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Occupy movement spreads to Dorchester
The Occupy movement, which has already spread to Jamaica Plain, Allston and out to suburban communities, now has taken root in Dorchester. “We need to use the momentum of Occupy Boston to work on progress here,” said Akunna Eneh, a 29-year-old Dorchester resident and one of Occupy Dorchester’s organizers. The group of residents and activists held its first “General Assembly” Wednesday night at the Dorchester House Health Center in Fields Corner to discuss how they could use the message and tactics of the Occupy movement to bring change to Dorchester. http://tinyurl.com/7mt8ymj ‘Occupy Boston’ Holds On As Other Camps Close (radio) It’s been almost six months since the Occupy Wall Street movement started in New York City. In most cities, the encampments have been shut down and street protests have dwindled. But in Boston, the movement’s organizers are trying out new tactics and strategies to keep their message alive. Climate Referees in Boston (1st Stop of Country Tour) Over 60 people dressed in referee outfits protested outside Sen. Scott Brown’s district office in Boston this afternoon to “blow the whistle” on the unseemly reality that Sen. Brown has taken over $1.9 million from fossil fuel interests since being elected and now supports moves in Congress to revive the Keystone XL pipeline, expand offshore drilling, gut the Clean Air Act, and to put taxpayer money towards subsidizing the fossil fuel industry. The action is part of an evolving strategy on the part of pipeline protesters, who are looking at new ways to take the pipeline fight off of Capitol Hill and back into districts across the country. http://tinyurl.com/7h4jawj
If you were anywhere near Harvard Business School last Saturday you might have seen a 12-foot tall puppet dancing to accordion music while a merry band of “Congresspeople” and “health insurance executives” swilled champagne, showered each other in cash and sang round after round of “For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow.” If you weren’t near HBS, you missed a fantastic party. Here’s what happened: Karen Ignagni, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, was greeted by this band of Occupy Harvard and Occupy Boston at the 9th Annual Healthcare Conference at HBS, where she was the keynote speaker. The merry band feted the insurance industry’s lobbyist-in-chief with an impromptu gala, honoring Ms. Ignagni with an award for “Excellence in the Business of Denying People Medical Care.” The revelers welcomed conference goers with cheers of “A-HIP-Hooray” and explained why Ms. Ignagni had been chosen for this ignominious award. Harvard plans to consolidate library, reshuffle employees Harvard University revealed its long-awaited plan for restructuring its library system this morning, calling for “changes that affect staff at every level” that are likely to include consolidating many services, reshuffling some employees, and offering buyouts to others. Some 70 protesters — including librarians, but also Occupy Boston participants and student labor activists — held a rally in Harvard Square Thursday, chanting, “Hey, Harvard, you’ve got cash. Why do you treat your workers like trash?” http://tinyurl.com/7vshm7s Decline in the working class caused by rising income inequality and loss of jobs – or ‘snooty liberals’? We have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that. One more thought: The real winner in this controversy is the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson. Back in 1996, the same year Ms. Himmelfarb was lamenting our moral collapse, Mr. Wilson published “When Work Disappears: The New World of the Urban Poor,” in which he argued that much of the social disruption among African-Americans popularly attributed to collapsing values was actually caused by a lack of blue-collar jobs in urban areas. If he was right, you would expect something similar to happen if another social group – say, working-class whites – experienced a comparable loss of economic opportunity. And so it has. http://tinyurl.com/7jxvx7c How Conservative Elites Stoke Racist Anxieties to Gain Power and Split Blacks and Whites The white victimhood narrative has paid substantial political dividends. In recent surveys, a majority of white conservatives believe they are oppressed, and a significant percentage of respondents also believe that anti-white racism is a bigger problem in American society than the discrimination faced by people of color. The sum effect of this politics of white victimology is a public policy that is less well-equipped to serve the common good, as shared class interests across the colorline can be sabotaged by right-wing appeals to white racial fears. We can draw a long line here — from the aborted interracial alliance of black and white indentured servants during Bacon’s Rebellion in the 17th century, to the populist, labor, and progressive movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, and into the present, when a narrow group of white elites have been able to distract the white working class and poor from their shared class interests with people of color. Race is a canard. Instead of looking to how people of color and white folks have common concerns about economic inequality for example, appeals to white skin privilege and white racial anxiety can be used to derail positive social change. To borrow the language of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the 1 percent has been using racism to divide and conquer for centuries. There is little new about the plutocrats’ game. http://tinyurl.com/7cahuxx Hundreds Of Protesters March To Conservative Action Conference To ‘Occupy CPAC’ Hundreds of protesters, chanting “We are the 99 percent” and waving signs decrying corporate tax dodging and other issues, marched in front of the Marriott Wardman hotel in Woodley Park, the site of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, this afternoon. Occupy CPAC, as protesters dubbed it, featured a giant inflatable “corporate fat cat,” and four protesters were dressed in blue and white baseball uniforms (resembling those of the Los Angeles Dodgers) that read “Tax Dodgers,” a reference to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. For more than a half hour, the protesters chanted and marched outside the hotel. http://tinyurl.com/84jauzj Occupy DC Protesters Invade CPAC 2012 Hotel, Ejected By Police (video) Conservative conference focuses on strategy to dismantle organized labor – key to WI success was separating public safety unions from the rest (radio) http://tinyurl.com/7hsq2ry ACTA: Global Takeover Of The Internet (video) http://tinyurl.com/8888ybw Fiasco cont: There Is No Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Term Sheet We are more than 24 hours removed from the foreclosure fraud settlement and the terms have, shockingly, not been released. In fact, American Banker reports that the terms will not be released before the filing of the settlement in federal court, because a document with actual terms does not yet exist. This is incredible. The Administration, the AGs, everyone involved in this made a big show of an agreement reached on foreclosure fraud. But there is no piece of paper with the agreement on it. There’s no term sheet. There are just agreements in principle. There’s a HUGE difference between an agreement in principle and the actual terms. I mean night and day. The Dodd-Frank bill was for all intents and purposes an agreement in principle. It left to the federal regulators to write hundreds of rules. And we have seen how that process of implementation has faltered on several key points. But the Administration wanted to announce a “big deal,” the details be damned. And they got buy-in from the AGs. Everyone else stayed silent. Lots of people are pissed off about this: Wisconsin’s gov. claims 50-state mortgage settlement money for state coffers – won’t pay foreclosure fraud victims Yesterday, 49 states joined the federal government in announcing a $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks over the banks’ foreclosure fraud abuses. The money from the settlement is meant to aid homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure or who find themselves underwater, meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth. However, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) – whose high profile assault on workers’ rights has prompted a recall effort against him – isn’t planning to use the money to help homeowners. Under the terms of the settlement, Wisconsin is set to receive $140 million, $31.6 million of which comes directly to the state government. And Walker is planning to use $25.6 million of that money to help balance his state’s budget: http://tinyurl.com/6nfmy63 Right-wing hawks who thought Iraq would be a cakewalk think it’d be easy to attack Iran – real soldiers say no The latest upsurge in calls for military action against Iran began with a piece in Foreign Affairs by Matthew Kroenig, a former analyst at the Pentagon and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “Time to Attack Iran.” The U.S. should carry out limited strikes on Iran’s key nuclear facilities, Kroenig argued, and could “reduce the political fallout of military action by building global support for it in advance.” “By building such a consensus in the lead-up to an attack and taking the outlined steps to mitigate it once it began,” Kroenig wrote, “the United States could avoid an international crisis and limit the scope of the conflict.” The Internet quickly worked its magic, as numerous writers dismantled the elements of Kroenig’s argument. Among the most effective and devastating rebuttals came from Kroenig’s own former Pentagon boss, Colin Kahl, who wrote that Kroenig’s “picture of a clean, calibrated conflict is a mirage. Any war with Iran would be a messy and extraordinarily violent affair, with significant casualties and consequences.” Regardless of its weaknesses, Kroenig’s piece opened the floodgates to calls for military action against Iran. Indeed, in a great demonstration of the Overton Window theory, many advocates of war have suggested that Kroenig did not go far enough, and that we should not settle for less than the end of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Occupy Cal protest continues on steps of Sproul Hall A group of Occupy Cal protesters continued an encampment on the steps of Sproul Hall Friday afternoon, extending a protest that began Thursday on the three month anniversary of the Nov. 9 campus protests. http://tinyurl.com/7wmn85b City throws out nearly 200 citations against Occupy Tucson protesters Nearly 200 citations to the Occupy Tucson protesters were dismissed this week over a dispute over whether park hours were posted when the protesters were cited. Last month, city prosecutors dismissed 85 citations that were issued between Oct. 15 and November 1, because they may not have been able to prove that signs were posted showing when Armory Park closed, city officials confirmed to News 4 Tucson. This week, an additional 193 citations against 43 defendants were thrown out for the same reason. http://tinyurl.com/7aqamej Occupy Honolulu: We Won’t Back Down Let it be known: we have no intention of backing down or giving up our rights to assemble peacefully in the public arena 24/7. We know our rights and we will continue to defend them if need be. Instead of continually trying to strong arm us, why not sit at the table with us to develop some real solutions? We invite the opportunity for reasonable and peaceful discussion of the many issues at hand. In spite of the challenges we face, we are becoming more passionate and organized than ever. The local (de)Occupy movement is much larger than the few tents that remain at Thomas Square. We invite everyone who feels the call, from near and far, to participate in whatever capacity they choose. http://tinyurl.com/6n2628t Letter to the editor: Publishing photo of Occupy protest was objectionable I keep staring at the picture on the front page of The Argus/Dispatch today (Jan. 30) with subdued rage. The influence of a newspaper to make a political point without using the op-ed page and yet be inflammatory was shown on that picture with the headline, “Assessing the damage.” The point being made by the picture with its burning flag and the young cowards wearing kerchiefs over their faces was: “Look at those dirty hippies and how much they hate America!” I want to gag. How I wish the Argus/Dispatch had done the same thing to the tea partiers when their extremists were putting swastikas on pictures of the president of the United States and spitting on African-American politicians when they walked by the protests. Obviously, not doing this implies the paper supported that behavior. Greece descending into chaos: Resignations, violent protests, and austerity Greece’s future in the eurozone grew increasingly precarious Friday as violence erupted on the streets of Athens and dissent grew among its lawmakers after European leaders demanded deeper spending cuts. http://tinyurl.com/7rt7yw5 Greek police unions: “We refuse to stand against our parents, our brothers, our children or any citizen who protests and demands a change of policy” Greece’s largest police union has threatened to issue arrest warrants for officials from the country’s European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders for demanding deeply unpopular austerity measures. In a letter obtained by Reuters Friday, the Federation of Greek Police accused the officials of “…blackmail, covertly abolishing or eroding democracy and national sovereignty” and said one target of its warrants would be the IMF’s top official for Greece, Poul Thomsen. http://tinyurl.com/7znr43q Austerity pushback: Striking Brussels firemen turn fire hoses on the police, prime minister’s office When the Belgian government decided to pour cold water on the country’s firefighters and increase their retirement age, the men struck back with the same method…literally. _Several hundred firemen broke through police cordons and hosed down the prime minister’s office. The men, dressed in full gear, were smiling as they directed the water at the building…and the small bunch of police officers huddled in front of it. The law enforcement men tried to hide behind their Plexiglas shields, but to little avail; they were all soaked within minutes. Showing a rather wicked sense of humor, the firemen then turned to fire extinguishers – and the soaked representatives of Belgium’s police force were swallowed by a cloud of white foam, emerging unharmed but completely blanketed in the substance. |