Occupy Wall Street

[bbsam]

Let her eat pancakes with the rest of us.

 

[wkmac]

Center for a Stateless Society Media Coordinator Tom Knapp, summarizing his experience with the Occupy St. Louis movement, reported a movement “with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘mild reform Democrat.’” Most of the people there, apparently, were basically Coffee Party people with better signs and slogans.
They’re probably not representative of the nationwide Occupy Together movement — the vibe coming from Occupy Wall Street, at least, is a lot more like Seattle. But there really is a contradiction in the movement between those who see it as part of a larger process of creating a new kind of society, and those who see it primarily as a source of pressure on the state to revive the New Deal or Social Democratic model.
Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer recently described the agenda — “Jobs for All” — unanimously approved by the OWS Demands Working Group (LBO News, October 20). “The anarchists are not happy about this,” he writes, “and are trying to block its adoption by the General Assembly.”
Henwood makes no bones about his support for the agenda, encouraging readers who agree with him to make their support felt. As for those who don’t like it, “please reflect on the size of the potential constituency for this agenda compared with that for your own.”
Among the expedients for “creating jobs” is a massive project to “rebuild infrastructure” — an approach well-loved by the Michael Moore “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, but fundamentally antagonistic to the portion of the movement with a more or less anarchistic vision of a post-corporate alternative economy.
The “Jobs for All” agenda is essentially a return to a greenwashed version of the centralized corporate-state Consensus Capitalism of the mid-20th century. That model relied on massive waste and capital investment boondoggles by the state to guarantee full utilization of capacity and full employment — the very pathologies of corporate capitalism that the folks at Monthly Review have been pointing to for years. Just leave the centralized, capital-intensive, bureaucratic structure of Galbraithian capitalism intact, and then let the state build a new (but greenwashed!) Interstate Highway System every ten years to keep it running at capacity. Then everybody can work forty hours a week at a “job” doing things at least half of which are the moral equivalent of digging holes and filling them back in again, in an economy organized by Rube Goldberg. It’s the world depicted in the movie “Brazil.”
In other words, we’ve got a bunch of “Leftists” who are nostalgic for retro capitalism.
It was subsidized infrastructure, as much as anything — starting with the railroad land grants of the 19th century — that was responsible for the pathological model of 20th century corporate capitalism: A system based on overaccumulation, capital intensiveness and high overhead, with the imperative of using subsidized waste, planned obsolescence and mass consumption to fully utilize capacity and keep the wheels turning. The mass production model itself — a model enabled by an activist state in alliance with big business — was inseparable from all the dysfunctional aspects of postwar corporate capitalism.
Those “roads and bridges?” The Interstate — created under the supervision of that great “progressive” Charlie Wilson, who said what’s good for GM is good for America — gave us suburban sprawl and enabled Wal-Mart’s big box/warehouses on wheels model to destroy Main Street.
There’s simply no way, in an economy with efficiently organized production, to employ 150 million people for 40 hours a week. Far better would be to eliminate all the subsidized waste, relocalize manufacturing with lean supply and distribution chains, adopt less capital-intensive and more flexible manufacturing processes, and adopt product designs for modularity, durability and ease of repair. The next steps would be to:
1) Eliminate the artificial property rights that are sources of rents, and allow market competition to flush out the embedded rents in the prices of goods and services, so that all the cost savings are transferred to the consumer;
2) Eliminate barriers to the shift of production from wage labor to the informal/household sector and to self-employment, wherever possible (and technological change is making it more efficient in a radically expanding portion of total production); and
3) Allow whatever wage labor remains to be evenly distributed through a shorter work week and job-sharing.
There’s a fundamental divide between those who want the state to prop up Corporate America in the interest of creating “jobs,” and those who want to kill off the whole job culture, the economic model by which we meet our needs through working at jobs provided by giant, hierarchical institutions.
In my opinion there’s no contest between them. As they said in the French General Strike forty years ago: “Be realistic: Demand the impossible.”

Kevin Carson "Battle for the Heart of the Occupy Movement" @ C4SS

 

[804brown]

The Vatican backs Occupy Wall Street too. Wow, first the nazis, then the commies. What other extremist group is going to jump on the band wagon next: al qaeada and the tea party wingers??

 

[wkmac]

Occupy The System from Counterpunch

[SIZE=-1]by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR and JOSHUA FRANK

It’s not too cool to be ridiculed
But you brought this upon yourself
The world is tired of pacifiers
We want the truth and nothing else
And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
‘Cause if you really want to hear our views
“You haven’t done nothing”!
–Stevie Wonder, “”You Haven’t Done Nothing”
​

There is an anger running rampant across the country. Some on the right are calling it class warfare. People are enraged. Jobs are scarce, the rich continue to get richer while the poor continue to struggle to make ends meet. Indeed, it should be classified as economic warfare, Americans are sick and tired of being pushed around. It is time to shove back.
Pizza man Herman Cain is right. The problem resides in the White House. Herman Cain is wrong. The problem resides on Wall Street. They are, in fact, the same problem: a goutish economic system that enriches the wealthy and impoverishes everyone else, a system that pillages the natural world and tramples on basic human liberties, a system that treats corporations as people and people as commodities.
The victims of neoliberal economics are easy to spot. So too are the perpetrators and profiteers of privatized markets. In many ways the occupations sprouting up around the country remind us of the outpouring of opposition to the WTO that jammed up the streets of Seattle in the late-1990s. Like that organic movement, the current protests are grassroots, and fueled, not by overt political motivations, but by a sense of justice.
Like the Battle for Seattle, Occupy America is taking place during a time when a Democrat resides in the White House. There is little question that President Clinton recklessly pursued a free trade agenda that endangered the American workforce and ravaged the environment. But today President Obama’s motivations are a bit more cavalier. While he speaks of job creation and jumpstarting the struggling economy, he simultaneously ensures his pals on Wall Street that their power and profits will remain intact.
President Clinton, like his predecessor, is largely responsible for the dire economic situation we now face. It was Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin that pushed for increased deregulation, which ended up shifting jobs, and entire industries, overseas.
Rubin even pushed for Clinton’s dismantling of Glass-Steagall, testifying that deregulating the banking industry would be good for capital gains, as well as Main Street. “[The] banking industry is fundamentally different from what it was two decades ago, let alone in 1933,” Rubin testified before the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services in May of 1995.
“[Glass-Steagall could] conceivably impede safety and soundness by limiting revenue diversification,” Rubin argued.
While the industry saw much deregulation over the years preceding Clintontime, the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act of 1999, which eliminated Glass-Steagall, extended and ratified changes that had been enacted with previous legislation. Ultimately, the repeal of the New Deal era protection allowed commercial lenders like Rubin’s Citigroup to underwrite and trade instruments like mortgage backed securities along with collateralized debt and established structured investment vehicles (SIVs), which purchased these securities. In short, as the lines were blurred among investment banks, commercial banks and insurance companies, when one industry fell, like mortgage lenders, others could too.
What Clinton began, President Bush only escalated with an extreme capitalist vigor. Alan Greenspan stayed as head of the Federal Reserve, continuing to press forward with his libertarian agenda of deregulation and damaging austerity measures. When Greenspan retired, Ben Bernanke, another Wall Street ally, took the Bank’s helm, and was kept in place by President Obama.
Obama wasted little time bailing out the greed-infested financial sector. When Obama took office he in 2009 he nominated Rubin-trained economist Timothy Geithner, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to serve as Treasury Secretary. Geithner, if anything, is an insider among insiders and Wall Street’s main man in DC.
It was certainly not the hope and change Obama supporters had voted for, especially in a time when the economy was suffering and jobs were scarce. Obama’s modest stimulus program did little to sustain job growth and was nowhere near the scale of the New Deal’s robust Works Progress Administration. In short, Obama has been an economic disaster for the majority of Americans, sans the Wall Street crowd that continues to profit and is protected under the guise of “too big to fail”.
Did you really expect something different from the man who begged Joe Lieberman to serve as his mentor in the senate?
It’s this entrenched, systematic refusal to challenge the status quo that is driving the animosity and outrage across the country. Wall Street is being upheld and indeed enabled by both the Democrats and Republicans, including, at the top of the stinking pile, President Obama and his administration.
The Democrats are a prosthetic party, a hollow shell for the detritus of New Deal liberalism, that maintains popular allegiance through blind inertia. For the past thirty years at least, the Democrats have functioned less as a political party driven by a tangible ideology than as a low-fat franchise of Wall Street and the defense contractors. From war to neoliberal economics, the new Democrats have pursued brutal policies, often inflicted most grievously at the party’s most devoted constituents: Hispanics, blacks, labor and the unemployed.
There’s a Wilsonian quality to Obama: trim, aloof, pedantic and shank-you-in-the-back dangerous. Obama has never wanted to be seen socializing with the poor or working class stiffs. He doesn’t even want them in his orbit, except as props behind his teleprompter. In his first three years in office, the closest the president came to such a pedestrian parlay was his famous beer summit with the Cambridge cop who manhandled Henry Louis Gates. Come to think of it, that meeting was a twofer, since it was also one of Obama’s few close encounters with a voice from black America as well.
Making the connection between the continued economic disparities on Main Street and the policies that fuel this divide is paramount to bringing about real change. As such, it’s time to Occupy Washington and make this, not only an electoral issue, but also a very real threat to our government’s consolidated power.
Obama’s first term has revealed the utter vacuity of our political system and the prodigious level of corruption eating away at the sinews of the empire. Democracy itself is being degraded. From bank bailouts and war to indemnification of corporate criminals and assassination orders against American citizens, the most urgent matters of government are now hatched without public debate in the secret chambers of power. The majestic hypocrisy of the Democrats in a time of deepening economic and environmental crisis has inflamed the spectrum of outrage now sweeping America. But where does the movement go from here?
The 99% movement needs to forsake protest for a sustained resistance and disruption of the status quo. After all, the object isn’t reform—we’re far, far beyond that–but radical, systemic change. Its structure should remain enigmatic, diffuse, protean—too slippery to be captured and co-opted by Democrats looking to hijack its momentum. In order to maintain its integrity and political power, the 99% movement must publicly shun any perilous alliance with Democratic front groups such as MoveOn and the Sierra Club. It should reject the coruscated cant of faux leftists like Bernie Sanders, Van Jones and Rachel Maddow and instead give full-voice to the intrinsic rage of the outsiders, the disenfranchised and destitute, the left behind, the new American preterite.
It’s time for the nation to hear the spooky vibrations of a home-grown and organic movement on the march, a swarming mass of discontent that will make the financial aristocrats and their low-rent political grifters tremble in their sleep.
Let’s run the bastards out of town.

[/SIZE]

 

[804brown]

UPS profits over $1 BILLION in its last quarter. Exxonmobil profits up 40%. It is business as usual in the corporate world. Yetwe have millions out of work. Poverty rate at record levels. People still getting foreclosed on. Companies cutting back on benefits and pensions for its workers. Jobs being outsourced to China, etc. All is well for the 1%!! Well, the 99% voted for change in 2008. Then again in 2010. Our corporate sponsored government cannot be trusted to make government for the 99% of us. The only thing to do is go to the streets . And stay there until the system is changed!!

 

[klein]

UPS profits over $1 BILLION in its last quarter. Exxonmobil profits up 40%. It is business as usual in the corporate world. Yetwe have millions out of work. Poverty rate at record levels. People still getting foreclosed on. Companies cutting back on benefits and pensions for its workers. Jobs being outsourced to China, etc. All is well for the 1%!! Well, the 99% voted for change in 2008. Then again in 2010. Our corporate sponsored government cannot be trusted to make government for the 99% of us. The only thing to do is go to the streets . And stay there until the system is changed!!

Why not become a good republican and give them more tax breaks, such as lowering corperate taxes, then taxing the working family more ?

That will get consumer confidence back up , NOT !

 

[Babagounj]

UPS profits over $1 BILLION in its last quarter. Exxonmobil profits up 40%. It is business as usual in the corporate world. Yetwe have millions out of work. Poverty rate at record levels. People still getting foreclosed on. Companies cutting back on benefits and pensions for its workers. Jobs being outsourced to China, etc. All is well for the 1%!! Well, the 99% voted for change in 2008. Then again in 2010. Our corporate sponsored government cannot be trusted to make government for the 99% of us. The only thing to do is go to the streets . And stay there until the system is changed!!

Nice to see that you to have fallen for this DNC trap.
Classic Class Warfare.
It' s the perfect crisis that this administration has been planning & waiting for.

 

[wkmac]

Nice to see that you to have fallen for this DNC trap.
Classic Class Warfare.
It' s the perfect crisis that this administration has been planning & waiting for.

Interesting how some can be doing the exact same thing, only standing on the otherside of the same narrative and hurling rocks. It's true the current INGSOC is guilty in many ways but our rock throwers seem to ignore their own version of INGSOC's guilt in helping build that perfect crisis in the first place. And the worse part is their solution is we should return to the first INGSOC as they have gone through rehab?

Yeah Right!

As Jullian Assange sez, "Crush the Bastards!"

All of them!

 

[wkmac]

Interesting how some can be doing the exact same thing, only standing on the otherside of the same narrative and hurling rocks. It's true the current INGSOC is guilty in many ways but our rock throwers seem to ignore their own version of INGSOC's guilt in helping build that perfect crisis in the first place. And the worse part is their solution is we should return to the first INGSOC as they have gone through rehab?

Yeah Right!

As Jullian Assange sez, "Crush the Bastards!"

All of them!

This also applies.

 

[moreluck]

Frank Sinatra Let it snow - YouTube

 

[FracusBrown]

We're doomed when we start making decisions and taking advice from people that rely on dependency to prosper.

" A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."

Sir Alex Fraser Tytler ( 1742-1813 )
Scottish jurist and historian

 

[Babagounj]

To assume that these protesters represent a majority of Americans is a total falsehood.
Why are they set up mostly in Dem. controlled cities and/ or states ?
(NY Times)
Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Fordham University, recently conducted a survey of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York.
Dr. Panagopoulos described the protesters as “disgruntled Democrats.”
A quarter said they were Democrats, but 39 percent said they did not identify with any political party.
Eleven percent identified as Socialists, another 11 percent said they were members of the Green Party, 2 percent were Republicans and 12 percent say they identified as something else.
Two-thirds of the survey respondents have attended college, and 25 percent are currently students.
Thirty percent have full-time jobs and 18 percent are employed part-time.
Forty percent are members of a union household.

 

[804brown]

Why not become a good republican and give them more tax breaks, such as lowering corperate taxes, then taxing the working family more ?

That will get consumer confidence back up , NOT !

We have tried conservative government (hierarchical authority based on wealth and other forms of power that rewards only success) and pragmatic liberal government (third way boring centrism of clinton and obama). Both have failed us. It is about time we try a progessive government where the government protects and empowers all people equally. Where the power of government is used to regulate corporations so that they actually exist to make life better for all of us not just the 1%!!

Yeah cut taxes for these greedy bastards some more?? They just were given an extension of huge tax cuts last December and they have sat on that $$. Trickle down never works (for the 99% anyway)!!

 

[804brown]

We're doomed when we start making decisions and taking advice from people that rely on dependency to prosper.

" A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back again to bondage."

Sir Alex Fraser Tytler ( 1742-1813 )
Scottish jurist and historian

You are talking about the dependency of those on corporate welfare right?? For they are the ones who currently make the decisions about how our economy works. Hows that been going lately, huh??

 

[804brown]

To assume that these protesters represent a majority of Americans is a total falsehood.
Why are they set up mostly in Dem. controlled cities and/ or states ?
(NY Times)
Costas Panagopoulos, a professor of political science at Fordham University, recently conducted a survey of the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York.
Dr. Panagopoulos described the protesters as “disgruntled Democrats.”
A quarter said they were Democrats, but 39 percent said they did not identify with any political party.
Eleven percent identified as Socialists, another 11 percent said they were members of the Green Party, 2 percent were Republicans and 12 percent say they identified as something else.
Two-thirds of the survey respondents have attended college, and 25 percent are currently students.
Thirty percent have full-time jobs and 18 percent are employed part-time.
Forty percent are members of a union household.

Occupy Wall Street speaks of issues that effects all of us. You might not think they speak for you but dont forget some house slaves during the American civil war thought things were fine too!! It amazes me how some people especially down south have this house slave mentality where they are serfs to their masters demands . They reject the empowerment of unions because they see them as "outside agitators" just making trouble for them on the plantation.

As for this "survey" by this guy, where is it published?? Was it scientifically done or was it just random?? Ive been down there several times and I do not detect disgruntled dems at all. I find mostly Green party types or socialist party types as well as libertarians and people who never voted before. Also most of them have jobs that they go to. Some quit school to join this movement while others are unemployed. Still others like me are fully employed yet make the time to come down and join in.

Stop criticizing from secondary sources. You say you are from eastern Mass, so why dont you visit Occupy Boston and find out for yourself!!

 

[804brown]

This Sunday, Mayor Bloomberg is hosting an intimate dinner at Gracie Mansion on behalf of the 1%, which we will be joining on behalf of the 99%!

Take Action: help us Occupy Gracie this Sunday at 6pm.

Bloomberg's dinner discussion will be about how to pave the way for the Super Committee to "go big" and cut $4 trillion in federal spending. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are all essential to the survival of the 99%, but the participants of this dinner party intend to slash all of them! Likewise, we intend to expose just how out of touch these 1%-ers are.

So, come dressed as Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, or a Peasant - and bring the family. We'll vote for the best costumes and they will serve us all cake!

Join us on Sunday at 6pm at 88th st and 1st ave., and / or help spread the word about @OccupyGracie!

 

[Babagounj]

Station’s users rail vs. Occupy
Commuters upset over dirty ‘mess’
Commuters and merchants in South Station say they are fed up with Occupy Boston squatters who are hogging electrical outlets and taking sponge baths in bathroom sinks, turning the bustling terminal into a unsanitary locker room.
Transportation officials said they have sealed up some outlets after fearful commuters worried Occupy members powering up electronic gadgets close to ATM machines could see PIN numbers being punched in. Yet, there’s no quick solution to sharing the bathroom.
Julia Tanen, spokeswoman for Cushman & Wakefield, the commercial real estate company that manages South Station, said crews Thursday covered three outlets next to Bank of America ATMs near the Summer Street entrance because customers taking cash out felt uncomfortable with people hovering nearby charging their phones.

“They were afraid people could see their PIN numbers. ... If people complain, we have to make them feel safe,” she said, adding the other outlet near the bathrooms on the main concourse was capped, too. “They were creating a hazard. People trying to get into the bathrooms were practically tripping on them.”
Alex Ingram, a spokesman for the leaderless Occupy Boston movement, explained that it’s difficult to police the behavior of a large group of people.
“We try to assume that everyone knows how to behave themselves in a public place. It’s an assumption that might be misguided,” he said.

 

[Babagounj]

99% vs 1% ?
Let's see who is makes up this 1%; according to POTUS anyone making over $250,000 is in his eyes is a millionaire, well he makes over $250,000 so he's a millionaire , so isn't Sen Kerry and most of the rest of the Senate . These are the same people who have refused to pass a budget for this country since 2008, a gross failure of their duties. So if they can't do their basic function of their job, how can one expect them to do anything right ?
The 99%....a false concept. What you have is a bunch of crybabies who really should be in mental hospitals { except most states closed their years ago to "save" money } that have illegally taken over private & public lands as their own. These encampments are quickly becoming a disgrace to every citizen. The MSM is falling over themselves to cover as many as possible. Because they are a distraction from the real problem makers, who now can really run amok without any oversight.

 

[moreluck]

I'm glad that a Tea Party group is demanding their money back that was paid for a place to demonstrate....the same place occupied for free now by the OWS people. You don't charge one group and not another. (in Virginia, I think)

 

[klein]

99% vs 1% ?
Let's see who is makes up this 1%; according to POTUS anyone making over $250,000 is in his eyes is a millionaire, well he makes over $250,000 so he's a millionaire , so isn't Sen Kerry and most of the rest of the Senate . These are the same people who have refused to pass a budget for this country since 2008, a gross failure of their duties. So if they can't do their basic function of their job, how can one expect them to do anything right ?
The 99%....a false concept. What you have is a bunch of crybabies who really should be in mental hospitals { except most states closed their years ago to "save" money } that have illegally taken over private & public lands as their own. These encampments are quickly becoming a disgrace to every citizen. The MSM is falling over themselves to cover as many as possible. Because they are a distraction from the real problem makers, who now can really run amok without any oversight.

Actually. by all calculations, the top 1% are those earning more than 347.000 anually.
In average they get a 12.5% wage/salary increase per year. (average taken over a 30 year period)

Just some straight facts.