OCCUPY WALL STREET

[Cin]

It is in the best interest of the 1% to keep us divided along any lines available. We are encouraged to divide ethnically and religiously and we have always been taught to look below us on the socio-economic scale for the cause of any financial difficulties we might encounter. Now we are being encouraged to consider an intergenerational division. Whatever it takes to keep us divided and at each others' throats

Here they come again with a new approach to get at Social Security. And since income greater than $90,000 is not subject to Social Security taxation I can feel comfortable making the claim that the money comes from the 98%. And not just SSI will be at risk if they succeed in turning us against ourselves. This new report, as well as some purposely misleading articles I have read recently, will supply ideal fodder to encourage changes in Medicare. Or reforms as they will be called. Unfortunately the “reforms” sought after will do nothing to lower the cost of healthcare and instead redirect more of the burden onto the backs of seniors.

Check out this article about a new and very misleading report.


Pew Report on Young-Old Wealth Gap is Misleading and Divisive; Could Fuel Intergenerational Class War


Those gunning for Social Security are already using the study to divide the "other 99 percent."

http://www.alternet.org/economy/1530...ss_war/?page=3

[Kätzchen]

I've been rather quiet lately, but with good reason: I like to take my time in processing whether information presented is in the best interest of those who are affected most by social inequality. I want to use my power wisely and to help faciliate, participate in the orchestration, and unite of the voice of the many who suffer egregious conditions of social inequality (at an OWS movement level).

I want to say thank you so much to the author of this thread (AZ), the collective voice of members who contribute toward the ongoing conversation in progress and to Miss Tick - who recently posted an article published by the organization called The Pew. I respect the authorship of articles from The Pew because of neutral scientific process that is inductive, quasilateral by design and inspects highly dialogical process in dialectical fashion. SoOoOOoOo, Kudos to The Pew!!!

I leave tonight for a national conference to present my graduate work on the Aristotelian canon of Memoria: Connecting Elie Wiesel’s voice to modern day accounts of whose voice counts most toward a credible accounting of the intelligentsia, the legitimatia, of memory. The same rubric of methodology in pedagogic form is, in my opinion, crucial to the OWS movement and already I see a way, as a Communication scholar, to connect present day accountings of whose voice counts most in OWS public discourse. The elements of indexicality & iconicity of the OWS movement points solidly toward the current trained incapacity of a US-centric condition - the disparity between those who have and those who have not (+/- variables of sets of data which may or may not be completely accurate due to reporting mechanisms that do not capture all sets of data needed for this process due to human based parameters within, currently held and socially constructed, human policy, etc.).

Here at home, in the paper (was it yesterday or the day before?) our Mayor, Sam Adams, has been instrumental in diffusing and redirecting and reassessing on a 24/7 basis in support of OWS and although there are not as many people participating in the first weeks of the movement, we still have people devoted to the cause -- they actually chained themselves to a barrel with bike locks! I stop by daily and visit with people and support this cause, whether it's first thing in the morning or on my way home.

Please know I appreciate each and every one of you here who have the time and energy to keep this conversation moving and igniting the hearts of those who have yet to find ways to support this cause.

*Thank You, to each and every one of you*

~D

[Cin]

I found this article to be humorous and horrifying in equal measure.


The 1% Are the Very Best Destroyers of Wealth the World Has Ever Seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt
by George Monbiot

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes. [(Illustration by Daniel Pudles)] (Illustration by Daniel Pudles)

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

[Cin]

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

Thanks for posting this. I have seen countless images of what these so called "non-lethal weapons" do to people and it makes me sick. Sicker that they are used against our own citizens exercizing Constitutional rights. I may not agree with some of the tactics used by demonstrators that I feel end up hurting the very people the Occupy movement is viewed as representing. But, I just cannot abide by this.

It is one thing when a crowd is armed and out of control, but quite another when unarmed anda agitated. Sometimes, I think that it would be best for police to just have a perimeter established around demonstrations (no fences or anything- just identify by landmarks) for obervation only and have emergency vehicles available at certain points with EMTs and fire personnel and just stay back and let the crowd find its own way to calm. Yes, some graffiti and probably smashed windows will happen, but I have yet to see in all of the coverage of the OWS instances where the bulk of demonstrators that have been out there for 9over 50 days not try to calm others down. There are several videos I have watched where the 98/99ers are very clear with not wanting outside groups to turn this into something is not- an anarchist revolution. These are people trying to be heard that feel like our systems do not represent the common good.

I am in no way any expert in crowd or riot control, but do know something about human behavior. Even with agitated group think going on, good sense arises among groups and people see that others can be hurt and that will not help their cause. People will self-regulate to bring about calm. Also, OWS folks are in constant conversation with factions all across the US (and the world) and it certainly looks to me like non-violence is at the core of this movement.

Don't even get me started on how I feel about how the manufacturers present the "non-lethality" of these kinds of weapons, including stun guns/Tasers. They can kill and they do mame people permanently.

Also, some of this footage brings me back to watching the military and the people in Egypt during Arab Spring. The soldiers did not want to hurt their own people. There have been reports by police officers here stating that using force on people at the OWS protests just does not feel right to them. They are in the 98/99% too.

[atomiczombie]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

I just came across this video. It's from Oakland but I just saw it for the first time on Common Dreams today. It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible.

Yeah I saw it on Countdown with Keith Olbermann last night. Disgusted and horrified me.

The thing that is most disgusting about this is the videographer was asking the police if it was ok for him to be filming them at that distance and as the video clearly shows, instead of answering him with words, they shot him with a rubber bullet. Grrr...

[SoNotHer]

Great articles, posts and videos - thank you all.

I heard an interview this morning on WBEZ Chicago with author Richard Wilkinson. It feels like there's a growing groundswell of people calling for a more just and equitable society. Wilkinson offers some good reasons why in Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better.



The way we live now

A hard-hitting study of the social effects of inequality has profound implications, says Lynsey Hanley

We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks' holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we'd trust each other more.

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don't soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources.

Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years' standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.

They use the information to create a series of scatter-graphs whose patterns look nearly identical, yet which document the prevalence of a vast range of social ills. On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country's level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable "low" end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable "high" end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.

This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world's richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence - murder, in particular - that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality - within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging.

The graphs also reveal that it is not just the poor, but whole societies, from top to bottom, that are adversely affected by inequality. Although the UK fares badly when compared with most other OECD countries (and is the worst developed nation in which to be a child according to both Unicef and the Good Childhood Inquiry), its social problems are not as pronounced as in the US.

Rates of illness are lower for English people of all classes than for Americans, but working-age Swedish men fare better still. Diabetes affects twice as many American as English people, whether they have a high or a low level of education. Wherever you look, evidence favouring greater equality piles up. As the authors write, "the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance".

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of reading this book is the revelation that the way we live in Britain is a serious danger to our mental health. Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Wilkinson and Pickett's description of unequal societies as "dysfunctional" suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain's "happiness tsar" Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be "fixed" or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management.

There's an almost pleading quality to some of Wilkinson and Pickett's assertions, as though they feel they've spent their careers banging their heads against a brick wall. It's impossible to overstate the implications of their thesis: that the societies of Britain and the US have institutionalised economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of their respective populations are mentally ill. What kind of "growth" is that, other than a malignant one?

One question that comes to mind is whether the world's most equal developed nations, Japan and Sweden, make sufficient allowance for individuals to express themselves without being regarded as a threat to the health of the collective. Critics of the two societies would argue that both make it intensely difficult for individual citizens to protest against the conformity both produced by, and required to sustain, equality. The inclination to dismiss or neuter individuals' complaints may, Wilkinson and Pickett suggest, go some way towards explaining the higher suicide rates in both countries compared with their more unequal counterparts. Those who feel wrong, or whose lives go wrong, may feel as though they really do have no one to blame but themselves.

What Japan and Sweden do show is that equality is a matter of political will. There are belated signs - shown in the recent establishment of a National Equalities Panel and in Trevor Phil lips's public pronouncements on the central place of class in the landscape of British inequality - that Labour recognises that its relaxed attitude to people "getting filthy rich" has come back to bite it on the rear.

Twelve years in power is long enough to reverse all the trends towards greater social and economic stratification that have occurred since 1970; instead they have continued on their merry way towards segregation. Teenage pregnancy rates have begun to rise after a period of decline; there is a 30-year gap in male life expectancy between central Glasgow and parts of southern England; and child poverty won't be halved by next year after all (though it wouldn't make as much difference as making their parents more equal).

There are times when the book feels rather too overwhelmingly grim. Even if you allow for the fact that it was written before Barack Obama won the US presidency on a premise of trust and optimism, its opening pages are depressing enough to make you want to shut it fast: "We find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, driven to consume and with little or no community life." Taking the statistics broadly, they may be correct, but many readers simply won't feel like that.

However, the book does end on an optimistic note, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making sick societies more healthy. A society in which all citizens feel free to look each other in the eye can only come into being once those in the lower echelons feel more valued than at present. The authors argue that removal of economic impediments to feeling valued - such as low wages, low benefits and low public spending on education, for instance - will allow a flourishing of human potential.

There is a growing inventory of serious, compellingly argued books detailing the social destruction wrought by inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a companion to recent bestsellers such as Oliver James's Affluenza and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety . But The Spirit Level also contributes to a longer view, sitting alongside Richard Sennett's 2003 book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality , and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome , from 2005.

Anyone who believes that society is the result of what we do, rather than who we are, should read these books; they should start with The Spirit Level because of its inarguable battery of evidence, and because its conclusion is simple: we do better when we're equal.

[AtLast]

Well wishes can be sent to Scott Olsen via this website-

http://www.scottolsen.org/thanks-and...-your-recovery