Is it no longer his government? He's washing his hands of it I guess.

[Cin]

Great article. Can you please provide the link to where it's published on the net? Thanks.

Here ya go.

http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/11/09/pre-occupied-with-fairness-the-moral-crisis-of-modern-capitalism-64156/

[SoNotHer]

It takes a minute to sign this, and far more to let business interests start "robo calling" your private cell numbers.


From -

http://pol.moveon.org/norobocalls/?id=32746-9280932-qpZAlCx&t=2

No Robocalls - Protect your minutes and privacy

Corporate interests like the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, and a coalition of debt collectors are trying to sneak H.R. 3035 through under the radar. This bill would allow businesses to repeatedly hound you throughout the day, no matter where you are, using up minutes that YOU pay for!

But there's still time to stop it.

If Congress hears an outcry from everyday Americans, they'll hang up on H.R. 3035 before it gets to a full vote. That's why we need a massive petition that people share widely with their friends and through their social networks. We'll deliver the petition to the House committee reviewing the bill, and make sure the media hears about it as well.

Sign the petition and then share it with everyone you know.

A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to Congress.

[Cin]

It's hard to believe that we are still here. The puppet masters and their puppeteers are still spouting the same old crap about minorities buying houses they couldn't afford and causing the financial collapse of the world. Congress passed laws in 1977 that simply leveled the playing field. Same standards for all borrowers. That was not the cause of the economic disaster that is still reverberating around the world. It wasn't that Occupy Wall Street made a mistake and occupied the wrong place, whoops they should have occupied congress. They knew and still know exactly who is responsible. And so do Bloomberg and his ilk.

Yes, it is Wall Street’s fault

Bloomberg joins Republicans in claiming Congress "forced" banks to give bad loans. Don't buy the propaganda

So here’s my question: If the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 effectively caused the Wall Street meltdown of 2007 by forcing banks to make bad home loans to improvident poor people (and we all know exactly who I mean), how come it took 30 years for the housing bubble to burst?

Next question: If fuzzy-thinking Democratic do-gooders enacted such laws in defiance of common sense and sound economics, why didn’t Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush I or Bush II do something? Was Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., secretly running the country?

Exactly how did the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in the United States — the investment bankers and corporate execs who host the $1,000-a-plate fundraisers, scoop up the Cabinet appointments and ambassadorships, and party down at White House galas — end up having less power over the U.S. economy than unskilled day laborers in Newark, N.J., or Oakland, Calif.?

Maybe some “resident scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, or another of the comfortable Washington think tanks devoted to keeping Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool topped-up, can teach us how things got so upside-down. Because under normal circumstances, the national motto is neither “e pluribus unum” nor “In God We Trust.”

It’s “Money Talks.”

Money was talking big-time last week. Clearly annoyed by the unkempt ragamuffins of Occupy Wall Street, New York’s dapper billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg delivered himself of a conspiracy theory so absurd that it had previously been confined to such dark corners of American life as the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity programs and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

“I hear your complaints,” Bloomberg said. “Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp … [T]hey were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will … And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Actually, “annoyed” is too mild to describe a sophisticated Wall Street player like Bloomberg resorting to so crude and poisonous a political lie. He can’t possibly believe it. For all its ragtag, hippie-dippie aspects, Occupy Wall Street must have people at Manhattan’s most elegant dinner parties running scared.

Here are some things Bloomberg certainly knows that make nonsense of this blame-the-victim tale:

First, there was no law forcing or even encouraging banks to make shaky loans. The Community Reinvestment Act merely required FDIC-insured institutions to apply the same standards to all borrowers — i.e., no more “redlining.” It worked fine for many years.

Second, the law applied only to retail banks, never to Wall Street investment houses or mortgage companies like Countrywide that led the 2007 meltdown. As the housing bubble fully inflated in 2006, 84 percent of subprime mortgages were written by private, totally unregulated lenders.

Is this the place to mention that Fannie and Freddie, the quasi-governmental mortgage underwriting companies, don’t actually make loans — as Bloomberg also surely knows? Did they buy worthless mortgage-backed securities along with other victimized investors? Yes, but too little and too late to have caused the crisis. Although far from pristine, they were more victims than perps.

Rolling Stone’s financial MVP Matt Taibbi reminds us how the whole scam worked.

“Bank A (let’s say it’s Goldman, Sachs) lends criminal enterprise B (let’s say it’s Countrywide) a billion dollars. Countrywide then … creates a billion dollars of shoddy home loans, committing any and all kinds of fraud along the way in an effort to produce as many loans as quickly as possible, very often putting people who shouldn’t have gotten homes into homes, faking their income levels, their credit scores, etc.

“Goldman then buys back those loans from Countrywide, places them in an offshore trust, and chops them up into securities … They then go out on the open market and sell those securities to various big customers — pension funds, foreign trade unions, hedge funds, and so on.”

And no, President George W. Bush, busy promoting what he called “the ownership society,” did nothing to restrain the action. Somebody named Bush discipline Wall Street? Get real. Even if he had, there wouldn’t have been anything a minority congressman like Barney Frank — whose actual views are almost the opposite of how Limbaugh describes them — could have done to stop him.

Then there are “resident scholars” like AEI’s Peter Wallison. Today, this guy composes tracts indicting government folly. In 2004, though, he wrote chiding federal bureaucrats for lagging behind the exciting new world of subprime lending. “Study after study,” he wrote, “has shown that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are failing to do even as much as banks and S&Ls in providing financing for affordable housing, including minority and low income housing.”

That’s money. Talking.

[Cin]

Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act in 1977 that set the same standards for all borrowers. The Bush administration weakened the enforcement of CRA. The CRA was at its strongest in the 1990s, under the Clinton administration, when subprime loans performed quite well. It was after the Bush administration cut back on CRA enforcement that problems arose. One would imagine this would show deregulation as the problem or at the very least stop those blaming the CRA. The Fed did nothing but encourage the wild west of lending of recent years.

If we need targets in government we need look no further than the 2000 law that ensured that credit default swaps would remain unregulated. And then again in 2004 when the SEC decided to allow the largest brokerage firms to borrow upwards of 30 times their capital. And then failed to oversee those brokerage firms in subsequent years. Clearly a failure to regulate is the problem. And only an idiot could imagine that more deregulation would be the answer. That’s like deciding that using gasoline to put out fires is a good idea.

Irresponsible behavior by Wall Street is the cause of this financial disaster. A failure to regulate allowed it to happen. And a continued failure to regulate will further destroy our economy. But unless we can get Wall Street out of Washington the problem isn’t likely to be solved anytime soon.

[Cin]

It’s most disturbing to me that even now we keep hearing about the housing bubble that burst and destroyed the financial universe. It’s crap. What was going on and is continuing to go on is directly caused by those weapons of mass destruction called derivatives. Not some guy or some 5000 guys who over estimated their ability to pay their mortgage and bought houses they couldn’t afford. The fact that this story is constantly spouted as reality just points to a deeper and darker truth. They have no intention of ever stopping.

“Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.”

The estimated notional value of the world derivatives is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 quadrillion. The GDP of the entire world is around $65 trillion. This shit is way out of control.

Here is some interesting information:

“Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input. You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan. Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon. Bernanke is absolutely insane. No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks. His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.”

Here’s some articles to check out if anyone is interested.

http://dailybail.com/home/holy-bailout-federal-reserve-now-backstopping-75-trillion-of.html

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-coming-derivatives-crisis-that-could-destroy-the-entire-global-financial-system

http://dailybail.com/home/william-black-not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper-bank-of-americas.html

[AtLast]

It’s most disturbing to me that even now we keep hearing about the housing bubble that burst and destroyed the financial universe. It’s crap. What was going on and is continuing to go on is directly caused by those weapons of mass destruction called derivatives. Not some guy or some 5000 guys who over estimated their ability to pay their mortgage and bought houses they couldn’t afford. The fact that this story is constantly spouted as reality just points to a deeper and darker truth. They have no intention of ever stopping.

“Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.”

The estimated notional value of the world derivatives is somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 quadrillion. The GDP of the entire world is around $65 trillion. This shit is way out of control.

Here is some interesting information:

“Bank of America is shifting derivatives in its Merrill investment banking unit to its depository arm, which has access to the Fed discount window and is protected by the FDIC.

This means that the investment bank's European derivatives exposure is now backstopped by U.S. taxpayers. Bank of America didn't get regulatory approval to do this, they just did it at the request of frightened counterparties. Now the Fed and the FDIC are fighting as to whether this was sound. The Fed wants to "give relief" to the bank holding company, which is under heavy pressure.

This is a direct transfer of risk to the taxpayer done by the bank without approval by regulators and without public input. You will also read below that JP Morgan is apparently doing the same thing with $79 trillion of notional derivatives guaranteed by the FDIC and Federal Reserve.

What this means for you is that when Europe finally implodes and banks fail, U.S. taxpayers will hold the bag for trillions in CDS insurance contracts sold by Bank of America and JP Morgan. Even worse, the total exposure is unknown because Wall Street successfully lobbied during Dodd-Frank passage so that no central exchange would exist keeping track of net derivative exposure.

This is a recipe for Armageddon. Bernanke is absolutely insane. No wonder Geithner has been hopping all over Europe begging and cajoling leaders to put together a massive bailout of troubled banks. His worst nightmare is Eurozone bank defaults leading to the collapse of the large U.S. banks who have been happily selling default insurance on European banks since the crisis began.”

Here’s some articles to check out if anyone is interested.

http://dailybail.com/home/holy-bailout-federal-reserve-now-backstopping-75-trillion-of.html

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-coming-derivatives-crisis-that-could-destroy-the-entire-global-financial-system

http://dailybail.com/home/william-black-not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper-bank-of-americas.html

It continues to be "blame the victims."

[AtLast]

http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_19298642?source=rss

Part of article- use link for the rest. There seems to be some heightened discontent going on with Oakland business owners and the City Council in terms of getting demonstrators out of the park.

The mayor's impromptu visit happened at the same time five council members, business people and faith leaders gathered at the Lake Merritt Band Shell to express their frustration with the camp, the violence and the effect on downtown businesses. They promised to find a way to boot the camp if the mayor will not do it.

[Cin]

http://www.mercurynews.com/rss/ci_19298642?source=rss

Part of article- use link for the rest. There seems to be some heightened discontent going on with Oakland business owners and the City Council in terms of getting demonstrators out of the park.

The mayor's impromptu visit happened at the same time five council members, business people and faith leaders gathered at the Lake Merritt Band Shell to express their frustration with the camp, the violence and the effect on downtown businesses. They promised to find a way to boot the camp if the mayor will not do it.

I don't know the truth of it all not being in Oakland but I read some of the comments at the end of the article and people are saying that the movement has helped businesses and that downtown businesses have been hurting for years. They seem to think that saying businesses are hurt is politically motivated and actually untrue. Again I'm not from there so I have no idea the reality of it. Perhaps people from there who read the article and the comments after it will have a much more informed opinion.

[ruffryder]

the occupy movement symbol ??

http://kenburridge.com/occupy-wall-street-moves-to-adopt-symbol/1733

what would it mean? .... A circle .. never ending, ONE - fight against 1 %?

Occupy
Unity
One World
One People
One Love
One
Solidarity

[ruffryder]

UC Berkeley Occupy


buovLQ9qyWQ

[theoddz]

Lookie Lookie Lookie!!!!! :D

Let's all sing along. :|:musicnote:

MbykzqJ6ens#!

That's too good, huh?? :winky::awww:

~Theo~ :bouquet:

[ruffryder]

Extreme poverty is now at record levels

According to this article one out of every 15 Americans are considered to be very poor. There are more than 20 million Americans living in extreme poverty.

http://www.alternet.org/story/153005/extreme_poverty_is_now_at_record_levels_--_19_statistics_about_the_poor_that_will_absolutely _astound_you?akid=7832.271864.2ZNl3t&rd=1&t=12

[AtLast]

I don't know the truth of it all not being in Oakland but I read some of the comments at the end of the article and people are saying that the movement has helped businesses and that downtown businesses have been hurting for years. They seem to think that saying businesses are hurt is politically motivated and actually untrue. Again I'm not from there so I have no idea the reality of it. Perhaps people from there who read the article and the comments after it will have a much more informed opinion.

Yes, there are differing views. I am not supporting the article in terms of "sides", just posting for information on new developments.

From local news, it seems like there are two sides to this and the businesses close to the Occupied park are the ones wanting it moved out and feel that they are being hurt because people are just staying away from the "heart" of the protest after incidences of violence. Also, some don't want a tent city and the sanitation issues around them.

I hope that they can all meet and discuss this whole thing with council members that are getting complaints and come up with solutions in compromise.

I hope that there is no more situations in which anyone gets hurt physically. But, it looked like tempers could flair when the council members that are being pressed by constituents tried to have a press conference about all of this.

This is really interesting in terms of how do we use our rights to assemble and bring our grievances to our government, yet, respect the rights of those that also are part of a community at large? And what responsibilities do bodies like city councils have in terms of representation of ALL of the people they were elected to represent? There are many people demonstrating that are not residents of Oakland or even Alameda County camping in the park. In fact, most of the people camping do not live in Oakland. So, who does the council act for- non-residents are not part of their consituency and also do not pay taxes in the city or county.

How do we address this in terms of a national protest? What is fair and what is not to the people that live and support the public funds of a municipality? Whose rights do we put above someone else's?

I have been thinking a lot about this in terms of a public park near me. It is a great park that is used by lots of groups and people from my city. Schools as well as city groups use the baseball diamonds and our rec department and senior center uses its facilities too. There are numerous activities that go on in it all of the time that are planned in advanced and people have to sign up for use permits. some plan events a year in advance and these are open to the public. There are two great play grounds there that families use every day (unless it is raining) and the fact is that our property taxes go to support this public park. It belongs to all of us.

if all of a sudden a bunch of people that do not even live here decided to take it over and camp, I have to be honest, I wouldn't like it. There is already traffic from 3 schools, a theater, and our community center and several city sports leagues (soccer, baseball- all kids programs) have secured use permits for their activities. So, they should have to give up their events and activities to people that just move in and want to use the park as a camp ground?

Now, having people gather there to protest in the areas not already spoken for to protest is different to me. But, I am talking about day use that does not impact the rightful use for others. Also, there are reasons for permits- sanitation needs and clean-up as well as any emergency services that might be needed. These are all supplied by the city because this is a public park and we all pay for this as residents here.

Frankly, most of the sports activities that go on in this city park are for kids that have few resources and want to participate in a sport or other community activity. There are all kinds of booster clubs that do fund-raisers to help support these programs as well as the city giving use permits to these kids groups. So, what do we say to a group of 3rd graders that have been all excited about the winter league they are in and ready to go play? I see the excitement and joy of these kids as they walk by or their parents park near my home as they go to participate. It is important to them. So are the old rose shows (senior citizens) and holiday children of light festivities that go on in this public park. All of which are open to the public and the park is intended and supported for by residents here.

I think that the OWS movement is important and needs to go on. However, it also has to compromise in terms of public use areas and abide by city and county ordinances of the 98/99%. Wall Street barons do not use public parks for activities like the general population- nor do their kids need to sell candy to buy school supplies.

[Toughy]

Be Afraid..........Be Very Afraid.....

The Oakland Chamber of Commerce and some members of the City Council have done a grand job of making people afraid to go to downtown Oakland and the reason to be afraid is a bunch of folks in a whole bunch of tents camped out in the City Center Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza). Be afraid they are violent. Be afraid they are hurting your business. Be fucking afraid of your fellow Oaktown residents.

I am sure there are some folks who won't go downtown because of OO. I am also sure that many many of the business around Oscar Grant Plaza are doing better business than before OO.

If the Chamber and the Council actually gave a shit about downtown business there would be an ad campaign to bring folks into downtown to eat and shop. There is not a damn thing to be afraid of in downtown Oakland on a normal day and/or evening.....

Be Afraid........they will get you......Be Afraid....

[persiphone]

i extracted this comment from this article that Miss Tick posted:

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-coming-derivatives-crisis-that-could-destroy-the-entire-global-financial-system


Understanding the puzzle of derivatives

The Commodity Futures market is one of the largest derivative trading arenas with many commodities; currencies; precious metals; and energy products listed – .

It all revolves around “Price” and “Time”. You will notice that on all traded contracts there are time periods listed noted by contract months going out up to three-years out.

Whatever the price is today (minute by minute as the contracts are traded) someone can buy or sell a contract with a 1% to 3% of the value of the contract in their account (buying or selling on margin)

Most from the public are psychologically conditioned that they have to buy first and then sell to make a profit. In derivatives that is 100% incorrect. You are making a “time” bet for higher or lower prices. If you think the value is going down, you sell a contract. If you think it is going up you buy a contract.

With the markets now primarily being traded electronically, when a buy or sell order is entered and at your price your fill usually is instant. This means you can jump in and out at your choice. If you choose it could be 10 minutes, an hour, a day, a week, or longer that you hold your position. The following is an example of the best profit in the shortest period I personally made:

It was back in 1981 and on on day when I was watching silver towards the close, it looked like it was very top heavy after moving up a few dollars over a couple of weeks. I said to myself: “I think it is going to collapse in the last few minutes before the close. It was 4-minutes to the close and I at that time having an account balance of about $32,000 slapped in two orders; (SELL) 35 DEC SILVERS at Market, and (BUY) 35 DEC SILVERS (Market on Close)

Well, got filled on the 35 sell orders in about 5 seconds and in the next 4-minutes silver collapsed by 42c where my Market on close orders were filled. No more 35 derivative orders held, just accounting of the instant CASH collected on the trade. Here is the accounting: 42c X 35 = $14.7 X $5,000 ($1 value of a silver contract move) = $73,500 + $32,000 (my account balance before the trade)= $106,500 (account balance after the trade) or not bad after a 4-minute derivatives trade. Now those that had the “other side” of the trade got burnt. The commissions I was paying at that time was about $15 per contract X 35 contracts traded = $525 that went to the House and exchange that “cleared” the trade.

Most commodity contracts have active participation in the front months but the further the time goes out participation dries up and thus no liquidity to trade those contracts.

For every contract being that it is a bet on “time” will reach its expiration and delivery day. When that happens all speculators are out and those wishing to take or make delivery stay in to the last day and then the exchanges match up the “real” buyers and sellers to each other on the outstanding contracts where physical delivery of the underling commodity is made.

Come that last day the volume of contracts held dries up to usually less that 1% of what it was a few days earlier (over 99% were speculators and less than 1% actually wanted to take or make delivery)

The 600 trillion notional value is: the value of all the bets.

EXAMPLE: on the commodity futures market has a $100,000 face value of the bet and the margin requirement to hold it over night is $2,500 and day trading margin can be $1,000. As of today the “Net” contract volume is at about 289,000 contracts. So based on notional face value that is 289,000 X $100,000 = $89 billion-dollars but the “margin deposits being used is substantially less.

So that 600 trillion is the “full contract value” of all contracts being traded. That 1.5 quadrillion is when you take into account both sides of the contract. For every buyer holding a contract there is a seller holding the other side. So when counting each side 600 X 600 = 1.2 quadrillion.

Here is the “Bottom Line”:

With 99% speculators, yes it is a casino. But “who” are the primary players that are liquidating tens of billion of dollars a day from the trading activity (remember when the trade is closed in 5-minutes or 5-months it is all a “cash” accounting for the winner’s and loser’s account balances)

Well, those from the general public that tries to play this game, they get their account balances decimated to the tune of 98% of those player that participated in very short periods of time. (bought on highs; sold on lows; got stopped out or force liquidated for not having the proper margin after being depleted from quick adverse market moves)

So who are that 2% factor that takes everyone’s money to the tune of over a few trillion dollars a year (some times in a month as happened at the end of 2008) ?

The answer may surprise you. Now the House and the Exchanges get a small cut from each side. There are a few magnates on the inside track that also make good money: But the “Primary” profiteer for several decades now are: Institutional Government Fund Management.

They in so many words all subscribe to the same News Services and consulting groups. They have the fund resources in trillion dollar collective totals managed from around the globe. They can act in loose concert and roll the markets up; down; sideways and do so as fast or as slow as they wish.

The end of 2008 showed how fast they could move the markets by exercising their multi-trillion dollar trading accounts and massive contract volume they can move in and out.

At the end of 2008 in a month and a half about 25 to 30 trillion-dollars was “sucked” right out of players accounts globally that were on the wrong sides of the trades. Now some government investment funds where they were on the outside track got burnt. The primary government institutional global accounts that “were” on the inside track made a killing of several trillion dollars.
Now here is the definition of arrogance:

Government (USA) global institutional funds now after having liquidating trillions out of the playing loser’s accounts at the end of 2008, (which caused massive defaults from the loser’s who ended up with severe deficit account balances)now uses a trillion here and a trillion there of taxpayer revenue to shore-up their own casino and friendly corporate interests.

Is there a “bubble” in the derivatives market?

As of 2009, Oh yes.. You can not suck so many trillions out of others accounts at the end of 2008 without destabilizing the playing field. Commodity futures contracts back then were settled after weeding out defaults so back to normal there. I note the definition of normal is those government institutional accounts rolling the market up and down, quick and slow; as they liquidate that 98% factions cash on the trades.

The danger lies in those “Mortgage Interest Rate Swaps” where there is a substantially reduced value of the underling commodity and in some cases the contract instrument traded had no underling commodity to back it up at all(real-estate home and commercial properties)

Here the balancing act is precarious to say the least. Offsetting those contract instruments to balance out with “real” underling value market to market is a nightmare for the players.

Those trillions in bailouts to the global banks and financial institutions have primarily gone to that end.

Are they getting closer to balancing the books? Yes..

Are they there yet? No, they are about 60% there and it will take more time to balance the remainder and the beat goes on..

Walter Burien – (CTA) Commodity Trading Advisor) 1978 – 1992 and
commodity Futures Trader of 33 years.


i highlighted some key points.

[Cin]

On Thursday, November 10 at 8pm, The New School in New York City will be hosting Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power, a discussion featuring award-winning filmmaker and author Michael Moore (Here Comes Trouble), best-selling author and Nation columnist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), Nation National Affairs correspondent William Greider (Come Home, America), Colorlines Publisher Rinku Sen (The Accidental American), Occupy Wall Street Organizer Patrick Bruner and Richard Kim, executive editor, The Nation.com (moderator). Sponsored by The Nation and The New School.

Watch the live stream here and visit The Nation's special section front on Occupy Wall Street for more coverage of the movement.


http://www.thenation.com/video/164494/watch-michael-moore-naomi-klein-and-others-live-tonight-whats-next-ows

[Toughy]

A man was shot and killed on Oscar Grant Plaza about an hour and a half ago. Occupy Oakland medics were first on the scene followed by regular first responders. The shooting was on a part of the Plaza that has no tents and is a place where folks hang out and play hacky sack, drum, etc.

Occupy Oakland was to be celebrating their 30 day birthday tonite. That's not happening of course. Folks are already packing up their tents and leaving.

go to KRON TV4 for more info.

[Ebon]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/big-banks-plead-with-customers-not-to-move-their-money.html

Big Banks Plead with Customers Not to Move Their Money
Posted on November 9, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog
Yes, The Big Banks DO Care If We Move Our Money

650,000 customers moved $4.5 billion dollars out of the big banks and into smaller banks and credit unions in the last month.

But there is a myth making the rounds that the big banks don’t really care if we move our money. For example, one line of reasoning is that no matter how many people move their money, the Fed and Treasury will just bail out the giants again.

But many anecdotes show that the too big to fails do, in fact, care.

Initially, of course, if the big banks really didn’t care, they wouldn’t have prevented protesters from closing their accounts.

NBC notes that – in response to inquiries regarding how many people have moved their money – Bank of America refused to provide figures, and instead sent the following defensive email:

“Bank of America continues to be a great place for customers to manage their everyday finances and achieve their savings goals,” [Colleen Haggerty, a spokeswoman for Bank of America's Southern California operations] said in an email. “We offer customers more choice and convenience, including industry-leading fraud protection, access to thousands of banking centers and ATMs, and the best online and mobile banking, which allow customers to bank on their terms 24/7.”

A writer noted at Daily Kos:

At Wells Fargo, my sister walked up to the teller and politely asked to close her account. The teller said, “No problem.” She pulled up her account and saw the balance and told her that due to the amount she had to speak with the branch manager. The branch manager came out. He was probably 30 years old and was very arrogant. He asked my sister why she wanted to close her account and my sister told him she thought Wells Fargo was part of the problem with the economy. He went thru some talking points about why she shouldn’t move her money, but my sister didn’t back down. When he asked her where she was going she told him that she would be banking at the North Carolina State Employees Credit Union. She isn’t a state employee, but anyone can join if you are related to a state employee. It turns out her husband is. Anyway, the bankster told her “You’ll be back. Credit unions can’t provide the services you need.” We’ll see about that. She withdrew over $200k from Wells Fargo.


READ FULL ARTICLE AT THE LINK...

I'm sorry to hear that someone got shot.

[greeneyedgrrl]

A man was shot and killed on Oscar Grant Plaza about an hour and a half ago. Occupy Oakland medics were first on the scene followed by regular first responders. The shooting was on a part of the Plaza that has no tents and is a place where folks hang out and play hacky sack, drum, etc.

Occupy Oakland was to be celebrating their 30 day birthday tonite. That's not happening of course. Folks are already packing up their tents and leaving.

go to KRON TV4 for more info.

do you have a link? i can't find it.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57322819/man-fatally-shot-near-occupy-oakland-camp/

OAKLAND, Calif. - A man has died after being shot just outside the Oakland encampment that anti-Wall Street protesters have occupied for the last month.

Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan says the victim was pronounced dead at a local hospital Thursday evening, less than two hours after two groups of men got into a fight near the Occupy Oakland camp on a plaza near City Hall.

Jordan says no suspects have been identified. He asked members of the public participating in the protest who may have taken photographs or video that captured the shooting to contact authorities.

The chief says investigators do not yet know if the men in the fight were associated with Occupy Oakland. But protest organizers say they weren't.

The shooting happened just before 5 p.m. on the edge of the plaza outside Oakland City Hill. The Occupy Oakland encampment sits in the middle of the plaza.

Paramedics on the scene were tending the bleeding man, whose condition wasn't immediately known as it was earlier reported. Police were interviewing witnesses and trying to contain a crowd of protesters who had tried to prevent television cameramen from taking video.

A woman from the encampment, Barucha Peller, told CBS station KPIX San Francisco: "The only direct Occupy Oakland involvement was in order to provide emergency first-aid services."

The shooting comes a day after a group of Oakland city and business leaders held a news conference demanding the removal of the encampment, saying that it has hurt downtown businesses and has continued to pose safety concerns.

Many protesters fear police will eventually move forward with another early morning raid to remove them. A tear gas-filled clash between demonstrators and police on Oct. 25 resulted in more than 100 arrests and left an Iraq War vet with a serious brain injury.

Mayor Jean Quan allowed the protesters to return to the encampment the day after that raid. The camp has since grown to about 180 tents.

But tensions and safety concerns have resurfaced in recent says, and on Wednesday, Quan asked members of the camp to show respect to the people of Oakland by peacefully leaving.

Earlier Thursday, a man was shot and killed at the Occupy Burlington protest in Vermont. Fellow protesters indicated that the gunshot appeared to be self-inflicted.

[AtLast]

The fatality near the OWS Oakland does not in any way appear to be OWS related. Unfortunately, street shootings in Oakland happen quite often and it looks like was yet another sad incident of inner-city street violence that simply happened near where OWS Oakland people are.

Something that happened in the midst of this is that a TV cameraman was attacked and hit in the face by someone that does appear to be part of OWS Oakland (although he is possibly one of many of the homeless that has moved into the camp and frankly, not really an actual OWS supporter). The camraman has a concussion from this. The guy was just doing his damnj job.

There have been several stories about theft concerning both Oakland and SF OWS camps and demobnstrations and the fact that they have become places for people that really have no interest in the social change that the core of this movement are interested in. There are many homeless people with untreated mental illness and drug/alcohol addictions moving into these camps and causing problems. It is time to face this and address it. My fear is that this will become a real problem for this movement in terms of keeping and gaining support from people that are ALL part of the 98/99%. In fact, that support social programs that are aimed at helping people with these kinds of problems.

The best idea to make it clear what this movement is really about for me is Atlanta's wanting to focus on "occupying" foreclosed homes- those taken from working and middle class people from big banks that wre involved in the biggest rip-off ever in the US.

[greeneyedgrrl]

thanks AtLast. i've seen this in my local occupy movement as well... it seems to be a widespread issue, which doesn't surprise me since the spaces are public. they've been talking (here) about establishing a permanent space here indoors... where people don't have to camp out, but can participate in organizing and demonstrating. i see issues with occupying houses... i know of local anarchist groups that have already been doing this in sf and berkely (in my experience they are mostly spoiled rich white kids) and i think that the occupy movement would need to distance themselves from these groups to have any credibility and be very discerning in choosing their targets
...and i think it's important to remember that the housing crisis is only part of the issue. it's so much more complicated than that... it's about big companies not being accountable in many situations (gambling with tax payer dollars, owning and controlling the food supply even as we subsidize it), regulations that don't benefit the people or the planet, but allow corporations to do as they please, the dollar being the biggest motivation in our economic system at the expense of all else. there need to be fundamental changes, and i don't think that blaming the big banks is going to get us there, i think that puts us in the victim stance and keeps us stuck. i'm not really sure what i the next steps should be, but i think that there needs to be a shift in thinking before we can get there. imho.

[SoNotHer]

The General Assembly is held on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday at 6pm in Oscar Grant Plaza.

Veterans March Against Police Brutality

Friday November 11

4:00 PM – 7:00 PM

14th & BROADWAY, OSCAR GRANT PLAZA, Amphitheater

As part of Veterans Day, veterans will be leading a march against police brutality on November 11th, 2011 in Oakland. We will start with a press conference and rally with an update and statement from Scott Olsen at Oscar Grant Plaza starting at 4pm.

We welcome all veterans of the 99% to lead the way and all supporters to join us as we march the streets. We march not only for injured veterans Scott Olsen, Kayvan Sabeghi and Doug Connor, but for all those who have been killed or injured as a result of police brutality.

Kayvan Sabeghi and Doug Connor were injured on November 3, 2011 while being detained near Oscar Grant Plaza. Kayvan was severely beaten and suffered a lacerated spleen and internal bleeding. He was abused and denied medical treatment. For hours, Kayvan waited in a holding cell in severe pain before receiving medical attention. Doug is an ex-army flight nurse who was attempting to help injured protesters in jail when he was then put in additional handcuffs that were so tight on his wrists that his hands turned blue and were numb. He was left in those handcuffs for several hours until he was released.

Numerous injuries have been incurred at the hands of the police in our communities. This is unacceptable. We strongly believe that the 99% should be free to exercise our constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech and peaceful assembly without fear of harm.

Oakland citizens have long been on the receiving end of police violence. The most recent victims have been military veterans who served their country in foreign wars, only to be seriously injured at home as they exercised the freedoms they served to protect.

While it has been the recent injurious of three of our military brothers that has catalyzed us, we stand against violence and brutality toward ANY of our people- veteran, civilian or otherwise.

As military members, we put our lives on the line in the name of protecting our country and its citizens (including the police). We take our oath to protect and defend the Constitution very seriously and while we may have departed the military, we never disavowed our commitment.

We will return to the streets this Veterans Day to remember our brothers and sisters who have served to protect the freedoms that the Oakland Police Department and the Alameda County Sheriffs have decided do not exist. We join the people of Oakland in affirmation of our Constitution, our right to peacefully assemble and to do so without fear of violence from those sworn to protect and serve.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/whoarethe1percent/

Who are the 1%? We Film. You Decide.

Inequality has ballooned over the last three decades as some of the wealthiest Americans have enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. Who are the worst offenders?

You tell us. We'll compile your suggestions and hold a vote to decide which ones Brave New Foundation will expose. We have just two criteria: they have to be in the wealthiest 1%, meaning a net worth of over $9 million, and they have to be using their wealth and power to keep down the other 99%. The rest is up to you. Have at it:


fKvka1Mhzzw

[AtLast]

thanks AtLast. i've seen this in my local occupy movement as well... it seems to be a widespread issue, which doesn't surprise me since the spaces are public. they've been talking (here) about establishing a permanent space here indoors... where people don't have to camp out, but can participate in organizing and demonstrating. i see issues with occupying houses... i know of local anarchist groups that have already been doing this in sf and berkely (in my experience they are mostly spoiled rich white kids) and i think that the occupy movement would need to distance themselves from these groups to have any credibility and be very discerning in choosing their targets
...and i think it's important to remember that the housing crisis is only part of the issue. it's so much more complicated than that... it's about big companies not being accountable in many situations (gambling with tax payer dollars, owning and controlling the food supply even as we subsidize it), regulations that don't benefit the people or the planet, but allow corporations to do as they please, the dollar being the biggest motivation in our economic system at the expense of all else. there need to be fundamental changes, and i don't think that blaming the big banks is going to get us there, i think that puts us in the victim stance and keeps us stuck. i'm not really sure what i the next steps should be, but i think that there needs to be a shift in thinking before we can get there. imho.

Oh, yes, complex! Something I remember quite clearly from "back in the day" and standing up by demonstrating was just how important it was to have media coverage be accurate. When the media just shows the folks that are not really invested in OWS and are just there to hang out and shit disturb, tghe public will turn against the movement and get behind actions to remove people and even not care about how police do this.

It just seems to me that there are county fairgrounds that could be utilized in ways that would benefit everyone and stop some of the local business owners complaints. Also, inviting these business owners into movement dialogue and compromising with them could build a stronger coalition that actually speaks to more of all of the 98/99%. We are business people, students, nurses, teachers, sales clerks, waiters, and even physicians and other professionals. The 98/99% is huge and covers so much!

Something I keep thinking about is that are a lot of people that agree with what the movement is trying to do, yet, just don't like what is going on in the encampments. I had a neighbor the other day say, "Hey, I'm a working man and when I camp, I pay campground fees and don't crap on sidewalks." He is a nice guy really (except I didn't like the working man- women work too) and did go through a year of being laid off- he gets what is happening to the working and middle class and doesn't like it, but also gets pissed off with some of what is going on- or what the media puts out there as representation of the Occupy camps.n he and his wife want to see their kids go to college and worry about the costs and if they will even get a job afterwards.

I do remember back in the 60's & 70's the very same things happening. And the spoiled rich kids out there just partying and flipping off authority do not help! Not then, not today. People will react negatively to seeing their municipality coffers spending $ on clean up and extra personnel when cities and counties are dealing with deficits.

Many bridges that need to be woven together in compromise- colaition building that represents us all.

[AtLast]

Ugh- on the local news (not the Faux News affiliate station), there was a report that the man that shot the other man and killed him was living in the Oakland camp. But, I haven't heard or read anything that really confirms this. I hope this is not true. Although, these kinds of things always become part of the "stories" around social movements.

On another note, the mayor of Richmond, CA attended an OWS rally yesterday. However, she was criticised too- because she went to that instead of the Veteran's Dat related re-opening of the Red Oak Victory ship in Point Richmond. But, there were city council members there. She can't be in two places at once. I thought this was unfair because the council split up members to be at different events and that seemed logical to me.

Ugh- the media management is key with this stiff. channel 2 here in the Bay Area will always do a negative spin on anything "liberal" because it is a Fox affiliate, but, the station I was watching does not belong to Fox. The report about the shooter in Oakland just seemed pointed and I think there needed to be some kind of confirmation about his being involved with OWS. Plus, there just are people camping out that are not really OWS people. Just as some of the Occupy Cal folks are not students there or anywhere.

Sometimes I think it would be good to do a spot on the fact that there are "professional" and life long protesters that will show up at any demonstration no matter the cause. It happens and there is always something made of this that discredits a movement/cause. maybe just getting out in front of this is a good idea. Make the separation from the people that are really part of a movement and working to resolve issues.

[ruffryder]

So we don't know if the shooting in Oakland was involved with the Occupy movement or if law enforcement did it?

What do you all think about occupying the media? Do you think they help or hinder the OWS movement? Has anyone seen ads on tv or heard any on the radios for or against OWS.. besides maybe politicians or the news addressing it ?

[Toughy]

The cops did not shoot this guy............ffs

One of the suspects (according to the local TV news I watched) has spent a couple of nights at Occupy Oakland encampment. The local news I watched has never said he was part of OO.......just that he slept there a few times.

[Heart]

Massive Women's Action at Occupy Wall Street, Nov 25th, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women:

http://www.af3irm.org/2011/11/wall-street-violence-against-women-dismantle-it

http://occupypatriarchy.org/2011/11/11/an-addended-and-updated-announcement-about-a-day-of-womens-action-november-25/

[SoNotHer]

The 10 Lowest Paying Jobs In America: BLS

The Huffington Post First Posted: 11/8/11 02:54 PM ET Updated: 11/8/11

What do fast food cooks, amusement park employees and farm workers have in common? They are among the lowest paying jobs in America today.

The mean hourly wage for all U.S. workers was $21.35 in 2010, but workers that get paid the least have seen their mean wages get dangerously close to minimum wage levels, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics. The data examined wages for workers in 22 major occupational groups and almost 800 detailed occupations, and found that fast food cooks made $8.91 per hour on average, only cents more than the highest state minimum wage of $8.67 in Washington state.

Those working in the restaurant and service industries account for many of the occupations with the lowest wages, including hosts and hostesses, as well as dishwashers. The low wages may not be surprising as eateries look to make due with fewer customers; a recent survey from the U.S. Census found that nearly half of Americans said they didn't dine out from fall 2009 to fall 2010.

But it's not just restaurant workers that are suffering. Americans' income growth has fallen off drastically in the last decade, a trend that only accelerated in the wake of the recession. Personal disposable income dropped by around 4 percent between the spring of 2008 and the second quarter of this year, Christian Science Monitor reports. Likewise, median household income fell $6,298 from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, median household income is at its lowest since 1999.

While nation's median income has fallen, the wealthiest Americans have seen huge boosts in the amount of money they're taking home, boosting income inequality and making income mobility increasingly difficult. From 2002 to 2007, two of every three dollars of income growth went to the top 1 percent of Americans, The Atlantic reports. Now the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

The wage decline has hit all workers including those with college degrees. College graduates have seen their starting wages drop by nearly a full dollar over the past 10 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/08/lowest-paying-jobs-in-america_n_1082017.html#s459363&title=4_Shampooers

[Cin]

2hzXz6mpqbE&feature=player_embedded

zBDmEA6DmUE&feature=player_embedded

[Cin]

Pax Occupata
by Randall Amster

Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that “the order is rapidly fading.” For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly contested. The headiness of those days brought many advances and opened up significant space for later movements to operate, yet in the final analysis somehow it all delivered us into even higher degrees of wealth stratification and greater consolidation of power. The order had flickered, but not quite faded, and in the end reasserted itself stronger than before.

Today we stand poised at a not-dissimilar crossroads. While perhaps no one has yet penned a Dylan-esque anthem of the movement -- although stalwarts such as David Rovics and Emma’s Revolution have dropped some poignant opening stanzas -- a mass chorus of voices is drawing lines in the sand literally everywhere: public spaces, workplaces, shipping ports, shopping malls, community centers, corporate banks, schoolrooms, boardrooms, and more. The Occupy Movement has transcended the narrow confines of Zuccotti Park, and in doing so has seemingly asserted itself wherever the forces of elitism and subjugation rear their heads. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand,” and whatever else transpires in the days ahead it can at least be said that the movement has reminded us all of this basic tenet.

Still, critics continue to ask, “where is your list of demands?” as if such can be reduced to movement letterhead in bullet-point fashion. To be sure, some concrete demands have been advanced, largely in the economic and political spheres and triggered by the exigencies of the Great Recession. But on some level, most everyone understands that this bill of particulars is just the surface of the movement, and that its essence really draws down to the core workings of the system itself. Adjusting debit card rates or mollifying student loan debts may bring some minor relief, but it has the feel of rearranging a couple of deck chairs, whereas many Occupiers are more urgently clamoring en masse for the dismantling of the Titanic itself.

At root, multitudes are demanding no less than a re-visioning of our political and economic relationships, and likewise of our collective human relationship with the larger environment. The time for single-issue tinkering is winding down, as the ecological and social fabric of our lives similarly degrades. After generations of living mainly as cogs in a mechanistic Moloch -- at times being reasonably well-compensated for the sacrifice of our mere freedoms and human dignity -- many people are experiencing new bonds of exchange, camaraderie, and community. There is a growing sense of engaged optimism in this moment of healthy rebellion.

And it is healthy, in contrast with the dead-end dispiritedness of corporate capitalism, in which everything and everyone are little more than raw materials for the robber barons’ assembly lines. This archaic and apocalyptic system of production and reproduction is sick at its very core, revealing a form of mass insanity masking as progress, and leaving illness and misery in its wake just beneath the shiny veneer of development. At the height of colonialism, blankets with smallpox were presented as “gifts” to unwitting natives, and in many ways this has become the central operating premise of the entire enterprise, a living metaphor for environmental despoliation and the ensuing political economy of toxification.

No more. The pox must be cast out, by necessity, if any part of the organism is to survive at this point. What began as a movement to occupy a symbolic place -- the plexus of financial machinations -- quickly became a call to occupy everything, and has further expanded to include the earth itself as a living participant in the calculus. Now, as the teeth of abject repression are bared in Oakland and elsewhere, a critical juncture is being reached in which the politics of practicality are slowly being supplanted by the poetics of possibility. People who have tasted freedom can no longer be kept conveniently in prisons, even if their cages are designed to appear like comfortable condominiums.

The technicians of empire thus stand stripped of their authoritarian mystique, increasingly so as they resort to heavy-handed tactics against peaceful people, including even those who have served in their infantries. A crisis of legitimacy is in the offing, as counter-institutions steadily replace those that run counter to even the pretense of democracy and equity. Hegemony yields to autonomy, corporatism to communitarianism, and warfare to welfare. There will be no placating the people by piecemeal legislation or token redistribution at this juncture; it is the reins of power themselves that are being demanded, and not merely the spoils.

But are the power elite quaking in their jack-boots? Are the walls of Babylon actually crumbling? This time, is the order really fading? Others have tried mightily before and come up short of changing the underlying paradigm, but there is a qualitative difference in evidence today: horizontal integration. Vertical structures, such as capitalism’s pervasive pyramid schemes, are inherently vulnerable to vicissitudes in the base -- whereas horizontal systems, such as those being forged in occupations everywhere, are inherently unbreakable since there is no a prior of power apart from every single piece of the whole. This is, in fact, how healthy organisms function, and further reflects how nature itself is organized at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

To a system of death and destruction, we interpose one of life and liberation. Consumption is remediated by creation; plutocracy by democracy; exploitation by participation. This is not merely a movement, but is in practice more akin to a global health care plan -- and this time, we will get universal (or at least earthly) coverage, with the only mandate being the basic imperative that is embedded in the undeniable interconnectedness of our existence. No legislation is needed, only the laws of nature; no medication, just dedication; no co-payments, merely co-creators. We are going to get well, all of us together and the habitat itself, and in the process we will work to wipe aside the sickly stain of the colonizer’s history.

Power may not abdicate, but it does change its garb at times. The Empire’s cloak of imperial majesty is threadbare, and a new wind is chilling its inner workings to the marrow. We neocolonial beneficiaries have infected others, and ourselves as well, with everything from acne and austerity to zoster and zero-sum thinking, and now it has come to pass that the global organism itself is essentially on life support. This is the reality that must eventually be confronted, both in terms of ecology and political economy: the externalities of disease and despair cannot be indefinitely outsourced. The only genuine form of wellbeing is one that injects itself everywhere, coursing through the veins of society at all levels and in every locale within the system.

Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana -- all made claims to establishing a “relative peace” within their ambit. But these forms of peace were imposed at the point of a bayonet or the nosecone of a warhead. They were all poisonous peaces, ultimately self-defeating enterprises of subjugation in which the masters could not escape their own systems of enslavement. Today, we are aiming for something more like Pax Populi, a form of peace made by and for people, not nations or corporations. In order to accomplish this, the ailing empire du jour must be supplanted by a constellation of healthy communities, interlinked by virtue of desire rather than dictate. This is the ambitious horizon of the burgeoning movement in all of its manifestations: Pax Occupata.

Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus.

[Cin]

Sometimes it's hard to understand how the Occupy Movement is actually affecting change. This article brings some clarity to this.

Ten Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything

Thursday 10 November 2011
by: Sarah van Gelder, David Korten and Steve Piersanti, YES! Magazine | News Analysis

Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class.

The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that “we the people” will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:

1. It names the source of the crisis.
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want.
We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.

3. It sets a new standard for public debate.
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually “trickle down.”

4. It presents a new narrative.
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.

5. It creates a big tent.
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.

6. It offers everyone a chance to create change.
No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.

7. It is a movement, not a list of demands.
The call for deep change—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—is the movement’s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.

8. It combines the local and the global.
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.

9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community.
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.

10. We have reclaimed our power.
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.

Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges—from climate change to soaring inequality—our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world.

[SoNotHer]

"Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus."

Wow. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
________________

QUOTE=Miss Tick;462796]Pax Occupata
by Randall Amster

Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that “the order is rapidly fading.” For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly contested. The headiness of those days brought many advances and opened up significant space for later movements to operate, yet in the final analysis somehow it all delivered us into even higher degrees of wealth stratification and greater consolidation of power. The order had flickered, but not quite faded, and in the end reasserted itself stronger than before.

Today we stand poised at a not-dissimilar crossroads. While perhaps no one has yet penned a Dylan-esque anthem of the movement -- although stalwarts such as David Rovics and Emma’s Revolution have dropped some poignant opening stanzas -- a mass chorus of voices is drawing lines in the sand literally everywhere: public spaces, workplaces, shipping ports, shopping malls, community centers, corporate banks, schoolrooms, boardrooms, and more. The Occupy Movement has transcended the narrow confines of Zuccotti Park, and in doing so has seemingly asserted itself wherever the forces of elitism and subjugation rear their heads. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand,” and whatever else transpires in the days ahead it can at least be said that the movement has reminded us all of this basic tenet.

Still, critics continue to ask, “where is your list of demands?” as if such can be reduced to movement letterhead in bullet-point fashion. To be sure, some concrete demands have been advanced, largely in the economic and political spheres and triggered by the exigencies of the Great Recession. But on some level, most everyone understands that this bill of particulars is just the surface of the movement, and that its essence really draws down to the core workings of the system itself. Adjusting debit card rates or mollifying student loan debts may bring some minor relief, but it has the feel of rearranging a couple of deck chairs, whereas many Occupiers are more urgently clamoring en masse for the dismantling of the Titanic itself.

At root, multitudes are demanding no less than a re-visioning of our political and economic relationships, and likewise of our collective human relationship with the larger environment. The time for single-issue tinkering is winding down, as the ecological and social fabric of our lives similarly degrades. After generations of living mainly as cogs in a mechanistic Moloch -- at times being reasonably well-compensated for the sacrifice of our mere freedoms and human dignity -- many people are experiencing new bonds of exchange, camaraderie, and community. There is a growing sense of engaged optimism in this moment of healthy rebellion.

And it is healthy, in contrast with the dead-end dispiritedness of corporate capitalism, in which everything and everyone are little more than raw materials for the robber barons’ assembly lines. This archaic and apocalyptic system of production and reproduction is sick at its very core, revealing a form of mass insanity masking as progress, and leaving illness and misery in its wake just beneath the shiny veneer of development. At the height of colonialism, blankets with smallpox were presented as “gifts” to unwitting natives, and in many ways this has become the central operating premise of the entire enterprise, a living metaphor for environmental despoliation and the ensuing political economy of toxification.

No more. The pox must be cast out, by necessity, if any part of the organism is to survive at this point. What began as a movement to occupy a symbolic place -- the plexus of financial machinations -- quickly became a call to occupy everything, and has further expanded to include the earth itself as a living participant in the calculus. Now, as the teeth of abject repression are bared in Oakland and elsewhere, a critical juncture is being reached in which the politics of practicality are slowly being supplanted by the poetics of possibility. People who have tasted freedom can no longer be kept conveniently in prisons, even if their cages are designed to appear like comfortable condominiums.

The technicians of empire thus stand stripped of their authoritarian mystique, increasingly so as they resort to heavy-handed tactics against peaceful people, including even those who have served in their infantries. A crisis of legitimacy is in the offing, as counter-institutions steadily replace those that run counter to even the pretense of democracy and equity. Hegemony yields to autonomy, corporatism to communitarianism, and warfare to welfare. There will be no placating the people by piecemeal legislation or token redistribution at this juncture; it is the reins of power themselves that are being demanded, and not merely the spoils.

But are the power elite quaking in their jack-boots? Are the walls of Babylon actually crumbling? This time, is the order really fading? Others have tried mightily before and come up short of changing the underlying paradigm, but there is a qualitative difference in evidence today: horizontal integration. Vertical structures, such as capitalism’s pervasive pyramid schemes, are inherently vulnerable to vicissitudes in the base -- whereas horizontal systems, such as those being forged in occupations everywhere, are inherently unbreakable since there is no a prior of power apart from every single piece of the whole. This is, in fact, how healthy organisms function, and further reflects how nature itself is organized at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

To a system of death and destruction, we interpose one of life and liberation. Consumption is remediated by creation; plutocracy by democracy; exploitation by participation. This is not merely a movement, but is in practice more akin to a global health care plan -- and this time, we will get universal (or at least earthly) coverage, with the only mandate being the basic imperative that is embedded in the undeniable interconnectedness of our existence. No legislation is needed, only the laws of nature; no medication, just dedication; no co-payments, merely co-creators. We are going to get well, all of us together and the habitat itself, and in the process we will work to wipe aside the sickly stain of the colonizer’s history.

Power may not abdicate, but it does change its garb at times. The Empire’s cloak of imperial majesty is threadbare, and a new wind is chilling its inner workings to the marrow. We neocolonial beneficiaries have infected others, and ourselves as well, with everything from acne and austerity to zoster and zero-sum thinking, and now it has come to pass that the global organism itself is essentially on life support. This is the reality that must eventually be confronted, both in terms of ecology and political economy: the externalities of disease and despair cannot be indefinitely outsourced. The only genuine form of wellbeing is one that injects itself everywhere, coursing through the veins of society at all levels and in every locale within the system.

Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana -- all made claims to establishing a “relative peace” within their ambit. But these forms of peace were imposed at the point of a bayonet or the nosecone of a warhead. They were all poisonous peaces, ultimately self-defeating enterprises of subjugation in which the masters could not escape their own systems of enslavement. Today, we are aiming for something more like Pax Populi, a form of peace made by and for people, not nations or corporations. In order to accomplish this, the ailing empire du jour must be supplanted by a constellation of healthy communities, interlinked by virtue of desire rather than dictate. This is the ambitious horizon of the burgeoning movement in all of its manifestations: Pax Occupata.

Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus.[/QUOTE]

[SoNotHer]

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/baldwin_res/?r=231930&id=30350-2059182-1uhuvUx

Tell House Democrats: Stand up to Wall Street banks

It sounds really simple: The largest banks that caused the housing crisis that led to our economic meltdown should be investigated fully, punished to the full extent of the law, and forced to compensate their victims for the harm they caused.

But the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to quickly cut a deal with the banks that lets them off the hook for massive amounts of mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Democratic Representative Tammy Baldwin is pushing back. She has introduced a resolution that supports taking a tough line with the banks.

The more Democratic members of Congress who cosponsor it, the stronger the message it will send to President Obama that he cannot give Wall Street a "get out of jail free" card for mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks. Not one of the Wall Street crooks who drove our economy off a cliff has gone to jail. And without aggressive investigation and prosecution of misconduct, none of them will.

Yet the Obama administration is pushing for a deal between state attorneys general and the large mortgage firms that essentially revolves around how lightly the banks would get off. There has been no real investigation, and no real push for meaningful penalties or accountability. In many ways, the settlement terms under consideration would amount to another backdoor bailout for the banks.

This is unacceptable. Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

Rep. Baldwin's resolution has three tenets:

(1) The mortgage servicers who engaged in fraudulent behavior should not be granted criminal or civil immunity for potential wrongdoing related to illegal mortgage and foreclosure practices.

(2) The Federal Government and State attorneys general should proceed with full investigations into claims of fraudulent behavior by mortgage servicers.

(3) Any financial settlement reached with mortgage servicers should appropriately compensate for, and accurately reflect, the extent of harm to all victims, including homeowners and State pension beneficiaries, caused by the mortgage servicers' fraudulent behavior.

What's on the table now--and what the Obama administration is pressuring the states to accept--falls far short of these standards. While the Baldwin resolution itself is non-binding, a large number of Democratic co-sponsors will do two things. First it will make it harder to spin a terrible settlement deal as a victory, which itself makes a deal less likely. Second, by establishing criteria for what an acceptable settlement might look like, it helps demonstrate the inadequacy of what's on the table.

We need to put the brakes on the headlong rush by state attorneys general and the Obama administration to settle with the banks. It's incompatible with the health of our democracy to allow wealthy and powerful people off the hook after they have caused massive and widespread suffering.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/baldwin_res/?r=231930&id=30350-2059182-1uhuvUx

[atomiczombie]

It's not on You Tube so I can't embed, but this is a video about the call to action on November 17th. It's so awesome I wanted to share it!

http://vimeo.com/31114509

[atomiczombie]

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/baldwin_res/?r=231930&id=30350-2059182-1uhuvUx

Tell House Democrats: Stand up to Wall Street banks

It sounds really simple: The largest banks that caused the housing crisis that led to our economic meltdown should be investigated fully, punished to the full extent of the law, and forced to compensate their victims for the harm they caused.

But the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to quickly cut a deal with the banks that lets them off the hook for massive amounts of mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Democratic Representative Tammy Baldwin is pushing back. She has introduced a resolution that supports taking a tough line with the banks.

The more Democratic members of Congress who cosponsor it, the stronger the message it will send to President Obama that he cannot give Wall Street a "get out of jail free" card for mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks. Not one of the Wall Street crooks who drove our economy off a cliff has gone to jail. And without aggressive investigation and prosecution of misconduct, none of them will.

Yet the Obama administration is pushing for a deal between state attorneys general and the large mortgage firms that essentially revolves around how lightly the banks would get off. There has been no real investigation, and no real push for meaningful penalties or accountability. In many ways, the settlement terms under consideration would amount to another backdoor bailout for the banks.

This is unacceptable. Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

Rep. Baldwin's resolution has three tenets:

(1) The mortgage servicers who engaged in fraudulent behavior should not be granted criminal or civil immunity for potential wrongdoing related to illegal mortgage and foreclosure practices.

(2) The Federal Government and State attorneys general should proceed with full investigations into claims of fraudulent behavior by mortgage servicers.

(3) Any financial settlement reached with mortgage servicers should appropriately compensate for, and accurately reflect, the extent of harm to all victims, including homeowners and State pension beneficiaries, caused by the mortgage servicers' fraudulent behavior.

What's on the table now--and what the Obama administration is pressuring the states to accept--falls far short of these standards. While the Baldwin resolution itself is non-binding, a large number of Democratic co-sponsors will do two things. First it will make it harder to spin a terrible settlement deal as a victory, which itself makes a deal less likely. Second, by establishing criteria for what an acceptable settlement might look like, it helps demonstrate the inadequacy of what's on the table.

We need to put the brakes on the headlong rush by state attorneys general and the Obama administration to settle with the banks. It's incompatible with the health of our democracy to allow wealthy and powerful people off the hook after they have caused massive and widespread suffering.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/baldwin_res/?r=231930&id=30350-2059182-1uhuvUx

1. Yay Tammy. She f'kin rocks.
2. I signed.

:)

[Cin]

1. Yay Tammy. She f'kin rocks.
2. I signed.

:)

Me too.....

[SoNotHer]

Beautiful and inspiring - thank you for posting this, AZ.

I am so proud of everyone moving this forward. It has given me such hope. :-)

It's not on You Tube so I can't embed, but this is a video about the call to action on November 17th. It's so awesome I wanted to share it!

http://vimeo.com/31114509

[SoNotHer]

Occupy Atlanta Encamps In Neighborhood To Save Police Officer’s Home From Foreclosure
By Zaid Jilani on Nov 8, 2011 at 11:30 am

Occupy Atlanta has repeatedly run into hurdles, as it has been evicted from Woodruff Park in Atlanta multiple times by the city’s unsympathetic mayor, Kasim Reed. Yet the group was invigorated yesterday as it moved to a new location to take action for economic justice.

Last week, Tawanna Rorey’s husband, a police officer based in Gwinnett County, e-mailed Occupy Atlanta to explain that his home was going to be foreclosed on and his family was in danger of being evicted on Monday. So within a few hours Occupy Atlanta developed an action plan to move to Snellville, Georgia on Monday to stop the foreclosure. At least two dozen protesters encamped on the family’s lawn, to the applause of neighbors and bystanders.

Nearly two dozen protesters assembled Monday afternoon at Tawanna Rorey’s four-bedroom home in a neighborhood just south of Snellville, clogging the narrow, winding street that runs in front of the house with cars, vans and TV trucks. Many neighbors stopped to gawk at the spectacle and even honked their car horns in support of the crowd. [...] [The protesters] set up two tents in the front yard, draped a “This Home is Occupied” sign over the porch railing and handed out bottled water and granola bars to other members.

A local CBS station filed a report about the new occupation. Watch it:

3BrhGNl4UX4&feature=player_embedded

The Sheriff’s Department did not come to evict the Roreys that day. A spokesman for the department told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the foreclosure process is still ongoing and that it has not scheduled an eviction. “It’s a good cause,” said Diona Murray, one of the Roreys’ neighbors, about the occupation. “If we don’t take a stand, who will?”

[Cin]

Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport: 5 Ways the 99 Percent Can Contribute to the Movement Right Now
by Les Leopold
How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage? Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent in the street.

Let’s take a look at where we are right now. There is battle royale underway between inhabitants of two entirely different universes over what’s wrong with our nation and what should be fixed.

On the one hand, the entire political establishment, blessed by Wall Street, wants the conversation to be all about debt and “entitlements." We are told 24/7 that we’re living over our heads, that our social safety net is too expensive, and that we need to cut, cut, cut trillions of dollars from public budgets so we don’t become the next Greece.

In that framework the only question is how much to cut and how much we should sacrifice. The so-called liberal position is that the rich should pay a bit more while the rest of us suffer cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Please note that taxes on Wall Street are not on the table.) The “grand bargain” is all about how much we will have to pay for the economic collapse caused by Wall Street. It's also a loser because the more we cut, the longer unemployment will last, and the more fiscal distress we’ll face as tax revenues stall.

On the other side is the framework that Occupy Wall Street successfully put into play. It argues that Wall Street should pay for the mess it created. It suggests that the issue is employment for the many, not debt repayments for the few. It also gets us to face up to myriad of ways that income inequality is hollowing out our society, destroying the middle-class and increasing poverty. It points the finger at those who crashed our economy and it demands reparations. And it does all this without making any specific demands. It doesn’t have to. It just needs to be the living embodiment of the many versus the few.

That’s the fight. So how can we enlist? Sure, some of us can go down to our local encampment and join the party. But if you’re old like me, or if you have a job and a family, you’re not likely to head out to your local town square and sleep on the concrete. So that raises the critical question: How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage?

Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent somewhere:

1. Get Your Non-Profits into Gear

If you work for a non-profit of any kind (like a labor union, an environmental group, a church organization, etc.) then insist that your organization devote at least 10 percent of its resources to protesting against Wall Street. There are probably 500,000 full-time staff working for unions, community organizations and environmental groups all across the country. Imagine if each week, each of those staffers put in two hours protesting at an Occupy Wall Street site. Combine that with a little organizing to bring out the rank-and-file, and we’re talking about a quantum leap in the size of the anti-Wall Street presence.

Of course, you might get stiff opposition from progressive non-profit leaders. After all, their organizations are set up to press important issues that might not seem to have any direct connection to the Wall Street mess. But it shouldn’t take much to show that the Wall Street crash is a game-changer. It should be clear by now that we can’t make progress on our individual issues unless we join together to reclaim our country from the Wall Street elites.

2. Organize Teach-ins about Wall Street’s Casino Economy

If you are affiliated with any academic institution or high school, this is the perfect time to organize teach-ins that target financial elites. We need large forums where information can be shared about our dismal distribution of income, how Wall Street took down the economy, how money is influencing politics, and how jobs can be created. And be sure to invite the community. Americans are just waking up to how much they’ve been ripped off. The educational task is just beginning and teach-ins can push it along in a hurry.

3. Terminate Your Bank Accounts in Public

If you’re going to withdraw your accounts from the major banks, then do it with gusto. At the very least we should try to use our new social media to pick a common time and location to close out our accounts together. We could even have a card-burning event in plain view. (Unlike burning your draft card in the old days, it’s perfectly legal to burn your credit card…outdoors, that is.)

4. Start a “99 Percent Club”

Americans lead the world in setting up new civic organizations. How about launching “99 Percent clubs” in your neighborhood and town? For starters, your club could brainstorm public actions to demonstrate anger at Wall Street. A silent vigil every Friday afternoon at one of the local banks would be a good start. (“Honk if you feel ripped off by Wall Street!")

Each group could develop imaginative actions that could grow in size, and that could gain the attention of the local media. Our social media could easily spread the best actions to other groups. And once you do get the ball rolling, build up your events by talking with your neighbors. I don’t think many doors will slam in your face. Instead, you’ll probably find a lot of angry people looking for ways to contribute.

5. Convince Yourself That You Can Make a Difference

Perhaps the most important act of defiance starts in our heads. We need to believe that real change is possible and that each of us can contribute. We’ve got to get over the idea that someone else – a political knight in shining armor -- is going to do it for us. We have to face up to the fact that very few politicians have the guts to challenge Wall Street. So it’s on us. This doesn’t mean that each of us has to be a superhero and lock ourselves to the gates of Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase. But each of us needs to do something concrete. At the very least we need to show up from time to time at our local Occupy Wall Street site.

Why would that matter? Because the currency of a populist movement is feet on the street. We need to publicly display our support in any way we can. As long as there is something called free will, each of us has the opportunity to go somewhere and publicly show that we are part of the irate 99 percent. We need to publicly display our anger at rule by a faction of the 1 percent.

Add to this list: Those of us trying to build up a new populist movement don’t have the answers. Our most useful role is to provide information, make the frameworks clear and push the discussion. The really good ideas seem like they magically appear. In fact, they are produced by the clash and exchange of ideas involving tens of thousands of people. We all need to dream them up, share them and bat them around until something clicks.

All we know for sure is that something is clicking right now. We have America’s attention….for now. And if we want this moment to last and develop, then each of us needs to add to this list. What can we do to show our support for the 99 percent? What can we do to protest against rule by financial elites? How do we build up this fledgling movement?

It’s your turn. Let ‘er rip!

[Gráinne]

I have a few questions about OWS's mission, and I mean no snark, but it's been bothering me:

1. Let's say I become wealthy purely on hard work and a good idea or three (I'm not, but hypothetically). Does this make me one of the "few"? And if OWS is for income redistribution, exactly how much would I have to distribute, and why? If I manage to get rich, no one should be allowed to tell me differently or what I can do with my earnings. (I'm not talking about charity-which many billionaires create and/or support).

2. Along that idea, would there be a maximum salary any one person could earn? And if so, who would enforce this, since OWS seems not to have any one leader?

3. Most of us wouldn't be here if some of the "few" in England hadn't decided to start a colony, the purpose of which was to make a profit. I think that's a fairly common human motivation-making a profit. How does this jibe with OWS's theories of equality?

4. I saw some of the most appalling poverty in communist China-supposedly a society set up with far more equality than our own. Yet there, and in Russia, there were always a "few" and a whole lot of "many". Is the kind of society OWS envisions even possible, if income equality and redistribution taken to its extreme doesn't work?

5. Why isn't OWS really protesting in Washington, at the government that passed the regulations that ultimately created this situation?

I am not starting a fight, but I thought of these questions-and more-this weekend. And before I support any movement, I want to know what it is I'm supporting behind the slogans.

[persiphone]

1. define wealth. also, no one gets rich here "on their own". this concept always annoys me. goods are moved on roads tax payers pay for and labor isn't an invisible force that gets no credit for aiding in making someone else wealthy. it is unethical to make piles of cash using a system we all pay for and then use that money to buy lawmakers to make the not rich people's lives more difficult in effort to make more money. there are many very very wealthy folks who agree with this, btw, and support paying more taxes because they know they can more than afford it.

2. a maximum salary for whom? let's assume you're talking about the not rich. there seems to be earning caps dictated by big business and the loss of manufacturing due to American businesses going overseas. is there a magic number across all professions? no, cuz that would be silly. enforcement of salaries (for those that actually get a salary) can be enforced with unions but they are falling by the wayside as well in the name of fiscal conservatism. and i'm uncertain how OWS not having a leader (they employ a more solvent democracy to make decisions) has anything to do with enforcement of maximum salaries? whatever that even means. i don't get the connection there, but ok.

3. profiting is not the issue. thieving is.

4. i think trying to attach the broken systems that exist in China to assumed theories about OWS is a real stretch and for that to be possible one would have to assume that the American people are really stupid and evil. and of course, they aren't. also, we have appalling poverty right here in this country and i don't think it's shameful that our citizens try to curb that just because there is poverty elsewhere. it should be noted that poverty stricken countries are also rebelling. think Arab Spring.

5. because Washington is owned by the financial sector of this country. i dunno how many times this needs repeating and/or supporting articles/statistics/law referrences.

[Cin]

I have a few questions about OWS's mission, and I mean no snark, but it's been bothering me:

1. Let's say I become wealthy purely on hard work and a good idea or three (I'm not, but hypothetically). Does this make me one of the "few"? And if OWS is for income redistribution, exactly how much would I have to distribute, and why? If I manage to get rich, no one should be allowed to tell me differently or what I can do with my earnings. (I'm not talking about charity-which many billionaires create and/or support).

I think I will use a quote from Elizabeth Warren to address this one:

Warren rebuts the GOP-touted notion that raising taxes on the wealthy amounts to "class warfare," contending that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody."

Warren rejects the concept that it is possible for Americans to become wealthy in isolation.

"You built a factory out there? Good for you," she says. "But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."


2. Along that idea, would there be a maximum salary any one person could earn? And if so, who would enforce this, since OWS seems not to have any one leader?

More important than anything legislative is consciousness. Politics can only change after consciousness changes. The single most important thing that the Occupy Movement can do is shine a light on how Washington is controlled by Wall Street.

3. Most of us wouldn't be here if some of the "few" in England hadn't decided to start a colony, the purpose of which was to make a profit. I think that's a fairly common human motivation-making a profit. How does this jibe with OWS's theories of equality?

Well there's making a profit and there's what we have going on right now. Warren Buffett's secretary pays more taxes than he does. Many corporations pay no taxes at all. They are getting tax breaks to move jobs out of the U.S. where they can pollute at will and higher cheaper labor.


4. I saw some of the most appalling poverty in communist China-supposedly a society set up with far more equality than our own. Yet there, and in Russia, there were always a "few" and a whole lot of "many". Is the kind of society OWS envisions even possible, if income equality and redistribution taken to its extreme doesn't work?

I don't think anyone wants to address our financial disaster by creating more poverty.


5. Why isn't OWS really protesting in Washington, at the government that passed the regulations that ultimately created this situation?

First place Wall Street or should I say Those who have the money or should I say the 1% control Washington. Washington is a puppet government run by and for the rich. What possible use would it be to protest to them. The gesture of protesting where the power is actually located is symbolic. It is to get people to understand who is pulling the strings and controlling our government. Second place regulation did not create this situation deregulation did. There is plenty of information on this thread, some I posted myself, that explains this.

[Cin]

I think coming into a thread that is 45 pages long and asking questions that have been addressed at length might be a clue to one of the problems we are all facing as a nation and as a planet. Regardless of all the information that is available, regardless of what is actually happening right in front of us, many of us are not able to see it.

[AtLast]

I keep thinking back to things like the SI Hayakawa and Ronald Reagan days in CA along with one of my favorite profs, Angela Davis (I hope she talked to OWS folks about what went wrong as well as what was positive "back in the day"). My biggest fear is that what is going on in some of the OWS camps will lead to the use of the National Guard to break up camps. This was a horrible time in the history of social activism in US history. I remember Kent State, too.

Things got twisted and violent even though that period brought about important change. I don't want this to happen again. I am having problems with continued support of OWS after things like rape, the drug overdose and death of a 20 year old as well as people just slashing cops in SF with exacto knives while they were simply standing by (doing their job) as OWS folks marched the other day. One was slashed on the face. Artisans that sell their wares at street fairs in SF were ripped-off and harassed by the negative groups in the SF camps over the weekend. These people make a living at these events and also pay to participate in these events. This is the time of the year in which they do a lot of business.

I want the core of this movement that is working on coalitions and ways to effect change for all of us to make a clear separation of themselves. The kinds of efforts to help the cop stay in a home is one way to do this. So is working with legislators on putting together real banking reforms is also great and these ideas are being presented by the 99%. Having some spokespeople out there making it clear that the core is non-violent and disagrees with the anarchist activities is a good idea. And I have had it with the punching-out of the media- they are doing their jobs, too (even those for Faux affiliates).

I hope the latest efforts of those that really are the OWS movement take over media reports so that what is really important about this movement is what the general public hears because this is what they can support that can effect positive change.

Social democratic values are based upon respect for all and working together to promote good for all- even if we disagree. I feel an obligation to support things like school or other municipal bonds that help stop lay-offs even if higher property taxes are crunching me during these financial times. And I will always vote for social programs because I think we all need to take responsibility for disadvantaged groups.

It has been interesting to be teaching community college students here this term. The bulk of my students are of color and young parents. Some are older and are trying to re-train due to being laid off. There are veterans too that have not been able to find employment. Obviously, fee hikes in education are on their minds and some are getting assistance from social programs- thankfully- they wouldn’t be able to attend classes if they couldn’t do this. Some have gone out to marches, but most need to take care of their children and also have some “under the table” type part-time jobs. Just about every one of them state that the camps should be broken up. Seven of my students that are parents of young kids and live in Richmond don’t want the only place they can take their kids too and play outside to be taken over by campers. They live in small apartments without safe play areas for their kids and use city park playgrounds several times per week. They have grandparents of little means that play checkers there, too. Our whether has been pretty good lately, so people can still be outside and enjoy themselves.

I know, I’m a broken record, but the fact is, I don’t think the general public gets how important public use areas are to low income people and senior citizens. I really don’t. Plus, I deal with this student group that is nothing like young, white, middle and upper middle-class university students. But I was an activist during the Vietnam War years. I get the importance of social discourse and protest, yet, we also made mistakes back then in taking over public space for prolonged periods and didn’t think about how this effects others. And I get really tired of other people thinking they have a right to take over public space for their agendas without going by the rules that are set up do that all of us so that we all can use these spaces. I really am a social democrat and don’t believe any of us have a right to interfere with public land use by all to the degree these camps are. And I really don’t want to see force being used against people. But, city officials have asked and asked for people to stop camping and offered alternatives for those that are homeless. Day protests without camping is effective, especially if it continues on and is peaceful and respectful. In fact, this would go much further in effecting change.


Right now, this AM- Oakland- so far (6:33 AM) no violence.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_19331753

[Gráinne]

I think coming into a thread that is 45 pages long and asking questions that have been addressed at length might be a clue to one of the problems we are all facing as a nation and as a planet. Regardless of all the information that is available, regardless of what is actually happening right in front of us, many of us are not able to see it.

I think it reflects a problem with the OWS movement, that there are a whole bunch of disparate groups with competing issues, and no one is able to make a concise list of say, the top 5 demands, that satisfies everyone and even more importantly, a firm plan besides occupying parks and "raising consciousness", for accomplishing these goals.

As you said, this thread is 45 pages long with lots of quotes, articles and vague ideas, but I haven't seen any list and how disrupting others' use of public property helps the cause.

[persiphone]

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7388130n&tag=contentBody%3BstoryMediaBox


Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
November 13, 2011 4:02 PM

Steve Kroft reports that members of Congress can legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill.



Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7388130n&tag=contentBody%3BstoryMediaBox#ixzz1dgzDM1gh

[persiphone]

I think it reflects a problem with the OWS movement, that there are a whole bunch of disparate groups with competing issues, and no one is able to make a concise list of say, the top 5 demands, that satisfies everyone and even more importantly, a firm plan besides occupying parks and "raising consciousness", for accomplishing these goals.

As you said, this thread is 45 pages long with lots of quotes, articles and vague ideas, but I haven't seen any list and how disrupting others' use of public property helps the cause.


huh?

actually, you're right. there are so many different ways that corruption has run rampant in this country that's it's SUPER hard to narrow it down to just ONE. :cigar2:

[AtLast]

I think it reflects a problem with the OWS movement, that there are a whole bunch of disparate groups with competing issues, and no one is able to make a concise list of say, the top 5 demands, that satisfies everyone and even more importantly, a firm plan besides occupying parks and "raising consciousness", for accomplishing these goals.

As you said, this thread is 45 pages long with lots of quotes, articles and vague ideas, but I haven't seen any list and how disrupting others' use of public property helps the cause.

If my memory serves me, the chief complaint at the start of the movement was that not one CEO, CFO or multi-millionaire at the top of Wall Street firms and the US banking system has been charged and prosecuted for wrong doing since the major collapses in 2008. This is something that has bothered me since that time along with those that "packaged" bogus securities which were sold internationally at the tune of mega-millions and even billions.

This and the fact that the regulations put in place to ward off future corruption like this really have no bite. And some of these very same practices are continuing right now!

Unless these "big wigs" are held criminally accountable- it will not stop. This would be at the top of my list of 5!

[ruffryder]

I went to Orlando pride yesterday. I've been to a few pride gatherings but not a parade. So, during the parade and looking at the booths I see support for our LGBT community and I see this from a few huge banks and politicians. . . I mean they are always trying to gain support from the community but it seemed so prevalent and I wondered if it had anything to do with the occupying going on and trying to keep people, "our community's" business and interest.

... and I just had to think about how some of these huge businesses have really supported the LGBT community and offer domestic and partner insurance and health care.

I know I will get some of you saying they also want to take our money and steal from us, etc., etc., I wasn't coming on to debate this. It was just something I took note of at a Pride event.

[SoNotHer]

By even calling it "Obamacare," health care opportunities for millions have been mislabeled, misunderstood and misrepresented. I'm not given health benefits at my job. Do you know someone else who is living without health care or who is paying out of pocket?


Supreme Court to Decide Fate of Obama's Health Care Law

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/249003/20111114/obamacare-supreme-court-constitutional.htm

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday announced that the justices will hear arguments on the constitutionality of President Barack Obama's health care reform law, the centerpiece of his agenda.

The justices decided to take on four legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. They will hear five and a half hours of oral arguments. The biggest issue for the nine justices will be the constitutionality of the law's mandate that most Americans carry health insurance.

Other legal issues on "Obamacare" that will get attention from the justices include whether the entire law can stand if the mandate is struck down, the law's Medicaid extension is constitutional and if an obscure tax law blocks any legal challenge to the law.

The Obama administration and the group of states will get two hours to argue the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Another hour will be allotted for arguments on whether legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act can be heard.

The obscure tax law, called the Anti-Injunction Act, essentially prohibits federal courts from hearing cases challenging a tax before it is paid. This applies to health care reform because people who refuse to get health insurance will get hit with a tax penalty. This could give the justices a way to avoid a decision on the constitutionality of the individual mandate.

Meanwhile, two "Obamacare" challenges -- a case from 27 state attorneys general and a small business group -- were consolidated. The justices granted the parties 90 minutes to argue whether all of the Affordable Care Act must fall if the individual mandate is severed.

The final issue for the justices will be an expansion of Medicaid. Under the Affordable Care Act, the eligibility requirements for Medicaid are expanded. States must cover these new Medicaid enrollees. Though the federal government will cover the cost of the expansion, states will start kicking in 5 percent of the costs in 2017 and 10 percent in 2020. The justices will decide if Congress exceeded its authority in passing that provision into law.

So far, lower appellate courts have split on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. A decision from the high court is expected this summer in the thick of the 2012 presidential election season.

[ruffryder]

Looks like Denver's occupy movement is getting shut down.

http://thedenverchannel.com

DENVER -- Denver police have ordered Occupy Denver protestors to remove belongings from Civic Center parks where demonstrators have been camping off-and-on for the past month.
Early Friday, police officers handed out written notices warning protestors, "It is illegal to place … any article, vehicle or thing whatsoever" on the public right of way, including “any street, alley, sidewalk, parkway or other public way or place.”
"PLEASE REMOVE ALL PERSONAL ITEMS FROM THIS AREA," the notice stated, adding that those who fail to remove belongings could face up to one year in jail and a $999 fine.

"If personal items are not removed immediately, you may be subject to an order of removal at which time all items will be subject to removal by the Denver Police Department," the police notice said.
The Denver Post reported that about 25 people removed their property and some left the park area.
"I was given one of these (notices). When I asked about it, a cop told me 'You can’t have all these couches, chairs and tables blocking the sidewalk,'" an activist posted on the Occupy Denver website.
Another person posted: "So, is this a way of getting people off the sidewalk as well as out of the park? (Denver Mayor Michael) Hancock is showing his true colors as an enemy of our First Amendment rights. Recall, anyone?"
Clashes between protestors and police over illegal overnight camping in Lincoln Park, where officers have repeatedly removed tents, tables and other gear, have triggered arrests and protests since early October.

This article here http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/29760448/detail.html details officers getting injured and more people getting arrested as the occupy protest become violent in Denver. It seems they are not supposed to have personal belongings blocking and taking up space on public sidewalks.

[Toughy]

It is not too much regulation that bankrupted Wall Street.........it is too LITTLE regulation on how paper is bundled and passed back and forth between financial institutions.

Most of the 1% want to pay their fair share in taxes. Warren Buffett made that clear and there is information out there about that. Warren Buffett (and all of those in the 1% plus the multi-national corporations) should not be paying a smaller percentage in taxes than I pay. Not fair, not right, not just, not ethical.

This is a MOVEMENT, not a single issue cause. It's messy. Movements rarely can be consicely put to paper. The goal is economic justice for all. If it makes someone happy, then the demand is economic justice.

The fact that homeless and mentally ill people are flocking to the Occupy encampments speaks volumes to economic injustice. The politicians and police are using violence occurring because of this as a reason to shut down the encampments. It's 'not safe' for you to be camped out on public property. Violence and death is occurring within and around the camps. Safety is paramount....safety safety safety.

[Toughy]

They did shut down Occupy Oakland this morning about 5:00am. From what I can tell it was peaceful and about 33 folks where arrested. They will not be allowed to return.

edited to add: at the press conference Mayor Quan suggested OO find private property like Occupy NY......interesting thought from her.

[SoNotHer]

So as winter comes on, and the OWS movements get shut down, the movement will hopefully find new ways to keep the momentum going. I was reading the news this morning about foreclosures for the third quarter. The percentage jump in foreclosures sometimes equal to the loss in value of the home in some cities. The debt, the loss, the suffering, the crisis continues -

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/gallery/10-cities-getting-slammed-by-foreclosures/

10. Columbus, Ohio

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +32%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,273
Unemployment: 7.6%
% home value down from peak: -12.42%

Columbus hit its median home value peak in the first quarter of 2006. Since that time, home values have declined a relatively modest 12.4%, including a 3.4% drop last year. By the second quarter of 2012, Fiserv projects that homes in the area will lose another 2.3% of their value. Median family income in Columbus is above the national average, and unemployment is just 8%, a full percentage point less than the national average. Despite the fact that things don’t look so bad for the Columbus housing market compared to other regions, the city foreclosure rate still increased by 32% last quarter. A total of 2,273 homes were foreclosed upon during that time.

9. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +35%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 1,743
Unemployment: 11.2%
% home value down from peak: -59.3%

There is arguably no single housing market with a worse long-term outlook than southwest Florida, and the Cape Coral-Fort Myers region is the worst of these. Housing prices in the have already dropped 59.3% from their peak, and Fiserv project them to decline another 12.2% by the second quarter of next year. According to Corelogic, 47% of the homes in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area are worth less than their mortgages because of declining values. Foreclosures have increased 35% in the last quarter, and with no sign of recovery in the immediate future that trend may worsen in the coming months.

7. Fresno, Calif.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +41%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,174
Unemployment: 14.9%
% home value down from peak: -54%

Fresno’s economy has continued to suffer since housing prices began to drop in 2006. It currently has an unemployment rate of 14.9%, which is one of the highest in the country. Home prices peaked in the first quarter of 2006 and have been decreasing since. The metropolitan area also has one of the highest underwater mortgage rates in the country, with a negative equity share of nearly 46%. In the last year alone home prices have dropped 11%.

5. Jacksonville, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +49%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,559
Unemployment: 9.5%
% home value down from peak: -39.3%

Jacksonville has experienced a quarterly increase in foreclosures of nearly 50%. Home prices have dropped 39.1% since their peak in the second quarter of 2006. The metropolitan area’s negative equity share also exceeds 46%, making it among the worst in the country for underwater mortgages. Home prices are expected to decrease another 10.7% by the second quarter of 2012.

3. Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +57%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 1,673
Unemployment: 11%
% home value down from peak: -51.4%

The Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice metropolitan area has seen the third largest increase in the country in foreclosures in the third quarter. However, only 1,673 homes out of the 311,475 on the market were foreclosed upon. The housing market has suffered a great deal since housing prices peaked in the first quarter of 2006. Since then, overall home prices have dropped 51.4%

[dykeumentary]

I have a few questions about OWS's mission, and I mean no snark, but it's been bothering me:

1. Let's say I become wealthy purely on hard work and a good idea or three (I'm not, but hypothetically). Does this make me one of the "few"? And if OWS is for income redistribution, exactly how much would I have to distribute, and why? If I manage to get rich, no one should be allowed to tell me differently or what I can do with my earnings. (I'm not talking about charity-which many billionaires create and/or support).

2. Along that idea, would there be a maximum salary any one person could earn? And if so, who would enforce this, since OWS seems not to have any one leader?

3. Most of us wouldn't be here if some of the "few" in England hadn't decided to start a colony, the purpose of which was to make a profit. I think that's a fairly common human motivation-making a profit. How does this jibe with OWS's theories of equality?

4. I saw some of the most appalling poverty in communist China-supposedly a society set up with far more equality than our own. Yet there, and in Russia, there were always a "few" and a whole lot of "many". Is the kind of society OWS envisions even possible, if income equality and redistribution taken to its extreme doesn't work?

5. Why isn't OWS really protesting in Washington, at the government that passed the regulations that ultimately created this situation?

I am not starting a fight, but I thought of these questions-and more-this weekend. And before I support any movement, I want to know what it is I'm supporting behind the slogans.

No, you are not starting a fight. We were born into it. Each person has to decide for themselves how much injustice they can ignore.
Let's put your arguments into in a 19th century historical context and see if they hold up.

1. If I become a wealthy plantation owner, does this mean I have to share my wealth with women? Aren't I doing enough by using their exploited labor to fund a tax write-off "charity" for the ones who aren't producing profit for me? This way at least they are of some use to me.

2. Will someone impose an upward limit on my greed? Who would do that? Women don't even have a clear leader!

3. Europeans colonized North America to exploit resources, including women. Why should we stop now? It's the American way.

4.Women in other places are treated worse. Therefore women in 19th century USA have it good enough and should be quiet. If women are given rights. everything will go wrong. I'm just fine with the status quo.

5. Why aren't the protesters far away from me, so I can continue oppressing women. I don't want women in my region getting any "big ideas!" Shouldn't women be home cooking and making me babies?


Don't let the arc of history hit you in the butt as it bends towards justice. Or something like that.

[Gráinne]

Okay, that's enough of this. Now I have "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of the thread". I'm done; and OWS has lost a supporter.

[Dominique]

Okay, that's enough of this. Now I have "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of the thread". I'm done; and OWS has lost a supporter.

Because of one person???? It's frustrating, on any subject, when people want you to do all of the home work, the research. OWS doesn't have ONE particular look or one specific agenda. Nor is it limited to one country.

[Gráinne]

Because of one person????

It was building, in other threads, even. I'm just done.

[Cin]

I think it reflects a problem with the OWS movement, that there are a whole bunch of disparate groups with competing issues, and no one is able to make a concise list of say, the top 5 demands, that satisfies everyone and even more importantly, a firm plan besides occupying parks and "raising consciousness", for accomplishing these goals.

As you said, this thread is 45 pages long with lots of quotes, articles and vague ideas, but I haven't seen any list and how disrupting others' use of public property helps the cause.

Occupy Wall Street chose to occupy near ground zero of the cause of the financial crisis that nearly destroyed the world's economy. It's symbolic. It grew from there.

Why would the movement be interested at this time in making a list of demands? Clearly there are still people who are confused about the basics. They still think regulation caused the housing bubble that burst and that minorities buying houses they couldn't afford destabilized the economy of the entire world. They still believe deregulating Wall Street even further is a good idea. I think raising consciousness is a very worthy goal. There is no real hurry to rush to a list of demands. Shining a light where there was only darkness will ultimately be very useful. Many people are starting to understand that giving corporation tax breaks when they move their business out of the U.S. is not going to create jobs for us. Giving tax breaks and bail outs to corporations has yet to develop into more jobs. And it's not going to. We need more jobs not more tax breaks and bail outs. If that doesn't work for you , then it doesn't work for you. But that is what I see as something that will actually help the economy.

The fact is political campaigns are financed by corporations naturally that means that politicians have the interests of the rich as their first and in some cases only priority. Until we can get Wall Street out of Washington we will not have fair elections or fair legislation and we will not have elected officials who make decisions with the best interest of all the people and of the United States, itself, foremost on their minds. If that doesn't work for you then it doesn't work for you.

But to say that these ideas are vague makes no sense. I really could go into all sorts of depth explaining further but I sense you really just don't agree with the issues as I see them. And that's fine. But I don't think the ideas are vague at all. You don't have to agree with them but they are indeed clear enough.

[atomiczombie]

It was building, in other threads, even. I'm just done.

I saw people honestly trying to answer your questions, guihong. I am unsure what specifically makes you think anyone is saying to you, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of the thread". No one here asked you to leave the thread. If you disagree with someone, why not challenge their take on things by sharing how you see things? The nature of these discussions is such that not everyone is going to agree about everything. But I think we can all learn from each other if we remember not to take things too personally.

Respectfully,

Drew

[Cin]

Okay, that's enough of this. Now I have "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of the thread". I'm done; and OWS has lost a supporter.

I don't get this. If you don't want to support the Occupy movement because you don't agree with the issues then don't support it. Find something else to support that works for you. Or if you are perfectly happy with the way things are then don't support anything. But you aren't going to punish OWS by not supporting it if your support is about how other people in a thread on a B-F forum treat you. How is that even relevant? If your support is based on that then it's not much support at all. Either you agree with the issues or you don't. Butch Femme Planet and the people who post here have nothing to do with that. Nor is it anyone else's responsibility to change your mind. There is nothing wrong with not supporting OWS. If it doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work for you. Hopefully in the end there will be more people who see the problems and want to work toward solutions than who don't.

[persiphone]

No, you are not starting a fight. We were born into it. Each person has to decide for themselves how much injustice they can ignore.
Let's put your arguments into in a 19th century historical context and see if they hold up.

1. If I become a wealthy plantation owner, does this mean I have to share my wealth with women? Aren't I doing enough by using their exploited labor to fund a tax write-off "charity" for the ones who aren't producing profit for me? This way at least they are of some use to me.

2. Will someone impose an upward limit on my greed? Who would do that? Women don't even have a clear leader!

3. Europeans colonized North America to exploit resources, including women. Why should we stop now? It's the American way.

4.Women in other places are treated worse. Therefore women in 19th century USA have it good enough and should be quiet. If women are given rights. everything will go wrong. I'm just fine with the status quo.

5. Why aren't the protesters far away from me, so I can continue oppressing women. I don't want women in my region getting any "big ideas!" Shouldn't women be home cooking and making me babies?


Don't let the arc of history hit you in the butt as it bends towards justice. Or something like that.


i really really really love this post.

[DapperButch]

I went to Orlando pride yesterday. I've been to a few pride gatherings but not a parade. So, during the parade and looking at the booths I see support for our LGBT community and I see this from a few huge banks and politicians. . . I mean they are always trying to gain support from the community but it seemed so prevalent and I wondered if it had anything to do with the occupying going on and trying to keep people, "our community's" business and interest.

... and I just had to think about how some of these huge businesses have really supported the LGBT community and offer domestic and partner insurance and health care.

I know I will get some of you saying they also want to take our money and steal from us, etc., etc., I wasn't coming on to debate this. It was just something I took note of at a Pride event.

There is a belief that gays/lesbians make more money than heterosexuals. http://joeclark.org/gaymoney/marketing/

Subsequently, big business wants to be nice to us.

[SugarFemme]

My community has 13.6% unemployment and 26% of the houses are vacant. It's really sad. Oh and they try and pretend that we don't have a homeless issue when there are literally tents and boxes lining up Main St.


So as winter comes on, and the OWS movements get shut down, the movement will hopefully find new ways to keep the momentum going. I was reading the news this morning about foreclosures for the third quarter. The percentage jump in foreclosures sometimes equal to the loss in value of the home in some cities. The debt, the loss, the suffering, the crisis continues -

http://realestate.aol.com/blog/gallery/10-cities-getting-slammed-by-foreclosures/

10. Columbus, Ohio

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +32%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,273
Unemployment: 7.6%
% home value down from peak: -12.42%

Columbus hit its median home value peak in the first quarter of 2006. Since that time, home values have declined a relatively modest 12.4%, including a 3.4% drop last year. By the second quarter of 2012, Fiserv projects that homes in the area will lose another 2.3% of their value. Median family income in Columbus is above the national average, and unemployment is just 8%, a full percentage point less than the national average. Despite the fact that things don’t look so bad for the Columbus housing market compared to other regions, the city foreclosure rate still increased by 32% last quarter. A total of 2,273 homes were foreclosed upon during that time.

9. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +35%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 1,743
Unemployment: 11.2%
% home value down from peak: -59.3%

There is arguably no single housing market with a worse long-term outlook than southwest Florida, and the Cape Coral-Fort Myers region is the worst of these. Housing prices in the have already dropped 59.3% from their peak, and Fiserv project them to decline another 12.2% by the second quarter of next year. According to Corelogic, 47% of the homes in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area are worth less than their mortgages because of declining values. Foreclosures have increased 35% in the last quarter, and with no sign of recovery in the immediate future that trend may worsen in the coming months.

7. Fresno, Calif.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +41%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,174
Unemployment: 14.9%
% home value down from peak: -54%

Fresno’s economy has continued to suffer since housing prices began to drop in 2006. It currently has an unemployment rate of 14.9%, which is one of the highest in the country. Home prices peaked in the first quarter of 2006 and have been decreasing since. The metropolitan area also has one of the highest underwater mortgage rates in the country, with a negative equity share of nearly 46%. In the last year alone home prices have dropped 11%.

5. Jacksonville, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +49%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 2,559
Unemployment: 9.5%
% home value down from peak: -39.3%

Jacksonville has experienced a quarterly increase in foreclosures of nearly 50%. Home prices have dropped 39.1% since their peak in the second quarter of 2006. The metropolitan area’s negative equity share also exceeds 46%, making it among the worst in the country for underwater mortgages. Home prices are expected to decrease another 10.7% by the second quarter of 2012.

3. Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice, Fla.

Quarterly increase in foreclosures: +57%
# of Foreclosures Q3 2011: 1,673
Unemployment: 11%
% home value down from peak: -51.4%

The Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice metropolitan area has seen the third largest increase in the country in foreclosures in the third quarter. However, only 1,673 homes out of the 311,475 on the market were foreclosed upon. The housing market has suffered a great deal since housing prices peaked in the first quarter of 2006. Since then, overall home prices have dropped 51.4%

[Glenn]

Another CEO gets a 100mil+ parachute after driving a company's stock price into the ground. This news release came AFTER market close on a Friday (so no one would notice) http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/31/eugene-isenberg-of-nabors-industries_n_1068186.html

[atomiczombie]

This from Occupy News on Facebook:


The Seattle City Council on Monday unanimously approved a resolution declaring its support for the Occupy movement’s campaign to limit economic insecurity and recognizing the movement's right to peaceful and lawful speech and assembly.
How are they proving this support?
Another unanimous City Council decision was made to move all City money out of Wells Fargo and into a Credit Union (about 3 billion dollars).

[SugarFemme]

I forgot to add that 1 in 5 children in my community go to bed hungry. It makes me so angry. Trillions of dollars for wars and banks and very little to feed hungry kids. "We" collectively as a society should be ashamed of ourselves they we have not held big business and the government accountable sooner. Just my opinion.

[greeneyedgrrl]

ish is going down at ows.
http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

[atomiczombie]

I am watching. The are cops are raiding Zucotti Park. Asshat police. Grr....

[Ebon]

Watching and listening to police scanner.

[SoNotHer]

Wow. Just wow. I'm amazed what people are posting and just nonplussed by the police response.

ish is going down at ows.
http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

[greeneyedgrrl]

i think that it would be so easy for me to get angry.....and to feel justified in that anger...and then i remember that we're all on the same side.
we're burning two ends of the same candle.
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRAplmTvOrvPUQrINng-_TsjIp5bqdcL6WT5Gni1ZyPHvAu45a5Qg
...and we have to stop.

[Corkey]

Like a thief in the middle of the night. Sad for the OWS.

[atomiczombie]

What really pisses me off is that they are taking all the protestor's things and throwing them away. All these things that have been donated to OWS and things bought with donated money, all destroyed without notice. And this is private property, not public property. So this is illegal. Shame shame.

[Ebon]

Flash Bombs!! Those evil motherfuckers!!!

[SoNotHer]

Well, history has taught has that might is right and force is necessary for order.

Right?

[greeneyedgrrl]

yes it sucks that their things are being destroyed, but i'm more concerned about what is happening to the people, their bodies, minds and spirits. i'm praying for the safety of all.

i hear the protestors get increasingly violent in their speech... and i know it's difficult not to, i'm not confident i'd do better and i know that this is not going to help their situation or relations with the police.

[SoNotHer]

So the goal is to take personal belongings and with no care whatsoever for what they grab, heap onto to add to the 25000 tons of trash NYC already produces a day.

So now that they've shown protestors how democracy doesn't work, the movement goes underground and becomes more unpredictable, more subversive and more volatile.

[Ebon]

Per the police scanner the cops are following the people to city hall.

[atomiczombie]

This makes me even more frustrated with myself that my agoraphobia keeps me from being in the streets protesting. I am so angry. This is so illegal and the NYPD is a TOOL. They told the protestors they had 10 minutes to get their stuff out of the park. When they tried to get their belongings, the cops pushed them out. The cops told them they could come back later and get their stuff, but now all their things are in a dumpster, and being loaded into trucks to go to the dump. Bullshit.

[SoNotHer]

Yeah, they told them they could get their stuff back and then heaved it into a pile like books to a pyre as garbage trucks backed up. Some of the police were laughing at them.

Yeah, this is what democracy looks like.

[Ebon]

They are only adding fuel to the fire.

[atomiczombie]

This violates so many rights and breaks so many laws it's crazy.

[greeneyedgrrl]

it really upsets me that the focus seems to be on the stuff. PEOPLE are getting hurt. eff the stuff.

[atomiczombie]

it really upsets me that the focus seems to be on the stuff. PEOPLE are getting hurt. eff the stuff.

Where are you seeing that people are getting hurt? I mean, I believe you but I haven't seen much on livestream.

[SoNotHer]

That they have done this at 2 a.m. in the morning, with no warrant, no care for belongings or safety, lies and laughter, shows that this movement is so on the right track.

I applaud the brave protesters, and I applaud anyone who is saying we can do better than greed, we can do better than inequality, we can do better than human, community and planetary destruction.

We can do better.

[SoNotHer]

Drew, there's a ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen that reads "many arrests/many injured." It also tells us that the press are being kept away. That's such a good sign, eh?

[Ebon]

I'm listening to the police scanner. There are like 400 people marching some where on Broadway. This cop just said over the radio "they'll cower like lambs when they see you."

[atomiczombie]

Drew, there's a ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen that reads "many arrests/many injured." It also tells us that the press are being kept away. That's such a good sign, eh?

Yeah I was just wondering if there are more specifics about injuries. And yes, injuries to people are worse than stuff being trashed. It's all violations of people's rights to gather, free speech and their right to due process before having their property seized.

[Ebon]

Yeah I was just wondering if there are more specifics about injuries. And yes, injuries to people are worse than stuff being trashed. It's all violations of people's rights to gather, free speech and their right to due process before having their property seized.

The cop is trying to get EMT for someone that was maced on Liberty and Broadway.

[SoNotHer]

Someone just said that they are bringing out hoses. I just contacted CNN and Bloomberg's office.

[atomiczombie]

I hope no one is seriously injured or killed. It's fucking lame enough for the cops to mace and pepper spray peaceful unarmed protestors.

[greeneyedgrrl]

Where are you seeing that people are getting hurt? I mean, I believe you but I haven't seen much on livestream.

they've brought it up several times on livestream: many arrests and injuries. doesn't sound like anything critical like in oakland, but still.. people are more important to me than stuff . stuff is part of the problem... stuff is what feeds the system. in my experience, when people yell things like, "eff the police" violence follows; it's part of the design of the system. the system that we have is violent, it expects violence and reacts with violence. our language is violent: 'peaceful' protestors are yelling things like "eff the police." that IS violence. it does not excuse the use of physical violence, but it is violent just the same.

if we're going to change things, i believe WE have to change things. coming with violence even in language is not different than what we've done in the past. making someone else the enemy is not different. we have to be different if this movement is going to survive. screaming at the police is escalates the situation. we have to be calm, we have to be peaceful, including in our language. THAT would be different.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15732661

Occupy Wall Street: New York police clearing protest
Protesters gather close to Zuccotti Park in New York (15 Nov 2011 - image Joshua Paul) Police said most protesters left the park once the order was given
Continue reading the main story
Related Stories

An American Dream deferred
Camp cleared at Occupy Oakland
Fatal shootings near Occupy camps

Police in New York have launched a pre-dawn operation to clear the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park.

The city mayor's office said on Twitter that the protesters should "temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps" but could return once the park was clear.

Occupy Wall Street was set up in September to protests against economic inequality and had been followed by dozens of protests around the world.

A camp in Oakland, California was cleared overnight on Monday.

The New York Times said that as the operation in Zuccotti Park began at about 01:00 (06:00 GMT), police gave an announcement, saying: "The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard."

Leaflets were also handed out saying protesters would be allowed to return once the clearance had taken place, but not to bring camping equipment.

Occupants were told to "immediately remove all private property" and that they would be arrested if they interfered with the operation, said the notice. Any belongings left behind would be put into storage.

The protesters' live web stream from the park showed crowds chanting "all day, all week, Occupy Wall Street" and "the whole world is watching" as police moved into the camp, close to New York's financial district.

"The police are forming a human shield, and are pushing everyone away," protester Rabbi Chaim Gruber told AP.

They released a statement saying: "Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park), home of Occupy Wall Street for the past two months and birthplace of the 99% movement that has spread across the country and around the world, is presently being evicted by a large police force."

Police spokesman Paul Browne said most people had begun leaving the park once the order to vacate was given but that a small group of people were refusing the leave.

He said the park was not heavily populated at the time, the Associated Press reports. At least one person was arrested for disorderly conduct.

The city authorities and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have come under pressure from local businesses to shut down the camp, which has numbered about 200 occupants as it nears its two-month anniversary.
Camp deaths

The Occupy movement, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings and economic protest camps in Spain, is calling for a more equal distribution of wealth.
Debris is cleared from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, CA (14 Nov 2011) Officials said the Oakland camp was cleared amid fears of violence

Organisers in the US say most of the country's money is held by the richest 1% of the population and that they represent the other 99%.

They have received widespread support, including from many authority figures, but there have been concerns about safety and hygiene, while critics of the movement say it has failed to suggest a viable alternative economic system.

The New York action comes after police arrested 33 people in Oakland, California as they raided the protest camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza early on Monday morning.

The camp had been marred by recent outbreaks of violence in and around it, including a fatal shooting last week. However, camp residents had said the killing was unconnected to their protest.

Police had declared the plaza a "crime scene" shortly they entered.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said she had to act after "repeated violence and this week a murder".

"We had to bring the camp to an end before someone else got hurt."

Oakland police had said they sympathised with the protesters' cause, but urged them to "leave peacefully, with your heads held high, so we can get police officers back to work fighting crime in Oakland neighbourhoods".

A similar raid ended with police in riot gear arresting 50 people in Portland, Oregon on Sunday evening.

Police in a Vermont city have also evicted protesters after a man fatally shot himself last week inside a tent.

A number of other US cities have seen protests camps spring up in the past two months, and the Occupy movement has also spread to Europe, South America and Asia.

[atomiczombie]

they've brought it up several times on livestream: many arrests and injuries. doesn't sound like anything critical like in oakland, but still.. people are more important to me than stuff . stuff is part of the problem... stuff is what feeds the system. in my experience, when people yell things like, "eff the police" violence follows; it's part of the design of the system. the system that we have is violent, it expects violence and reacts with violence. our language is violent: 'peaceful' protestors are yelling things like "eff the police." that IS violence. it does not excuse the use of physical violence, but it is violent just the same.

if we're going to change things, i believe WE have to change things. coming with violence even in language is not different than what we've done in the past. making someone else the enemy is not different. we have to be different if this movement is going to survive. screaming at the police is escalates the situation. we have to be calm, we have to be peaceful, including in our language. THAT would be different.

The thing about the stuff is:

1) It is almost all donations to OWS by supporters, and much of it is electronics like cameras and laptops which keep people like us updated and connected to the movement, medical equipment and food which is not only for the protestors, but for street people as well. OWS feeds and gives shelter and health care to the homeless! And the rest is generators, tents and camping equipment. None of this stuff is non-essential. A movement like this needs these things to perform it's functions.

2) It is being seized and destroyed without due legal process. All of this is taking place on private property (the park is privately owned) so there is no legal basis for this raid.

[greeneyedgrrl]

The thing about the stuff is:

1) It is almost all donations to OWS by supporters, and much of it is electronics like cameras and laptops which keep people like us updated and connected to the movement, medical equipment and food which is not only for the protestors, but for street people as well. OWS feeds and gives shelter and health care to the homeless! And the rest is generators, tents and camping equipment. None of this stuff is non-essential. A movement like this needs these things to perform it's functions.

2) It is being seized and destroyed without due legal process. All of this is taking place on private property (the park is privately owned) so there is no legal basis for this raid.

i get all of that and how much it sucks.

[greeneyedgrrl]

i believe that nonviolence is the way to go...including non-violent language.

[atomiczombie]

i believe that nonviolence is the way to go...including non-violent language.

I agree completely.

[dykeumentary]

The NYPD used smart tactics if their goal was to reclaim that physical space.
If the goal of OWS is system-wide change, and more participation of everyday people, maybe this eviction will work towards OWS's goals.
I hope it does.

[SoNotHer]

I agree, Dykeumentary. By doing this in the early hours on a Monday with a brief formality of notice, they have created more empathy and outrage. This was not played well, and people will not forget it.

And this forces the movement in a new direction and I believe a better one.

[SoNotHer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/15/zuccotti-park-cleared-occupy-wall-street_n_1094313.html#liveblog?icid=maing-grid7|main5|dl1|sec1_lnk1|112574

In an unexpected move, the New York City Police Department descended on Zuccotti Park around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, proceeding to evict protesters, clear the park and arrest those that stood in their way.

Police told demonstrators that the 2-month-old camp must be temporarily emptied for cleaning, citing "health and fire safety" hazards, and that protesters could either leave on their own volition or stay and be arrested and stripped of their belongings. By 4 a.m., the park was cleared and hundreds of protesters, uncertain of their next move and blocked by police barricades, wandered the financial district.


According to The Associated Press, 70 arrests had already been made.

While police say protesters will be allowed back in the park in the morning, their tents will not, according to an eviction notice handed to occupiers.

"You are required to immediately remove all property, including tents, sleeping bags and tarps from Zuccotti Park. That means you must remove the property now," the notice read. "You will be allowed to return to the park in several hours, when this work is complete. If you decide to return, you will not be permitted to bring your tents, sleeping bags, tarps and similar materials with you."

Although the park was cleared, some protesters did not appear ready to give in to the eviction notice's demands.

"This is a standoff," said James Rose, 39, an artist who had been occupying the park on and off for a month. Rose is a member of the Arts and Culture working group, and had been out for the evening at an Occupy Wall Street arts show offsite. He returned home to find himself locked out by the barricades.

He gestured at a line of roughly 30 cops, setting up a fresh row of metal fences along the side of Cortland Street, one block north of the park. "We're being herded like sheep now," Rose said. "But this is so not over."

Garrett Perkins, 29, standing with two stuffed camping backpacks, said he had been sleeping in Zuccotti when hundreds of cops surrounded the tents. Most protesters did not move, he said, even after the police first announced that the park must be cleared. Then the police began throwing out tents, cuffing occupiers and using pepper spray.

Perkins travelled to Occupy Wall Street from Alaska with a large collection of cold weather gear. When the choice came down to losing his gear or walking, he opted to hold onto his belongings.

"I thought it would be a blow to myself and the movement if I lost all this cold weather gear," Perkins said. "This is a long uphill battle and we're going to need it."

Protesters did not appear ready to give up the fight -- or the occupation of Zuccotti -- despite the setback.

"The movement started at Zuccotti, but it's bigger than Zuccotti," said Jerry Letto, a 24-year-old deliveryman from Brooklyn. Letto said demonstrators would "definitely" return to Zuccotti, although the time frame remained unclear at that time.

"I don't know about that," Billie Greenfield, a 24-year-old standing nearby said. Greenfield wasn't without hope, however. "This will only make us stronger," she said.

Through the night, protesters routinely sang "We Shall Overcome" and chanted "We are the 99 percent." Others beat drums and yelled: "New York, Cairo, Wisconsin, push us down we'll rise again!" They did so under the watchful eye of hundreds of police officers.

Shen Tong, a protester and former leader of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, tried to calm the growing tension between protesters and police. Addressing a crowd of about a hundred people two blocks from the park, he shouted, and his words were echoed by all those standing near.

"Brothers and sisters of the NYPD who used to think you're not part of this. Tonight, you're a part of this," he said. "You used to think you could just keep your head down and get along, or maybe get ahead, but tonight, we tell you, you are involved!"

Shen said the key to winning the night was to stay mobile. In light of the night's events, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is reportedly planning to address the situation at an 8 a.m. press conference. Demonstrators had previously planned to stage "a block party the 1 percent will never forget" on Wall Street Thursday in commemoration of the Occupy Wall Street's two-month anniversary.

[persiphone]

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

[dykeumentary]

Well, pesky elections might soon be a thing of the past. Imagine the streamlined production of government money into profit -- without having to do any campaign spending! It's happening in Greece and Italy.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-11-15/EU-crisis-greece-italy/51200064/1?csp=34news

[SoNotHer]

Good Catch, D. I was just reading about Bersculoni and Papandreou. An economic crisis is often an harbinger of ominous changes and freedom, including the right to elect a government of your choosing, is often the first thing to go.

Well, pesky elections might soon be a thing of the past. Imagine the streamlined production of government money into profit -- without having to do any campaign spending! It's happening in Greece and Italy.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-11-15/EU-crisis-greece-italy/51200064/1?csp=34news

[persiphone]

Good Catch, D. I was just reading about Bersculoni and Papandreou. An economic crisis is often an harbinger of ominous changes and freedom, including the right to elect a government of your choosing, is often the first thing to go.



gawd i hope this isn't the direction we're heading. i fear living in a police type state however that would manifest itself. surely the people won't stand for this ridiculous turn of events.

[SoNotHer]

I've just been getting up to speed on this the past couple days. There's a terrific article in the current Newsweek about the intimate relationship between DC and Wall Street and who's getting rich and how. Not good. Thank you for staying on this issue.

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

[AtLast]

The hopefully well attended Occupy related demonstrations this coming Saturday is important. I hope folks from the Planet attend as we have members from all over.

Frankly, middle-class students have lost a lot in terms of access to higher education. They cannot utilize many funding options open to students that fall under income levels. But the fact is that our middle-class has been hurt the most by the housing bubble burst, the foreclosures and shrinking wages. Without a strong middle-class, the bulk of property and other taxes collected has dwindled which is the back bone of social program funding.

Education costs increasing have made it almost impossible to attend even with part-time employment (and that has dwindled as well).

[persiphone]

this is shocking i'm sure. NOT.



Fannie, Freddie executives score $100M payday post bailout
By Chris Isidore | CNNMoney.com – 8 hours ago


Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.


The top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010, while the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. And each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.


That's a total of $95.4 million, which will essentially be coming from taxpayers, who have been keeping the mortgage finance giants alive with regular quarterly cash infusions since the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA) took control of the companies in September 2008.


Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Halderman, each received about $5.5 million in pay for last year, and they could receive more when their final deferred compensation for 2010 is set. All the executives receive a significant portion of their pay in the year or years after they earn it.


The CEOs' pay targets for 2011 are about $6 million a piece, though Halderman might not get much of that money since he's announced plans to leave Freddie sometime in 2012. He must still be at the company in order to receive the deferred compensation. His base pay for 2011 is $900,000, with most of the rest of his compensation coming in deferred payments.


The salary filings were all made by the companies in early 2011, but received relatively little attention until a recent report by Politico, the political news Web site, which highlighted about $12.8 million in bonuses the executives received for last year.


That published report sparked a political firestorm on Capitol Hill that could lead to legislation to put strict limits on pay at the two firms. But it only told part of the story. The full extent of salary, deferred pay and bonuses are only found in the filings.


Rep. Spencer Bachus, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled a vote in his committee Tuesday on his own legislation that would suspend the compensation packages of top executives at the firms.


"The fact that the top executives of these failed companies are receiving multi-million dollar pay packages, plus millions more in bonuses, is an added insult to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill," Bachus said in a statement announcing plans to hold the vote.


The Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the matter on Tuesday. Additionally, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is set to call Edward DeMarco, the acting director of FHFA, and the CEOs of the two firms, to a hearing on the pay packages on Wednesday.


Sixty senators from both parties have already sent a letter to DeMarco asking that he change the compensation policy of the two companies. FHFA has final say on pay at the two companies.


"The idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which rely on taxpayer funding to stay afloat, must offer excessive bonuses to its executives to attract effective management strains credulity," the letter said.


DeMarco responded to the senators saying that the executives who were running the companies in 2008 when the problems occurred have left without any golden parachutes, and that effective management is needed to make sure that taxpayer losses at the firms do not rise and the companies continue to function. He said current executive pay at the firm is about 40% less than before the bailouts.


"I need to ensure that the companies have people with the skills needed to manage the credit and interest rate risks of $5 trillion worth of mortgage assets and $1 trillion of annual new business that the American taxpayer is supporting," he wrote.


Spokespeople for Fannie and Freddie declined to comment ahead of the hearings.


The latest cost estimate from FHFA is that the two bailouts will end up with a net cost to taxpayers of about $124 billion through 2014, though that figure could rise as high as $193 billion. Even the lower cost estimate will make it the most expensive bailout of the financial crisis -- far more costly than bailing out the nation's banks or automakers.


The CEOs and the other top executives at Fannie and Freddie get all their pay in cash, and none of it in company stock , which is generally deemed worthless.


The company filings that disclosed the pay back in February also defended the pay based on the work they had done.


Fannie's filing said that under Williams' leadership, the company "made solid progress in managing credit losses on its pre-2009 book of business, acquired a 2010 book of business with a strong credit profile that is expected to be profitable, and achieved substantial progress in making the company more operationally disciplined and efficient."

[persiphone]

The hopefully well attended Occupy related demonstrations this coming Saturday is important. I hope folks from the Planet attend as we have members from all over.

Frankly, middle-class students have lost a lot in terms of access to higher education. They cannot utilize many funding options open to students that fall under income levels. But the fact is that our middle-class has been hurt the most by the housing bubble burst, the foreclosures and shrinking wages. Without a strong middle-class, the bulk of property and other taxes collected has dwindled which is the back bone of social program funding.

Education costs increasing have made it almost impossible to attend even with part-time employment (and that has dwindled as well).



i think Obama recently passed a cap on student loan payments of 10% of your income maximum. i think the whole thing is now based on your current income, actually. i could be wrong. it's been a minute since i read about it and it was a buried story and i haven't seen anything about it since.

[SoNotHer]

This in the context of asking for a $7.8 billion more from taxpayers? What? It's time to start telling the kids in the sand box who never have enough that they do in fact have more than enough.

this is shocking i'm sure. NOT.

Fannie, Freddie executives score $100M payday post bailout
By Chris Isidore | CNNMoney.com – 8 hours ago

Mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac received the biggest federal bailout of the financial crisis. And nearly $100 million of those tax dollars went to lucrative pay packages for top executives, filings show.


The top five executives at Fannie Mae received $33.3 million in 2009 and 2010, while the top five at Freddie Mac received $28.1 million. And each company has set pay targets of as much as $17 million for its top managers for 2011.


That's a total of $95.4 million, which will essentially be coming from taxpayers, who have been keeping the mortgage finance giants alive with regular quarterly cash infusions since the Federal Home Finance Agency (FHFA) took control of the companies in September 2008.


Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Halderman, each received about $5.5 million in pay for last year, and they could receive more when their final deferred compensation for 2010 is set. All the executives receive a significant portion of their pay in the year or years after they earn it.


The CEOs' pay targets for 2011 are about $6 million a piece, though Halderman might not get much of that money since he's announced plans to leave Freddie sometime in 2012. He must still be at the company in order to receive the deferred compensation. His base pay for 2011 is $900,000, with most of the rest of his compensation coming in deferred payments.


The salary filings were all made by the companies in early 2011, but received relatively little attention until a recent report by Politico, the political news Web site, which highlighted about $12.8 million in bonuses the executives received for last year.


That published report sparked a political firestorm on Capitol Hill that could lead to legislation to put strict limits on pay at the two firms. But it only told part of the story. The full extent of salary, deferred pay and bonuses are only found in the filings.


Rep. Spencer Bachus, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled a vote in his committee Tuesday on his own legislation that would suspend the compensation packages of top executives at the firms.


"The fact that the top executives of these failed companies are receiving multi-million dollar pay packages, plus millions more in bonuses, is an added insult to the taxpayers who are forced to foot the bill," Bachus said in a statement announcing plans to hold the vote.


The Democrat-controlled Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the matter on Tuesday. Additionally, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is set to call Edward DeMarco, the acting director of FHFA, and the CEOs of the two firms, to a hearing on the pay packages on Wednesday.


Sixty senators from both parties have already sent a letter to DeMarco asking that he change the compensation policy of the two companies. FHFA has final say on pay at the two companies.


"The idea that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which rely on taxpayer funding to stay afloat, must offer excessive bonuses to its executives to attract effective management strains credulity," the letter said.


DeMarco responded to the senators saying that the executives who were running the companies in 2008 when the problems occurred have left without any golden parachutes, and that effective management is needed to make sure that taxpayer losses at the firms do not rise and the companies continue to function. He said current executive pay at the firm is about 40% less than before the bailouts.


"I need to ensure that the companies have people with the skills needed to manage the credit and interest rate risks of $5 trillion worth of mortgage assets and $1 trillion of annual new business that the American taxpayer is supporting," he wrote.


Spokespeople for Fannie and Freddie declined to comment ahead of the hearings.


The latest cost estimate from FHFA is that the two bailouts will end up with a net cost to taxpayers of about $124 billion through 2014, though that figure could rise as high as $193 billion. Even the lower cost estimate will make it the most expensive bailout of the financial crisis -- far more costly than bailing out the nation's banks or automakers.


The CEOs and the other top executives at Fannie and Freddie get all their pay in cash, and none of it in company stock , which is generally deemed worthless.


The company filings that disclosed the pay back in February also defended the pay based on the work they had done.


Fannie's filing said that under Williams' leadership, the company "made solid progress in managing credit losses on its pre-2009 book of business, acquired a 2010 book of business with a strong credit profile that is expected to be profitable, and achieved substantial progress in making the company more operationally disciplined and efficient."

[atomiczombie]

more on insider trading by our elected officials......


Visa's Courtship of Nancy Pelosi
By Daniel Stone | The Daily Beast – 12 hrs ago


Visa has long bragged about its rewards program for consumers. So when its lucrative swipe fees got caught in the congressional crosshairs a few years back, the credit-card giant developed a special program for then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to feel its influence.

The lobbying campaign, reconstructed by Newsweek through interviews and documents, speaks volumes about the efforts of big business to curry favor, even among perceived enemies. It also shows how such efforts can personally and politically benefit politicians, even ones like Pelosi who set out to suffocate the “culture of corruption” in Washington or ultimately didn’t give Visa what it wanted.

The tale begins in 2007, when the credit-card industry became concerned that the new Democrats who took charge of Congress after the 2006 elections were intent on passing legislation to curtail credit-card swipe fees to vendors, which were worth billions of dollars in revenues in the industry, and to create new protections for consumers.

Visa had never been particularly close to Pelosi, a frequent critic of the financial industry, even though the credit-card giant’s headquarters were in her hometown of San Francisco.

But the army of lobbyists Visa assembled—it had a total of 14 lobbying firms at its disposal—set out to try to woo Pelosi with a strategic campaign, hoping to forestall action on any credit-card legislation until after the 2008 presidential election.

“Was there a concerted effort to press Pelosi? Yes. It was partly that she was speaker. But also that Visa’s based out [in her district], where she’s from. They were under attack. It was the confluence between her position and when she engaged she would be intense,” says a lobbyist directly familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the press about internal strategy. “We were sitting around the table and decided we needed a concerted effort related to Pelosi. We needed a full-court press.”

The effort began in earnest in late 2007. Ogilvy, one of Visa's outside lobbying firms, picked off one of Pelosi’s government-affairs advisers, Dean Aguillen, who had close ties in the speaker’s office. Aguillen quit the speaker’s team and went to Ogilvy in December 2007. By law he was unable to lobby his former boss for a year, but he immediately registered to lobby Congress on the credit-card issue, offering guidance to other lobbyists on Visa’s team during strategy sessions, according to a lobbyist present in strategy deliberations.

In an interview, Aguillen told Newsweek he worked for Visa on the credit-card-legislation issue and sporadically talked with his former colleagues in Pelosi’s office. “It’s public record that I advocated on behalf of Visa the past few years,” he said. “I didn’t set up a meeting with the speaker directly, but I’ve definitely done some outreach to the House individually. What we did is help Visa build and maintain strong relationships and a strong reputation.”

Aguillen said he didn’t have any lobbying contact the first year after he left Pelosi’s office, but starting in 2009 he did aim to maintain the relationships, and talked about the various issues he was working on.

Asked whether Visa was using his connections for access, he demurred. “This is my first venture into the private sector. I hope that I had done enough that people would find me to be an asset.”

Visa wanted to meet with Pelosi and her top aides to make the case against the swipe fees. That summer Visa’s outgoing CEO, Carl Pascarella, bumped into Pelosi on the street in the San Francisco neighborhood they share, and she arranged for him to contact her Washington office for a meet-and-greet, according to sources families with the encounter.

Around the same time—on July 21, 2008, to be exact—Pelosi’s reelection campaign received a $1,000 donation from Visa’s political-action committee. Two days later, according to Pelosi’s office, the speaker met Pascarella and the incoming Visa chief executive, Joe Saunders, in her Capitol Hill office. The three exchanged pleasantries and no specific legislation was discussed, according to Pelosi’s office.

Aguillen, for his part, also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the first half of 2008.

Separately, Pelosi’s husband, Paul, a major investor in California, got a lucrative phone call—a pre-screen invite in March 2008 to take part in Visa’s $17.9 billion public stock offering, at the time one of the hottest stock offerings in an otherwise soft market. The initial-public-offering price was $44 per share and was limited to institutional investors and a group of specially selected individuals. Almost $18 billion was made available in public stock to preselected investors. Paul Pelosi made the cut.

The top financial institution to handle the sale was Wells Fargo Shareholder Services, a bank where Paul Pelosi, a seasoned investor, held an account. Before the IPO, Pelosi received a call from his financial adviser at Wells Fargo alerting him that he had been approved to purchase Visa stock and, considering the public buzz around the stock, recommending he buy, according to Pelosi’s office.

Paul Pelosi initially bought 5,000 shares at the $44 initial price. Within a couple of days, the shares' value soared to $64. Paul Pelosi purchased 15,000 more shares over the next three months, at much higher prices. The total quantity was valued as high as $5 million, according to the then-speaker’s financial-disclosure form. In late 2008, when the stock market soured, Pelosi sold 1,000 of the first IPO shares for a meager profit of $2,500 to $5,000, records show. He has kept the other 19,000 shares, which now are valued at $95 each.

Nancy Pelosi’s office denies that the meetings, the lobbying, or her husband’s stock purchase had any influence on her legislative actions. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for the Democratic leader, said Paul Pelosi’s finances are kept distinctly separate from the congresswoman’s legislative work, and she complies with all the legal as well as ethical obligations of her position. He also pointed out that Pelosi has repeatedly advocated for legislation the credit-card industry dislikes.

Several bills affecting credit providers snaked through the House in 2008, including one introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) that would have ended the swipe fees, the small percentage that credit companies like Visa charge with every transaction. Another bill by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), affording significant new protection to credit-card holders, passed the House but did not make it through the Senate. Conyers’s legislation passed his House Judiciary Committee with bipartisan support on Oct. 3, 2008, the last day lawmakers were in office before leaving to campaign for the election, but was not brought to the floor, which Pelosi controlled as speaker.

Pelosi’s office says she chose not to bring up the swipe-fee bills in 2008 because she did not believe President George W. Bush would sign them into law.

Pelosi tried for consumer protections in 2008, but the next year she put more muscle behind the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, a bill that gave new protections to consumers and was opposed by the credit-card industry. The bill was entirely devoted to preventing consumer exploitation, and swipe fees were not included, a victory of sorts for the industry.

Only after Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois caught momentum with a bill that would crack down on credit-card companies’ fees in 2009 did the provision eventually make it into law as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

When confronted earlier this month at a press conference about the delay in swipe fees, Pelosi said the House waited to act on the swipe fees until “we had a president that could sign the bill.” Her spokesman Hammill says it is preposterous to think Visa’s lobbying or the stock purchases had any influence on the speaker’s legislative actions.

I saw the 60 minutes segment about this on Sunday. It was really well produced and I am surprised CBS and it's corporate owners allowed it to air.

BUmfy1csm8I

[Corkey]

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/11/15/officials-journalists-among-those-arrested-during-zuccotti-park-raid/

All I can say is I hope the ACLU has a field day with the NYPD and Bloomberg.

[ruffryder]

i think Obama recently passed a cap on student loan payments of 10% of your income maximum. i think the whole thing is now based on your current income, actually. i could be wrong. it's been a minute since i read about it and it was a buried story and i haven't seen anything about it since.

I hope this is true. I heard something was gonna change and students can at least consolidate into one loan. Not sure about 10% though. Wouldn't mind a link or more information if anyone has it. I just got my bachelors degree and owe loans and am unemployed so yeah.. not sure they are gonna get any of my money for awhile until I am employed.

I forgot to add that 1 in 5 children in my community go to bed hungry. It makes me so angry. Trillions of dollars for wars and banks and very little to feed hungry kids. "We" collectively as a society should be ashamed of ourselves they we have not held big business and the government accountable sooner. Just my opinion.

I saw in one of the occupy areas, (I think Denver) a church was feeding the homeless and offered food to the occupy protestors as well. I don't understand why we should be ashamed of ourselves for people going to bed hungry when you can be a part of the solution and offer what you have to the hungry. If we haven't been able to rely on big corporations to help with homelessness and starvation in the U.S. why should we now? Or why should we be ashamed because of it? You already know what they are about, helping themselves and making money. I think if people got together at the occupy movements and included the homeless and hungry it could make a difference in our world. Afterall isn't learning about teaching and setting an example and being the 1% difference.

Okay, that's enough of this. Now I have "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out of the thread". I'm done; and OWS has lost a supporter.

Not sure what happened here, but if someone said that that is rude and I'm sorry you feel you don't have a voice here. I, for one appreciate the questions you have. Not everyone understands everything going on or agrees with everything about OWS. So I appreciate differing views and questions so that people can understand. Sorry again.

[AtLast]

i think Obama recently passed a cap on student loan payments of 10% of your income maximum. i think the whole thing is now based on your current income, actually. i could be wrong. it's been a minute since i read about it and it was a buried story and i haven't seen anything about it since.

This is true in part, however, the student loan programs were taken from government administration and given to private banks (over the last few decades)! We need to go back to full government administration and re-payment. It used to be that the interest paid on these loans went back to the government agencies for reinvestment of student loans- now it is "profit" for banks. Thus, a huge amount of what used to "re-fill" the public coffers to keep granting student loans became part of a private profit margin- which brings us to Wall Street profits.

Also, some of the interest made was put back into educational systems other than the student loan programs, as in state education college funding. What happened (and even under Obama's plan) is that the "working" margin of interest profit is now going to the private incomes/bonuses of private bankers and is part of those dividends paid to stockholders of the private banks. Those are folks within the 1%!

Sound familiar? This was the direct work of Republican privatization political strategies. In effect, the student loan programs in the US were raped for the good of private and publically traded business on the backs of college students.

Obama's plan will help with having sane payments for students after graduation, that is true. But the banks will not have as high of a yield of profit from these loans. Probably they will add more loan fees in order to recover these losses (remember, the so called regulation safeguards we now have don't really have much bite at all- pretty bogus, really).

There are also many loan fees associated with these loans that were not charged when they were administered by the government. Not even close. The original government run student loans were a very good bargain for students and were not filled with initiation fees. In fact, a student paid about $15 to file a loan application and that was about it for them in terms of loan fees. And they paid a low inhterest rate when they began paying back these loans.

No, problems around student loans and the relationship to banks and Wall Street are not being fully addressed.

Even loans for our veterans that can give them good deals on buying a home are profit makers for banks and Wall Street via how they are intermingled and administered through private banking.

Personally, I want whatever taxes I pay that is earmarked for education and loans to vets to be part of government administration and put back into the programs so that the programs grow and more loans become available for both populations and the jobs that were available to government employees are brought back!

Have to add that "out-sourcing" happens within our geographical boundaries (public to private administration)!!!

[atomiczombie]

Mayor Bloomberg shuts Zuccotti Park as he reviews court order issued hours after police cleared the park of protesters

NEW YORK — Hours after police officers descended on Zuccotti Park in a surprise sweep of the Occupy Wall Street headquarters, protesters were locked in a standoff Tuesday morning with police over a court order that would allow them to return with their tents.

A hearing on the temporary restraining order, filed by a New York City judge, was under way Tuesday afternoon. The city filed court papers opposing the order and claiming that giving protesters free rein over the park would cause unsafe and unsanitary conditions. They also claimed occupiers were stockpiling makeshift weapons including metal-pipes inside cardboard tubes.
Earlier, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters Tuesday that he had not received the order and that the park would remain closed "until we can clarify the situation," he said.

Tuesday's court order, which was published on The New York Times website, said authorities were prohibited from "preventing protesters from re-entering the park with tents and other property previously utilized." But Bloomberg closed the park while lawyers reviewed the order.

PhotoBlog: Dispatches from the disputed streets

The park had become a health and fire safety hazard and that "unfortunately ... (it) became a place not to protest, but to break the law," Bloomberg said Tuesday.
"Inaction was not an option," he said. "We could not wait for someone in the park to get killed."
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said around 200 were arrested overnight, including dozens who tried to resist by linking arms at the center of Zuccotti Park or chaining themselves together with bicycle locks.

NBC New York's Jonathan Dienst, who was at the scene in Lower Manhattan, reported that he had counted a further 40 arrests along Broadway.
Jay-Z and others who are profiting from Occupy Wall Street
A few protesters, who appeared to resist and shove officers, were thrown to the ground and placed in handcuffs, he reported.

Ryan Peters, 29, from Chicago, who took a leave of absence from the advertising agency where he works to tour different Occupy protests, cried as he told msnbc.com's Miranda Leitsinger that about 30 people had chained themselves up inside the Occupy protest's kitchen area.
"People want to fight for something that's really important," he said. "It makes me cry every time I think of them (the people in the kitchen) getting locked down in the park … these guys are patriots."

Another protester, Luc Baillargeon, 29, told Leitsinger that "a few" people were treated for pepper burns and minor lacerations but he added there were no apparent signs of serious injuries. NYPD told WNBC three people were injured during the evacuations, one of whom was taken to Bellevue Hospital.
Meanwhile, a message on the @OccupyWallSt Twitter account said that city council member Ydanis Rodriguez was "beaten by nypd and bleeding from head."

Police confirmed Rodriguez was part of a group arrested near Cortlandt Street and Broadway as they tried to push through a barricade around 1:45 a.m., NBC reported.

Josh Harkinson, writer for Mother Jones magazine and one of the few journalists present during the eviction, reported on Twitter that he heard from several sources that police felled a tree in the park in order to remove protesters who had climbed to safety.

John Minchillo / AP

Trash is piled high near Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street's longtime encampment in New York, during the cleanup effort early Tuesday. AP Photo/John Minchillo
Regrouping?

After being evicted, several hundred demonstrators regrouped in nearby Foley Square to discuss their next move, setting up a new Twitter account.
Nicholas Frechette, 25, said he had been pepper sprayed during the eviction but was undeterred.

"We broke the night together doing something truly revolutionary," he said in Foley Square.

Protesters also grouped at Duarte Square, a city park at Canal Street and Avenue of the americas, about a mile north north of Zuccotti park. Two people with bolt cutters allegedly snipped a lock to a fenced-off lot at nearby Trinity Church aroud 11 a.m. EST. Police came in and cleared them out, arresting about two dozen people in the process, The New York Times reported.

After the church-lot was swept, a group of protesters marched back to Zuccotti Park, blocking Broadway traffic along the way. They circled the park while awaiting the outcome of the court hearing.

The police operation in the park — known by the demonstrators as Liberty Park or Liberty Square — comes just two days ahead of a massive planned demonstration Thursday marking the movement's two-month anniversary.
Earlier, Mayor Bloomberg defended the move to evict the protesters and tear down their tent city, saying in a statement that the park was "becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others."

"Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags," he added. "Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments."

The park was cleared in less than three hours in what appeared to be a highly coordinated action, prompting firebrand left-wing film-maker and activist Michael Moore to ask on Twitter whether President Obama or federal agencies had been involved in planning the clearance and similar evictions of Occupy camps elsewhere in the US.

Letters to protesters

After the raid, thousands of dollars worth of computer and camera equipment, tents and sleeping bags could be seen piled in the center of the park by sanitation workers. Police said in a statement that the items would be brought to a sanitation garage where they could be collected later.
By 9 a.m. ET, the park had been power-washed clean by city workers and stood empty — as seen in this picture from msnbc.com's Jonathan Woods — as police in riot gear waited for orders to reopen it.

Police earlier handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, owner of Zuccotti Park, and the city saying that the park had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous.

Justin Stone-Diaz, a member of the "Think Tank" policy group set up by the protesters, told msnbc.com that police had used a Long Range Acoustic Device — a powerful speaker that disperses crowds by producing an uncomfortable sound.

Story: Police dismantle Oakland camp, protesters on march
Another protester, Nan Terrie, an 18-year-old law student, told msnbc.com that a number of people had also chained themselves up in the women's tents.

"This is an illegal eviction (that) they are trying to do to us," she said.
Thorin Caristo, 37, whose eyes appeared red and swollen, told msnbc.com he felt stinging in his eyes for several minutes after being cleared from the camp.

"I feel like this (action) will be a catalyst for the movement," he said.

Mary Altaffer / AP
A demonstrator yells at police officers as they order Occupy Wall Street protesters to leave Zuccotti Park, their longtime encampment in New York, early Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Protester John Murdock told msnbc.com he was arrested and held for four hours. "Shame on America, shame on the police," he said. "This is not okay. This is an embarassment for the country.

"We're just getting started. We changed the conversation of the nation. This is just another chapter."

Crowds chanted "The people united will never be divided" in Foley Square.
Protester Han Shan, 39, left his job to work on the movement full time. He was at the park helping get out media equipment and supplies as the eviction took place and then moved one block away to "bear witness."

PhotoBlog: Occupy Wall Street

"I think obviously people are angry. We see like thousands ... of police amassing around a peaceful protest," he told msnbc.com.

"It's one night in what is a growing movement ... this is a movement now that is much, much larger than one square in downtown Manhattan," Shan added. "We've seen sweeps of occupations in Oakland and Denver and other places, but I don't think that it's going to affect the momentum of this movement."

LINK: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45299622/ns/us_news-life/#.TsLG8WDmHWk

[Corkey]

Update: Zuccotti park reopened through a bottleneck, barricades still in place.

[atomiczombie]

This is from Occupy News on FB:

DEFEAT: OWS is no longer allowed to camp at Zucotti Park. Now it is up to see if Mayor Bloomberg keeps his promise and opens the park up for protests during the day. The restraining order protecting the protesters has been repealed.

[SoNotHer]

Oh yeah. Even if you've seen this, it's the inspiration we need right now:

IHeVlA4eeuc

[atomiczombie]

http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/occupy-wall-street-michael-moore-connects-the-federal-government-to-encampment-raids

He says the Obama administration has helped mayors coordinate the raids against encampments in NY, Oakland, Denver, etc.

[Toughy]

http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/occupy-wall-street-michael-moore-connects-the-federal-government-to-encampment-raids

He says the Obama administration has helped mayors coordinate the raids against encampments in NY, Oakland, Denver, etc.

Can he back that up? I didn't hear anything about where he got this info.

[atomiczombie]

Can he back that up? I didn't hear anything about where he got this info.

All I saw is his interview with Keith. I haven't seen anything else about this either.

[atomiczombie]

yoG9PmdGaT8

Go Keith! Go!

[Cin]

Can he back that up? I didn't hear anything about where he got this info.

It appears all references to this comes from this reporter Rick Ellis and his conversations with a source in the Justice Department. Perhaps the reincarnation of Deep Throat? Most all other articles talking about the federally coordinated crackdowns refer to this article as their source. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned a conference call with 18 cities regarding the Occupy movement during an interview with BBC, but has since refused comment.

I believe it is true. But without an admission from the federal government or from sources willing to go on record there really isn't 'beyond a shadow of a doubt' proof here. And even if there were, Obama certainly has plausible deniability and six degrees of separation to boot. I'm sure it is in his best political interest to have his effort to help get rid of the protestors be understood by the 1% while being seen by the rest of us as probably misinformation or mere speculation. Sounds like the same old, same old to me.

Occupy' crackdowns coordinated with federal law enforcement officials

Rick Ellis
Minneapolis Top News Examiner

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

The FBI has so far failed to respond to requests for an official response, and of the 14 local police agencies contacted in the past 24 hours, all have declined to respond to questions on this issue.

But in a recent interview with the BBC," Oakland Mayor Jean Quan mentioned she was on a conference call just before the recent wave of crackdowns began.

"I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them."

At the time this story was updated, Mayor Quan's office had declined to discuss her comments.

http://www.examiner.com/top-news-in-minneapolis/were-occupy-crackdowns-aided-by-federal-law-enforcement-agencies

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/15/1036830/-Good-news-about-the-Federally-coordinated-crackdown:-NYC,-Albany,-Portland,-Oakland,-Berkeley,-

http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/11/15/cities-coordinating-crackdowns-on-occupy-wall-street-with-the-federal-government/

[Cin]

6 Burning Questions About the Violent Crackdowns on Occupations Around the Country
By Lynn Parramore
November 15, 2011
Alternet

In the aftermath of a city-by-city crackdown featuring hundreds of arrests and evictions of Occupy encampments, plenty of questions demand answers.


Occurring without provocation, the Occupy crackdown gives the appearance of an orchestrated effort to thwart an emerging protest movement. Early morning Tuesday, in New York City, hundreds of police officers, many in riot gear, swept down on Zuccotti Park, throwing away private property, restricting press and using aggressive tactics to remove protesters and supporters. Here are some things we’d really like to know.

1. Who convened the mayors call? In an interview with the BBC, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan alluded to her participation in a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities just prior to the raids on encampments across the country. Mayors' associations do exist, but they do not typically organize police interventions or local decision-making in such detail. Given the abuses of the past, such as the notorious COINTELPRO and other intervention programs that the U.S. government organized during the Vietnam protests, the public has a right to know the details of who organized that call.

2. Was there an attempt to control press coverage? New Yorkers awoke to front-page stories and photographs in both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. Coverage by the two papers was supportive of the mayor and the police actions but disparaging toward the protesters. An AlterNet reporter, arriving on the scene at 1:30am, shortly after the raid began, could get nowhere near Zuccotti Park due to police barricades (and was subjected to pepper spray while attempting to report on events). How did the friendly reporters gain their access? Was there advance coordination to allow certain media outlets access and block the rest? Why was press access restricted? Were some reporters' credentials confiscated? How will reports of unwarranted force on the part of police toward the press be addressed?

3. What, if any, was the role of the White House? Who was in charge of following the nationwide Occupy crackdown at the White House? What does President Obama, the man who celebrated the uprisings in Egypt (and who is currently out of the US, in Asia), think about the raids and the encroachments on the civil liberties of peacefully protesting Americans? As a constitutional scholar, what is his view of the restrictions of the press and the arrests of journalists?

4. Was the Department of Homeland Security involved in the raids? Filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted this question, asking if the Department may have given the green-light to the raid. The DHS has been reportedly following Occupy Wall Street Twitter feeds and other social media networks. Did it play any role in the crackdown?

5. What, if any, was the role of the FBI? Suggestions are circulating that the FBI and other federal agencies may have advised local law enforcement agencies on how to conduct the raids and even how to handle press relations. Did this happen? Was there any coordinating of arrests across the country on the part of the FBI?

6. Where are the libertarians? In the face of all the clamor about “states' rights,” local government and the Constitution, we want to know where all the libertarians have suddenly gone. It’s enough to drive you to drink an emergency cup of tea.

[Dominique]

Well, dare I say FINALLY (?) Occupy Pittsburgh made a statement
last night. They we demonstrating outside the convention center where a huge meeting of Haliburton exec's and like people where congregating.

They were asked to move off of Covention center property. Convetion center was funded with tax payer dollars (according to OPgh) there fore they felt they had a right to be there. Police asked them several times to move across the street. Most did. A few did not (5) and they were all arrested for tresspassing.

According to the morning news, It never got out of hand, (noisy) but that's all. The morning news also ran a film clip from one of the Opgh folks of the convention atendee's pressed up against the glass watching the whole thing.

http://www.post-gazette.com/images5/2011115MHoccupyprotesthpx_3.jpg

[SoNotHer]

Great shot and go Pittsburgh :-)

Well, dare I say FINALLY (?) Occupy Pittsburgh made a statement
last night. They we demonstrating outside the convention center where a huge meeting of Haliburton exec's and like people where congregating.

They were asked to move off of Covention center property. Convetion center was funded with tax payer dollars (according to OPgh) there fore they felt they had a right to be there. Police asked them several times to move across the street. Most did. A few did not (5) and they were all arrested for tresspassing.

According to the morning news, It never got out of hand, (noisy) but that's all. The morning news also ran a film clip from one of the Opgh folks of the convention atendee's pressed up against the glass watching the whole thing.

http://www.post-gazette.com/images5/2011115MHoccupyprotesthpx_3.jpg

[SoNotHer]

Some amazing things are coming out of Monday's 2 a.m. raid, and I love Brodsky's message -

"Mike Bloomberg is nothing if not consistent. He's America's leading apologist for the 1%. His recent defense of banks and Wall Street as blameless for the financial meltdown the Great Recession was New York chutzpah in extremis. It was obvious he sensed the long-term dangers that OWS poses to his vision of American. Clearly, the use of cops to sweep Zuccotti Park was always where he was headed.

History works itself out in unexpected ways. The initial beauty and effectiveness of OWS was its non-hierarchical, amoeba-like incarnation. It replicated across the world based on two insights: Technology, properly used, can swiftly create organizations of gigantic proportions, and most people understand that wealth and power are now more concentrated that ever before and that's a bad thing for all of us. It didn't need leaders and spokespeople.

Bloomberg's sweep of Zuccotti Park changed all that and forces OWS to examine its future. The challenge to OWS is real. Can it turn its' technological genius and simple message into an organization that makes real, practical change in people's lives? We've worked out a democratic system that permits aggregations of human beings to challenge aggregations of money. The civil rights movement, the women's movement, labor, anti-war, environmental, etc. et. al., all found ways to make politics, government and daily life better for the great majority. Now it's OWS' turn. Can it transform, develop an agenda, participate in conventional politics and change the power arrangements in America and elsewhere. Can it do all that without losing its' integrity, transparency and openness? Yes, it can, but it won't be easy.

One of the lasting progressive images from the beginning of the labor movement is the moments before the execution of a labor organizer named Joe Hill, on trumped-up charges. His last words, "don't mourn for me, organize" became part of a song written by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson that Pete Seeger and many others made famous. Now the OWS movement has arrived at its defining moment, thanks to a phalanx of cops and a mayor by, of, and for the 1%.

Now, we can begin."

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2011-11-15-df_111011_3600.jpg

[Sachita]

I absolutely love this. It's long but so worth watching.

Marianne Williamson Speaking About the Occupy Movement, Berkeley, CA November 2011

QHW3gyH0u3c

[VintageFemme]

via twitter:

SalmanRushdie (https://twitter.com/#%21/SalmanRushdie) Salman Rushdie Nazis destroyed books to "purify" German culture. Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What's Bloomberg's excuse? "Hygiene"? #ows (https://twitter.com/#%21/search?q=%23ows)


...a little smirky but he says what he thinks and makes no excuses. i'm ok with that.

[dykeumentary]

http://i1143.photobucket.com/albums/n634/dykeumentary/photo-12.jpg
Occupy Phiadelphia this afternoon

[dykeumentary]

via twitter:

SalmanRushdie (https://twitter.com/#%21/SalmanRushdie) Salman Rushdie Nazis destroyed books to "purify" German culture. Bigots do it in the name of God, or Allah. What's Bloomberg's excuse? "Hygiene"? #ows (https://twitter.com/#%21/search?q=%23ows)


...a little smirky but he says what he thinks and makes no excuses. i'm ok with that.

I can't get behind that.
A reasonable and fair discussion/response to what is happening requires that people use language that is NOT a wild exaggeration to provoke a reaction.

Since this thing started I've had to point out how outlandish and fear-based the claims of "who the protectors are" and "what their goals are" that were being spread by the media. I'm surrounded by people who don't have an analysis about OWS that shows them it is in their interest.

Comparing Bloomberg to a Nazi is as useless and counterproductive as comparing "the 99%" to wild anarchists who just want free marijuana.

We have to do better. Rushdie should know better.

[theoddz]

I looked and looked, but there's no way I can see to share this on social media (Facebook). It's too good not to share, so I'm going to cut and paste the text of the article/blog here and then paste the link to the blog page at the bottom. Thanks for your patience. I know it's a long read, but I think it's worth it. :winky:
-------------------------------------------

Saturday 19 February 2011

by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

What Conservatives Really Want
(Photo: Patrick Feller / The New York Times)

Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011.

----------

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting and on and on.

Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.

Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matter to conservatives.

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility — acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions. Empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that.

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that.

Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.

In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used against conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture or even death, say, for women's doctors.

Freedom is defined as being your own strict father - with individual, not social, responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will, of course, need a gun.

This is the America that conservatives really want. Budget deficits are convenient ruses for destroying American democracy and replacing it with conservative rule in all areas of life.

What is saddest of all is to see Democrats helping them.

Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific "cuts" is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American - the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle-class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.

Democrats help conservatives by not shouting out loud, over and over, that it was conservative values that caused the global economic collapse: lack of regulation and a greed-is-good ethic.

Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called "Democratic Communication Disorder." Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Talk matters, because language heard over and over changes brains. Democrats have not built the communication system they need, and many are relatively clueless about how to frame their deepest values and complex truths.

And Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. "Benefits" are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.

Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like "entitlements" instead of "earnings" and speak of government as providing "services" instead of "necessities."

Is there hope?

I see it in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands citizens see through the conservative frames and are willing to flood the streets of their capital to stand up for their rights. They understand that democracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work - not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy - the democracy of caring, of social responsibility and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/20110219190836960

~Theo~ :bouquet:

[persiphone]

cross posted from the politics and law forum.....skeery!


http://vimeo.com/31100268

[AtLast]

I keep hearing snips here and there about how many of those connected via Wall Street agree with this movement (other than Warren buffet). This is based upon the disparity of wages and the "rich gets richer, the poor, poorer" adage. There are a multitude of jobs throughout the Wall Street "insitution"- a lot of the "secretaries" Buffet spoke of as well as mid-management folks that don't make mega millions. But reports do point to the folks that are doing quite well financially too.

What I am wondering about is why the hell these people are not speaking up more? Hummmm........ (yes, a kind of sarcastic Hummmm...).

[Toughy]

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/index

Occupy SF has been in the streets today.....closed down a BofA and are sitting in the bank and being arrested.

[Cin]

cross posted from the politics and law forum.....skeery!


http://vimeo.com/31100268

Thanks for posting this. I would hate to see this pass.

[persiphone]

Thanks for posting this. I would hate to see this pass.


Linus posted it in Politics and Law. i'm under the impression it was voted on today or was at least up for a vote today, but i'm not finding any news on it.

[SoNotHer]

Yes, it is. Thank you for posting. You might want to cross post this in the petition thread and the Internet and privacy thread.

cross posted from the politics and law forum.....skeery!


http://vimeo.com/31100268

[persiphone]

'Patriotic Millionaires' Beg Supercommittee for Higher Taxes
By SUSANNA KIM | ABC News – 11 hrs ago


Two dozen wealthy members of the group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength are targeting members of the deficit "supercommittee" to increase their taxes.

Entrepreneur and producer Charlie Fink, said he and other Patriotic Millionaires testified in a congressional hearing and visited the offices of 13 members of Congress on Wednesday, seven of whom are members of the supercommittee, to express their concern for the country's fiscal health.

Fink, who lives in Washington, D.C., said if the Bush tax cuts do not expire, the country "is digging itself a big hole by foregoing revenue."

"Without revenue, we will never solve the problem by giving tax cuts to the wealthy while supporting two foreign wars," Fink, a former AOL executive, said.

The group visited the offices of legislators in both parties, including Senators John Kyl, R-AZ, and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Reps. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., minority leader, Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., and Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., assistant democratic leader.

"It was a very refreshing conversation that restored my faith that there are people who, in spite of their financial successes, have not lost their compassion and sense of fair play," Rep. Clyburn told ABC News after meeting the group.

The supercommittee has stalled on how to trim over $1 trillion from the budget.

Democratic members of the group met on Wednesday for more than two hours.

Patriotic Millionaire Robert Johnson, former chief economist of the U.S Senate banking committee, said that the current economic system is not broken, but it is "working on behalf of those who designed it in their favor."

"America is no longer based on markets and capitalism, instead our economy is designed as 'socialism for the rich' – it is designed to ensure that the wealthiest people take all of the gains, while regular Americans cover any losses," he said at a press conference this afternoon in Washington, D.C.

"It's a Las Vegas economy where regular Americans put their money on the table and the richest 1 percent own the house," he said. "And if the 1 percent happen to lose money, the 99 percent bails them out – covers their losses and then stands by watching while the house does it all over again."

Last November, the Patriotic Millionaires launched with 45 signatories who sent a letter to President Obama asking him to allow the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of last year. The petition was signed by the Grammy Award-nominated DJ, MOBY, as well as Jerry Cohen of Ben-and-Jerry's-Ice-Cream fame.

The Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength wrote a 155-word letter saying they hope their taxes will increase. Its text is posted at FiscalStrength.com.

The message of the group has remained the same.

"For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled," the group's website states. "We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more."

Other Patriotic Millionaires who participated on Wednesday were Lawrence Benenson, executive vice president of Benenson Capital Co., David desJardins, former Google software engineer, Guy Saperstein, civil rights attorney, and Eric Schoenberg, former managing director of Broadview International.

[SoNotHer]

This is actually excellent. I am in awe of what she pulls together with this and how she does it.

I absolutely love this. It's long but so worth watching.

Marianne Williamson Speaking About the Occupy Movement, Berkeley, CA November 2011

QHW3gyH0u3c

[SoNotHer]

Excellent piece for this and so many other passages -

"From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions. Empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens. The conservative worldview rejects all of that."

I looked and looked, but there's no way I can see to share this on social media (Facebook). It's too good not to share, so I'm going to cut and paste the text of the article/blog here and then paste the link to the blog page at the bottom. Thanks for your patience. I know it's a long read, but I think it's worth it. :winky:
-------------------------------------------

Saturday 19 February 2011

by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

What Conservatives Really Want
(Photo: Patrick Feller / The New York Times)

Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011.

----------

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women's rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting and on and on.

Budget deficits are a ruse, as we've seen in Wisconsin, where the Governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.

Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matter to conservatives.

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: empathy — citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility — acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally. Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions. Empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens.
The conservative worldview rejects all of that.

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military (we have 174 bases around the world), not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

But where does that view of individual responsibility alone come from?

The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally.

The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that.

Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.

In conservative family life, the strict father rules. Fathers and husbands should have control over reproduction; hence, parental and spousal notification laws and opposition to abortion. In conservative religion, God is seen as the strict father, the Lord, who rewards and punishes according to individual responsibility in following his Biblical word.

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used against conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture or even death, say, for women's doctors.

Freedom is defined as being your own strict father - with individual, not social, responsibility, and without any government authority telling you what you can and cannot do. To defend that freedom as an individual, you will, of course, need a gun.

This is the America that conservatives really want. Budget deficits are convenient ruses for destroying American democracy and replacing it with conservative rule in all areas of life.

What is saddest of all is to see Democrats helping them.

Democrats help radical conservatives by accepting the deficit frame and arguing about what to cut. Even arguing against specific "cuts" is working within the conservative frame. What is the alternative? Pointing out what conservatives really want. Point out that there is plenty of money in America, and in Wisconsin. It is at the top. The disparity in financial assets is un-American - the top one percent has more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent. Middle-class wages have been flat for 30 years, while the wealth has floated to the top. This fits the conservative way of life, but not the American way of life.

Democrats help conservatives by not shouting out loud, over and over, that it was conservative values that caused the global economic collapse: lack of regulation and a greed-is-good ethic.

Democrats also help conservatives by what a friend has called "Democratic Communication Disorder." Republican conservatives have constructed a vast and effective communication system, with think tanks, framing experts, training institutes, a system of trained speakers, vast holdings of media and booking agents. Eighty percent of the talking heads on TV are conservatives. Talk matters, because language heard over and over changes brains. Democrats have not built the communication system they need, and many are relatively clueless about how to frame their deepest values and complex truths.

And Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. "Benefits" are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.

Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like "entitlements" instead of "earnings" and speak of government as providing "services" instead of "necessities."

Is there hope?

I see it in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands citizens see through the conservative frames and are willing to flood the streets of their capital to stand up for their rights. They understand that democracy is about citizens uniting to take care of each other, about social responsibility as well as individual responsibility, and about work - not just for your own profit, but to help create a civilized society. They appreciate their teachers, nurses, firemen, police and other public servants. They are flooding the streets to demand real democracy - the democracy of caring, of social responsibility and of excellence, where prosperity is to be shared by those who work and those who serve.
---------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/article.php/20110219190836960

~Theo~ :bouquet:

[Cin]

Is This 84-year-old Woman the New Poster Child of the Occupy Movement?
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/face-of-movement.jpg
84-year-old Dorli Rainey being helped by fellow activists after Seattle police blasted a crowd of Occupy protesters with pepper spray

“Freedom of speech is a concept. It is not always practiced in this country,” says Rainey, whose blog, Old Lady in Combat Boots, talks about her civic activism.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/16-6

[Cin]

The OWS People's Library was confiscated during the Tuesday night raid, angering the public who rightly were horrified by images of books--particularly a lovingly-curated collection of donated and crowdsourced books--being destroyed.

Douglas Rushkoff urges those disheartened by this to regroup and restart and take the library for a metaphor:

A book can have more influence for being destroyed than having existed in the first place. This week isn't the first time my books have been destroyed, but it's probably the most significant....Remember, though, the People's Library is less about the books sitting in the reference section at Zuccotti Park than the extended network of books being shared and read by real people in the real world...Likewise, while the Occupation of Zuccotti and other places may serve as "reference" points, the real occupation is embodied by those of us in the real world who change our behaviors to reflect our values, and who stand up for what we believe in the conversations occurring all around us.

The library was immediately restarted with a half a dozen paperbacks. Within two hours the collection was up to over 100 volumes and the library was fully functioning—cataloging, lending, and providing reference services. “The library is still open” was repeated like a mantra...During the reoccupation on the evening of November 15, it started to rain so library staff put a clear plastic trash bag over the collection. Within minutes a detail of about 10 police descended and demanded that the covering be removed because they deemed the garbage bag to be a tarp. There were a few tense minutes as staff tried to convince them otherwise, but ultimately it was removed—leaving the collection open to the elements. As the police withdrew, scores of people chanted “BOOKS …BOOKS … BOOKS … BOOKS.” ... Library staff quickly set up umbrellas over the bulk of the books and began sending librarians home with bags of books to keep the collection safe in remote locations.

complete article here:http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/731822/bloomberg%27s_bibliocide_update_on_confiscated_%22 people%27s_library%22_books/#paragraph6

[dykeumentary]

Following #N17 is riveting.
This is the first time I've used twitter like this.

[Cin]

http://rt.com/on-air/ows-day-action/
It's fun to watch it too, but definitely not as riveting.


http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
Maybe a tad more riveting.

[SoNotHer]

Oh yeah. A couple of us here were watching the 2 a.m. Ziccoti Park raid live on Livestream the other night and comment in the thread. I'm grateful to have had Ebon, Corkey, Persiphone and AtomicZombie here to talk with while I watched that.



http://rt.com/on-air/ows-day-action/
It's fun to watch it too, but definitely not as riveting.


http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
Maybe a tad more riveting.

[atomiczombie]

Oh yeah. A couple of us here were watching the 2 a.m. Ziccoti Park raid live on Livestream the other night and comment in the thread. I'm grateful to have had Ebon, Corkey, Persiphone and AtomicZombie here to talk with while I watched that.

You can call me Drew :D

[atomiczombie]

Is This 84-year-old Woman the New Poster Child of the Occupy Movement?
http://www.commondreams.org/sites/commondreams.org/files/imce-images/face-of-movement.jpg
84-year-old Dorli Rainey being helped by fellow activists after Seattle police blasted a crowd of Occupy protesters with pepper spray

“Freedom of speech is a concept. It is not always practiced in this country,” says Rainey, whose blog, Old Lady in Combat Boots, talks about her civic activism.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/11/16-6

I saw this on Countdown last night. Un-freakin'-believable. I am also dumbstruck that a NY City Councilman was beaten and arrested for simply going there to observe the raid. Annnnd, he was denied access to a lawyer for 17 hours!! he held a press conference about it yesterday, and Mayor Bloomberg hasn't said jack shit about it. Can you say police state?!?!?!?

[atomiczombie]

From Occupy News on FB:

As cops are attacking Wall Street, Protesters are rushing back into Zucotti Park with backpacks.

[Cin]

From Occupy News on FB:
Supposedly the cops have people trapped in zuccotti park and they won't let people out. Word is people are being beaten. The police have everything barricaded and are there will be a mass arrest in an effort to stop the demonstration scheduled for 5.

Apparently they have let people out of the park now. Not sure what was going on.

[dykeumentary]

<-- worried.

A video I made from my visits to NYC and Philadelphia (http://youtu.be/Dp17mrfu1DI)

[atomiczombie]

Woohoo the first aid tent is back up at Zuccotti!!

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/17/8842128-occupy-wall-streets-first-aid-tent-goes-mobile

[atomiczombie]

Video of OWS today via remote control helicopter. You can see the cops using flash grenades and tear gas on the crowds.

9vOor1xmVDs