Tents gone, students turn to Occupy 2.0
Since students have returned from winter break, Occupy Harvard has held two meetings each week to plan the movement’s next phase: Occupy 2.0, Korn explained. “The idea behind Occupy 2.0 is transitioning from our physical encampment to more cohesive, disruptive, interesting, fun, targeted actions,” she said.
Among these actions, Occupy Harvard has begun working on the No Layoffs Campaign with SLAM (Student Labor Action Movement). The No Layoffs Campaign gained considerable attention in 2008 when students participated in a wave of demonstrations as the university laid off several staff workers. This year the campaign aims to protest on behalf of the library staff, many of whom will be laid off due to a restructuring of the library system, according to university administration.
Occupy Harvard has also joined with the Occupy UMass Boston movement only established more than a week ago. Occupy Harvard has lent tents, solidarity signs and other resources to the students at UMass in an effort to show “we are all students fighting the same fight,” Korn said.
Tipped workers – 72.9 percent of whom are women – hope for hike in sub-minimum wage this year
“Thanks to the Occupy movement, more voters are aware of inequality and the terrible toll it takes on low-wage workers and their families,” says Amy Hanauer, executive director of Policy Matters Ohio. “Support is growing for increasing the minimum wage of tipped workers who work hard, but have fallen farther and farther behind because their wages don’t cover their basic needs.”
The pay of tipped workers has languished because an obscure federal provision, called the tip credit, has established a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers: $2.15 per hour or $4,333 a year for a full-time worker. The federal full minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, or about $15,000 a year for a 40-hour workweek.
Raising the minimum wage may alleviate what researcher Sylvia A. Allegretto calls an under-appreciated factor in the poverty of women.
“The sub-minimum wage hits women hard because 72.9 percent of tipped workers are women compared to less than half the overall labor force,” says Allegretto, co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment of the University of California, Berkeley.
The United States: First Country To Report More Male Rape Victims Than Female
In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That’s 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year.
The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.
As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it.
Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon- that is, one of total surveillance-America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.
Falling out of the Middle Class
Nearly one in two Americans is now living on the lower end of the income scale, according to the Census Bureau. For a family of four that’s less than $45,000 a year. These are three families who are falling out of the middle class.
http://tinyurl.com/7tefm2j
Homeless Families, Cloaked in Normality
Unlike in the 1980s, when the crisis was defined by AIDS patients or men who slept on church steps, these days it has become more likely that a seemingly ordinary family, rushing about on public transportation with Elmo bags and video games, could be without a home.
Of New York’s more than 40,000 homeless people in shelters – enough to fill the stands at Citi Field – about three-quarters now belong to families like the Lewises and are cloaked in a deceptive, superficial normalcy. They do not sleep outside or on cots on armory floors. By and large, their shoes are good; some have smartphones. Many get up each morning and leave the shelter to go to work or to school. Their hardships – poverty, unemployment, a marathon commute – exist out of sight.
Attorney’s general and Obama administration’s mortgage fraud settlement is a stealth bank bailout
The settlement amounts to a transfer from retirement accounts (pension funds, 401 (k)s) and insurers to the banks. And without this subsidy, the biggest banks would be in serious trouble.
. . .
The Obama Administration may have decided that investors have acted enough like patsies, given how they have failed to react to rampant servicer abuses, that they judge the risk of investor litigation and a related PR embarrassment to be small. But this battle is not yet over. The rumblings I am hearing from investor-land remind of the sections of the Lord of the Rings when the Ents were finally roused. It isn’t yet clear that investors will act, but if they do, the Administration will be unprepared for the vehemence of their response.
Commentary: Our disappearing civil liberties
Sure, the argument goes; it would be nice to hold on firmly to our liberties. But we are at war, and in wartime you have to sacrifice some of them. You can get back to normal after the war is over.
But the war on terror is a permanent war, fought against an ill-defined enemy and with no discernible end. There will be no Appomattox this time, no Potsdam, no Treaty of Versailles.
If you suspend your freedoms for the duration of a war that will never end, then those freedoms do not exist.
Occupy LA announces meeting with Wells Fargo Bank over home foreclosures
Representatives of the Occupy Los Angeles movement announced today that they plan to meet with Wells Fargo Bank executives on Monday, February 6 to discuss possible remedial measures the bank can take to ease the foreclosure-fraud problem. According to the Occupy activists, the meeting with Wells Fargo will be the first of its kind in the nation in which bank executives and Occupiers come together to discuss the economic issues which led to the Occupy protests that began on Wall Street last September.
Occupy Dayton gets new digs – With permanent office, group’s focus turns to political process
Occupy Dayton has relocated from downtown tents to a permanent office in East Dayton that has helped it become more focused on political initiatives.
Getting a permanent home is a big step for Occupy Dayton, said Lunay, which in December lost its camp in Courthouse Square. Maintaining the camp put a lot of pressure on the group and took most of its energy, she said.
“It’s much nicer to be able to focus on getting in there and changing legislation,” Lunay said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re working at – ballot (initiatives) and things of that regard, on a local level as well as statewide.”
http://tinyurl.com/6nm9cy3
Socially responsible investment fund managers equivocate, weakly resist idea of avoiding for-profit health insurers and too-big-to-fail banks
The mutual-fund industry began offering products based on this idea in the 1970s, and Morningstar Inc. recently identified 199 mutual funds and 23 exchange-traded funds as socially responsible. Among the industries these funds typically shun are those connected to tobacco, alcohol, pollution, weapons and authoritarian regimes.
But some involved in socially responsible investing, or SRI, say two recent developments-a long, acrimonious debate about health-care finance and the worst financial crisis in 80 years-may prompt some socially responsible investors to take a closer look at two other sectors: for-profit health insurers and too-big-to-fail banks.
People now see it is a system for the rich only
The Occupy groups have been conveniently dismissed by the right as lacking an agenda. In this regard the Tea Party ironically sets a good example for the Occupiers, for deep below the Tea Party’s surface chaos is a focus: “no new taxes”. (That this means inevitably reneging on commitments to the ageing population or changing the laws of maths is not mentioned but that is another story.)
Within the Occupiers’ complaints there is also a central theme and it should be made loud and clear: “social justice and tax schedules in particular have moved against the working poor”.
Former Salt Lake City mayor and now Justice Party candidate: Overthrow the ‘dictatorship of money’
Rocky Anderson is always deferential to Occupy Wall Street when asked about the movement, most recently in a Jan. 31 interview with the online environmental magazine Grist. Occupy has been a “very healthy thing in this country,” and there’s an “enormous convergence” between its concerns and his. But for inspiration, the Justice Party candidate points to Tahrir Square, not Zucotti Park.
“One of the great inspirations for us was what we saw in much of the Arab world, where people were intent on overthrowing their nations’ dictators,” he told Grist’s special projects editor Greg Hanscom during a wide-ranging Q&A. “… They put their lives on the line, utilizing democratized means of communication through social networking and engaging in classic grassroots organizing – and they succeeded.”
http://tinyurl.com/7warzqk
Flag burning becoming Occupy Oakland’s signature gesture after protesters light another one up
Another American flag was burned at an Occupy Oakland rally late Saturday, capping off a smaller, more peaceful march compared to last weekend’s burst of violence.
Local news media reported that there were only dozens of protesters who marched Saturday night, and there were no reports of violent clashes with police.