OCCUPY WALL STREET

[Toughy]

The cops did not shoot this guy............ffs

One of the suspects (according to the local TV news I watched) has spent a couple of nights at Occupy Oakland encampment. The local news I watched has never said he was part of OO.......just that he slept there a few times.

[Heart]

Massive Women's Action at Occupy Wall Street, Nov 25th, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women:

http://www.af3irm.org/2011/11/wall-s...n-dismantle-it

http://occupypatriarchy.org/2011/11/...n-november-25/

[SoNotHer]

The 10 Lowest Paying Jobs In America: BLS

The Huffington Post First Posted: 11/8/11 02:54 PM ET Updated: 11/8/11

What do fast food cooks, amusement park employees and farm workers have in common? They are among the lowest paying jobs in America today.

The mean hourly wage for all U.S. workers was $21.35 in 2010, but workers that get paid the least have seen their mean wages get dangerously close to minimum wage levels, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics. The data examined wages for workers in 22 major occupational groups and almost 800 detailed occupations, and found that fast food cooks made $8.91 per hour on average, only cents more than the highest state minimum wage of $8.67 in Washington state.

Those working in the restaurant and service industries account for many of the occupations with the lowest wages, including hosts and hostesses, as well as dishwashers. The low wages may not be surprising as eateries look to make due with fewer customers; a recent survey from the U.S. Census found that nearly half of Americans said they didn't dine out from fall 2009 to fall 2010.

But it's not just restaurant workers that are suffering. Americans' income growth has fallen off drastically in the last decade, a trend that only accelerated in the wake of the recession. Personal disposable income dropped by around 4 percent between the spring of 2008 and the second quarter of this year, Christian Science Monitor reports. Likewise, median household income fell $6,298 from 2000 to 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, median household income is at its lowest since 1999.

While nation's median income has fallen, the wealthiest Americans have seen huge boosts in the amount of money they're taking home, boosting income inequality and making income mobility increasingly difficult. From 2002 to 2007, two of every three dollars of income growth went to the top 1 percent of Americans, The Atlantic reports. Now the 400 richest Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

The wage decline has hit all workers including those with college degrees. College graduates have seen their starting wages drop by nearly a full dollar over the past 10 years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/1...e=4_Shampooers

[Cin]

[Cin]

Pax Occupata
by Randall Amster

Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that “the order is rapidly fading.” For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly contested. The headiness of those days brought many advances and opened up significant space for later movements to operate, yet in the final analysis somehow it all delivered us into even higher degrees of wealth stratification and greater consolidation of power. The order had flickered, but not quite faded, and in the end reasserted itself stronger than before.

Today we stand poised at a not-dissimilar crossroads. While perhaps no one has yet penned a Dylan-esque anthem of the movement -- although stalwarts such as David Rovics and Emma’s Revolution have dropped some poignant opening stanzas -- a mass chorus of voices is drawing lines in the sand literally everywhere: public spaces, workplaces, shipping ports, shopping malls, community centers, corporate banks, schoolrooms, boardrooms, and more. The Occupy Movement has transcended the narrow confines of Zuccotti Park, and in doing so has seemingly asserted itself wherever the forces of elitism and subjugation rear their heads. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand,” and whatever else transpires in the days ahead it can at least be said that the movement has reminded us all of this basic tenet.

Still, critics continue to ask, “where is your list of demands?” as if such can be reduced to movement letterhead in bullet-point fashion. To be sure, some concrete demands have been advanced, largely in the economic and political spheres and triggered by the exigencies of the Great Recession. But on some level, most everyone understands that this bill of particulars is just the surface of the movement, and that its essence really draws down to the core workings of the system itself. Adjusting debit card rates or mollifying student loan debts may bring some minor relief, but it has the feel of rearranging a couple of deck chairs, whereas many Occupiers are more urgently clamoring en masse for the dismantling of the Titanic itself.

At root, multitudes are demanding no less than a re-visioning of our political and economic relationships, and likewise of our collective human relationship with the larger environment. The time for single-issue tinkering is winding down, as the ecological and social fabric of our lives similarly degrades. After generations of living mainly as cogs in a mechanistic Moloch -- at times being reasonably well-compensated for the sacrifice of our mere freedoms and human dignity -- many people are experiencing new bonds of exchange, camaraderie, and community. There is a growing sense of engaged optimism in this moment of healthy rebellion.

And it is healthy, in contrast with the dead-end dispiritedness of corporate capitalism, in which everything and everyone are little more than raw materials for the robber barons’ assembly lines. This archaic and apocalyptic system of production and reproduction is sick at its very core, revealing a form of mass insanity masking as progress, and leaving illness and misery in its wake just beneath the shiny veneer of development. At the height of colonialism, blankets with smallpox were presented as “gifts” to unwitting natives, and in many ways this has become the central operating premise of the entire enterprise, a living metaphor for environmental despoliation and the ensuing political economy of toxification.

No more. The pox must be cast out, by necessity, if any part of the organism is to survive at this point. What began as a movement to occupy a symbolic place -- the plexus of financial machinations -- quickly became a call to occupy everything, and has further expanded to include the earth itself as a living participant in the calculus. Now, as the teeth of abject repression are bared in Oakland and elsewhere, a critical juncture is being reached in which the politics of practicality are slowly being supplanted by the poetics of possibility. People who have tasted freedom can no longer be kept conveniently in prisons, even if their cages are designed to appear like comfortable condominiums.

The technicians of empire thus stand stripped of their authoritarian mystique, increasingly so as they resort to heavy-handed tactics against peaceful people, including even those who have served in their infantries. A crisis of legitimacy is in the offing, as counter-institutions steadily replace those that run counter to even the pretense of democracy and equity. Hegemony yields to autonomy, corporatism to communitarianism, and warfare to welfare. There will be no placating the people by piecemeal legislation or token redistribution at this juncture; it is the reins of power themselves that are being demanded, and not merely the spoils.

But are the power elite quaking in their jack-boots? Are the walls of Babylon actually crumbling? This time, is the order really fading? Others have tried mightily before and come up short of changing the underlying paradigm, but there is a qualitative difference in evidence today: horizontal integration. Vertical structures, such as capitalism’s pervasive pyramid schemes, are inherently vulnerable to vicissitudes in the base -- whereas horizontal systems, such as those being forged in occupations everywhere, are inherently unbreakable since there is no a prior of power apart from every single piece of the whole. This is, in fact, how healthy organisms function, and further reflects how nature itself is organized at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

To a system of death and destruction, we interpose one of life and liberation. Consumption is remediated by creation; plutocracy by democracy; exploitation by participation. This is not merely a movement, but is in practice more akin to a global health care plan -- and this time, we will get universal (or at least earthly) coverage, with the only mandate being the basic imperative that is embedded in the undeniable interconnectedness of our existence. No legislation is needed, only the laws of nature; no medication, just dedication; no co-payments, merely co-creators. We are going to get well, all of us together and the habitat itself, and in the process we will work to wipe aside the sickly stain of the colonizer’s history.

Power may not abdicate, but it does change its garb at times. The Empire’s cloak of imperial majesty is threadbare, and a new wind is chilling its inner workings to the marrow. We neocolonial beneficiaries have infected others, and ourselves as well, with everything from acne and austerity to zoster and zero-sum thinking, and now it has come to pass that the global organism itself is essentially on life support. This is the reality that must eventually be confronted, both in terms of ecology and political economy: the externalities of disease and despair cannot be indefinitely outsourced. The only genuine form of wellbeing is one that injects itself everywhere, coursing through the veins of society at all levels and in every locale within the system.

Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana -- all made claims to establishing a “relative peace” within their ambit. But these forms of peace were imposed at the point of a bayonet or the nosecone of a warhead. They were all poisonous peaces, ultimately self-defeating enterprises of subjugation in which the masters could not escape their own systems of enslavement. Today, we are aiming for something more like Pax Populi, a form of peace made by and for people, not nations or corporations. In order to accomplish this, the ailing empire du jour must be supplanted by a constellation of healthy communities, interlinked by virtue of desire rather than dictate. This is the ambitious horizon of the burgeoning movement in all of its manifestations: Pax Occupata.

Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus.

[Cin]

Sometimes it's hard to understand how the Occupy Movement is actually affecting change. This article brings some clarity to this.

Ten Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything

Thursday 10 November 2011
by: Sarah van Gelder, David Korten and Steve Piersanti, YES! Magazine | News Analysis

Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class.

The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that “we the people” will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything:

1. It names the source of the crisis.
Political insiders have avoided this simple reality: The problems of the 99% are caused in large part by Wall Street greed, perverse financial incentives, and a corporate takeover of the political system. Now that this is understood, the genie is out of the bottle and it can’t be put back in.

2. It provides a clear vision of the world we want.
We can create a world that works for everyone, not just the wealthiest 1%. And we, the 99%, are using the spaces opened up by the Occupy movement to conduct a dialogue about the world we want.

3. It sets a new standard for public debate.
Those advocating policies and proposals must now demonstrate that their ideas will benefit the 99%. Serving only the 1% will not suffice, nor will claims that the subsidies and policies that benefit the 1% will eventually “trickle down.”

4. It presents a new narrative.
The solution is not to starve government or impose harsh austerity measures that further harm middle-class and poor people already reeling from a bad economy. Instead, the solution is to free society and government from corporate dominance. A functioning democracy is our best shot at addressing critical social, environmental, and economic crises.

5. It creates a big tent.
We, the 99%, are people of all ages, races, occupations, and political beliefs. We will resist being divided or marginalized. We are learning to work together with respect.

6. It offers everyone a chance to create change.
No one is in charge; no organization or political party calls the shots. Anyone can get involved, offer proposals, support the occupations, and build the movement. Because leadership is everywhere and new supporters keep turning up, there is a flowering of creativity and a resilience that makes the movement nearly impossible to shut down.

7. It is a movement, not a list of demands.
The call for deep change—not temporary fixes and single-issue reforms—is the movement’s sustaining power. The movement is sometimes criticized for failing to issue a list of demands, but doing so could keep it tied to status quo power relationships and policy options. The occupiers and their supporters will not be boxed in.

8. It combines the local and the global.
People in cities and towns around the world are setting their own local agendas, tactics, and aims. What they share in common is a critique of corporate power and an identification with the 99%, creating an extraordinary wave of global solidarity.

9. It offers an ethic and practice of deep democracy and community.
Slow, patient decision-making in which every voice is heard translates into wisdom, common commitment, and power. Occupy sites are set up as communities in which anyone can discuss grievances, hopes, and dreams, and where all can experiment with living in a space built around mutual support.

10. We have reclaimed our power.
Instead of looking to politicians and leaders to bring about change, we can see now that the power rests with us. Instead of being victims to the forces upending our lives, we are claiming our sovereign right to remake the world.

Like all human endeavors, Occupy Wall Street and its thousands of variations and spin-offs will be imperfect. There have already been setbacks and divisions, hardships and injury. But as our world faces extraordinary challenges—from climate change to soaring inequality—our best hope is the ordinary people, gathered in imperfect democracies, who are finding ways to fix a broken world.

[SoNotHer]

"Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus."

Wow. Beautiful. Just beautiful.
________________

QUOTE=Miss Tick;462796]Pax Occupata
by Randall Amster

Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that “the order is rapidly fading.” For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly contested. The headiness of those days brought many advances and opened up significant space for later movements to operate, yet in the final analysis somehow it all delivered us into even higher degrees of wealth stratification and greater consolidation of power. The order had flickered, but not quite faded, and in the end reasserted itself stronger than before.

Today we stand poised at a not-dissimilar crossroads. While perhaps no one has yet penned a Dylan-esque anthem of the movement -- although stalwarts such as David Rovics and Emma’s Revolution have dropped some poignant opening stanzas -- a mass chorus of voices is drawing lines in the sand literally everywhere: public spaces, workplaces, shipping ports, shopping malls, community centers, corporate banks, schoolrooms, boardrooms, and more. The Occupy Movement has transcended the narrow confines of Zuccotti Park, and in doing so has seemingly asserted itself wherever the forces of elitism and subjugation rear their heads. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand,” and whatever else transpires in the days ahead it can at least be said that the movement has reminded us all of this basic tenet.

Still, critics continue to ask, “where is your list of demands?” as if such can be reduced to movement letterhead in bullet-point fashion. To be sure, some concrete demands have been advanced, largely in the economic and political spheres and triggered by the exigencies of the Great Recession. But on some level, most everyone understands that this bill of particulars is just the surface of the movement, and that its essence really draws down to the core workings of the system itself. Adjusting debit card rates or mollifying student loan debts may bring some minor relief, but it has the feel of rearranging a couple of deck chairs, whereas many Occupiers are more urgently clamoring en masse for the dismantling of the Titanic itself.

At root, multitudes are demanding no less than a re-visioning of our political and economic relationships, and likewise of our collective human relationship with the larger environment. The time for single-issue tinkering is winding down, as the ecological and social fabric of our lives similarly degrades. After generations of living mainly as cogs in a mechanistic Moloch -- at times being reasonably well-compensated for the sacrifice of our mere freedoms and human dignity -- many people are experiencing new bonds of exchange, camaraderie, and community. There is a growing sense of engaged optimism in this moment of healthy rebellion.

And it is healthy, in contrast with the dead-end dispiritedness of corporate capitalism, in which everything and everyone are little more than raw materials for the robber barons’ assembly lines. This archaic and apocalyptic system of production and reproduction is sick at its very core, revealing a form of mass insanity masking as progress, and leaving illness and misery in its wake just beneath the shiny veneer of development. At the height of colonialism, blankets with smallpox were presented as “gifts” to unwitting natives, and in many ways this has become the central operating premise of the entire enterprise, a living metaphor for environmental despoliation and the ensuing political economy of toxification.

No more. The pox must be cast out, by necessity, if any part of the organism is to survive at this point. What began as a movement to occupy a symbolic place -- the plexus of financial machinations -- quickly became a call to occupy everything, and has further expanded to include the earth itself as a living participant in the calculus. Now, as the teeth of abject repression are bared in Oakland and elsewhere, a critical juncture is being reached in which the politics of practicality are slowly being supplanted by the poetics of possibility. People who have tasted freedom can no longer be kept conveniently in prisons, even if their cages are designed to appear like comfortable condominiums.

The technicians of empire thus stand stripped of their authoritarian mystique, increasingly so as they resort to heavy-handed tactics against peaceful people, including even those who have served in their infantries. A crisis of legitimacy is in the offing, as counter-institutions steadily replace those that run counter to even the pretense of democracy and equity. Hegemony yields to autonomy, corporatism to communitarianism, and warfare to welfare. There will be no placating the people by piecemeal legislation or token redistribution at this juncture; it is the reins of power themselves that are being demanded, and not merely the spoils.

But are the power elite quaking in their jack-boots? Are the walls of Babylon actually crumbling? This time, is the order really fading? Others have tried mightily before and come up short of changing the underlying paradigm, but there is a qualitative difference in evidence today: horizontal integration. Vertical structures, such as capitalism’s pervasive pyramid schemes, are inherently vulnerable to vicissitudes in the base -- whereas horizontal systems, such as those being forged in occupations everywhere, are inherently unbreakable since there is no a prior of power apart from every single piece of the whole. This is, in fact, how healthy organisms function, and further reflects how nature itself is organized at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.

To a system of death and destruction, we interpose one of life and liberation. Consumption is remediated by creation; plutocracy by democracy; exploitation by participation. This is not merely a movement, but is in practice more akin to a global health care plan -- and this time, we will get universal (or at least earthly) coverage, with the only mandate being the basic imperative that is embedded in the undeniable interconnectedness of our existence. No legislation is needed, only the laws of nature; no medication, just dedication; no co-payments, merely co-creators. We are going to get well, all of us together and the habitat itself, and in the process we will work to wipe aside the sickly stain of the colonizer’s history.

Power may not abdicate, but it does change its garb at times. The Empire’s cloak of imperial majesty is threadbare, and a new wind is chilling its inner workings to the marrow. We neocolonial beneficiaries have infected others, and ourselves as well, with everything from acne and austerity to zoster and zero-sum thinking, and now it has come to pass that the global organism itself is essentially on life support. This is the reality that must eventually be confronted, both in terms of ecology and political economy: the externalities of disease and despair cannot be indefinitely outsourced. The only genuine form of wellbeing is one that injects itself everywhere, coursing through the veins of society at all levels and in every locale within the system.

Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana -- all made claims to establishing a “relative peace” within their ambit. But these forms of peace were imposed at the point of a bayonet or the nosecone of a warhead. They were all poisonous peaces, ultimately self-defeating enterprises of subjugation in which the masters could not escape their own systems of enslavement. Today, we are aiming for something more like Pax Populi, a form of peace made by and for people, not nations or corporations. In order to accomplish this, the ailing empire du jour must be supplanted by a constellation of healthy communities, interlinked by virtue of desire rather than dictate. This is the ambitious horizon of the burgeoning movement in all of its manifestations: Pax Occupata.

Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus.[/QUOTE]

[SoNotHer]

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/...059182-1uhuvUx

Tell House Democrats: Stand up to Wall Street banks

It sounds really simple: The largest banks that caused the housing crisis that led to our economic meltdown should be investigated fully, punished to the full extent of the law, and forced to compensate their victims for the harm they caused.

But the Obama administration is pressuring state attorneys general to quickly cut a deal with the banks that lets them off the hook for massive amounts of mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Democratic Representative Tammy Baldwin is pushing back. She has introduced a resolution that supports taking a tough line with the banks.

The more Democratic members of Congress who cosponsor it, the stronger the message it will send to President Obama that he cannot give Wall Street a "get out of jail free" card for mortgage and foreclosure fraud.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks. Not one of the Wall Street crooks who drove our economy off a cliff has gone to jail. And without aggressive investigation and prosecution of misconduct, none of them will.

Yet the Obama administration is pushing for a deal between state attorneys general and the large mortgage firms that essentially revolves around how lightly the banks would get off. There has been no real investigation, and no real push for meaningful penalties or accountability. In many ways, the settlement terms under consideration would amount to another backdoor bailout for the banks.

This is unacceptable. Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

Rep. Baldwin's resolution has three tenets:

(1) The mortgage servicers who engaged in fraudulent behavior should not be granted criminal or civil immunity for potential wrongdoing related to illegal mortgage and foreclosure practices.

(2) The Federal Government and State attorneys general should proceed with full investigations into claims of fraudulent behavior by mortgage servicers.

(3) Any financial settlement reached with mortgage servicers should appropriately compensate for, and accurately reflect, the extent of harm to all victims, including homeowners and State pension beneficiaries, caused by the mortgage servicers' fraudulent behavior.

What's on the table now--and what the Obama administration is pressuring the states to accept--falls far short of these standards. While the Baldwin resolution itself is non-binding, a large number of Democratic co-sponsors will do two things. First it will make it harder to spin a terrible settlement deal as a victory, which itself makes a deal less likely. Second, by establishing criteria for what an acceptable settlement might look like, it helps demonstrate the inadequacy of what's on the table.

We need to put the brakes on the headlong rush by state attorneys general and the Obama administration to settle with the banks. It's incompatible with the health of our democracy to allow wealthy and powerful people off the hook after they have caused massive and widespread suffering.

Tell House Democrats: Stand with Tammy Baldwin and stand up to Wall Street banks.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/...059182-1uhuvUx