OCCUPY WALL STREET

[Greyson]

Originally Posted by atomiczombie

I don't really know about that. When I opened my new Patelco credit union checking account, they didn't ask me to verify income or do a credit check at all. All I had to do was give them 20 bucks, and that went directly into my new account. They said I have to have a savings account too, however, they opened it for me and THEY put in $1.00 themselves (I still have my $20 in my checking). There is no minimum balance I have to keep in either account. I am allowed to have 6 overdrafts a month before they ding me with a fee for it!! Can you imagine Bank of America doing that???

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Greyson

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.

i have mixed feelings about unions as well and i'm glad you brought this up because i'm torn on this issue. i feel like unions had their place when working conditions were bad and there was a movement, not unlike this current one, to change that in America. i think the unions did a great job of making working conditions for Americans way better and i'm all for that.

however, that has not been my experience of unions in my lifetime. as a kid, my stepdad was the secretary treasurer of a huge union (i won't say which one or where) and when the pres of that union announced that he was going to retire, my stepdad ran for that position. i remember having security living at the house and having a security person escort me to school and stay with me at school all day because of the severity of the death threats and attempts of violence on our family. it was pretty scary. when the election happened, hundreds of votes came up missing and my mother threatened divorce if my stepdad chose to challenge the vote. so he let it go. he was then out of work for almost 2 years because no one would give him a job, not even any of the union houses.

fast forward to my very early 20s and i had gotten my CDL. i joined the union to get a good local job driving trucks and i was rerouted to hanging curtains at the convention center instead. my rep guy or whatever his official position was, told me that i could move faster through the A, B, and C "lists" and that i should go to dinner with him to "discuss my future." i left the union. i find lots of things about the current unions distasteful and corrupt.

that being said, i can't deny that unions have helped wages for all of us go up. there are industries that have lost their unions all together and are now fast becoming, if they aren't already, horrible jobs with little pay in dangerous working conditions (slaughterhouses jump to mind) and i feel like....where will we be with NO unions? we're going back to the times in our workforce that spawned unions to begin with. i don't know what the answer is or if there is an answer. i have this love hate feeling about unions and i haven't been able to make a decision on my position about them one way or the other.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by Greyson

I had to chuckle on this one. I loathe PATELCO Credit Union and I stopped using Bank of America about 25 years ago. When I moved to the Bay Area in 1991 I quickly joined a credit union that is now defunct. The credit union went under about three years ago and Patelco was delegated the credit union to take over the old credit union's accounts.

IMO, Patelco was nickle and diming me to death for every little service. My accounts with them were in no way near the minimums. They tried to get me to sign up for their Visa credit/debit card, I would not. The interest was too high. Very similar to what the banks were offering at that time. Needless to say, I switched credit unions after about 9 months of Patelco Hell.

I have very mixed feelings on the OWS movement. I do see a need for it and I also believe OWS is being co-opted by factions that have no real concern and comittment for the non-violent, law abiding, working and not able to find work democracy minded types.

One more banking story. I recently requested a refund from the labor union I am forced to pay dues too. I have no choice. The union calls this forced dues, "fees." In general, I support labor unions but through my involvment in the past with labor unions as an organizer and representative, I learned just how wasteful unions could also be with the money of the workers. I pay about $72 dollars a month to the union. I have been receiving their news, propoganda about the OWS movement and Pension Reform. I did not agree with much of it because I see the union information as yet another grab for more dollars to support their relevance or perceived relevance.

I did get refunded for some of my "fees" because the union's hand was forced by legal decisions made by the courts. I found it quite hypocritical to see that this union's check was from Wells Fargo. After receiving from the union information about how to support pulling our money from banks, the union itself is using Wells Fargo as their bank.

IMO, Wall Street is not the only culprit in this entire mess. We have the US Congress, Labor Unions, Laws being passed with no funding to enforce the laws, the electorial college, and Greed in general.

If I have any trouble with Patelco, I will keep everyone here updated about it.

As for labor unions and mismanagement, yes there is definitely a history of some unions getting corrupted and working against the interests of their members. Not all labor unions are perfect. That is something that needs to be addressed too, because even a union go back on it's democratic principles and values of worker's rights. But not all unions are like this, and in general having strong unions does benefit all workers, union or not.

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by atomiczombie

If I have any trouble with Patelco, I will keep everyone here updated about it.

As for labor unions and mismanagement, yes there is definitely a history of some unions getting corrupted and working against the interests of their members. Not all labor unions are perfect. That is something that needs to be addressed too, because even a union go back on it's democratic principles and values of worker's rights. But not all unions are like this, and in general having strong unions does benefit all workers, union or not.

actually, i have lots more 'unions behaving badly' stories, i just posted the two that involved my personal experience. in fact, i have not seen, been involved with, or had friends that were in various unions that didn't have a horror story about it. there is clearly SOMEthing wrong with our unions across the board. but again, i feel like NO unions are equally as bad if not worse.

[WickedFemme]

I moved my B of A accounts to a credit union in San Francisco. It's called the San Francisco Fire Credit Union. sffirecu.org
they are great! They don't charge fees and the only requirement if you are not a firefighter or spouse of is that you reside in SF.

As far as the OWS movement; I highly support it and see a need for some major changes. I have seen things decline slowly over a period of time. I have worked my whole life and have never seen the job market as bad as it is now. I also haven't seen workers treated as badly as they are now either. The greed that exist in this society is disgusting to me. I don't dislike people because of their earnings regardless - what I dislike is the lack of accountability and equality across all lines.

[AtLast]

It feels like nothing that ever begins as a fair and honest enterprize ever escapes some form of corruption in the US. Unions are no exception. And I believe that they do not play as significant roll in worker's rights and treatment as they did during the Industrial Age- very different set of safety variables, for example. There are many very wealthy union "bosses" that really don't differ much than the Wall Street tycoons.

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.

Talk to some former Detroit assembly-line workers about the role of unions and job loss- and their stories are not always on the side of the union. many feel that unions played a large role in the decline of jobs because they did push wages and benefits out of bounds. Although, I have a problem with this in terms of the "Big 3" being "public" corporations that pay dividends to stock holders over and above the difference between gross receipts and obligations (including payrolls). Those "profits" we hear about are after all costs of doing business are paid and far and above a usual and customary profit margin that a private, independent business calculates and is required (by law) to stay within. The public corporations do not have the same rules to adhere to.

[Dominique]

I waited with baited breath for the oganizational meeting of Occupy Pgh.
Much to my disappointment, I found out quickly how involved the unions wanted to be. They arranged for the sign paintings to take place at the union halls. They were setting up the Parade. I wasn't liking this. I didn't want to be a voice of the union. The unions were a big reason the Steel mills are no longer here and the entire reason coal mining hasn't been here for 25 years. I almost walked away.

However, the organizers of Occupy Pgh (appreciative of the unions help)
also didn't want this to be a union statement and somehow, someway, the semblance of Occupy took place and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Opportunism, just what I have grown to dislike about unions, in general,taking selfish advantage of circumstances with little regard for principles.

[Toughy]

As a veteran, I am looking to figure out which of the many military credit unions I will join. I did take what money I have out of Wells Fargo. I am stuck with Wells Fargo because I need a bank in New Mexico as well as in Oakland. However, I can move my money every month to a credit union.

Any military/veterans out there who can make a credit union recommendation?

[greeneyedgrrl]

Originally Posted by AtLast

On the other hand, there exist labor unions, especially public employee unions that remain honest and truely on the side of employees. Also, it isn't a good idea to judge all standing trade unions by their national organizations- local shops have their own personalities and sense of justice.

i worked as a public employee... and our union was seiu (huge corporation that is taking over monterey bay and in my experience has not had the workers best interest in mind and has been in the midst of controversy on more than one occasion). maybe we're the exception and not the rule... but i suspect this is happening all over.

[Cin]

It’s a matter of morality.

The Right loves to spout off about morals, about the morality behind their leadership. Perhaps, finally, the rest of us have figured out it’s all a sham and a scam. There’s nothing moral about what they do to the majority.


The War Against the Poor
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality
By Frances Fox Piven

We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99%” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top 1% over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80%.)

The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages -- for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.

Being Poor By the Numbers

A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%.

Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3% of the population, or 47 million people -- one in six Americans -- were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.

Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them “debt poor.” Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.

Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it’s clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.5% in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49% higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.

In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.

Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor’s share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn’t earn even a poverty-level livelihood -- and even that’s not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.

Campaigning Against the Poor

This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.

As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services, and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics “poverty,” along with “welfare,” “unwed mothers,” and “crime,” became code words for blacks.

In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous “war on drugs” that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale “reform” of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.

This was not only war against the poor, but the very “class war” that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don’t like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks, and financial institutions.

The poor -- and blacks -- were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations, and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations, and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.

Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan “end welfare as we know it.”

A Movement for a Moral Economy

The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty, and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences -- welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.

The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when “recovery” arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1% of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.

The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program,” it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program’s funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.

The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.

The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping -- and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.