OCCUPY WALL STREET

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West

Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.

The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.

And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.

I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week – though it helped – to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now – via their poisonous influence on the markets – clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940?

Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and – oh, dear, even al-Jazeera – treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion...t-6275084.html

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

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by Miss Tick

Thud of the Jackboot
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t laugh.

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

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

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

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

[SoNotHer]

[persiphone]

yep. i skipped walmart. i only got ONE thing at target.

[SoNotHer]

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

Originally Posted by persiphone

yep. i skipped walmart. i only got ONE thing at target.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

Absolutely!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

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

i dunno but i'll call them and ask i'll have them send the reply to your PM addy :P

[persiphone]

Originally Posted by AtLast

Absolutely!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[SoNotHer]

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More at -

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

[AtLast]

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

[SoNotHer]

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

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

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

2) The next of America through exactly the same.

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

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

Originally Posted by AtLast

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

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

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

Any thoughts?

[dykeumentary]

Originally Posted by SoNotHer

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

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

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

2) The next of America through exactly the same.

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

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

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

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

[Slater]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Corkey]

Dylan, MSNBC had one guy on, wish I could remember his name, independent and supported all the things I am for, like gmo lgbtqi rights and environmental regulations. But for the life of me I can't remember his name or his party. It's CRS folks, don't get old...

[Corkey]

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

Found it! Rockey Anderson.

[SoNotHer]

Good article and info, Corkey. Thank you!

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

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

Originally Posted by Corkey

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

Found it! Rockey Anderson.

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Slater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Truly Scrumptious]

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

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

[AtLast]

Wondering about how important it might be to block as many GOP candidates from office on the way to building a viable 3rd Party? That way, at least less damage will be done to many of the core issues for the OWS movement.

Also involvement in local politics as a building block toward this aim.

Just thinking about this- one for actual ways to see an actual path created that will speak to Occupy issues and solutions.

There has to be a way to bring this movement to a place that effects real change.