Occupy Wall Street-NYC Builds Momentum for Spring Resurgence: Launches 5-Week Bus Trip and will arrive in Boston today
Early Wednesday morning, nearly two dozen occupiers boarded a 24 seat conversion bus in Brooklyn. For the next five weeks, members of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) from New York City will be touring the Northeast to connect with other occupations.
“Interoccupy communications and face to face community building is a key step in growing solidarity in a global movement,” says Austin Guest, member of the OWS Direct Action group. At each stop along the trip, occupiers will share skills and knowledge with each other. By building relationships between occupations, occupiers are setting the stage for nationally coordinated actions.
http://tinyurl.com/6me9k85
[OWS-NYC Occupiers will be attending OB events all weekend and Monday for skill sharing/building and to strengthen bonds]
MassUniting and Occupy Boston march on GE with a simple message: “PAY YOUR FUCKING TAXES”
Everyone who met in Dewey Square this afternoon had one thing in common – whether they’re an activist with MassUniting, a member of Occupy Boston, or one of the police officers assigned to chaperone today’s protest. They all paid a lot more taxes than General Electric last year.
And so the group of roughly 100 pissed off people poured across Atlantic Avenue, and marched one block from Dewey to GE’s Boston offices on Summer Street. Their message was simple: “Pay your fucking taxes!” They even brought an invoice for the company.
Insights and predictions 2012: More resistance needed
There is only one way things will get better, and that is politicians and bankers and the oligarchs start fearing the population, and believing that the military and police can’t protect them. The longer citizens insist on being “nice” and letting oligarchs steal their future, beat them, imprison them, take their homes, their jobs and their lives, the longer the oligarchs and their servants will do so. Why shouldn’t they?
Wages of austerity on display in Britain – its economy is now doing worse than it did in the great depression
The Cameron-Osborne policies of expansion-through-austerity have produced a flatline for real GDP, and the odds are high that British real GDP is headed down again. In less than a year, if current forecasts come true, the Cameron-Osborne Depression will not be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but the worst depression in Britain… probably ever. That is quite an accomplishment.
As Phillip Inman of the Guardian puts it:
the UK’s plan for recovery from the financial crisis was based on a full-throttle recovery in 2012… consumer confidence, business investment and general spending would converge to send the economy on a trajectory of above-average growth… the lack of investment will perplex ministers. They have done what the right-wing economists told them to do and moved out of the way – the theory being that public sector spending and investment was ‘crowding out’ the private sector…
It did not work: “Spain is showing the way with its austerity-driven recession. Where the weak tread, we [in Britain] look keen to follow…”
http://tinyurl.com/7vqpufe
New-home purchases fall, 2011 worst ever for sales
Fewer Americans bought new homes in December. The decline made 2011 the worst year for new-home sales on records dating back nearly half a century.
http://tinyurl.com/7e7dspm
Conservative historian: Global capitalism, free trade, threaten to destroy democracy
[Francis Fukuyama’s] essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, explained that “some very troubling economic and social trends, if they continue, will both threaten the stability of contemporary liberal democracies and dethrone democratic ideology as it is now understood.”
Yikes. What trends are those? Global capitalism, he said. Free-trade doctrine and new technology, along with the steady offloading of American jobs, are destroying the middle class-the necessary foundation for democracy in advanced economies. “What if the further development of technology and globalization undermines the middle class and makes it impossible for more than a minority of citizens in an advanced society to achieve middle-class status?” Fukuyama asked.
His alarming observations were picked up by other conservative commentators and treated respectfully, a sign that these anxieties are widely shared. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, longstanding advocate of globalization, embraced Fukuyama’s argument. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote with sympathy for the struggling white working class. It votes Republican and gets hammered by corporate capitalists in return.
Economists vs. Americans
The Financial Trust Index has been tracking public sentiment toward the financial system for more than three years. And sentiment isn’t good.
In the latest release today, the survey found that just 23% of Americans say they trust the U.S. financial system. That’s as low as the earliest months of the economic crisis. And 62% describe themselves as angry, or very angry, about the nation’s economic situation – the highest level since March 2009.
For its latest quarterly survey, the Financial Trust Index took its responses from average Americans to a series of economic assertions and put them up against the responses from an expert panel of economists. The results are striking:
Participatory democracy and the new quiet revolution
There has been a concerted effort among some members of Canada’s political, business and media elite to write off the Occupy movement as a one-off: a leaderless, unfocused, quasi-anarchic group of people who have no real business tramping about our public parks.
These criticisms stem from a traditional view of what western democracy and, specifically, representative democracy, should entail. This tradition bestows enormous power on our elected representatives.
But a new type of democracy may be slowly emerging, one that better reflects the hopes and aspirations of citizens in Canada and around the world. The Occupy movement is one part of a global political shift toward participatory democracy.
http://tinyurl.com/895sm48
What would Occupy look like if we turned it into a nonprofit?
It will become a creature of foundation funding and of the need to become “legitimate” in the eyes of other NGOs and political players. It will also lose contact with its base, people who do not want to come in from the cold, because they believe this is a position of power and integrity. Without them and the “we don’t play by your rules” attitude, what power can OWS actually muster, whether moral, popular or otherwise?
http://tinyurl.com/7faxvps
FBI would like to follow you on Facebook and Twitter
The FBI has got tired of monitoring social media sites manually and wants to reinvent the process. So, soon your posts may instantly light up on a map as a big red dot if considered suspicious, marking the location of the ‘bad actor.’
“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” says the Request for Information published by FBI on January 19.
The FBI’s ‘market research’ shows that the bureau is planning to monitor all ‘publicly available’ data on social media sites through a new game-changing system. The bureau is looking for a company which is interested in and capable of building such a system and has published a list of requirements for it.
New media driving Occupy movement, prof says
Lacking structured leadership, a single spokesperson and even a clear message, the Occupy movement has grown through the use of personal media and new technologies, sustained by participants’ own network of contacts and willingness to dive into the political fray, says a UCLA information studies professor who studies the different ways media and technology shape society and culture.
Throughout the life of the Occupy movement, dynamic social and technological factors have helped shape the character and effect of demonstrations and fueled the coverage the movement has received in the mainstream press. And Professor Leah A. Lievrouw sees the day-to-day use of mobile devices as a defining element of Occupy’s activism that has helped organizers gain momentum and support as well as ignite social, cultural and economic change.
http://tinyurl.com/7xr459w
Six million people under correctional supervision in the U.S.-more than were in Stalin’s gulags
Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today-perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system-in prison, on probation, or on parole-than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
State of Obama: Immunity for Wall Street
Empire and the banks. President Obama’s State of the Union address, bracketed by imperial bombast, made actual news with yet another administration maneuver to protect Wall Street from the wrath of the states. The remainder of his speech was mainly a rehash of previous policies, heavy on tax tinkerings that would have made a previous generation of moderate Republicans – a now extinct breed – proud.
The only newsworthy item, the creation of a “special unit of prosecutors” that the president announced would “expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis,” is not an Obama initiative, but a response to unwanted pressures.
. . .
The “special unit of prosecutors,” officially dubbed the Unit on Mortgage Origination and Securitization Abuses, is to be co-chaired by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, whom the White House had booted out of a negotiating committee because of his opposition to Obama’s banker protection racket. Last night, at the joint session of Congress, Obama sat Schneiderman in the First Lady’s box, to give the impression that he and the obstinate New Yorker had been on the same page all the time. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Obama was trying to shut down the attorney generals’ probes into banker criminality, and was finally forced to set up a federal unit of his own. However, with the “investigation” now in Obama’s hands, de facto banker immunity may have been achieved, and the puny “settlement” could soon be announced. Wall Street will be pleased, and no doubt reciprocate with hundreds of millions in campaign contributions.
Obama’s Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton
I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans … until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.
Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?
Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?
http://tinyurl.com/7rr8ros
Activist removed for her own safety after Gingrich crowd turns angry
A former Lake Worth city commissioner was removed from an event featuring Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in Coral Springs, Florida on Wednesday because authorities feared the candidate’s supporters might turn on her.
“Do you work for the people or Freddie Mac?” Cara Jennings shouted, standing about 50 feet from the candidate.
http://tinyurl.com/6qe6yjc
Surprise! Neoliberal foundation funded by Walton family and finance industry says solution to bad schools in urban areas is to privatize them (charter schools)
A new study commissioned by D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray recommends that the city turn around or close more than three dozen traditional public schools in its poorest neighborhoods and expand the number of high-performing charter schools.
http://tinyurl.com/7hru7ws
State-owned bank idea gains traction
A push to create a publicly owned financial institution in Washington has gained traction among key legislative leaders in Olympia, with 44 House members and 11 state senators signed on to bills that would put the state in the finance business.
The idea faces countless legal, financial and political obstacles. Symbolically, a State Bank of Washington faces a problem because its very name references two oft-reviled institutions: state government and the banking industry. To overcome that obstacle, the proposed legislation would establish something called the Washington Investment Trust, eliminating the troublesome words “state bank.”
Nationally and locally, the Occupy movement has brought new energy to the previously little-noticed push for state-run banks, which would be modeled after the nearly century-old Bank of North Dakota, the only state-owned bank. Now, more than a dozen states are looking at the North Dakota bank as a possible model for reducing financing costs for government services ranging from infrastructure construction to student loans. Proponents of state-owned banks in Washington and Oregon described the merits of such a bank to about two dozen local residents at a Wednesday evening meeting hosted by Occupy Vancouver.
http://tinyurl.com/6shrdl4
Occupy Burlington plans protest actions this weekend against nuclear power plant
” We condemn Judge Murtha’s decision in favor of Entergy against the democratic decision of the people and state of Vermont to shut down Vermont Yankee-a dangerous, polluting nuclear plant that has been plagued with accidents, leaks, poor maintenance, and run by a dishonest company. We stand in solidarity with the Vermont Yankee workers and support a just transition where they receive economic support and retraining.”
http://tinyurl.com/7t5gxm5
Appalachian Mountains Occupy: Dozens of Western North Carolina occupiers ‘take possession’ of federal courthouse in protest against Citizens United
Western North Carolina occupiers “took possession” last week of the Federal Building in Bryson City where federal court is held to protest a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that declared corporations are people.
“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one,” one protester’s sign proclaimed. About 50 people turned out for the Friday event, which took place in the parking lot outside the Federal Building at the corner of Veterans Boulevard and Main Street.
Swain County residents seemed generally supportive of protesters’ stance: many honked as they passed by, or called out in encouragement.
Occupy Napa and other groups marshall supporters to defend homeowner against foreclosure – BofA has sudden change of mind
They came to the historic Napa County Courthouse on Thursday afternoon ready to stand up for an embattled homeowner, using chants, video and signs attacking the banking industry.
Then the homeowner, Josie Jenkins, arrived with unexpected news for the protesters. On the day she was to have lost her Napa home to Bank of America in a foreclosure auction on the courthouse steps, she had gained a reprieve – for now.
“She’s a good neighbor and that’s important to us,” said Genji Schmeder, Jenkins’ neighbor for 20 years. “This whole thing is a disgrace. People who are lower-income are getting pushed out of the neighborhood.”
Occupy protesters disrupt NY foreclosure auction
Occupy Wall Street activists say they disrupted a foreclosure auction at Brooklyn Supreme Court by bursting into song.
Occupy organizer Michael Premo says about 100 people showed at the court Thursday afternoon and 37 were arrested. The New York Police Department could not confirm the arrests.
Premo says that when the bidding started, the protesters began singing out against the sales. He says one of the six properties up for auction was sold after protesters were handcuffed and escorted out of the courtroom.
http://tinyurl.com/7un8xwg
Threat of support rallies from Detroit Occupiers and other activists helps stop foreclosure on local coffee shop and community center
Citigroup has reached an agreement with Chris Jaszczak that will keep 1515 Broadway in downtown Detroit alive and functioning under his control and ownership. The coffee house and community center is no longer under the threat of foreclosure and eviction.
Supporters said the mobilization by Moratorium NOW!, People Before Banks, Occupy Detroit, and Occupy Our Homes was key to saving 1515.
Philadelphia 99%ers tell Wells Fargo: Pay back the millions made on bad deals!
Philadelphia area parents, students, members of Occupy Philadelphia and a host of community advocacy groups rallied at the Center City Wells Fargo branch today, calling on the bank to pay back the millions they made on bad deals with the city and the Philadelphia School District.
According to a recent report by the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, the city and School District have lost more than $332 million in net interest payments and cancellation fees related to swaps negotiated with bailed out financial institutions including Wells Fargo.
http://tinyurl.com/7sgvnzp
Colorado judge rules 4th Amendment protects Occupiers while they are in their tents
A judge has ruled that police violated two Occupy Boulder protesters’ Fourth Amendment rights when officers opened tent flaps to see whether the people inside were sleeping.
In a ruling received by attorneys Thursday, Boulder Municipal Judge Linda Cooke said the Occupy Boulder protesters did have a reasonable expectation of privacy while camping on the lawn of the Boulder County Courthouse on Pearl Street. Police did not have warrants to search the tents, and as a result, the observations of the officers will be suppressed in court.
“Society’s view of the degree of privacy afforded a person’s tent does not turn on what activities are being conducted inside,” Cooke wrote. “Rather it is the concept of a tent as a temporary abode, and all that is implied by that characterization, that gives rise to an expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.”
Cooke also disagreed with prosecutors who said that because the location of the tents was illegal, the protesters had no expectation of privacy.
In Guelph [Canada], parents with children in baby strollers plan “occupy” protest at skating rink from which they are prohibited
Leslie Shapiro wants to skate on the City of Guelph’s outdoor rink at Market Square with her young daughter in tow in a stroller. However, the rules of the new rink forbid her to do so. It was only a couple weeks ago, when she was told by staff that she wasn’t permitted to be on the ice with her baby stroller.
“These rules really alienate young families,” she said. “People who have young children need extra support and Guelph seems to be unwilling to give that.”
On Saturday morning, between 11 a.m. and noon, Shapiro is encouraging other mothers with strollers to come out and skate on the rink. She said they expect to be peaceful, but don’t anticipate leaving the rink, if asked. Get Juiced is offering the families free hot chocolate after the skate and Shapiro expects to gather with other parents to have a discussion on the issue.
ACTA action: Poland signs up to ‘censorship’ as 20,000 rage against ‘SOPA big brother’
After days of protests and hacker attacks, Poland has signed the controversial ACTA copyright protection treaty. Opponents call it an assault on online freedom, since it demands that internet service providers police user activity.
. . .
The agreement, which has already been signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, has been criticized by human rights groups for the secrecy, in which it has been developed, and the potential for abuse it poses.
The deal has been compared to the SOPA/PIPA bills, which drew worldwide opposition and an internet strike, once the danger the posed became widely publicized. It the case of ACTA, the public remained mostly unaware of its nature, before the hacktivist group Anonymous spread the message.
One Response to “The OB Media Rundown for 1/27/12”
Like to offer a bit of an “elder view”, if folks don’t mind … age 71, degrees in religion and law, working poor most of my adult life, lived in and around Berkeley CA from 1969 – 1982, almost 14 years. Retired social philosopher … and occasional fool.
Language can create prisons and boxes that we don’t even notice. The past lives in language, and often keeps out the present and the future. For example, the use of such terms and concepts as: “nationally coordinated actions”; “occupiers”; “There is only one way things will get better, and that is politicians and bankers and the oligarchs start fearing the population,..”
“Us and Them” language actually misses the reality. The 1% is as much involved and part of any solution as the 99%. An honest reading of the history of the poltical ’60’s is that the Country turned to the Right, not the Left. “Coordinated actions” fed the will of the establishment. This reactive pull to the Right actually forced even the Democrats into the Center (Clinton etc.).
The Lords of Finance (see my essay “Uncommon Sense” http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/degeneration.html ) saw the financial collapse coming, and knew that this would result in left style political actions, which is why they created the Patriot Act, and began defining “protest” as domestic terrorism. The final stone in that edifice is giving the President the power to disappear people.
Attacks on the Internet are born in the same far-seeing efforts of the Lords – they know they will have to control it. Homeland security building up police forces is a similar strategic move. All Occupy groups have spies and agent provocateurs in them – don’t be naive and pretend otherwise.
There are a lot of similar social/political phenomena, all of which point to the fact that the Lords are prepared for a repeat of the ’60’s. They too think the past, and a lot of the Occupy work is filled with thinking that hasn’t yet escaped the Left’s immature social/political thinking of decades ago.
Time to step back and realize some of us “elders” may know some stuff about which the young are frequently clueless. At the same time, something wonderful in the spirit of the Occupy Movement (as well as the Arab Spring) is coming from the future. People’s hearts are in the right place, but a head which thinks superficially will not see what needs to be seen. As was noted in the beginning of OWS-NYC, there is as yet no real social/political philsophy – no deep new thinking that belongs to our time, and not to the ’60’s. Got to think the present and the future and stop repeating the failed past actions of the Left from the ’60’s. The hearts of the young carry the future, but the wise elder heads of this time also know stuff to which those hearts need to listen.
Want details? See my “Economic and Sociel Rebellion”: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Rebellion.html
joel