OCCUPY WALL STREET

[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?

[Corkey]

Originally Posted by 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?

go to iBelong.org to figure out which cu you like best and fits your needs.

[Toughy]

I am not a fan of unions for a myriad of reasons. Most have to do with the mandatory monthly dues regardless of work status, as well as calling for strikes when there is a no strike clause in the agreements.

I do however vehemently support collective bargaining.

If anyone wants to hear a union story and how much that particular union hated my outspoken ass....I will tell the story....blah blah blah no strike clause....dishonest....blah blah blah...liquor store clerks in WA.....teamsters will support not delivering booze in a state controlled booze enviornment??? blah blah blah.....attempted recruitment as a union organizer over rusty nails in a bar with men in 1000 dollar suits and me in boots and levis.....blah blah blah.......

However much like my opinion on abortion I am radically different today...well most days until I remember union dues (on a 20-30 hour work week) of 11 bucks per 2 week pay period....in the 70's.

Unions are corrupted by money in exactly the same way politicians are corrupted by money.

[atomiczombie]

George Carlin nailed it when he talked about bankers:

[CherylNYC]

I'm having trouble with all this union bashing. There are corrupt politicians, corrupt CEOs, welfare cheats, corrupt U.S. Army Officers, people on disability who have no actual disability, and there are corrupt unions and/or union reps. If it's possible to steal money from a government program or to violate the trust of people whose money you manage, someone will find a way to do so. To say 'I'm not a fan of unions because they can be corrupt' is a lot like saying we should abolish welfare or disability payments because there are welfare/disability cheats. It's myopic to ignore the greater good because someone is cheating somewhere.

I belong to two unions. While the first union I joined isn't quite overrun with pervasive corruption, it is a hotbed of cronyism and is a perfect picture of how the good ol' boy network still works it's magic. I actually have evidence that two business agents sold out the contract at a theatre where I worked about 25 yrs ago. Even with all that, this union has the power to sit down at the table with very wealthy and powerful producers/managers to get and keep a decent middle class wage for it's members, as well as providing health insurance, pension and other benefits. We're freelancers. There is NO WAY that I or any of the other people I worked with in that jurisdiction could EVER have gotten any of the above for ourselves. If the union wasn't sitting at the bargaining table we would have been paid like crap, would have never received overtime payment, would have no official days off, would not have health care coverage, or a pension to retire with. How can I be so sure of this? Because I didn't always have a union card. The difference between the wages I was able to earn plus the benefits for which I became eligible once I had a union card, and how I lived before I was represented by this union, even with it's questionable ethical standing, is astonishing. I say that as someone who has no family connections whatsoever, and as someone who only was allowed to become a member because that union was under court order to allow women in. Yeah, they sucked in a lot of ways, just like corporate culture would have sucked and would have kept my female ass out of every position except the housekeeping staff had they been allowed.

I haven't worked in that jurisdiction since 1990. I was able to join a related union that represents scenic artists, and never looked back. I get paid by the hour to be a sculptor. Not only do I get pension benefits, a 401k, a safety specialist who shows up to make sure we're not getting poisoned and health insurance, I make an even better hourly wage. Once again, none of us would have had the smallest chance of negotiating these pay scales, working conditions, or benefits packages on our own. Frankly, I wouldn't even know where to start negotiating benefits. The formulae are waaaaay too complex. My specialty is sculptural scenery, not managing funds and benefits. And guess what? This union is freakin' squeaky clean. Not one of the people in leadership positions in this union has even the whiff of corruption or of cronyism around them. Even those who have emotional disagreements with the leadership about some issue or other never think to accuse anyone of corruption, because there just isn't any. This union once had a suspect business agent in the mid 1990s and we were were all pretty disgusted. Frankly, if it was true his corruption was incredibly minor compared to my previous union, and he looks like an angel compared to your average corporate shark. But everyone else in a leadership position in this union is so darned ethical that he looked bad enough to be heaved out.

For those who think that unions are no longer needed, consider Wallmart. 'Nuff said. And once again drawing from personal experience, unions continue to set the industry standard even when they don't have jurisdiction in that workplace. A major entertainment company that I'll only refer to as Mauschwitz has a pervasive anti-union corporate culture. But their in-house artists benefit greatly from the gains our union has made. They routinely get offered any new benefit which our union secures for our membership. Why? Because the Mauschwitz Corporation knows that they can only keep their artists from joining us by making sure that they get nothing less than we do. The next time you're tempted to bash unions, stop and ask yourself if Ford/Chrysler/GM wouldn't immediately start paying Wallmart wages and imposing Wallmart conditions if they were allowed abrogate their union contracts and obligations.

OK. I'm done now.

[Bard]

just a chime on the unions. I am not a member of our union because I am a first line supervisor. I support our Union because my guys need the protection but I worry that will the union show up if the guys need them they already had to swich to a diffrent due to corruption. I belong to the FOP and that gives me support. As a police officer we need the union protection

[Toughy]

I don't see Union bashing. I see pointing out that Unions are not perfect and there are long-standing issues that Unions have never addressed.

I still completely and totally support collective bargaining.....the real point of Labor Unions. I have huge issues with bad ethics........signing an agreement with a no-strike clause and then going on strike. Union bosses getting paid full salaries while folks on strike are missing house payments. Union bosses dumped in cement. It's not all myth.

None of that is Union bashing. It's simply pointing out the reality. I cannot, with any kind of ethics, rant and rave about money in politics, corruption, inequitable salary ranges from top to bottom, and all the other blah blah blah without calling Unions to task also. Unions do the same things. Unions should be forced to clean up their act. We need them to be ethical if they are going to be a viable force for social change. They need to put their money where their mouth resides....and posters are not money....

As I said.....not a big fan of standing labor unions, but a die-hard unflinching supporter of collective bargaining.

[Corkey]

While I have never belonged to a union, and have never needed to, the cronyism in some unions is rampant, such as the longshoreman's union which an ex of mine belonged to. They did nothing for her when she was injured on the job. So while some may have need, I would question wether or not they actually do any good for the money one spends.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Corkey

While I have never belonged to a union, and have never needed to, the cronyism in some unions is rampant, such as the longshoreman's union which an ex of mine belonged to. They did nothing for her when she was injured on the job. So while some may have need, I would question wether or not they actually do any good for the money one spends.

I'm sure your friends experience is true, however, the Longshoreman strike of 1934 on the West Coast (San Francisco and Oakland, California, Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington- the "Albion Hall group") was a significant union movement helping thousands of these workers.

It is hard for me at times when talking "unions" because so many of the early (post WW I) work of labor unions for blue collar workers ans well as women and childrens worker rights is so important in terms of changes in safety and health for US workers. Work weeks, breaks, child labor laws, the advent of the "week end," etc. are things we take for granted today and there were bloody (as was the 1934 Longshoreman strike and all of the women killed in the "Triangle Shirtwaste Fire" of 1911) strikes and demonstrations by and for very hard working people being treated like dirt.

I do see a huge difference in what early union fights were about and what goes on today. There is a lot of cronyism and corruption at the top of union organizing. I can't help but feel thankful for early union organizing and what this has mean't for the US worker. Yet, I can see where members today are not fairly represented by them at all. And also when unions have hurt worker job security in the long run by not working with industries during times in which major economic changes have caused huge shrinkage in numbers of available jobs simply based upon supply and demand.

On the other hand, large companies (including the Big 3 in Detroit) failed to adjust their factory output during these times and did not re-tool factories for production of the kind of cars that became more popular during fuel shortages and with the influx of Japanese cars into the US. These trade agreements were known by these companies, yet they made no adjustments. Unions continued to bargain from obsolete positions which I think hurt workers deeply during the decline of the industrial age and the start of the US expanding into world markets. And the information age began and this has changed the face of the US workforce forever as well as expanded global economies that we have to compete in.

I'm not sure that union organizers made adjustments as well- there are differences in the kinds of health and safety variables within the information age than in the earlier manufacturing economy in the US.

I don't think it is all about the "good" or "bad" about unions. I think it is more about work force and union adaptations to what is best for workers in a very different world of work. So often, it just feels like apples and oranges being compared to me.

[Cin]

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

It is interesting how many articles I've read lately with some reference or other to morality.

Pre-Occupied with Fairness: The Moral Crisis of Modern Capitalism
Wednesday, 11/9/2011 - 12:19 pm by John Paul Rollert

There’s no good explanation for why Wall Street continues to suck up vast amounts of money except that there is a flaw in the system itself.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters were not immune to the news of Steve Jobs’s passing. “A ripple of shock went through our crowd,” Thorin Caristo, a leader of the movement’s web outreach, told the Associated Press. He later called for a moment of silence from the stubborn assembly at Zuccotti Park, and the 99% paid tribute to an exceptional member of the other club.

The gesture failed to move some. National Review’s Daniel Foster envisioned “viscera of a thousand heads exploding from the sheer force of cognitive dissonance,” while conservative columnist Michelle Malkin said that the protesters honoring Jobs’s life and work “without a trace of irony” provided the “teachable moment of the week.” The lesson, it seems, is that one cannot critique capitalism without also rejecting every single capitalist, a conclusion that is not only logically flawed but one that was famously rejected by William F. Buckley, Jr., the ideological avatar of the modern conservative movement and a founder of the National Review.

In a column written just a few years before his death, Buckley condemned what he called the “institutional embarrassments” of capitalism, CEOs whose enormous compensation packages defy the gravitational pull of poor stock performance. Buckley was no equalitarian, and he drew a contrast between the “executive plunder” reaped by certain CEOs and the allowances that may be made for the likes of a Thomas Edison. Were such a person alive today, he said, “it would be unwise to cavil at any arrangement whatever made by a company seeking his services exclusively.”

Unwise, but more importantly, unwarranted, for at the heart of Buckley’s argument is an appeal to fairness. It does not seem unreasonable that a Thomas Edison, or a Steve Jobs, be paid a lot more than the rest of us. But when it comes to people who not only fail to create value, but actually supervise its destruction, it seems outrageous that they should make more over a long lunch than most people make in an entire year. Or, as Buckley puts it, “What is going on is phony. It is shoddy, it is contemptible, and it is philosophically blasphemous.”

To be clear, were he still with us today, Bill Buckley would not be occupying Wall Street. His aim was to save capitalism from itself, and he would likely chide the protesters for trying to save us from capitalism. Still, the sense of moral outrage that infuses his column — aptly titled “Capitalism’s Boil” — is not altogether different from that expressed by the weather-weary demonstrators. Doubtless, there are some who want to uproot capitalism altogether and replace it with some other system for distributing scarce goods, but one suspects that most who have turned out are simply looking to air the familiar grievances of the financial crisis (joblessness, soaring poverty, crushing debt) and shame those on Wall Street who cashed in on a crisis they helped create.

The same may be said with even greater confidence for the support the movement is enjoying across the country. It is not the case that a nation of closet communists has finally found a voice; rather, the protesters have come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism — that the system simply isn’t working. In this respect, the focus on Wall Street is both apt and overbroad. Overbroad because, if you brush the complex instruments that precipitated the financial crisis, you won’t find the fingerprints of every banker on Wall Street. Apt because the success of the financial sector as a whole not only defies the experience of the last few years, but the story of the American middle class for over three decades.

Sign up to have the Daily Digest, a witty take on the morning’s news, delivered straight to your inbox.

Paul Krugman has famously called this period The Great Divergence. “We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared,” he said in the inaugural post of his New York Times blog. “Between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.” During the same period, the percentage of the nation’s wealth held by the top 1% grew from 20.5% in 1979 to 33.8% in 2007. These trends have helped to set the U.S. apart from other developed countries in terms of wealth inequality. According to the C.I.A World Fact book, the U.S. currently ranks 39th in unequal wealth distribution, edging out Cameroon and Iran but just behind Bulgaria and Jamaica. By contrast, the UK comes in at 91st place, with Canada 102nd and Germany 126th.

The financial sector doesn’t tell the whole story of growing inequality, but it certainly plays a central role. As Simon Johnson described its meteoric rise in a 2009 essay for The Atlantic:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The inequality within the financial sector is more striking still, with the most successful managing directors taking home enough to buy and sell a brace of lowly associates. Again, the numbers speak for themselves: In 1986, the highest paid CEO on Wall Street was John Gutfreund of Salomon Brothers, who made $3.1 million. In 2007, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, made just short of $68 million.

To be sure, Americans have always had a high tolerance for economic inequality, particularly compared with their European peers. The quintessential American tale is still the rags to riches story, and for Democrats and Republicans alike, ‘class warfare’ is an accusation to be rebutted, not an open call to arms. Indeed, as the unlikely tribute to Steve Jobs attests, even for those who are willing to roundly object to the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us, the problem is not inequality per se, but giving a satisfactory account for it. As Bill Buckley well understood, economic systems have to give a moral account of who wins, who loses, and why, particularly insofar as those systems are shaped by democratic choices. It is not hard to give a compelling account for why someone like Steve Jobs grows far richer than the rest of us — his success tends to vindicate capitalism, not undermine it — but the same may not be said for the financial sector in general. The problem isn’t that the average banker doesn’t work hard (the hours are grueling) nor that his work isn’t essential to helping maintain a modern, civilized society (it is); the problem is that the same may be said for an ER nurse or a sixth grade teacher, and it isn’t immediately clear why one should make 10 times as much as the other.

Buckley said of the CEO pay packages he so despised that “extortions of that size tell us, really, that the market system is not working,” meaning that the free market, left to its own devices, does not allow for such gross distortions. This is certainly the account conservatives prefer when they try to explain Wall Street’s inordinate success. According to them, anti-competitive regulations, cheap money from the Fed, and the cozy relationship between the big banks and Washington have allowed the financial sector to prosper not because of capitalism, but despite it.

To liberals, this sounds ridiculous. After 30 years of lower taxes, freer trade, weaker unions, and a general trend toward deregulation, the idea that growing inequality and Wall Street’s exceptional success somehow defy the natural tendencies of capitalism is an astonishing exercise in wishful thinking. The forces of the free market alone may not explain these trends, but they seem hardly at odds.

Increasingly, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been faulted for not taking explicit sides in this dispute, but like Buckley in his column, the aim of their protests is not policy prescription, but moral persuasion. When your house is on fire, you don’t stand around wondering whether faulty wiring or an arsonist is to blame. You raise a hue and cry until your neighbors fill the street.

Great article. Can you please provide the link to where it's published on the net? Thanks.

[Ebon]

Senior Citizens at Occupy Chicago out and about to fight for their SS and Medicare.



Then later on that day. The old folks get carried off to jail.

[Cin]

Originally Posted by atomiczombie

Great article. Can you please provide the link to where it's published on the net? Thanks.

Here ya go.

http://www.newdeal20.org/2011/11/09/...italism-64156/

[SoNotHer]

It takes a minute to sign this, and far more to let business interests start "robo calling" your private cell numbers.


From -

http://pol.moveon.org/norobocalls/?i...32-qpZAlCx&t=2

No Robocalls - Protect your minutes and privacy

Corporate interests like the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, and a coalition of debt collectors are trying to sneak H.R. 3035 through under the radar. This bill would allow businesses to repeatedly hound you throughout the day, no matter where you are, using up minutes that YOU pay for!

But there's still time to stop it.

If Congress hears an outcry from everyday Americans, they'll hang up on H.R. 3035 before it gets to a full vote. That's why we need a massive petition that people share widely with their friends and through their social networks. We'll deliver the petition to the House committee reviewing the bill, and make sure the media hears about it as well.

Sign the petition and then share it with everyone you know.

A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to Congress.