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Catholic worker group storms building housing Obama campaign headquarters, starting week of protest in Chicago
Dozens of demonstrators calling for an end to war rushed into President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago on Monday morning, and eight were arrested, NBCChicago reported.
The protest, led by a group associated with the Catholic Worker movement, was the first of a series of planned demonstrations and marches by groups highlighting poverty, environmental, and education issues during the May 20-21 NATO summit in the city and the May 18-19 G8 summit at Camp David in Maryland.
http://tinyurl.com/88ynn7g
Revivals of protest in the class war
Despite the success of the Occupy movement in putting inequality on the international agenda, it can safely be reported that just about everywhere, the 1 per cent are still laughing all the way to the bank. In fact they own the bank. Just a little south of here, the Bank of America was bailed out by American taxpayers to the tune of $45-billion. It claimed a pre-tax loss of $5.4-billion and so paid no taxes for the past two years. In one of those years, it dished out executive bonuses and compensation worth $35-billion. Could I make this stuff up?
The bargain between the 1 per cent and the governments of the 1 per cent is clear: huge tax breaks for the big boys, austerity for the 99 per cent. Can you handle more figures? Since the geniuses on Wall Street gave us the great crash of 2008, American banks received $7.7-trillion in bailout money and British banks $1.3-trillion. Yes, trillion, in both cases. To offset those losses to the public purse, the United States will cut public spending by $2.4-trillion in the next decade and Britain $128-billion. In Britain this will include almost half-a-million lost public sector jobs.
It’s time to resurrect the biting formula given us years ago by John Kenneth Galbraith, an earlier generation’s Paul Krugman: private affluence, public squalor.
People’s Summit opens a week of protest against NATO in Chicago
Hundreds gathered from across the country for the People’s Summit, united in their opposition to the NATO/G8 agenda of war and poverty. Organized jointly by the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War and Poverty Agenda (CANG8) and Occupy Chicago, the People’s Summit included 40 workshops and four plenary sessions. More than 50 attended a workshop featuring three Chicago leaders of the CANG8, speaking on, “The Strategic Aim in Opposing NATO in Chicago.”
http://tinyurl.com/bpordqo
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/15/12” »
Occupy Clinics appeal in advance of the Chicago NATO summit: Healthcare not warfare!
To all our family from the global 99%, To all those who believe that healthcare is a human right, To all those coming to protest NATO and its wars for profit around the globe, To all those who have struggled with mental illness personally or with loved ones, To all those who have been denied healthcare, To all those who have waited all day in emergency rooms, To all those public servants facing layoffs or cuts to salary and pension, To all those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, To all those who believe that another world is possible beyond this madness.
The Mental Health Movement calls on all protesters coming to Chicago to join us in the fight for healthcare not warfare. As NATO war-makers come to this city to plan wars that leave people traumatized and cost trillions of dollars, clinics that help people heal from trauma and deal with mental illness are being shuttered for lack of $2.3 million dollars. As our battle to save our clinics has intensified, Occupy Chicago and other Occupy groups around the city have become powerful allies. Now we ask members of Occupy Wall Street, other Occupy groups and all other sectors of the social movements coming to Chicago to protest NATO to join us in occupying clinics by setting up a 24/7 presence outside of recently closed mental health clinics. We will dramatize the contradictions of a system that finds billions to wage NATO’s endless wars for profit but leaves its most vulnerable without basic healthcare.
http://tinyurl.com/6oqauuo
How to Raise $350 Billion from Financial Transaction Tax
Bill talks to RoseAnn DeMoro, who heads the largest registered nurses union in the country, and will lead a Chicago march protesting economic inequality on May 18. DeMoro is championing the Robin Hood Tax, a small government levy the financial sector would pay on commercial transactions like stocks and bonds. The money generated, which some estimate could be as much as $350 billion annually, could be used for social programs and job creation – ultimately to people who, without a doubt, need it more than the banks do.
http://tinyurl.com/7yqxon5
Dimon On Whether JP Morgan’s $2 Billion Loss Proves Banks Are Still Too Risky: ‘I Don’t Think So’
JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon appeared today on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he was asked by host David Gregory if JP Morgan’s massive loss shows that the banking system – just a few years after a financial crisis that nearly brought the global economy to its knees – is still too risky. Dimon replied, “I don’t think so.”
. . .
Of course, the point isn’t whether JP Morgan, the biggest bank in the U.S., can survive a trade like this. It’s whether the financial system can sustain this sort of trading by all of the big banks, many of which are not in the same financial shape as JP Morgan.
http://tinyurl.com/87lw954
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/14/12” »
Join these and other members of the Health/Justice Working Group Monday, May 14 at St. Paul’s Cathedral, 138 Tremont Street at 6 pm for an introduction to the group’s educational efforts, organizing and direct action projects.
Health is a human right and systemic injustices, the pursuit of profits over people, and the accumulation of wealth by the few all harm the health of our communities. We seek to mobilize, educate, inspire and act in solidarity in ways that lead to greater health justice.
‘Seize and pay tribute:’ Lessons for America from recent finance capital conquests in Europe
Finance today is the means of conquering a country and getting what in the past took an army. Financial conquest is how you shift the taxes onto the population to pay the financial sector, how you load a population down with debt and make a population pay interest and amortization and penalties on debt service, you make a population pay for schooling instead of getting it free or a low price as used to be the case, you make a population take on a lifetime of debt in order to get a home that used to be affordable, you make the governments go into debt for the banks, so that in Europe governments can’t-don’t have a central bank to monetize their own deficits but actually have to borrow money from banks. You achieve-you essentially empty out an economy, and you take its economic surplus financially without an army, just by trying to promote what really is junk economics and junk politics, if the economics of Rubinomics in America under Clinton and Rubenomics in America under George Bush, and now with a vengeance under Obama-.
100,000 march in Spain over austerity
At least 100,000 Spaniards angered by grim economic prospects and the political handling of the international financial crisis have turned out for street demonstrations in the country’s cities, marking the one-year anniversary of a movement that inspired similar pressure groups in other countries.
http://tinyurl.com/6t7cuqo
Deconstructing strident pro-austerity bias in American journalists’ economic coverage
The reporters’ adoption of the German perspective leads them to emulate Berlin’s refusal to consider the Greek perspective. Instead, the reporters’ adopt the German framing of the issue. That framing is that the Greeks are inexplicably “refusing to abide by the terms of the country’s international loan agreement.” The idea that the Greek people should continue to take the Berlin elevator that has plunged their nation into a great depression because their disgraced leaders were coerced into agreeing to a deal that is destroying their nation is insane.
Democracy is all about throwing out leaders who have disgraced themselves, crushed the nation’s economy, and cravenly taken orders from a hostile foreign power. The Greeks have done just that. Why would anyone expect the Greeks to continue to follow a suicidal economic policy imposed by Germany? Berlin and the NYT reporters share the bizarre belief that if your coerced leaders sign a suicide pact you have a duty to commit suicide because – a deal is a deal.
230,000 jobless Americans lost their unemployment insurance this weekend
More than 230,000 jobless Americans will lose their unemployment insurance by this weekend as reductions in the federal program that provides extended benefits to the long-term unemployed take broader effect.
The new round of reductions is hitting eight states this month, meaning that about 400,000 long-term unemployed Americans in 27 states will have been cut off of the federal government’s extended unemployment benefits program this year, according to an analysis by the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for the unemployed.
The cuts stem from a congressional agreement this year that will reduce the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 99 weeks to 79 weeks as the nation’s jobless rate declines.
http://tinyurl.com/73wzduv
Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/13/12” »