Austerity backlash: Sarkozy out in France, ruling parties lose in Greece

French and Greek voters delivered a sharp rebuff to their governments in national elections Sunday, raising questions about the viability of the European Union’s austerity program intended to preserve the euro as Europe’s dominant currency.

By a 52 to 48 margin, France elected Francois Hollande its first Socialist president in 17 years, replacing the right-of-center Nicolas Sarkozy, who became the first French leader to be denied a second term in 32 years.

In Greece, voters delivered a stinging judgment against the two ruling parties that had supported austerity agreements with the EU, cutting their support by nearly half and raising questions about whether they would be able to cobble together a new government. The biggest winners in Greece were the Radical Left coalition, which finished second, and the Golden Dawn party, a neo-fascist group that won parliamentary seats for the first time, with nearly 7 per cent of the votes.

http://tinyurl.com/cpwfg3v

How Occupy Wall Street Has Already Won 

The idea that policy is the only way to make change is precisely the ideological assumption that Occupy subverts. The Occupy movement is non-hierarchical because it recognizes that it’s not leaders we need. The changes necessary to provide human rights to the masses and safeguard the earth can not be outsourced to policy makers, but will require that individual people begin to build the world they wish to live in.

http://tinyurl.com/7e2467u

Student loan battle heads to Senate

The Senate is the newest arena in the election-year face-off over federal student loans, and both sides are starting out by pounding away at each other.

With Congress returning from a weeklong spring recess, the Senate plans to vote Tuesday on whether to start debating a Democratic plan to keep college loan interest rates for 7.4 million students from doubling on July 1. The $6 billion measure would be paid for by collecting more Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes from high-earning owners of some privately held corporations.

Republicans want a vote on their own bill, which like the Democrats’ would freeze today’s 3.4 percent interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans for one more year. It would be financed by eliminating a preventive health program established by President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

http://tinyurl.com/6pnh3xs

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/7/12” »

RIP Adam Yauch, Occupy protester

Adam Yauch marched with us in November over the Brooklyn Bridge. He was a visionary artist who never lost sight of his community. [OWS tweet]

http://tinyurl.com/coa4839

Boston protesters send digitized memo to Bank of America

For two years, Presley Obasohan says he has begged Bank of America to modify a mortgage on a home he bought in Dorchester at the height of the housing bubble. Every time, he has been denied. “They are not listening to me,” said Obasohan, 55.

Friday night, a group of more than 75 protesters could not ignore Obasohan’s plea. A recording of his voice reading his letter to Bank of America boomed over a pair of speakers in Copley Square. His words were digitized and projected on two floors of a Bank of America building on the corner of St. James and Berkeley streets in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

City Life/Vida Urbana, a Boston-based advocacy group, has been protesting foreclosures throughout the economic crisis, but Friday’s rally in downtown Boston came with a twist. Enlisting the help of volunteer John Hulsey, a Harvard University graduate film student, the organization took their message to the bank. They digitized the words of a handful of homeowners who have either have been foreclosed on or are facing the threat of losing their homes and projected those messages onto the Bank of America building.

http://tinyurl.com/clbadhz

New York Times says ‘the jobless young find their voice’ in slick new Astroturf groups drenched in money

The Campaign for Young America is in the midst of a 21-state bus tour that is set to conduct 100 round tables with young people, Occupy Wall Street protesters, community leaders and entrepreneurs. “One thing we are really focused on is trying to better connect colleges and universities to local employers,” Mr. Smith said. Later this year, the group will endorse specific policy recommendations based on input during the round tables, and host candidate forums, he said.

Fix Young America is supported by members of the nonprofit Young Entrepreneur Council, based in New York. (Officially the new group has a hashtag in front of its name, to reflect its presence on Twitter.)

The group assembled more than two-dozen people – including Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, university leaders and entrepreneurs – to offer prescriptions for solving youth unemployment.

http://tinyurl.com/84uqgrn

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/5/12” »

A GOP convention protester’s playbook covers pepper spray to prison time

Each person in an affinity group would have a job. Someone might be a driver, another in charge of supplies, like water. Several needed to be willing to get arrested, if it came to that. Someone else needed to be willing to handle the affairs of those who were taken into custody, like walking the dog or arranging bail. Part of being in an affinity group was protecting it from infiltration by a police informant, which made them cagey about their plans.

Maria’s group, which also included several unemployed people, a couple of students and a few homeless, was trying to lay the groundwork for a march in August by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, a movement to abolish poverty. It was starting to look like a giant obstacle course.

Not only was Tampa trying to create a vast zone around downtown with special rules for protesters, there was also a federalized zone around the convention that was protected by the U.S. Secret Service. It would be difficult to get close to the delegates.

Wright said the Poor People’s Campaign wasn’t going to bother getting a permit. “We’ve already decided we’re marching regardless,” he said.

http://tinyurl.com/74l2ebb

‘The economic elite has launched a class war against us and they have indicated every intention of seeing it continue’

This epic of financial capitalism has produced little real wealth but it has been an effective tool for shifting existing wealth from those who produced it to a small group of plutocrats via a state / financial nexus. The only proposed solutions emanating from the plutocrat / state are for more of the same policies that have destroyed the American economy, polity and culture. The sad truth is that the economic elite benefit from our declining wages and the looting of our social resources in direct proportion to what we lose. The economic elite has launched a class war against us and they have indicated every intention of seeing it continue.

Current circumstances are understood in a general sense by most of us and in some great detail by a significant number. Legal scholars and current and former criminal prosecutors have identified a large number of actionable financial, war and environmental crimes committed by the financial and political elite that have gone un-prosecuted and unpunished. A social division exists where the rich and the politically connected have impunity for theirs crimes while the police and the surveillance state are used as tools of social control and political repression against the rest of us. Were redress available through the established order, criminal prosecutions of culpable elites would already have taken place.

Meanwhile, a set of concrete economic proposals that would immediately improve the lives of those most affected by the current economic crisis, as well those of the long-term dispossessed, exists without being enacted and with no impetus for enacting them from either major political party.

http://tinyurl.com/7blgr3h

Economists’ Malign Influence on Taxes

Free market economic “literature” as economists call it – and their papers frequently are works of fiction – gave succor and intellectual respectability to the decades of deregulation and tax cuts that have bankrupted the country. Congress is compromised, to be sure, but lobbyists and members need economic studies as cover for what they are doing.

The United States is a plutocracy, with an income and wealth distribution that rivals South America’s worst cases, but economists refuse to acknowledge that these outcomes are attributable to ill-advised public policies on taxation, regulation, trade, and education spending over the last several decades.

Economists bleat about “globalization” as though it were inevitable rather than a set of deliberate policy choices. Markets are political creations, so results produced by them are not inviolable or free from question. And they don’t always produce equilibrium.

http://tinyurl.com/6n2gl5t

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/5/12” »

Occupy the American Psychiatric Industry solidarity rally in Boston, Saturday, May 5th, 2 pm

MPOWER in MA is planning a May 5th action in solidarity with Philadelphia activists. Our “Occupy the American Psychiatric Industry” will take place on May 5, 2012 at 2 pm at the Arbour Hospital in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston: Arbour Hospital, 49 Robinwood Avenue, Boston, MA 02130

http://tinyurl.com/d7huntf

Occupy the American Psychiatric Association

On May 5th, a reform psychiatric organization called Mindfreedom has organized a rally in Philadelphia and a march to “occupy” the American Psychiatric Association, which is holding its ritzy, drug industry funded yearly convention at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.  MindFreedom states that it represents those who say they have been harmed or even helped by organized psychiatry but find that recent proposed changes to the DSM will lead to increased practices of over or wrongful diagnoses and over-medicating with drugs that carry severe side effects. Among the scheduled speakers will be activist attorney Jim Gottstein, founder of Psychrights, who lobbies against forced institutionalization and drugging and exposed the dangers of atypical antipsychotics frequently prescribed for individuals with autism.

Autism parents have trouble enough attending their own dental appointments much less rallies but the way this event is organized, there is nothing to stop anyone from carrying a sign protesting the proposed changes the DSM’s autism category.  There is also an occupy rally in Boston on the same day in solidarity with the Philadelphia event.

http://tinyurl.com/clp3r77

PHOTOS: Boston May Day 2012 Rally at City Hall Plaza

Following a march from Copley Square, over 100 activists from Occupy Boston, Boston May Day Committee, Student Anarchist Federation, and several other progressive organizations held a traditional May Day rally at Boston City Hall Plaza on Tuesday at lunchtime. Many attendees then proceded to an immigrant march from East Boston to Everett later the same afternoon.

There was a moderate police presence, no incidents and no arrests. The event was one of several May Day 2012 activities in Boston. Organizers said steady rain kept numbers low throughout the day. (Open Media Boston)

http://tinyurl.com/ckqz2db

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 5/4/12” »