http://news.yahoo.com/house-passes-6...235908339.html

Goodbye habius corpus, goodbye my vote for Obama.

Damn....

"Unnerving many conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats, the legislation also would deny suspected terrorists, even U.S. citizens seized within the nation's borders, the right to trial and subject them to indefinite detention. House Republican leaders had to tamp down a small revolt among some rank-and-file who sought to delay a vote on the bill."

Yup, and Obama is going to sign that piece of shit. :annoyed:

Infuriating and inspiring...
 

I love this woman's spirit and what she is doing to fight the new round of voter suppression laws.

Worth the watch -

Ya know, this bill that will suspend habeas corpus and repeal the federal rules of criminal procedure, I am just dumbfounded that Obama is going to sign it. It is against everything he ran for in 2008. That he takes all this corporate money for his campaign speaks to how much he has been bought and paid for by the 1%.

As I have said before, the longer we choose the lesser of two evils for president, the longer 2 evils will be our only choices. We need stand up and reject the two party system. The 99 Declaration committee is actively working to get delegates from every congressional district to come together in Philadelphia on July 4th 2012 and vote on a list of demands to put to the president and congress. Let's throw our support behind them. They are the best hope for our voices to be heard.

https://www.facebook.com/www.the99declaration.org

Right now their site, www.the99declaration.org, is having technical issues but they will get it resolved soon. They will be voting on delegates in 96 days.


More on the Indefinite Detention Inserted Into Defense Authorization Act: http://occupywallst.org/forum/obama-...cupy-must-sta/

The Lessons of History or Maybe Not. You Decide.
 

This piece is from an Urban Planner Blog I read. Below I have posted the link to the full piece and snipped a paragraph in hopes of getting your attention, interest.
__________________________________________________ _______________


Since too much inequality can foment revolt and instability, the CIA regularly updates statistics on income distribution for countries around the world, including the U.S. Between 1997 and 2007, inequality in the U.S. grew by almost 10 percent, making it more unequal than Russia, infamous for its powerful oligarchs. The U.S. is not faring well historically, either. Even the Roman Empire, a society built on conquest and slave labor, had a more equitable income distribution.



http://http://persquaremile.com/2011/12/16/income-inequality-in-the-roman-empire/

I always knew Mr. Smiles wasn't "special and magic" like everyone thought he was, even I fell for it for a minute. Then I started researching and finding out how tight he was with wall street. Usually people like him are the most vicious. He likes corporate money just like the rest of them.

I like this plan and I will support it. But careful we might end up in one of these holding places for life. I hate to say it and I don't like the guy but all the shit that Alex Jones talked about when he spoke of this stuff is coming to fruition. Starting with the law that Obama is about to sign. I wonder how much he's getting paid for it.

Alex also said that juice boxes makes people gay so it's kind of hard to take him serious.

"He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words."
 

I just thought I'd take a minute in this thread to note the passing of Christopher Hitchens. Dogged, controversial, brilliant and incendiary, he was a tenacious fighter for so many things, not the least of which was freedom of thought and the right and value of individual expression.


16 December 2011
Christopher Hitchens dies at 62 after suffering cancer

British-born author, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62.

He died from pneumonia, a complication of the oesophageal cancer he had, at a Texas hospital. Vanity Fair magazine, which announced his death, said there would "never be another like Christopher". He is survived by his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, and his children from a previous marriage, Alexander and Sophia.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter described the writer as someone "of ferocious intellect, who was as vibrant on the page as he was at the bar". "Those who read him felt they knew him, and those who knew him were profoundly fortunate souls."

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...11716730-1.jpg

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth in 1949 and graduated from Oxford in 1970. He began his career as a journalist in Britain in the 1970s and later moved to New York, becoming contributing editor to Vanity Fair in November 1992.

"Prospect of death makes me sober, objective"

He was diagnosed with cancer in June 2010, and documented his declining health in his Vanity Fair column. In an August 2010 essay for the magazine he wrote: "I love the imagery of struggle. "I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient."

Speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme, in November that year, he reflected on a life that he knew would be cut short: "It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more rationed than you thought it was." Radicalised by the 1960s, Hitchens was often arrested at political rallies and was kicked out of the Labour Party over his opposition to the Vietnam War. He became a correspondent for the Socialist Workers Party's International Socialism magazine.

In later life he moved away from the left. Following the September 11 attacks he argued with Noam Chomsky and others who suggested that US foreign policy had helped cause the tragedy. He supported the Iraq War and backed George W Bush for re-election in 2004.

It led to him being accused of betrayal: one former friend called him "a lying, opportunistic, cynical contrarian", another critic said he was "a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay". But he could dish out scathing critiques himself. He called Bill Clinton "a cynical, self-seeking ambitious thug", Henry Kissinger a war criminal and Mother Teresa a fraudulent fanatic.

'A great voice'

He also famously fell out with his brother, the Mail on Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens, though the pair were later reconciled. Hitchens could be a loyal friend. He stood by the author Salman Rushdie during the furor that followed the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Writing on Twitter after the announcement of Hitchens' death, Mr Rushdie said: "Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops."

Former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly debated religion with Hitchens at the Munk Debate in Toronto in November 2010. "Christopher Hitchens was a complete one-off, an amazing mixture of writer, journalist, polemicist, and unique character," said Mr Blair.

"He was fearless in the pursuit of truth and any cause in which he believed. And there was no belief he held that he did not advocate with passion, commitment and brilliance.

"He was an extraordinary, compelling and colourful human being whom it was a privilege to know." The MP Denis McShane was a student at Oxford with Hitchens. He said: "Christopher just swam against every tide. He was a supporter of the Polish and Czech resistance of the 1970s, he supported Mrs Thatcher because he thought getting rid of the Argentinian fascist junta was a good idea. "He was a cross between Voltaire and Orwell. He loved words."

"He could throw words up into the sky, they fell down in a marvellous pattern.
Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious”

The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States, and he happily took on the role of the country's best-known atheist.

He maintained his devout atheism after being diagnosed with cancer, telling one interviewer: "No evidence or argument has yet been presented which would change my mind. But I like surprises." The author and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins described him as the "finest orator of our time" and a "valiant fighter against all tyrants including God". He said Hitchens had been a "wonderful mentor in a way".

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who once worked as an intern for Hitchens, said: "Christopher Hitchens was everything a great essayist should be: infuriating, brilliant, highly provocative and yet intensely serious.

"He will be massively missed by everyone who values strong opinions and great writing." Hitchens wrote for numerous publications including The Times Literary Supplement, the Daily Express, the London Evening Standard, Newsday and The Atlantic. He was the author of 17 books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger, How Religion Poisons Everything, and a memoir, Hitch-22.

A collection of his essays, Arguably, was released this year.

The story continues at -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16212418

This was exquisite reading, Greyson. Thank you for posting it.

Thanks for this article, turasultana.

I do not support strategies such as protests designed to bring closure to sea ports.

Free-Falling in Milwaukee: A Close-Up on One City's Middle-Class Decline
By David Rohde

In the last 30 years, Milwaukee's middle class families went from a plurality to its smallest minority. Its poorest parts have a higher infant mortality rate than the Gaza Strip.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt..._Wisconsin.jpg

MILWAUKEE -- As Washington and Madison fiddle, this city's middle class is slowly deteriorating.

First, the numbers. From 1970 to 2007, the percentage of families in the Milwaukee metropolitan area that were middle class declined from 37 to 24 percent, according to a new analysis by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. During the same period, the proportion of affluent families grew from 22 to 27 percent-while the percentage of poor households swelled from 23 to 31 percent. In short, Milwaukee's middle class families went from a plurality to its smallest minority.

The biggest culprit is the disappearance of well-paying manufacturing jobs. Despite a promising recent uptick in high-end manufacturing, Milwaukee has suffered a 40 percent decline in manufacturing jobs since 1970, when Schlitz, Pabst and American Motors reigned. Instead of shrinking, the city's urban poverty is creeping outward toward suburbs. Smoke floats over Villard Avenue, a once active area dominated by factories that now have mostly closed, in the 1st district where unemployment numbers are high in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Late Wednesday afternoon, that was evident in the Jefferson Elementary school of West Allis, a once solidly middle class suburb bordering Milwaukee. In a crowded school gymnasium, principal Shelly Strasser said that fifty percent of students now qualify for free or reduced price school lunch programs. In other local schools, the number is ninety percent.

"It breaks your heart," said Strasser, a West Allis native who said she now has homeless students. "That's something we've never seen as a district."
The change also emerges in Cudahy, a once middle class suburb just south of the city. As a child, Debby Pizur watched traffic jams form on local streets during factory shifts changes. Today, many of those factories are shuttered, Pizur works three jobs at the age of 59, and runs a non-profit that provides food, clothing and household items to the community's poor.

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/ea...media.net.jpeg

The number of families served by her center, "Project Concern," has doubled since she took over five years ago. Increasingly, families are "doubling and tripling up," she said, with parents, siblings and children moving in with one another.

In Milwaukee's poorest corners, the infant mortality rate is higher than that of the Gaza Strip, Colombia and Bulgaria.

"I have no job," said Brenda, a woman who declined to give her last name and blushed as she picked up free food and clothing. "I haven't had a job for three years."

'YOU CAN'T MOVE OUT. YOU'RE STUCK.'

Milwaukee's poor, meanwhile, are poorer. A drive through the north side district of Alderman Ashanti Hamilton showed it. In the 1970s, the area was home to one of the most prosperous black communities in the nation. Two massive factories employed 15,000 workers."In those days, you could lose a job in the morning," recalled Joe Bova, a 69-year-old retired crime victim advocate. "And have another job after lunch."

Today, both plants have closed, run-down shops line derelict streets and Ashanti puts the unemployment rate for young black males at 50 percent. In Milwaukee's poorest corners, the infant mortality rate is higher than that of the Gaza Strip, Colombia and Bulgaria. All the while, Milwaukee's wealthier suburbs thrive. Ozaukee County, just north of the city, is the 25th wealthiest in the United States in terms of per capita income.

"It's basically two cities," said Howard Snyder, executive director of the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation, a local non-profit. "Now, everybody is locked in. You can't move in. You can't move out. You're stuck. There was a moment for bold action but it has passed."

Unfortunately, Milwaukee's dwindling middle class is part of a national trend. A November study by researchers at Stanford University found that the share of American families living in middle class neighborhoods in the United States dropped from 65 percent in 1970 to 44 percent in 2009. Milwaukee experienced the second greatest decrease in the country, according to the study; only Philadelphia's was worse. "Income inequality grew," said Sean Reardon, the author of the study. "The growth in the tails in Milwaukee and the shrinking middle class is what I'd expect to see."

How to slow that trend vexes Milwaukee officials. In the wake of big-government, anti-poverty initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s, Milwaukee adopted market-oriented downtown development projects in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, the city's center and lakefront boast high-end residential condominiums, a sparkling convention center and stunning Santiago Calatrava-designed art museum. New service jobs dominate the economy, but vary vastly in pay. As in other American cities, bankers, lawyers and professionals earn handsomely. Cashiers, janitors and restaurant workers struggle to make ends meet.

HELD BACK BY POLARIZATION

In recent years, the city turned several abandoned factories into new industrial parks. Tenants range from a local frozen pizza producer to a Spanish-owned firm that manufactures wind-turbine generators. Several thousand new jobs have been created, but the tens of thousands of well-paid, manufacturing jobs that built Milwaukee have not been replaced.

"You had the war on poverty and then you had the trickle down theory," said Sherrie Tussler, executive director of the Hunger Task Force, a local non-profit that feeds a growing number of formerly middle-class families. "And neither one worked."

Finding a third way in Wisconsin, an epicenter of American political polarization, will not be easy. Hamilton, the alderman, insists the answers to America's woes will emerging at the local, not state or federal level. "It's happening," he said. "And it's been demonstrated that things can work when things are not so politicized." The 38-year-old Milwaukee native insists he and other Democrats work closely with local business leaders to try to revive the city. Government alone is not the answer, he said. Nor is the free market alone. Wisconsin, Hamilton insists, is an example for a divided country.

"It's an example of what not to do," he said, "and what can be done." I pray he's right.

This post also appears at Reuters.com, an *Atlantic* partner site.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...250100/#slide3

I didn't and don't support the port closure strategies either. So many of the 99% are negatively affected by this type of strategy- and it leads to those that lost pay to turn aware fro the occupy movement. Right before the holidays. Far too many of the 99% will begin to view this movement as a bunch of white, spoiled middle-class college students that have no idea what it is to try and earn a living. I remember these sentiments back in my 60's days of dissent. An important lesson to learn for activists. One has to build awareness of the populations they beleive they are protesting for and with in a realistic way. Walk a mile in my shoes... comes to mind.


It appears that the Occupy Oakland folks realized this and have taken up donation drives to give to those that lost pay- a very good idea. We all learn from our mistakes- part of just being human.

About time...
 

Countrywide Will Settle a Bias Suit
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday announced the largest residential fair-lending settlement in history, saying that Bank of America had agreed to pay $335 million to settle allegations that its Countrywide Financial unit discriminated against black and Hispanic borrowers during the housing boom.

A department investigation concluded that Countrywide loan officers and brokers charged higher fees and rates to more than 200,000 minority borrowers across the country than to white borrowers who posed the same credit risk. Countrywide also steered more than 10,000 minority borrowers into costly subprime mortgages when white borrowers with similar credit profiles received regular loans, it found.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the settlement showed that the Justice Department would “vigorously pursue those who would take advantage of certain Americans because of their race, national origin, gender or disability,” adding: “Such conduct undercuts the notion of a level playing field for all consumers. It betrays the promise of equal opportunity that is enshrined in our Constitution and our legal framework.” The settlement is subject to approval by a federal judge in California; according to the proposed consent order filed Wednesday, Countrywide denied all of the department’s allegations.

Dan Frahm, a Bank of America spokesman, stressed that the allegations were focused on Countrywide’s conduct from the years 2004 to 2008, before Bank of America purchased it. “We are committed to fair and equal treatment of all our customers, and will continue to focus on doing what’s right for our customers, clients and communities,” he said. “We discontinued Countrywide products and practices that were not in keeping with our commitment and will continue to resolve and put behind us the remaining Countrywide issues.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...ticleLarge.jpg

The problems stemmed from a Countrywide policy that gave loan officers and brokers the discretion to alter the terms for which a particular applicant qualified without setting up any system to comply with fair-lending rules, the department said. Lending data showed that Countrywide ended up charging Hispanics and African-Americans more, on average, than white applicants with similar credit histories. In 2007, for example, Countrywide employees charged Hispanic applicants in Los Angeles an average of $545 more in fees for a $200,000 loan than they charged non-Hispanic white applicants with similar credit histories. Independent brokers processing applications for a Countrywide loan charged Hispanics $1,195 more, the department said.

Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, which in 2010 had sued Bank of America over Countrywide’s lending practices, also settled that case on Wednesday as part of the deal. “Chances are, the victims had no idea they were being victimized,” said Thomas E. Perez, the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general for civil rights. “It was discrimination with a smile.”

In addition, from 2004 to 2007 — the peak of Wall Street firms’ demand for subprime loans that they purchased, bundled and resold as securities, a major cause of the ensuing financial crisis — Countrywide allowed its brokers and employees to steer applicants who qualified for regular mortgages into a riskier and more expensive subprime loan. The odds of a minority applicant being steered into such a loan were more than twice as high as those for a non-Hispanic white borrower with a similar credit rating, the department said. About two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic and one-third were black, the department said. If a judge approves the settlement, victims will receive between several hundred and several thousand dollars, with larger amounts going to those who were steered into subprime mortgages despite qualifying for regular loans.

The settlement dwarfed previous fair-lending cases. The largest on record until Wednesday, Mr. Perez said, was a $6.1 million settlement in March 2010 related to two subsidiaries of A.I.G. Under federal civil rights laws — including the Fair Housing and Equal Credit Opportunity acts — a lending practice is illegal if it has a disparate impact on minority borrowers. Against the backdrop of the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has made a major effort to step up the laws’ enforcement. In early 2010, the division created a unit to focus exclusively on banks and mortgage brokers suspected of discriminating against minority mortgage applicants, a type of litigation that requires extensive and complex analysis of data.

Working with bank regulatory agencies and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the unit has reached settlements or filed complaints in 10 cases accusing a lender of engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination. The Federal Reserve first detected statistical discrepancies in the loans Countrywide was making and referred the matter to the Justice Department in early 2007, according to a court filing disclosed in 2010 as part of a civil fraud case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Angelo R. Mozilo, the former chief executive of Countrywide.

With its aggressive pursuit of growth in the home lending market, Countrywide became a symbol of the excesses and collapse of the housing boom. After accumulating $200 billion in assets, it nearly fell into bankruptcy. As the financial crisis began to mount, it was taken over by Bank of America for $2.8 billion. The acquisition, regarded as one of the worst deals ever, has already cost the bank tens of billions of dollars in losses. Investor uncertainty about future losses is a prime reason that its stock has lost roughly two-thirds of its value over the last two years.

While Wednesday’s settlement put one legal headache behind the bank, the second-largest in the United States by assets, it still faces legal challenges on a host of other fronts. Besides an effort by investors to force it to buy back billions of dollars in defaulted mortgages, Bank of America and other large servicers are negotiating with state attorneys general to settle an investigation into improper foreclosure practices. That settlement could cost the largest servicers more than $20 billion.

The remnants of Countrywide and its mortgage servicing unit agreed in June 2010 to pay $108 million to settle federal charges that the company charged highly inflated sums to customers struggling to hang on to their homes. The settlement resolved the biggest mortgage-servicing case ever brought by the Federal Trade Commission with one of its largest overall judgments. The money was to be used to reimburse homeowners who were charged excessive fees. In August 2010, the company agreed to pay $600 million to settle shareholder lawsuits over its mortgage losses.

Nelson D. Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/bu...e-lending.html

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2011 by Rolling Stone

A Christmas Message From America's Rich
by Matt Taibbi

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.

Published on Friday, December 23, 2011 by On the Commons

Occupy Giving: Why Do the 1% Give Less Than the Rest of Us?
by David Morris

This is the giving season and we Americans are prodigious givers. Nearly two thirds of us donate to charities each year. This year we will send more than $225 billion to charities. More than a quarter of this giving will occur in December.

Those are the bare facts. But this year, when the stark divide between the 1% and the 99% has begun to inform our thinking and our approach, it might be instructive to examine the world of giving through that lens.

How The 1% Differs

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.

To discover what motivates giving Paul K, Piff, a PhD candidate in social psychology at University of California carried out a series of experiments. He discovered that people earning $15,000 or less are more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than those earning more than $150,000.

The 99% tend to give primarily to their church. Giving by the 1%, on the other hand, according to Judith Warner writing in the New York Times “was mostly directed to other causes—cultural institutions, for example, or their alma maters—which often came with the not-inconsequential payoff of enhancing the donor’s status among his or her peers.”

Indeed, empathy and compassion seem in short supply among the 1%. Piff comments, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others”. Which, as Warner notes, affirms economist Frank Levy’s observation in his 1999 book about the new inequality—The New Dollars and Dreams: American Incomes and Economic Change. “The welfare state rests on enlightened self-interest in which people can look at beneficiaries and reasonable say, ‘There for the grace of God…’ As income differences widen, this statement rings less true.”

We should bear in mind that what is reported as charitable giving by the 1% significantly overstates the actual private sacrifice, as economist Uwe E. Reinhardt points out. If the wealthy donate $10,000 to charity and are in the combined 50% federal, state and local tax bracket then their effective sacrifice is $5,000 and society as a whole, without its advice and consent, subsidizes the rest.

Foundations and the Public Good

Much of the giving by the very wealthy is done through foundations. Foundations account for about 13% of all charitable giving, about $40 billion a year. Foundations may help the needy but they rarely advocate for them. “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent,” opined Emmett D. Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation recently told the New York Times. “We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

While most Foundations do not engage in campaigns to expand policies that extend a helping hand to our neighbors, a growing number are engaging in campaigns whose result may be the opposite. This movement may have begun in the early 1980s when William Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Nixon and Ford and principal in leveraged buyout and private equity firms and the President of the Olin Foundation joined with others to start the Philanthropy Roundtable.

In his 1978 book, A Time for Truth, Simon declared, “Most private funds … flow ceaselessly to the very institutions which are philosophically committed to the destruction of capitalism. … [T]he great corporations of America sustain the major universities, with no regard for the content of their teachings [and sustain] the major foundations, which nurture the most destructive egalitarian trends.”

The Philanthropy Roundtable was established to channel the contributions of the 1% in more self-serving directions.

In 2011 the Roundtable awarded the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership to Charles G. Koch. In 2008 Koch, or rather the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation entered into an agreement with Florida State University to provide millions for the school’s economics department. The catch, according to the St. Petersburg Times was that Koch would have the authority to approve who ultimately filled the positions. Moreover, the professors it approves must be hired with tenure and FSU must continue to support them for at least four years past the period in which Koch had promised funding

Just to be clear here. The public is subsidizing possibly to the tune of 50 percent charitable contributions to a public university that give control to a private person to hire professors who will teach what may be a required course that will educate the students about the evils of government.

In the last few years a growing number of billionaires have established their own private foundations. They receive an immediate tax deduction for the full value of their contribution even though the foundation is only required to give away 5% of that endowment each year. Which means that for every $1 million contributed, which can mean a $500,000 loss to the public sector, the foundation must give away only $50,000.

Moreover, the billionaire has the right to decide where that money is spent.

The Gates Foundation and Public Education

The most dramatic example to date may be the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates endowed the Foundation, avoiding billions of dollars in taxes and now heads the Foundation and decides how it spends its money.

The Gates Foundation originally gave its money to school districts to encourage smaller schools that have a better track record at improving student performance. But, says Allan C. Golston, President of the Foundation’s U.S. program, “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes. The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer”. In 2009 the Foundation gave almost $80 million for advocacy to influence the $600 billion various levels of government spend annually on education. In partnership with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Walmart Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation has become the dominant player in writing the rules for the future of public education.

The New York Times has reported on how astonishingly comprehensive and influential these Foundations’ campaigns have been.

The 2009 stimulus package included $6 billion to help the public education system. The Gates Foundation and its partners swung into action to make sure it was spent “correctly”. They were helped by the fact that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff and Assistant Deputy Secretary came from the Gates Foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving door policy limiting involvement with former employers.

Gates financed the New Teacher Project to issue and influential report detailing the flaws in existing evaluation systems. The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers developed the standards and Achieve, Inc. a non-profit organization coordinated the writing of tests aligned with the standards, each with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. The Alliance for Excellent Education received half a million “to grow support for the common core standards initiative”. The Fordham Institute received a million to “review common core materials and develop supportive materials”.

And when the rules were issued and the competition began, the Gates Foundation offered $250,000 to help each state apply so long as the state agreed with the Foundations’ market oriented approach.

And to educate the general public, the Foundation spent $2 million on a campaign focused on the film Waiting for Superman that demonized teachers’ unions.

Most charter schools, the preferred solution for Gates, Broad and the Walmart family, are non-profits. But they see no reason why they need to remain non-profits. A 2009 guide book by the Philanthropy Roundtable noted, “many education reformers believe that EMOs (profit oriented management companies) hold real potential for revolutionizing public education. If investors in EMOs are able to deliver consistent student achievement and create a profitable investment vehicle, they will have discovered a highly attractive and sustainable model for charter schools specifically and public education generally.”

Today more than 700 public k-12 schools around the country are managed by for profit companies. In May, Ohio adopted legislation allowing for-profit-businesses to open their own taxpayer-financed charter schools, which led Bill Sims, head of the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools to express his concern that this could “take the public out of public charter schools.”

In 2011 the Gates Foundation seems to have deepened its anti-government efforts, giving almost $400,000 to the conservatives’ legislative privatization network ALEC.

Warren Buffett is a major investor in the Gates Foundation. In 2011 he gave another $1.5 billion to the Foundation bringing the total to almost $10 billion so far.

Buffett is well known for writing and speaking about the unfairness of the tax system. He has signed on to an effort to force the 1% to pay a higher, not a lower tax rate than the 99%.

To date Buffett hasn’t been willing to give millions to underwrite a comprehensive campaign to convince legislators and the country to raise taxes on the rich. And the Gates Foundation hasn’t to my knowledge entertained the idea that it might spend $80 million on a campaign to increase the resources devoted to public education.

Eliminate the Charitable Giving Tax Deduction

In June 2010 Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, asking their wealthy compatriots to give away half or more of their wealth. Several dozen billionaires reportedly have signed on. Many will set up their own foundations and reap substantial tax benefits while retaining the right to decide where the money is invested. CPA Robert A. Green has estimated that this could result in $250 billion or more being diverted from the treasuries of state and federal governments.

We should eliminate the tax deduction for charities. The impact on giving will be modest while the savings to the public sector will be substantial.

A 2006 survey by the Bank of America found that over half of high-net-worth donors said their giving would stay the same, or even increase, if the tax deduction for charitable gifts fell to zero. The American Enterprise Institute notes “research shows that virtually no one is motivated meaningfully to give only because of our tax system.” Jack Shakely who ran the California Community Foundation for 25 years recently penned an Op Ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he noted that while the top tax bracket for individuals has plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 35% in 2003 (and according to the IRS the very rich are today taxed at an effective rate of 17 percent) charitable donations have remained almost constant, hovering between 1.7% and 1.95% of personal income per year.

This year governments may lose $50 billion or more because of tax deductions taken overwhelmingly by the rich for charitable givings intended primarily to enhance their status with their brethren or to attack the public sector. We can’t stop the rich from using their money for their own purposes (although we should certainly enact laws to stop them from unduly influencing legislation and elections). But we should not add insult to injury by giving them huge amounts of public sums to attack the public sector.

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2011 by The Irish Times
In the Year of the Protester, Bradley Manning is the Great Dissenter
by Davin O'Dwyer

PRESENT TENSE : IT HAS BEEN an extraordinary year, full of tragedy and tumult: there’s every chance that 2011 will rank with 1968 and 1945 as an era-defining 12 months.

Time magazine has nominated the “protester” as its person of the year, a decision that has generated plenty of ink, but, among the tsunamis and financial crises, it’s true that the act of protest has marked the year out as particularly noteworthy.

From Tahrir Square to Puerta del Sol to Zuccotti Park, people have gathered out of a desire for fairness and democracy, giving shape to world events in a way that few could have predicted on Christmas Eve 2010.

But there is one protester who has been somewhat omitted from the narrative of 2011’s protests, a protester who has been behind bars since May 2010, and whose act of dissent stands equal to all those who sprung the Arab Spring: Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of US military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks.

Manning’s military hearing began eight days ago at Fort Meade, in Maryland, and the sense of inevitability around the charges of aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act makes this trial more about the rights and wrongs of whistleblowing than about determining whether he actually leaked that huge trove of classified information.
Full Article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/24-6

More on Manning
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_N...eing_Tortured/

Thud of the Jackboot
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Too bad Kim Jong-il kicked the bucket last weekend. If the divine hand that laid low the North Korean leader had held off for a week or so, Kim would have been sustained by the news that President Obama is signing into law a bill that puts the United States not immeasurably far from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in contempt of constitutional protections for its citizens, or constitutional restraints upon criminal behavior sanctioned by the state.

At least the DPRK doesn’t trumpet its status as the last best sanctuary of liberty. American politicians, starting with the president, do little else.

A couple of months ago came a mile marker in America’s steady slide downhill towards the status of a Banana Republic, with Obama’s assertion that he has the right as president to order secretly the assassination, without trial, of a US citizen he deems to be working with terrorists. This followed his betrayal in 2009 of his pledge to end the indefinite imprisonment without charges or trial of prisoners in Guantanamo.

Now, after months of declaring that he would veto such legislation, Obama has now crumbled and will soon sign a monstrosity called the Levin/McCain detention bill, named for its two senatorial sponsors, Carl Levin and John McCain. It’s snugged into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.

The detention bill mandates – don’t glide too easily past that word - that all accused terrorists be indefinitely imprisoned by the military rather than in the civilian court system; this includes US citizens within the borders of the United States. Obama supporters have made strenuous efforts to suggest that US citizens are excluded from the bill’s provisions. Not so. “It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help Al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” says Senator Lindsay Graham, a big backer of the bill. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” The bill’s co-sponsor, Democratic senator, cosponsor of the bill, Carl Levin says it was the White House itself that demanded that the infamous Section 1031 apply to American citizens.

Anyone familiar with this sort of “emergency” legislation knows that those drafting the statutes like to cast as wide a net as possible. In this instance the detention bill authorizes use of military force against anyone who “substantially supports” al-Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces”. Of course “associated forces” can mean anything. The bill’s language mentions “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”
 
This is exactly the sort of language that can be bent at will by any prosecutor. Protest too vigorously the assassination of US citizen Anwar al Awlaki by American forces in Yemen in October and one day it’s not fanciful to expect the thud of the military jackboot on your front step, or on that of any anti-war organizer, or any journalist whom some zealous military intelligence officer deems to be giving objective support to the forces of Evil and Darkness.

Since 1878 here in the US, the Posse Comitatus Act has limited the powers of local governments and law enforcement agencies from using federal military personnel to enforce the laws of the land. The detention bill renders the Posse Comitatus Act a dead letter.

Governments, particularly those engaged in a Great War on Terror, like to make long lists of troublesome people to be sent to internment camps or dungeons in case of national emergency. Back in Reagan’s time, in the 1980s, Lt Col Oliver North, working out of the White House, was caught preparing just such a list. Reagan speedily distanced himself from North. Obama, the former lecturer on the US constitution, is brazenly signing this authorization for military internment camps.

There’s been quite a commotion over the detention bill. Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU have raised a stink. The New York Times has denounced it editorially as “a complete political cave-in”. Mindful that the votes of liberals can be useful, even vital in presidential elections, pro-Obama supporters of the bill claim that it doesn’t codify “indefinite detention.” But indeed it does. The bill explicitly authorizes “detention under the law of war until the end of hostilities.”

Will the bill hurt Obama? Probably not too much, if at all. Liberals are never very energetic in protecting constitutional rights. That’s more the province of libertarians and other wackos like Ron Paul actually prepared to draw lines in the sand in matters of principle.

Simultaneous to the looming shadow of indefinite internment by the military for naysayers, we have what appears to be immunity from prosecution for private military contractors retained by the US government, another extremely sinister development. Last Wednesday we ran here an important article on the matter from Laura Raymond of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The US military has been outsourcing war at a staggering rate. Even as the US military quits Iraq, thousands of private military contractors remain. Suppose they are accused of torture and other abuses including murder?

The Centre for Constitutional Rights is currently representing Iraqi civilians tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq, seeking to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law. In Raymond’s words, “By the military’s own internal investigations, private military contractors from the US-based corporations L-3 Services and CACI International were involved in the war crimes and acts of torture that took place, which included rape, being forced to watch family members and others be raped, severe beatings, being hung in stress positions, being pulled across the floor by genitals, mock executions, and other incidents, many of which were documented by photographs. The cases – Al Shimari v. CACI and Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3 – aim to secure a day in court for the plaintiffs, none of whom were ever charged with any crimes.”

But the corporations involved are now arguing in court that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, the US government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued. And Raymond reports that “they are also invoking a new, sweeping defense. The new rule is termed ‘battlefield preemption’ and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any ‘battlefield’.”

You’ve guessed it. As with “associated forces”, an elastic concept discussed above, in the Great War on Terror the entire world is a “battlefield”. So unless the CCR’s suit prevails, a ruling of a Fourth Circuit federal court panel will stand and private military contractors could be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a “battlefield”.

Suppose now we take the new powers of the military in domestic law enforcement, as defined in the detention act, and anticipate the inevitable, that the military delegates these powers to private military contractors. CACI International or a company owned by, say Goldman Sachs, could enjoy delegated powers to arrest any US citizen here within the borders of the USA, “who has committed a belligerent act or who has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces,” torture them to death and then claim “battlefield preemption”.

Don’t laugh.

On this issue of the “privatization” T.P.Wilkinson has a brilliant essay in our latest newsletter on “corporate nihilism and the roots of war”. Wilkinson starts with a critique of the familiar argument that a return to the draft would bring America’s wars home to the citizenry and the prospect of their children being sent off to possible mutilation by IEDs or death would spark resistance. Wilkinson suggests that this underestimates the saturation of our society by militarism. He goes on:

“But does the new warfare even need the large battalions of expendable troops? Just as financial “engineering” has replaced industrial production as a means of wealth extraction, remote-control weapons deployment and mercenary subcontracting have largely replaced the mass armies that characterized U.S. and U.K. warfare in Korea and Vietnam. In this sense, warfare has become even more “corporate.” The fiction that wars of invasion and conquest are the result of state action is obsolete. The entire “national security” process has been fully depoliticized; in other words, the state is more clearly than ever a mere conduit for policies and practices whose origin and essential characteristics are those of boardroom strategic planning and marketing. The difference between global business and global warfare has, in fact, dissolved.

“This presents a serious cognitive problem for anyone trying to find the root of this poisonous plant in order to tear it from the ground that nurtures it. The military sustained by the draft was mimetic of the steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or the cotton plantation in the south? Today’s military operates like the headquarters of Microsoft or USX – the actual physical violence has been outsourced.”
Article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/...-the-jackboot/

good. i've been waiting for this and this is where my efforts will go

i've said many times that FICA is complete and utter bullshit. the same goes for other ratings agencies.

Bradley Manning came to mind when the first stirring of the National Defense Act thingy that encompasses all US citizens into the anti-terror threat started. i thought....hell hasn't it already happened to Bradley? christ.

and what happens when these are the jobs that are available?

Oh, Persi...
 

Is Target selling adult videos and sex kits now? ;-)

Absolutely!

I have thought a lot about the fact that we all are going to have change some things in order to really support the working and middle classes economically. As long as we buy like crazy from big box and large chains that import from countries like China, we contribute to large, publically traded corporations.

Then, there are the arguments about stores like WalMart bringing jobs into locales. And major Japanese auto producers do now have plants in the US and employ US workers.

It is a very complex balance, I think. I buy at independent businesses, but I live in a place near a major urban center, so I have choices. And I have made choices about this due to political ideology. I do pay a little more for things due to choosing the Mom & Pop businesses, but I am not raising a child any longer and only financially responsible for myself.

I hate it that solar panels were designed and developed in the US and now are only produced in other countries and sold back to us. Even if you want these made in the USA, forget it.

We do live in a global economy and do some of our own exporting. But, at the helm of trade, multi-national corporations hold the power. Yet, we don't want to give up less expensive products that frankly are most likely made by people in other countries paid very low wages and work in conditions that are inhumane. But, we keep buying these goods because they cost us less.

Now, with the wage disparity in the US, I don't see us changing this much. People look for bargains, or at least a lower price because the 98% does not have much disposible income and it has been shrinking.

There are many variables to look at about how we consume goods and how we can actually change things without harm to one or more segments of the kinds of work we do and where we do it. Just not simple.

i've never had personal experience with this...BUT....i've known a few people who work in large companies where the old non chinese boss gets replaced with a new chinese boss and then the non chinese people under him/her get laid off and chinese workers are hired in their place. i've seen this happen quite a few times to friends of mine. i'm not sure what relevance this has if any i just thought it was interesting.

as for consumerism and chinese products....people have been ranting about buying American for decades now. but try actually doing it. it's near impossible. and the products on store shelves aren't the only things coming from China. for every one retail item there is ten times as many hidden products coming from China than the public is even aware of. Chinese honey (springs to mind from a different convo) comes here by the barrel full and it's not even legal. and we unwittingly buy it in plastic bears, cereals, and any processed food that claims to have honey in it because the labeling is all bullshit. we are drowning in much more Chinese imports than even we are aware of on the retail end.

Inspiring and brilliant....
 

How 2011 became the year of compassion: OWS didn't just reject unfair aspects of our economic system. It reclaimed the idea of communal solidarity
By Rebecca Solnit

http://media.salon.com/2011/12/RTR2U4YE-460x307.jpg

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.”

The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99 percent of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation — “occupy the river” — in little ones below.

The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves.

Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection.

If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us — and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation and debt jubilees.

Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins. One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children.

We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage.

Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker and Occupier Astra Taylor puts it,

Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis — whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater — truly boggles the mind.”

If what’s been happening locally and globally has some of the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never been one quite so pervasive — from the scientists holding an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, São Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles and Reykjavik. And don’t forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings.


More at -

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/22/how_...ion/singleton/

http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2...de_given_p.php

Occupy L.A.
"Occupy The Rose Parade" Given Permission To March At The End With The Crazies

Article makes a good point- thinking about the mega-buck floats in this parade yearly sponsored by big corporations.

Any thoughts?

While I understand the operatic appeal of this, I don't know that I believe that most parade watchers are really interested in reevaluating their political ideologies. I think they just want to see a parade. It also occurs to me that at some point I would like to see an America more focused on substance than fluff. I'm not sure that making your presence known and shown at the latter is very effective.

Occupying homes about to be foreclosed and small stores on the brink of bankruptcy and frankly small farms that are struggling to survive makes more sense to me. Two things I would like to see OWS be more prominently -

1) The best of America through volunteerism, activism and civil change.

2) The next of America through exactly the same.

I volunteered in DC with a queer group called Burgundy Crescent which matched queer-identified volunteers with a wide variety of volunteer projects within and outside our community. I never regretted a single experience, and I thought we do more good work and fostered more goodwill than anything I had ever participated in.

I think OWS could do the same and create goodwill and effect real change by ensuring that people stay in their homes, their businesses and on their farms. This kind of action is immediate, positive and effective. What do you think?

I agree with you!
I am glad that the actions of the autumn got the public's attention, but I believe that the changes we all need will only come from a MOVEMENT, and that takes a lot of community relationships. I think these modern times are being propelled by sound bite and spectacle, but I have been part of successful community organizing, and it took a lot of time, long conversations, and visible and invisible commitment to the long term.
Kind of like any healthy relationship.

I am happy to see the actions against foreclosures and in support of small businesses and farms. I think they will prove successful tactics.

I’ve been mulling over the discussion of 3rd party candidates but haven’t had time to comment until now. I certainly think we would benefit from having more than just two parties/candidates to choose from. I do, however, think that most 3rd party Presidential undertakings are largely vanity campaigns (e.g. Nader in 2000) that effect very little positive change and can be damaging in a bunch of ways. They are damaging in that they help perpetuate the notion that 3rd party candidates are not (and by extension, never will be) viable candidates. But they are also damaging because, you know what, the lesser of two evils can still be a hell of a lot better than the greater of two evils.

I know a lot of other factors contributed to the results in 2000 (suspect counting in Florida, the archaic Electoral College system by which a candidate can get more votes and still lose, etc), but none of that would have mattered had Nader not been on the ticket. Gore would have won the state conclusively, even with only a portion of Nader’s 97,000+ Florida votes.

With Gore in the White House, we don’t go to war in Iraq, and those thousands of lives and trillions of dollars would not have been needlessly squandered. With Gore in the White House maybe 9/11 is averted (the outgoing Clinton administration warned the incoming Bushies that Al-Qaeda was where they needed to focus their attention, the Bushies said, basically, "Fuck off.") but even if it isn't, do we honestly think Gore would have torched the subsequent global goodwill as quickly and thoroughly as Bush did? Or that Gore would have so shamelessly exploited the tragedy to militarize law enforcement, justify torture, etc? And those are just a few things off the top. Would the EPA have been defanged, or the response to Hurricane Katrina been so anemic, or the home loan mess/stock market crisis been handled the way it was?

I think 3rd party Presidential candidates can play a valuable role even if they are not viable, as pot-stirrers. They can put questions on the table, or in some debates put them directly to the other candidates, that the two major parties would prefer to avoid and that the corporate media is uninterested in asking. But once that role has played itself out, they need to step out of the race unless there truly is so little difference between the two major party candidates that it literally does not matter which one wins (and when has that been true??). To remain in the race for the hell of it strikes me as ego and/or as a way to pad the future book deals and appearance fees.

As I said, I think we would benefit from have viable 3rd (and 4th) party Presidential candidates. But we are far from that being realistic, and we are moving further from it, not closer. Campaign finance has always been a monumental hurdle for candidates outside the 2 parties, at least for those who are not billionaires, and that situation has only worsened with the easing of restrictions on corporate donations to campaigns. The Electoral College structure itself bolsters up the two party system and if no one candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes (a plurality is not sufficient) then the House of Representatives choose a President. So a 3rd party candidate would have to win the EC outright, not just get more votes than any of the other candidates, because realistically the House is going to choose based on party affiliations rather than who received the most votes. That doesn't even address the fact that if an outsider somehow managed to win the Presidency, they would have few if any allies in the House and Senate and their ability to get things done with be severely compromised.

So before we start getting too excited about the possibility of 3rd party Presidential candidates, I think we need to look at some serious, far-reaching campaign and election reform, and we need to focus on getting 3rd, 4th, and 5th party candidates into the House and Senate in noticeable numbers. That would yield immediate results because then neither of the two parties could count on gaining clear control of the House and Senate and they might be forced to engage in actual governing. Once those pieces are in place, I think we can start talking about a real 3rd party Presidency.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011...ical-third-way

Found it! Rockey Anderson.

Good article and info, Corkey. Thank you!

"In the next year, he'll have to harness both that experience and savvy for the task he has now set himself: launching a new political party, the Justice party, and running for president in 2012.

His agenda is a familiar one on the left. Broadly speaking, he wants to break the hold of corrupting corporate influence on the two main parties and give a voice to ordinary working people. It also chimes with the general thrust of the Occupy movement, even though the latter has steered clear of engagement with electoral politics."

I have often thought about if Gore had won, we would not have gone into Iraq. Imagine....

But what you say about serious election reform is the number one thing that has to happen for any 3rd (or 4th, etc.) party to emerge and become viable. Our campaign funding as it is, especially post the Citizens United decision, must be changed in order for this to happen. It can only change with an amendment to the Constitution and that is a long haul plus, think of the lobbying that would go on to stop such an amendment. The 1 & 2% do not want such reform because they would lose the strong hold they have on politics. Bought and paid for.

You get right to what really hinders our being able to assemble a 3rd party that could actually build momentum. Thanks.

75 Years Ago Today, the First Occupy - From Michael Moore's mailing list today
 

75 Years Ago Today, the First Occupy ...a note from Michael Moore

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Friends,

On this day, December 30th, in 1936 -- 75 years ago today -- hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them.

The workers couldn't take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime -- it was do as you're told or get tossed onto the curb.

So on the day before New Year's Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave.

They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in.

But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers. It was a monumental historical moment as no other major company had ever been brought to its knees by their employees. Workers were given a raise to a dollar an hour -- and successful strikes and occupations spread like wildfire across the country. Finally, the working class would be able to do things like own their own homes, send their children to college, have time off and see a doctor without having to worry about paying. In Flint, Michigan, on this day in 1936, the middle class was born.

Full article here:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mi...y-first-occupy