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” »

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” »

Malden Residents Form Union To Fight 22%-58% Rent Hikes

Tenants across the city found every renter’s nightmare slipped under their doors last week: a notice their rents will increase anywhere from 22 percent to 58 percent next month, with just two weeks to decide whether to accept the new agreement.

But residents say they won’t take the hikes without a fight, and a majority of the tenants have formed a union – Malden Tenants United – to prevent what they call unreasonable increases in a sluggish economy.

The sudden increase and union-organizing comes after a total of 265 units at 349 Pleasant St., 17/19 Washington St. and 86-96 Maple St. in Malden, as well as 53/63 Fellsway in Medford, were purchased by Brighton-based Alpha Management, which owns and maintains more than 60 properties in the Greater Boston area.

http://tinyurl.com/6o2brua

Patrick: ‘T must prepare for additional cuts,’ MBTA says service cuts will be the only option

Gov. Deval Patrick said Monday that unless lawmakers move soon on legislation to bail out the cash-strapped MBTA, he expected agency officials to begin drawing up plans for additional service cuts on the Boston-area transit system.
. . .

Joe Pesaturo, an MBTA spokesman, said Monday that staff was developing a “watch list” of bus routes that would potentially be eliminated if the legislation was not passed.

“Our only option will be service cuts if we don’t have the revenue by July 1,” Pesaturo said.

http://tinyurl.com/7o7wdwr

Occupy Providence protest seizes on 38 Studios ‘debacle’

Occupy Providence is seizing on what it calls the debacle involving former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s now troubled video gaming company.

The protest group says the state “recklessly gambled” on 38 Studios, which was lured to Rhode Island from Massachusetts in 2010 with a $75 million loan guarantee from the Economic Development Corp.

http://tinyurl.com/79javq8

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/5/12” »

OMB Audio: Occupy Boston Considers Future Of Movement

Friday evening, about 75 stalwart activists took part in an Occupy Boston assembly in front of the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common.

Horizontal democracy and consensus decision-making was in full force as facilitators encouraged as many people as possible to address both long-term and short-term goals of the movement. Speakers identified themselves as proponents of a wide range of leftist beliefs: from anarchists to economic reformers to democratic socialists.

Much of the agreement in strategy and philosophy revolved around a universal distaste for so-called austerity measures that have led to wide and deep cuts in government budgets. Speakers decried public services being reduced while prices go up.

http://tinyurl.com/7dzf74e

The facts are clear – This cruel austerity experiment has failed

Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralysed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics. Yanis Varoufakis, ex-speechwriter for former Greek prime minister George Papandreou and now an economics professor in the US, said last week: “There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down.”

http://tinyurl.com/6npga6o

OWS ‘Summer Disobedience School’ prepares for Black Monday

Last Saturday saw the kickoff of Occupy Wall Street’s Summer Disobedience School (OWSDS), described in its “Curriculum” as a “twelve-week training program that will empower us to map, target, and disrupt sites of capitalist injustice across the city with a wide range of creative tactics accessible to people with all levels of experience.” The program, developed by the Direct Action Working Group, is divided into four three-week quarters, with each quarter taking a different city park as a staging-ground: Bryant Park, Central Park, Washington Square Park and, ultimately, Liberty Plaza. While focused primarily on tactical training, OWSDS is also a long-term strategic platform for the summer in advance of the one-year anniversary of OWS on September 17 – a date that is already looming large in the imagination of the movement under the sign of “Black Monday.”

http://tinyurl.com/6wpzyhb

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/4/12” »

The price of a do-nothing Congress – Government layoffs, budget cuts making matters worse

The latest employment data indicate that the U.S. job market is in a holding pattern – the price we pay for a do-nothing Congress focused more on austerity than job creation.

Our economy added 69,000 new jobs in May, for an average of 96,000 over the past three months, with a downward revision of 49,000 for March and April’s data. While this pace of job creation is fast enough to keep unemployment from rising, it remains well below that necessary to bring our economy back to full employment anytime in the near future.

Look no further than Congress for the reasons why this is the case. Last year, Congress refused to put in place the American Jobs Act, which would have helped to reduce unemployment and create jobs. By not acting Congress and the states are instead cutting off the long-term unemployed from any additional benefits and shrinking government spending. While the private sector has been adding jobs for 27 months, for a total of 4.3 million jobs since February 2010, state and local governments have been shedding workers in most months since the fall of 2008, for a total loss 660,000 jobs. These layoffs are pro-cyclical, meaning that they are dragging down economic growth.

http://tinyurl.com/8a59rul

Is income inequality stalling the US economy?

Austerity in the US came in a different form. We passed a massive stimulus bill (40 per cent of which was a middle-class tax cut). But by last summer, the debate over budgets and deficits rose to a fevered pitch. Since then, we have been stuck on and off in phony debates over taxes (which are historically low), “entitlements” (which are not going broke), regulation (which is also weak) and debt (which is a canard). It all seems like an attempt to redirect our attention from measures that could help all of us to measures that would help only some of us – meaning debt and regulation and taxes are the obsessions of the rich, not the rest of us poor bastards trying to get on in life. Last week, President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney were competing for the title of Mr Austerity. But it’s all campaign rhetoric, as it has been since this silly debate began.

Even Republicans, most of whom have pledged to shrink government down to a size suitable for drowning in a bathtub, know increased spending is better for the economy in the short term. Last week, just in case the GOP’s radical wing continued resisting, our non-partisan congressional budget office released a frightening reminder.

http://tinyurl.com/7t7s4zh

Liars abound as greed gains a bit more luster

It’s been five years since the global financial crisis first shook the foundations of the world economy. One spin-off from the crisis has been intense scrutiny of the ethics of the wealthy. At first it was the reckless and indifferent Wall Street bankers that were the focus of attention. Then the Occupy movement started to ask bigger questions about the privileges and influence enjoyed by the ”1 per cent”.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, tensions over wealth and class have been exposed by the European debt crisis. Even here in Australia the actions and motivations of some vocal billionaires have been in the spotlight.

Against this background, a team of researchers, led by Paul Piff from the University of California, Berkeley, posed a controversial question for investigation. Who are more likely to behave ethically: the privileged or the disadvantaged?

http://tinyurl.com/6muopy2

Continue reading “The OB Media Rundown for 6/3/12” »