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    The OB Media Rundown for 6/8/12

    Feed the Hood delivers to JP’s needy

    An activist who distributes food to needy Jamaica Plain residents is planning a “legendary” fund-raiser in Roxbury to continue his efforts to feed JP’s hungry.

    Organizer Jamarhl Crawford is bringing the Last Poets, a group of poets and musicians originally organized during the 1960s, to Roxbury to raise funds to continue his work with the Feed The Hood and Fill Your Fridge programs.

    In Feed the Hood, Crawford and his helpers buy good-quality, healthy food and cook it either at home or at a near-by church. Then they drive around, handing the food to those who need it, mostly the city’s homeless population.

    http://tinyurl.com/6uvmlwx

    Wall Street CEO pay rises 20 percent in 2011, despite losses in corporate value

    In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the subsequent Occupy movement and the protests against the 1 percent, you might think that financial corporations would rein in the multi-million dollar salaries paid to their CEOs.

    Instead, compensation to the best-paid CEOs at the largest U.S.-based financial companies collectively rose by an average of 20.4 percent in 2011, according to a new report from Bloomberg Markets magazine. This rise is even more surprising in light of the fact that 33 of the 50 biggest financial companies had negative share returns in their 2011 fiscal years. High-level investment managers maintain that many of the CEOs of companies with underwhelming stock performance are overpaid and warn that the controversy over executive pay in the financial industry will not be resolved until shareholders hold executives fully accountable for their under-performance.

    http://tinyurl.com/7eauhfh

    Judge Upholds Ban on NDAA Detentions – Rejects Obama Call to ‘Reconsider’ Decision

    Judge Katherine Forest has upheld her previous ban on the use of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provisions that allowed the president to summarily detain “terror suspects” in military custody for indefinite periods of time with no legal oversight.

    In her initial ruling, Forest had accepted the arguments from a number of political dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, that they had a reasonable fear that they could be disappeared off the street and held in military custody for constitutionally protected political speech. The Administration did not argue that they wouldn’t be detained, but insisted that since they hadn’t been detained yet they had no standing to contest the law.

    http://tinyurl.com/75hrnyu

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/8/12” »

    The OB Media Rundown for 6/7/12

    This is What Plutocracy Looks Like: Walker Rides Huge Funding Edge to Victory

    On Tuesday night, with Gov. Scott Walker’s re-election in a special recall vote, Wisconsin learned a brutal lesson: “This is what plutocracy looks like.”

    Thousands of union members and other Wisconsinites have been fighting for the last 16 months when Walker, in his own words, decided to “drop the bomb” and cripple the operations of almost all public employee unions by introducing Act 10. This triggered a massive upsurge by labor and its allies to restore worker rights, strengthen plundered public institutions like education and healthcare, and to revitalize democracy. Activists gathered over 1 million signatures on petitions to trigger the recall vote during the coldest days of last winter.

    But their vision of a new progressive era for Wisconsin has been turned upside down-at least temporarily-by a tidal wave of money from billionaire CEOs and corporations that swept Walker to victory.

    http://tinyurl.com/7oycnfs

    Wisconsin Recap: Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage

    It’s not complete to say this is just Obama’s doing.  Obama has done everything he’s done with the support of labor leaders, Democratic supportive groups like Moveon, foundations, liberal pundits, African-American church networks, feminist groups, LGBT groups, and technology interests.  Any of these could have stopped him by withdrawing support and overtly attacking him, but only the LBGT community fought for their rights.  This American labor bureaucracy, which simply does not strike and therefore has no leverage against capital, operates largely as a group of fragmented business unionists.  Unfortunately, business unions don’t exist when business decides it doesn’t want unions.  And that’s what global business elites have decided, as this piece published on this very site titled The Liquidation of Society versus the Global Labor Revival shows.

    http://tinyurl.com/bovgaku

    Does Sallie Mae Want Students To Default ?

    Lenders are paid full book value on defaulted loans (principal plus interest).  For defaulted loan collections, collectors get to keep 25 cents on every dollar collected.  If the loan is rehabilitated, the new, much larger, loan is sold, and the guarantors get paid (in addition to 10 months of payments that go straight into their pockets) something like 18%  of the inflated balance.

    For lenders who only lend to students (and don’t guaranty, or collect on defaulted loans), they lose no money on a default. The money they are reimbursed can (and is) immediately used to fund another loan.  Therefore, these lenders, fiscally, have a neutral outlook about defaults (i.e. they don’t care one way or another if a loan defaults).

    http://tinyurl.com/dy2kxhp

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/7/12” »

    Banking Actions Working Group Endorses June 16th Anti-Austerity March

    After finalizing plans for several other direct actions targeting lawless banking entities in the months ahead, the Banking Actions working group voted tonight to endorse the Saturday, June 16th anti-austerity march that will begin from Dewey Square starting at 12:30 pm. Some working group members participating in the march will emphasize the roll of banks in waging a war of austerity against the 99 percent throughout America and across the world. For more about the march, go here.

    The Banking Actions Working Group meets every Wednesday at 6:30 pm in Copley Square on the grass and is a great group to join if you’ve been looking for opportunities to get more involved with Occupy to take action to support real change in the Boston area and throughout Massachusetts.

    Free School University Radio: Race & Economic Inequality: Building a multi-racial movement for justice with Camilo Viveiros

    Tonight at 7 pm, www.obr.fm

    The Occupy movement has always been much about economic inequality and economic injustice, but the racialization of inequality has not always been emphasized.  The mainstream media loves to highlight stories of middle class families losing their jobs or their homes, but people in racial minority or immigrant communities bear a disproportional burden: first fired, last hired, hugely targeted by predatory mortgage lenders in good times, their communities decimated by foreclosures during the crisis.  How can we educate ourselves about the racialized aspects of economic inequality?  How are working class people of color organizing themselves to fight injustice?  And how can we learn from them, and work with them to build a truly global, multi-racial movement for economic justice?  Community organizer Camilo Vivieros will help us explore and answer these questions.

    Camilo Viveiros has worked on immigrant worker issues and multi-ethnic/multi-racial economic and environmental justice organizing with students, youth and seniors in New England. He has worked for the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, and the Massachusetts Senior Action Council.  For two years, he was Executive Director of Rhode Island Jobs with Justice.  He is currently lead organizer for the George Wiley Center in Rhode Island along with providing direct action, organizing and campaign development trainings for diverse grassroots groups around the country.  Born to immigrant parents, Camilo was raised in the working class immigrant community of Fall River. He has been involved in work for social justice for virtually his whole life. Over the years he has organized for unions of the homeless, welfare rights unions, against the prison industrial complex and many different issues. He has a backgroundin tenant, youth and congregation-based organizing and gained national mediaexposure in 2000 when he was arrested during demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Four years later, after a national campaign, www.friendsofcamilo.org, he was acquitted of all charges.

    Occupy Boston Radio is currently available by internet only.  You can reach us at https://www.occupyboston.org/radio/ or http://obr.fm, or by going to https://www.occupyboston.org and choosing “Radio” from the red menu bar at the top of the page.  Once on the page, click the “play” arrow on the radio player control app to begin listening.   Listener participation is possible via call-in or IRC chat – see phone number and link on the radio page.

    The OB Media Rundown for 6/6/12

    Chicago Activists Demonstrate Against NATO Arrests, City Summit Spending

    Nearly 100 demonstrators massed at Jackson and LaSalle yesterday evening to highlight what they call targeted repression and the use of entrapment tactics by law enforcement of activists involved with the NATO summit protests and occupy movements. At 5:30 p.m. several dozen demonstrators paired off and zip-tied themselves to one another to symbolize what they see as the politically motivated arrests of protesters throughout the NATO summit.

    They marched with others from the corner through the Loop chanting slogans like “we have nothing to fear from home brewed beer” and “we’re activists, not terrorists,” before ending at Daley Plaza, where activists held a press conference. The speakers were flanked by demonstrators holding up masks featuring photos of two people they say infiltrated various local movements on behalf of law enforcement in order to incite violence to justify police surveillance and arrests.

    http://tinyurl.com/cwlezkp

    Austerity champion Gov. Scott Walker Beats Barrett in Wisconsin Recall Race

    Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will successfully overcome a recall vote that would have stripped him of his job, CNN projects based on exit polling data and partial vote results.

    Walker, a Republican hero for pushing austerity measures that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public unions, was leading Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by a 59-41 margin with 31% of the vote in.

    http://tinyurl.com/c55nbg6

    Paycheck Fairness Act Fails Senate Vote

    Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a bill that would have ensured women are paid the same amount as their male counterparts.

    The Senate failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have required employers to demonstrate that any salary differences between men and women doing the same work are not gender-related. The bill also would have prohibited employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information with their co-workers, and would have required the Labor Department to increase its outreach to employers to help eliminate pay disparities.

    http://tinyurl.com/bnywx74

    Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/6/12” »

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