Dressed in finery, Occupy Boston celebrates an anniversary
Occupy Boston participants aren’t known for their high-brow fashion decisions; when the objective is staying dry and warm and you’re living in a tent in the middle of a city, your clothing of choice tends to be quite the opposite of haute couture (not that we’re judging).
So to see some of the Occupiers dressed in outfits that would be considered decidedly 1 percent-like on Saturday, Dec. 17, was a little out of the ordinary. At the same time, it was fitting, as their Day of Action activities, marking the movement’s three-month anniversary, included an “ironic ‘pro-corporate’ march” down Newbury Street and through the Prudential Center.
http://tinyurl.com/77qo5ap
Profile: People of Occupy Boston – Nicole Sullivan
BLAST Magazine: What do you do?
NS: At Occupy, I do quite a few things. I am in several action-oriented groups such as Direct Action and street teams. I believe that doing actions is the only way to create change. Its like that cliché, “actions speak louder than words.” The fact that Occupy is so action oriented is why I joined. I was sick of talking about things, I wanted change I am also in a couple of outreach groups – outreach and movement building – where we reach out into the Boston community to try to get really grounded in community issues and to bring our message out to the masses. I also do a lot of anti-oppression work. I came into activism through feminism and I see everything from an anti-oppressive standpoint. I fully believe that we need to include the full 99% percent to be a mass movement so the anti-oppression working groups I am in seek to create a space to do that. I also participate in more infrastructure related groups, such as in reach which works on internal communication. Occupy Boston keeps me pretty busy.
Occupy Atlantic Avenue! The night before the Occupy Boston clearance
Occupy Boston! It was one of the last big ones to get cleared out, as I understand. I wasn’t there for the police clearance operation-but I was there the night before, when OB chumped down Boston Mayor Tom Menino, at least temporarily.
I’m not an occupier as such: I never camped at Occupy Boston, and I can’t claim to have been a big player in what went on. Some friends and I went to marches regularly, and made new friends at them. The Boston bunch is interesting, along with the usual cast of activists and people from the anarchist and red circuits, you get types characteristic of New England: kids with the clothes, accents, and (the most convincing elements) sallow skin and bad teeth of the local white working class talking anarchy and trans rights; WASPy late-middle-aged engineers biking in from MIT in their best windbreakers and wire-rim glasses; bro-dudes from BC, BU, and Northeastern who’ll start a chant of “OCCUPY! SHUT IT DOWN! BOSTON IS THE PEOPLE’S TOWN!” faster than they will “YANKEES SUCK!” It felt good to be a part of it, even in my limited way.
The Four Occupations of Planet Earth – How the Occupied Became the Occupiers
Everywhere, the “we” couldn’t be broader, often remarkably, even strategically, ill defined: 99% of humanity containing so many potentially conflicting strains of thought and being: liberals and fundamentalists, left-wing radicals and right-wing nationalists, the middle class and the dismally poor, pensioners and high-school students. But the “we” couldn’t be more real.
This “we” is something that hasn’t been seen on this planet for a long time, and perhaps never quite so globally. And here’s what should take your breath away, and that of the other 1%, too: “we” were never supposed to exist. Everyone, even we, counted us out.
Occupy Atlanta Helps Save Iraq War Veteran’s Home From Foreclosure
In a tangible victory by the Occupy movement, Occupy Atlanta has successfully helped save an Iraq War veteran from foreclosure.
Activists began occupying Brigitte Walker’s home on Dec. 6. By the end of that first week, JPMorgan Chase, which owns her mortgage, began discussing with the activists and Walker the possibility of a loan modification. Chase’s modification offer became official Monday morning. The offer will result, Walker said, in hundreds per month in savings.
http://tinyurl.com/79d87hb
Three of four hunger strikers end fast, Occupy DC protester says
After 11 days of starvation, three of the four Occupy DC protesters who had been on a hunger strike in support of District voting rights have decided to eat, one of the strikers said Monday.
Euro crisis may spread across globe, ECB warns
The European Central Bank warned that contagion from the debt crisis could afflict other eurozone countries and even spread across the globe. The central bank’s financial stability review said tensions had now reached the “systemic crisis proportions” seen at the time of the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 – partly because of the failure of politicians to act in time.
A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around
If we expect to maintain any semblance of “normality,” we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis-but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery. Small and medium-size companies, especially new ones, are disproportionately the source of job creation in any economy, and they have been especially hard-hit. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending. But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks, without restrictions, without conditions, and without a vision of the kind of banking system we want and need. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around.
That we should tolerate such a confusion of ends and means says something deeply disturbing about where our economy and our society have been heading. Americans in general are coming to understand what has happened. Protesters around the country, galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, already know.
Homeless kids in U.S. number 1.6 million: study
Fully 1.6 million children in the United States – one in 45 kids – were homeless last year, living in shelters, cars, abandoned buildings and parks, a study released Monday found.
Youth homelessness has surged 28 percent since 2007.
http://tinyurl.com/6uzbj8c
The case for a national popular vote
Taken together, the system undermines the most basic notion of republican democracy: the idea that every voter gets equal representation in our national government. In American presidential races, it’s the opposite. Between the nominating process and general election, we have effectively denationalized our most important national election, allowing a tiny handful of voters to choose who represents all of us in the White House. For no substantive or defensible reason, these voters get this undemocratic, anti-republican power not because they are inherently more important, valuable, or demographically representative citizens (in fact, they are often less representative), but simply because they happen to live within a specific state whose nominating contests come early (New Hampshire/Iowa) or whose general elections tend to be narrowly won and lost.
The fastest way to right at least some of this grotesque wrong is to move to a system that elects presidents via a national popular vote.
Co-opt fail: PUMAs return as “a project of the 99%”
Today, Democrats from across America have been getting robocalls from Zombie-PUMAs [a pro-Hillary group from the 2008 election]. I got one of them this afternoon in Baltimore. Sam Stein and others have posted the audio, which has your typical free-from-the-constraints-of-reality PUMA rant:
“America would be better off today if Hillary Clinton was our president. The Wall Street robber barons would be jailed, young people could afford college and find jobs and six million homeowners wouldn’t face foreclosure. We need to change our course. Please sign our petition to draft Hillary Clinton for president.” [LOL]
The message pimps a PUMA fronting web site with no information about who is behind the effort. Well, almost no information. Each page of the site proclaims the effort is: “a project of the 99%”. . .
http://tinyurl.com/6msucsa
Big bank bonuses may be headed for record year
According to a new report from The New Bottom Line and The Public Accountability Initiative, bonuses at seven of the biggest U.S. banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, US Bank, and Wells Fargo – will total about $156 billion in 2011, which would be “slightly larger than last year’s record breaking number.”
http://tinyurl.com/72cpemm
Occupy College
Many protestors connected to the Occupy movement are very concerned about tuition. But while President Obama is interested in a “candid discussion about why higher education costs so much,” protesters have a general, though perhaps ultimately more compelling, demand: stop privatizing public colleges.
http://tinyurl.com/d9hrzso
Yes, the American people are responsible
Let me respond to the idea that Americans are not responsible for what is happening to America, especially poorer Americans.
No. Sorry, but no. Sure, their guilt isn’t as great as that of the liberal class, or the financiers, or various other folks, but they are still responsible. It was a democracy. There were ways to stop it from getting to this. In a democracy, the PEOPLE are held responsible. Yes, there were forces working to stop it from being a democracy, but they voted for people like Reagan and the members of Congress, and so on. Whether you think the 2000 or 2004 elections were stolen (yes on the first, maybe on the second) they let it get to the point where it could be stolen. They didn’t riot in 2000. They reelected George Bush after everyone knew he was torturing scum.
Until Americans get that they are responsible, they will not also get that they can change things. If Americans are powerless, if it’s “not their fault” that also means they can’t fix it.
‘Craigslist killer’ case highlights the plight of America’s jobless
The victims were in their late 40s or older, an age when it is often harder to land work. Some were drifters, others had moved from one low-paying job to another.
But there were men like Sanson, too, who just a few years ago regarded themselves as solidly middle-class and prosperous, and who back then could not have imagined pursuing a $300-a-week job and living in a trailer.
Today they find themselves among the ranks of the near-destitute as the number of people living in poverty grows nearly twice as fast in many of the US’s once-affluent suburbs as in its inner cities.
Gen-X and the social safety net: Homeless death statistics for one county