Occupy protesters in Quincy target Bank of America
According to occupyquincy.org, Occupy Quincy is part of a larger group, Occupy the South Shore, speaking out against big banks, primarily Bank of America.
“Bank CEOs take home millions in bonuses for making more and more families homeless with aggressive foreclosures and squeezing more money out of customers with inflated interest rates and fees,” the website states.
Those who attended the peaceful rally were encouraged to close their Bank of America accounts and do business with local credit unions. Quincy police were present, but no issues were reported.
http://tinyurl.com/7r3pzvl
Occupy the Courts protests planned
The Occupy Boston encampment in Dewey Square is a fading memory. But now some of the same protesters have their eyes on another target, at least for one day: the federal court system.
Organizers of Occupy The Courts are hoping for protests at federal courts across the country on Friday to commemorate the two-year anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court opinion which found that corporations have a First Amendment right to make unlimited campaign contributions.
Protesters organise global candlelit vigil in honour of Martin Luther King day (and there’s another three months of demos to look forward to)
Occupy protesters coordinated a global series of candlelight vigils tonight in honour of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Hundreds of Occupy activists, alongside members of the National Action Network, braved freezing temperatures for a march through Harlem, New York.
Protesters aimed to light candles at 7pm in every time zone from ‘California to Cairo, New York to New Orleans, Germany to Nova Scotia.’
Couple found love at Occupy Boston
November 15 was a busy day at Occupy Boston. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons was speaking at the camp. Crowds had gathered in the drizzle. Protesters toiled to make their tents ready for the rain. But Anya Karasik, 18, and Robert Stitham, 25, only had eyes for each other.
. . .
That immediate closeness between strangers was exactly what drew people at Occupy Boston together, said Robert Epstein, a psychologist who is founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
Epstein studies what causes people to fall in love. The Occupy movement – large crowds of passionate people with similar beliefs living in tight quarters – was practically a psychologist’s dream.
“It’s hard to imagine anything like it, outside of a real war zone,” Epstein said.
http://tinyurl.com/83epk2s
Does Occupy movement continue Martin Luther King’s push for social justice?
More than 20,000 are expected to join Sacramento’s 31st annual Martin Luther King Jr. march today, including 1,000 under the banner of Occupy Sacramento.
“King would say, ‘Please finish what I started.’ That’s what we’re doing,” said Sean Laney, head of Occupy Sacramento’s education committee.
Not since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s have so many Americans been galvanized in the fight for economic equality. The Occupy movement arguably has drawn even greater numbers, thanks to social media and the more than 46 million Americans living below the poverty line – the most ever in U.S. history.
http://tinyurl.com/6ms23u9
Occupy demonstrators, others honor King with march
Occupy demonstrators are joining artists, celebrities and others to honor the memory of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The demonstrators are scheduled to take part in a candlelight vigil at Riverside Church. The church is hosting a program that it says will feature performances by Patti Smith and other artists. The speakers are expected to include Yoko Ono and Russell Simmons.
http://tinyurl.com/7kbup6y
Mass Incarceration: A Civil Rights Crisis
Since 1970, the U.S. prison population has exploded from about 325,000 people to more than 2 million today. According to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, this is a phenomenon that cannot be explained by crime rates or drug use. According to Human Rights Watch (Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, 2000) although whites are more likely to violate drug laws than people of color, in some states black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men. Latina/os, Native Americans, and other people of color are also imprisoned at rates far higher than their representation in the population.
Once released, former prisoners are caught in a web of laws and regulations that make it difficult or impossible to secure jobs, education, housing, and public assistance-and often to vote or serve on juries. Alexander calls this permanent second-class citizenship a new form of segregation.
http://tinyurl.com/75hn3qj
Black pastors urge followers to join Occupy fold
The Rev. Harold Mayberry stood before his First African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation Sunday morning in Oakland and outlined how it was time for members to connect with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Nationally, many African American leaders have acknowledged a disconnect between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the larger black community.
http://tinyurl.com/6rqj8fv
Why I’m Suing Barack Obama
[Chris Hedges] Attorneys Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran filed a complaint Friday in the Southern U.S. District Court in New York City on my behalf as a plaintiff against Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to challenge the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force as embedded in the latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed by the president Dec. 31.
The act authorizes the military in Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” for the first time in more than 200 years, to carry out domestic policing. With this bill, which will take effect March 3, the military can indefinitely detain without trial any U.S. citizen deemed to be a terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. And suspects can be shipped by the military to our offshore penal colony in Guantanamo Bay and kept there until “the end of hostilities.” It is a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.
I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge. I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have “disappeared” into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.
http://tinyurl.com/8yd3cbk
In Washington, State bank idea gains support among Occupiers and Democrats who control the state house
State government stores money at Bank of America, buys goods with U.S. Bank cards, and distributes welfare aid through JP Morgan Chase ATMs.
Supporters of cutting such ties to big banks say the first step is creating the state’s own bank.
The idea of a state bank – a favorite of the Occupy movement that sees it as an alternative to Wall Street – has strong support among the Democrats who control the state House. Speaker Frank Chopp called it a top priority last week in a speech opening this year’s session of the Legislature.
Occupy Movements as Media Spectacle
Dramatic news and events are presented as media spectacles and dominate certain news cycles. Stories like the 9/11 terror attacks, Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama and the 2008 U.S. presidential election were produced and multiplied as media spectacles which were central events of their era. In 2011, the Arab Uprisings, the Libyan revolution, the UK Riots, the Occupy movements and the other major media spectacles cascaded through broadcasting, print, and digital media, seizing people’s attention and emotions, and generating complex and multiple effects that may make 2011 as memorable a year in the history of social upheaval as 1968 and perhaps one as significant.
2011 in retrospect appears as a year of Popular Uprisings in an era of cascading media spectacle.
http://tinyurl.com/7kfvtak
Petaluma joins national movement to address the idea of corporate personhood
Petaluma joined a growing number of cities Monday in calling for a constitutional amendment that would address the idea of corporate personhood and limit political spending by corporations.
http://tinyurl.com/7k6n6lh
Campaigns embrace ‘Occupy’ themes – Local and national figures seek to appeal to the 99%
It came to prominence when demonstrators vowing to represent the 99 percent condemned corporate malfeasance, lopsided executive salaries and the distribution of wealth from the middle to the top. Four months later, the grievances of Occupy Wall Street have become a pillar of campaigns from Washington, D.C., to San Diego.
The amalgamation of deepening distrust in the American institutions of Washington and Wall Street, the sluggish job and housing markets and the growing prospect that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney may become the Republican presidential nominee has helped thrust tenets of the Occupy movement into the political sphere.
http://tinyurl.com/6r9u6mw
Occupy and the Tragedy Facing the 1%
“What rights do we have?” “Why do we have to change our lifestyle to allow for people to block our streets and stop us from going to restaurants, meetings, salons, etc. Enough is enough, what about our rights?…My wife cannot go to the spa after work and we have stopped going out to eat…”
This whining letter from a member of Washington D.C.’s 1%, which was among the documents we received at the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund in response to our recent FOIA requests, was apparently attention-grabbing enough to be circulated and shared between the D.C. Mayor’s office and the D.C. Chief of Police as they contemplated whether to follow the example of other big-city mayors and law enforcement agencies and try to close down an Occupy encampment in the nation’s capital.
When the 1% speaks (or just whines) — politicians listen. “Whose streets?” “Their streets” it seems.
In the wake of apparently coordinated police raids and evictions on Occupy encampments around the country, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has undertaken a major Freedom of Information Act initiative. We are working to force public disclosure of government documents on coordination and discussion between federal and local law enforcement and Mayors’ offices in the assault against the Occupy movement.
http://tinyurl.com/7enwu3n
Corporate Personhood Cannot Withstand Organized Persons
The U.S. Constitution never gave any rights or personhood to corporations or transformed money into speech. It ought not to be necessary to amend a document to, in effect, point out that the sky is blue and up is not down. If the Supreme Court rules that Goldman Sachs can send legislation directly to the White House and cut out the congressional middleman, will we have to amend the Constitution to remove the Goldman Sachs branch of government? Where will this end?
The Constitution also never gave the Supreme Court the power to overturn every law passed by Congress. In fact, the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to set exceptions and regulations on what types of cases the Supreme Court can take. So, Congress could take some types of cases away, although it might have to be a great many.
The Constitution also allows the Congress to impeach and remove Supreme Court justices. Congress could remove the most corrupt one or two or three or four or five and only consent to new justices opposed to corporate personhood.
Congress could also just ignore the Supreme Court on this matter and pass a flood of legislation regulating and stripping corporations of their outrageous claims to power, compelling the court to take up case after case.
The reason none of these things is happening is, of course, the weak link smack in the middle of them: Congress.
http://tinyurl.com/8a74w34
UK ‘already back in recession’, warn forecasters
The UK is likely to already be in recession, according to two highly regarded economic forecasters, as developments in the eurozone paralyse the country’s recovery.
MF Global May Not Be Able to Pay Clients Back: Trustee
Former customers of MF Global Holdings’ collapsed brokerage were disappointed to hear on Thursday that the trustee hunting for funds missing from their accounts has no immediate plans to transfer more money to them.
. . .
Giddens and his team of lawyers said they may not be able to make another mass transfer of funds above the roughly $3.8 billion they have already paid out. That figure represents about 72 percent of the total money held in customer accounts when the firm went under, leaving many customers still thousands or millions of dollars out of pocket.
http://tinyurl.com/7kvpzp6
Romney’s Bain Job Count Goes From 100,000 to ‘Thousands’ in Six Days
Faced with attacks from the left, right, leftish, righter and center forward, Mitt Romney has spent his days in South Carolina focusing on trying to make people forget about Bain by talking about it constantly. After Sarah Palin and the rest of the world called out Romney, or at least called on him to get more specific about the alleged 100,000 jobs his work at Bain created, Romney decided to say Thursday that there was “proof” of those jobs on the websites of the companies that he didn’t bankrupt. But for the most part, the “100,000” is being dropped from the playbook.
In fact, in a matter of six days, it looks like the Romney camp has gone from saying “over a hundred thousand jobs” to “tens of thousands of jobs” to rolls-off-the-tongue “thousands of jobs.”
Why The GOP Suddenly Dreads A Long Primary Process
There was a time when Republicans wanted a primary more drawn-out than in previous years. They even tweaked their primary rules for allotting delegates so that the process would take a little bit longer, the goal being that the contest would draw attention and create momentum going into the general election. Not anymore. Now, they want the primary to wrap up quickly, and they’re using the South Carolina deadline to frame the race as in the home stretch.
Once Newt Gingrich and the super PAC behind him unleashed their anti-Bain attacks, and Rick Perry tagged along with comments about “vulture capitalism,” Republicans have re-evaluated their desire for a more protracted battle. As Dave Weigel has pointed out, it’s one thing for Democrats to give a liberal critique of Bain Capital-style capitalism, but it lends those critiques a whole new level of respectability when it comes out of the mouths of conservatives like Gingrich and Perry. For all the spin we usually see on TV, Republicans are pretty clear that this is a serious concern.
http://tinyurl.com/7rn3ke6
Could Colbert actually win in South Carolina?
If Colbert wins it will in effect be a win for ‘none of the above’. Instead of leaving SC three for three, Romney will head into Super Tuesday having lost to a joke candidate. Not good for any candidate but a catastrophe for the ‘inevitable’ nominee.
http://tinyurl.com/6or2vrf
LAPD levels wild charge of ‘lynching’ at Occupy protester
An Occupy Los Angeles protester was arrested by police at Thursday night’s Art Walk on suspicion of lynching. Sergio Ballesteros, 30, was arrested Thursday night at 8:45pm. His bail was set at $50,000, according to the Sheriff’s inmate locator. He was arrested on suspicion of lynching, LAPD Officer Yi Lian told LAist.
“Lynching” might not be what you’re thinking: it is a felony charge that describes taking a person from the custody of police officers by means of a riot-or attempting to do so. Sue Basko, an attorney who has been giving Occupy Los Angeles activists legal advice, writes at the Occupy Los Angeles site that based on the video and the accounts of what happened at Art Walk, the “lynching” charge is trumped-up:
The police would have to be saying there was a riot, which does not seem to be the case, unless you count police behavior. Two or more people would have to be engaging in this riot and using it to take someone from police custody. Who are the two people? Where is the riot? Who was in police custody and was taken from it? Sergio alone cannot be [engaging] in a lynching, because it takes two or more people. None of these things appear to have happened.
http://tinyurl.com/7gyryrl
Nigerian unions call off national strike
Union leaders in Nigeria have called off a week-long nationwide strike that has been paralysing the country’s economy, following a decision by Goodluck Jonathan, the Nigerian president, to roll back fuel-price increases.
People demonstrate against capitalism in Germany
Several thousand people have demonstrated in Germany against capitalism. Under the slogan “a different world is possible” protesters called for system change demanding real democracy. Protests organized by the Occupy-movement took place in more than 20 cities across the country.
Up to a thousand people took to the streets in Berlin. In the financial heartland of Frankfurt 300 people protested against the power of the banks. Munich, Dusseldorf, Hanover and Hamburg saw further demonstrations.
A protest camp in Berlin has been evicted by riot police earlier this week, but organizers already prepare the next protests and with further austerity measures looming while economic growth has significantly slowed down the occupy movement is likely to gather more support in future.
http://tinyurl.com/8y524zu
Occupy Nova Scotia to Participate in International Bahrain Solidarity Day
Occupy movements around the globe, in recognition of solidarity with Arab Spring protestors, and in particular the struggles faced by the Bahraini dissidents, have declared an international Bahrain Solidarity Day slated for January 17th.
Maori group threatens to occupy site near New Zealand beach if proposed quarry project goes ahead
Local iwi are considering an appeal or setting up camp and occupying the area.
“The quarry as far as we’re concerned will dissipate our ancestor, and our ancestors are buried within these sacred lands,” said George Manuirirangi, chairman of Ngati Tu Hapu.
The local council said it is aware of the concerns, and that the project will only go ahead if certain obligations are met.