Citizens United uniting citizens across the country
[For information about actions against Citizen’s United in the Boston area Jan. 20-21, go here: http://tinyurl.com/6ueezzw]
“The U.S. is a great place to be a corporation but increasingly a desperate place to live and work.” – A member of Occupy Boston, challenging Mitt Romney on his statement that corporations are persons.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the controversial Supreme Court case decided by a narrow majority of 5 justices in 2010, may have the consequence of uniting citizens across the country at the local level – in opposition to the ruling. “Occupy the Courts” actions, sponsored by Move to Amend and other groups including various Occupy sites, are being planned to mark the 2-year anniversary of the decision which allows corporations to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections.
http://tinyurl.com/7qdebja
Protest foils Lynn foreclosure auction
Sixty-one-year-old Cheryl D’Amico spent the past few months going to bed afraid. “I was fearful someone would knock on my door and ask me to leave my house,” she said on a sidewalk outside her Lynn home. D’Amico came close to that nightmare scenario Tuesday when a foreclosure auctioneer arrived at her Lexington Avenue home to sell it to the highest bidder.
http://tinyurl.com/8yb2bnc
Coast Guard deployed to protect grain ship that will be met by union and Occupy protesters
The U.S. Coast Guard will escort the first ship coming to the EGT grain terminal at the Port of Longview this month, and the Occupy movement and local labor groups say they are planning to greet the vessel with a massive protest.
EGT officials say they have not scheduled a date for the ship’s arrival. The freighter is expected to haul thousands of tons of grain to Asia, but opposition groups are already marshaling their forces to support the lengthy protest by union dock workers at the grain terminal.
The Coast Guard will deploy one or two vessels to escort the grain ship up the Columbia River, with more on call if necessary, said Lt. Lucas Elder, a spokesman for Coast Guard’s Portland-based marine safety unit. Other law-enforcement agencies will also be present, he said. Small boat captains who refuse to get out of the way of the ship could face hefty civil penalties, Elder said.
Occupying the future
In less than three months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has gone from inhabiting hundreds of physical spaces in large cities, to occupying public discussion and action in thousands of small communities everywhere, including here in Maine.
Instead of city parks, the decamped occupiers opened up vast public space in the American cultural and political landscape, and made it possible, finally, to discuss and debate once taboo subjects vital to a healthy democracy. The “99 percent to 1 percent” frame succeeded because it resonated deeply with the experiences of hard working people everywhere and touched off an emotional tsunami for fairness, justice and decency.
Occupy now accompanies the news shows, and gives voice to endless costly wars, illegal bank foreclosures, ransacked 401Ks, high unemployment, extreme wealth inequality, the disappearance of the middle class, corporate greed, polluter profiteering, a bought political system, and increasing homelessness, hunger, union busting, voter suppression, student loan debt and much more.
Occupy Atlanta aiding church damaged by tornado that is now threatened by foreclosure
Activists with Occupy Atlanta have set up camp at a local church where they are fighting the possible eviction of the congregation.
“We’re fighting not for brick and mortar, but we’re fighting for a 108-year-old legacy,” said the church’s pastor, Dexter Johnson. Johnson called on the Occupy movement for help saving Higher Ground Empowerment Center on Spencer Street in Atlanta’s Vine City community.
http://tinyurl.com/7qvc3wl
Texas Protestors Greet Wisconsin’s Walker on fundraising junket
Earlier today, more than 125 Texans greeted Scott Walker on his fundraising trip to Austin. Walker was the keynote speaker at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual policy orientation for Texas legislators.
Occupy Austin, the Texas AFL-CIO and the Austin community held a rally to support Wisconsin workers and to protest Walker’s anti-worker agenda. Since taking office more than a year ago, Walker has staged an all out war on the middle class by stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights, raising taxes on the poor, slashing education and health care funding all while giving millions of dollars in tax breaks to corporate allies and the mega-rich.
Huffpo says Goldman Sachs has recovered its reputation based on survey from firm owned by UK conservative politicians
[For more about the polling firm YouGov, go here http://tinyurl.com/7eagpp3 (How YouGov Fixed Debate Poll), here http://tinyurl.com/7yspedc (YouGov Push Polling), and here http://tinyurl.com/7hzupx3 (YouGov Summary)
Occupy Wall Street supporters surely will be none too pleased by this. Goldman Sachs has returned to levels of popularity not seen since a 2010 lawsuit alleging fraud during the subprime mortgage crisis severely damaged the company’s reputation, according to a You Gov BrandIndex survey.
OccupyLA Public Health Concerns Were Overstated in the Press
Great report by Dan Bluemel of the L.A. Activist on the supposed “public health concerns” cited in the press as a pretext to clear the Occupy LA camp. If you’ll recall, in the run-up to the LAPD clearing of the City Hall camp, numerous press reports detailed the “obvious problem” of lice, staph infections and general uncleanliness. A November 18 editorial in the LA Times cited these concerns as among the chief reasons the city needed to clear the camp.
Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg told Bluemel an LAPD spokesman told them about the lice and unsanitary conditions. The Times, however, apparently did not adequately confirm those conditions with public health officials.
Writes Bluemel: [O]n the same day of the Times’ article, Bellomo sent a letter to Gaye Williams, Villaraigosa’s chief of staff, stating quite the opposite. In the matter of toilets, wastewater disposal, food safety, personal hygiene and refuse and debris removal, Bellomo reported minor infractions that were quickly remedied, and noted that bottled water had been “in adequate supply.”
http://tinyurl.com/6r9ryhd
Rightwing media dismayed that CNN newscaster said of Anonymous: ‘the majority of them are just average Joe Americans’
Explaining the cause behind Anonymous and noting how they call themselves the “Air Force” of the Occupy movement is more like free publicity for the group than a critical investigation. Though CNN mentioned members’ arrests at the hands of the FBI, Lyon also pointed out during the 3 p.m. hour of Newsroom how “the majority of them are just average Joe Americans.”
http://tinyurl.com/82kbedx
Obama to hand Commerce Dept. authority over cybersecurity ID
President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.
It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.
http://tinyurl.com/3yn2s33
Homeland Security Is In Your Tweets, Waiting For Your Revolution
The biggest takeaway from the publicly available list of publicly available sites that the DHS monitors is that Twitter appears to be officially Important, despite the ridiculous volume of crap that it publishes (to sift through it all, the DHS uses no less than 13 different trend sites and six search sites).
Occupy Wall Street Joins Occupy The Dream: Is It Cooptation, or Growing the Movement?
The Occupy Wall Street movement has, to date, “been effective in warding off cooptation by Democratic Party fronts such as Rebuild The Dream and MoveOn.org.” But OWS’s recent alliance with Black clergy-based (and Russell Simmons-backed) Occupy The Dream raises serious questions in this election year. “It appears that Occupy Wall Street’s new Black affiliate is also in ‘lock-step’ with the corporate Democrat in the White House.”
http://tinyurl.com/6u7sqkf
Lock ‘Em Up, Throw Away Their Dignity
There is an almost uniquely Calvinist mindset in much of America that is deterministic to the point of barbarity about punishment and reward. Income inequality is tolerated because the rich must have done something to deserve that wealth. Similarly, those who are poor must have been too lazy or too unloved in the eyes of Providence to better their condition. The mindset shows up in our debate over abortion, where abortion as a result of consensual sex is often frowned on, but abortion in the case of rape or incest is mostly accepted outside the far-right fringe because in the latter case, the poor woman didn’t deserve to be burdened with the pregnancy. This has always been one of the ugliest facets of American culture, and it remains so to this day.
Nowhere is this view more brutally repulsive than in our attitude toward criminal punishment.
Romney: Income inequality should only be discussed in ‘quiet rooms’
Andy Rosenthal gets a bit of a laugh out of Mitt Romney’s insistence that the only reason anyone would talk about inequality is the “politics of envy”, and that if the subject is discussed at all, it should only be in “quiet rooms”.
http://tinyurl.com/6qru3w8
Mitt Romney and our overdue debate about capitalism
Thanks to Mitt Romney and such well-known socialist intellectuals as Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, the United States is about to have the big debate on the nature of modern capitalism that should have started back in 2008. The focus will be on whether some kinds of capitalism are bad for the system as a whole.
As a political matter, the discussion will be a classic test of an old Karl Rove theory that the best way to undercut an opponent is to attack him in his area of perceived strength. Romney’s central claim is that his business experience prepares him to be the nation’s great job creator. That message runs into some difficulty if he is seen instead as a job _destroyer.
With folding of Occupy tents, homeless left out in the cold
When Occupy Philly was ordered to leave the plaza, most of its homeless members left first. They didn’t want to get arrested; but some of them did want to maintain the higher standard of living those tents had made possible. In the dead of night, and with the help of a pickup truck, a small group relocated to empty land in the city’s Port Richmond section, owned by Conrail.
They called it “Camp Liberty.” But, within a day, Conrail officials ordered the encampment vacated.
From Camp Liberty, they trekked to an I-95 overpass a few blocks away. And yet again they were told — this time by SEPTA which owns that property — to leave.
http://tinyurl.com/85dhnld
After Encampment Ends, NYC Occupiers Become Nomads
This is what the Occupy encampment has become: a band of homeless protesters with no place to go. Amid accusations of drug use and sporadic theft, they’ve been sleeping on church pews for weeks, consuming at least $20,000 of the donations that Occupy Wall Street still has in its coffers. Their existence is being hotly debated at Occupy meetings: Are these people truly “Occupiers” who deserve free food and a roof over their heads?
“We don’t do this out of charity,” said 34-year-old Ravi Ahmad, who works for Columbia University and volunteers with Occupy in her spare time. “We do this so that whoever wants to work in the movement can work in the movement. This is a meritocracy.”
Will Occupy OC Rifts Destroy the Anti-Corporate Greed Protests?
While two Occupy leaders outlined negotiations with Fullerton officials about upcoming rallies and a possible encampment site–Brea Dam, the mostly college-aged crowd listened intently and afterwards seemed eager to participate in future protests against corporate abuses.
But the sedate vibe belied increasing bitter tensions inside the movement and speculation amongst Occupiers that personality clashes could soon kill the left-leaning protests.
http://tinyurl.com/78qsmoh
DJ Spooky, Occupy Wall Street, and the Frictions of Radical Chic
When DJ Spooky invited the Occupy Wall Street Library to hold a book-party / dance-party at the chichi Vandam club Work in Progress, it was an open question how the revolutionary politics of the occupation and the glitz of the downtown nightclub scene would mesh.
The answer is: Not at all. The collaboration ended early with harsh words between the librarians and the club’s management, as the occupiers packed up their books and left just as DJ Spooky was beginning his set for the club’s well-dressed patrons.
http://tinyurl.com/7tlaykc
Cummings Questions Issa’s Priorities in Occupy DC Probe
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) appears to be in the early stages of launching an investigation into the Department of the Interior’s handling of the Occupy DC encampment at McPherson Square, an effort that his panel’s top Democrat thinks is a waste of time.
“Our committee has the power to achieve great benefits investigating waste, fraud and abuse on behalf of the American people,” Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement provided to Roll Call, “but investigating Occupy Wall Street protestors is a poor use of our resources and authority.”
http://tinyurl.com/74y8mec
Occupy South Whidbey: Protest movement will make its first stand in Freeland
Inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the “Occupy” demonstrations in large cities across the country, dozens of South Whidbey residents have been gathering each week to map out how they, too, can make a difference.
Later this week, members of “Occupy South Whidbey” will gather for its first political action: a sidewalk protest outside the Chase Bank branch in Freeland.
According to Occupy South Whidbey member Jim Hyde, the protest is meant to draw attention to the massive profits of Chase – $4.26 billion in the third quarter of 2011 alone, he said – and the financial giant’s role in the ongoing financial crisis. The demonstration starts at 3 p.m.
Nationwide ‘Occupy’ strike paralyzes Nigeria
Thick black smoke and flames rose Tuesday from the burning roadblock that cut off a highway linking Nigeria’s mainland to the islands where the oil-rich nation’s wealthy live. The bare-chested young men who live under the bridge said they had had enough.
“This is oligarchy, this is not a democracy!” shouted Danjuma Mohammed, as he stood before the fire holding rocks in his hands. “We are no longer afraid of you! We are ready for war!”
As the paralyzing nationwide strike called by labor unions Nigeria entered its second day Tuesday, protests by those angered by government corruption and inaction drew tens of thousands to the streets and remain largely peaceful.
http://tinyurl.com/6vafjf4
Nigerian Streets On Fire, Borders Ordered Closed
Angry protesters set up burning tire roadblocks on major streets and highways in Lagos demanding reversal of fuel subsidy removal. They also demand government must fight corruption. The flaming tires sent thick black smoke over much of Ikoyi Island, the residential home of foreign diplomats and wealthy Nigerians.
http://tinyurl.com/7xh579n