California Free Press

11 College Campuses with Major 'Occupy' Movements

from online universities blog

November 28, 2011

Occupy Wall Street has been going on for months now, and although reactions to the movement are mixed, there are protest locations numbering somewhere near 1,000. Within that number are several college campuses that boast major Occupy movements, whether there’s a presence on campus, or simply very active students involved in their local Occupy chapter. There’s even an Occupy Colleges movement, formed to protest college tuition hikes amid staggering student loan debt. Like Occupy Wall Street, Occupy movements on college campuses have been met with mixed reactions, some finding great support in university administration, and others fighting an uphill battle. Read on, and we’ll take a look at the beliefs, incidents, and status of 11 college Occupy movements going on today.

1. Occupy Duke: On the Duke University campus, students are getting involved in social activism. And although there is a local Occupy movement, Occupy Durham, students at Duke have decided to strike out on their own, citing issues with the Occupy Durham group, as well as a need to focus on problems within the university. Occupy Duke has created a peaceful camp on campus, offering a space to "create a platform for discussion." Occupy Duke member Anastasia Karklina shares, "A lot of students here are from different economic backgrounds, and this is a self expression, a way to protest and express the way you’re discontent with the way things are, so I don’t see it as occupying yourself or occupying a privileged institution." Faculty on campus at Duke have been primarily supportive, and have formed a group, calling themselves "Faculty in Solidarity." Duke administrators have permitted an indefinite campout, and the dean of students has praised the movement’s high level of commitment. Occupy Duke tries to have at least one faculty or staff member present at all times, and Occupy Duke member Maria Arias indicated that having a faculty member on hand helps students to better understand the arguments being made by Occupy Duke and the larger Occupy movement. "It’s a good cause, well worth supporting," Professor of Literature Kenneth Surin said.
2. UC Berkeley: UC Berkeley’s Occupy camp has made the news recently, with an incident between protesters and police on Nov. 9. Berkeley’s Occupy demonstrators attempted to establish an encampment on campus, but it was dismantled, and protesters were pulled off the steps of the administration building, some with the use of batons. Previously, the university administration indicated that protesters could stay around the clock for a week, provided that the camp didn’t have any signs of people living there, such as tents and stoves. The protesters did not comply, and set up an Occupy Cal tent site. The resulting incident that followed as police attempted to dismantle the site has sparked a debate over whether the police reaction was acceptable, or went too far. Still, the incident and fervor that has been sparked only goes to show that Berkeley has a strong Occupy movement that is not going away any time soon.
3. Seattle Central Community College: One might expect major protest movements to be centered on large universities, but in Seattle, a small community college is providing nighttime shelter to the city’s Occupy protesters, which now number somewhere between 100 and 200 overnight. The protesters, who have been through weeks of tension with Seattle’s city hall and police, agreed to move their tents to Seattle Central Community College, spending their nights on campus and days at protests occurring at Westlake Park. The group has promised not to interfere with academic activities, but the college has already decided they’d like the movement to leave. The college estimates that the demonstration is costing $20,000 a week, with reports of vandalism, and a need for additional security and cleaning crews. Demonstrators say they have no plans to move, while college administrators are researching legal ways to remove them from campus. Still, some in the college are finding a way to make use of the Occupy presence, with some professors hosting classes right in the camp. Professors offered their knowledge and resources, teaching protesters how to get their message across with history lessons, Martin Luther King letters, and more.
4. Boston University: Students from Boston University have been an active part of the Occupy Boston movement. They typically get involved by meeting on campus at Marsh Plaza, and then marching together to join other protesters. On Nov. 8, about 30 students also set up their own overnight encampment at Marsh Plaza as a contingent of Occupy Boston, right next to the statue of Martin Luther King. They vacated the space the following morning, after police officials and the dean of students asked them to leave, citing the lack of a proper permit for protesting in the space. This is not the first bit of trouble BU students have run into with Occupy Boston. In mid-October, about a half dozen BU students were among the 141 Occupy Boston protesters arrested in a police confrontation. Originally, 100 students had marched to join the protest, and the college’s BU Occupies Boston page has more than 500 members.
5. Auburn University: In early October, Occupy Wall Street found its way to Auburn University, as supporters began gathering at Ross Square on campus. The group has had good support even from the beginning, with over 200 people liking the Occupy Auburn Facebook page within its first week of existence, and by mid-October reaching more than 500 people. The group has spent time handing out leaflets at game days, discussing the movement, and gaining interest. The Occupy Auburn movement has been quick to point out that they don’t intend to be freeloaders, rather, they want to spread the wealth for others. On Oct. 28, the group gathered at Toomer’s Corner, displaying signs that shared phrases like, "I have a job and I Occupy Auburn." Feeling misunderstood, the group wants everyone to know that they’re not looking for a handout, but a level playing field. They’ve encouraged others to engage in local banking and shopping to help discourage corporate greed and bailouts.
6. Brown University: Beginning in early October, Occupy College Hill has been a presence on the Main Green at Brown University. Initially, the group boasted about 60, and that number has held strong. One of the larger events held by the Brown University group was One Night Stand, in which Occupy College Hill and nearby Occupy Providence participants camped out the night before Brown University’s semi-annual meeting of the Corporation. The next morning, they confronted members of the Corporation, and shared discussions about grievances aimed at improving the university through teach-ins. Specifically, Occupy College Hill shared that they are concerned at the university’s lack of support for the Providence community, by not paying property taxes even though the university can afford to do so. Some of the university’s staff and faculty came out to show their support, including the chancellor, dean of the faculty, and associate dean for student life.
7. University of New Mexico: The (Un)Occupy Albuquerque group at the University of New Mexico has already had lots of run-ins in its short life. In late October, the group had several incidents with authorities, including the arrest of a man threatening protesters with a knife, and paramedics called to the area to treat someone who had collapsed, and subsequently died. The university responded by citing a difficulty to determine who exactly was a part of the (Un)Occupy protest. (Un)Occupy Albuquerque held a funeral procession for the First Amendment, citing an apparent violation of their constitutional rights by UNM. The ACLU came to the group’s rescue, and they were issued a new permit after a new agreement was facilitated. In early November, UMN hosted an Occupy Wall Streed/Unoccupy Albuquerque teach-in, focusing on the issues underlying the Occupy Wall Street movement with speakers including UNM faculty, deans, students, community activists, and even New Mexico Senator Tim Keller.
8. Oklahoma State University: At its inception, Occupy OSU identified itself as mainly a "group of people who are not afraid to go to jail," citing the very real possibility of arrest as a protester in the Occupy movement. But they haven’t let that possibility keep them quiet, with plenty of events that have already happened, and more planned with the intent to air their disagreements about what’s going on at Wall Street. In late October, Occupy OSU joined the Occupy Your Capitol effort, staging a demonstration at the Oklahoma City capitol building. The group has focused its efforts on being a part of larger movements within the state, joining up with Occupy OKC and offering help in the form of supplies and lending their numbers to larger demonstrations. OSU’s occupation plans to take their cause to the Payne County Courthouse in Stillwater to make their movement even more prominently known in Oklahoma.
9. Humboldt State: Occupy Humboldt has found lots of support on campus, with several weeks of occupation at HSU on the Humboldt State Quad, and perhaps most interestingly, formal support from the Associated Students of Humboldt State University. On Oct. 17, a resolution from the Associated Students expressed support for the presence of Occupy Humboldt on campus, recognizing the constitutional rights of the occupiers, and calling on campus administration to allow occupiers to sleep and camp at the site. The camp on the HSU Quad has several tents, each with a purpose, including a library, first aid station, and sleeping quarters. The university has seemed to remain benign, and as of late October, reported seeing no need to confront participants or force them away. In fact, one HSU student and Occupy Humboldt organizer reports that the police have even been supportive.
10. Occupy UCLA: On Nov. 9, Occupy UCLA made a huge stir when 11 students sat at the middle of Wilshire Boulevard, shutting down the street for two and a half hours. The students were arrested, but all were bailed out. In all, 200 protesters were there to make their voices heard. These particular students were protesting as part of ReFund California, protesting tuition hikes and service cuts at public universities in California. Previously, Occupy UCLA had pitched tents on campus at Bruin Plaza, but the campout was short-lived due to missing permits. Interestingly enough, the campus has also been home to another Occupy movement, Occupy UCLA Athletics, a group that has voiced its disenchantment with the UCLA football program.
11. Occupy ISU: At Iowa State University, more than 200 people turned out to protest as part of the Occupy movement. The group has plans to make a difference at the state level, with the hope that a smaller movement can have a larger impact if applied at the right level. The Occupy ISU students made their voices heard by walking out of classes together and brandishing signs in solidarity, moving from the campus out onto the community streets. The students highlighted problems with school debt, and inability to find jobs after graduation, with one protester in particular wearing a box that shared, "My Student Debt is Boxing Me In." Other students shared their problems, highlighting the plight of so many: working multiple jobs with a full course load and struggling to pay tuition and rent. The group has more events planned, and has worked together with the local Occupy Ames group.

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Restore the Basic Bargain

by Robert Reich

Monday, November 28, 2011

For most of the last century, the basic bargain at the heart of the American economy was that employers paid their workers enough to buy what American employers were selling.

That basic bargain created a virtuous cycle of higher living standards, more jobs, and better wages.

Back in 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day – three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action “an economic crime.”

But Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford’s auto workers into customers who could afford to buy Model T’s. In two years Ford’s profits more than doubled.

That was then. Now, Ford Motor Company is paying its new hires half what it paid new employees a few years ago.

The basic bargain is over – not only at Ford but all over the American economy.

New data from the Commerce Department shows employee pay is now down to the smallest share of the economy since the government began collecting wage and salary data in 1929.

Meanwhile, corporate profits now constitute the largest share of the economy since 1929.

1929, by the way, was the year of the Great Crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

In the years leading up to the Great Crash, most employers forgot Henry Ford’s example. The wages of most American workers remained stagnant. The gains of economic growth went mainly into corporate profits and into the pockets of the very rich. American families maintained their standard of living by going deeper into debt. In 1929 the debt bubble popped.

Sound familiar? It should. The same thing happened in the years leading up to the crash of 2008.

The latest data on corporate profits and wages show we haven’t learned the essential lesson of the two big economic crashes of the last seventy-five years: When the economy becomes too lopsided – disproportionately benefitting corporate owners and top executives rather than average workers – it tips over.

In other words, we’re in trouble because the basic bargain has been broken.

Yet incredibly, some politicians think the best way to restart the nation’s job engine is to make corporations even more profitable and the rich even richer – reducing corporate taxes; cutting back on regulations protecting public health, worker safety, the environment, and small investors; and slashing taxes on the very rich.

These same politicians think average workers should have even less money in their pockets. They don’t want to extend the payroll tax cut or unemployment benefits. And they want to make it harder for workers to form unions.

These politicians have reality upside down.

Corporations don’t need more money. They have so much money right now they don’t even know what to do with all of it. They’re even buying back their own shares of stock. This is a bonanza for CEOs whose pay is tied to stock prices and it increases the wealth of other shareholders. But it doesn’t create a single new job and it doesn’t raise the wages of a single employee.

Nor do the wealthiest Americans need more money. The top 1 percent is already taking in more than 20 percent of total income — the highest since the 1920s.

American businesses, including small-business owners, have no incentive to create new jobs because consumers (whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the American economy) aren’t spending enough. Consumers’ after-tax incomes dropped in the second and third quarters of the year, the first back-to-back drops since 2009.

The recent small pickup in consumer spending has come out of their savings. Obviously this can’t continue, and corporations know it. Consumer savings are already at their lowest level in four years.

Get it? Corporate profits are up right now largely because pay is down and companies aren’t hiring. But this is a losing game even for corporations over the long term. Without enough American consumers, their profitable days are numbered.

After all, there’s a limit to how much profit they can get out of cutting American payrolls or even selling abroad. European consumers are in no mood to buy. And most Asian economies, including China, are slowing.

We’re in a vicious cycle. The only way out of it is to put more money into the pockets of average Americans. That means extending the payroll tax cut. And extending unemployment benefits.

Don’t stop there. Create a WPA to get the long-term unemployed back to work. And a Civilian Conservation Corp to create jobs for young people.

Hire teachers for classrooms now overcrowded, and pay them enough to attract people who are talented as well as dedicated. Rebuild our pot-holed highways. Create a world-class infrastructure.

Pay for this by hiking taxes on millionaires.

A basic bargain was once at the heart of the American economy. It recognized that average workers are also consumers and that their paychecks keep the economy going.

We can’t have a healthy economy until that bargain is restored.

The Occupy Movement: A Ray of Hope

Stephen H. Unger

Stephen H. Unger
Professor Emeritus
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Columbia University

November 29, 2011

For more than three decades, the fruits of technological progress have been harvested by a tiny percentage of the population, who amassed great wealth, while the great majority worked harder, but barely held their own financially [Unger-1]. Tens of millions of Americans descended into, or remained mired in, poverty. Both major political parties, tho differing greatly in style, have been fully complicit in this process [Unger-2]. There was surprisingly little resistance by the victims. Young people were silent as their futures were strip mined via massive outsourcing.

Against this background it is exciting to see the dramatic awakening in the form of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which seems to be spreading rapidly. What are the salient issues driving the movement? What are the distinctive features of OWS? How might it succeed in wresting power from the wealthy?

What is OWS about?

The core of the Occupy movement consists of young Americans who see their country being dominated by corporations who care nothing for the welfare of the general population. They see their prospects for satisfying employment rapidly fading. The spirit of the movement is well captured by the chant that seems popular among Occupy groups nationwide: "Banks were bailed out, we were sold out!"

The growing role of money in politics, considered a key factor in the domination of both the Democratic and Republican parties by the 1%, is a principal theme [Unger-3]. ( The idea of publicly funded election campaigns is popular among OWS activists. Other concerns include the way corporate interests have been de-industrializing the US by shutting down production here, building factories abroad, and importing foreign made goods, thus eliminating American jobs in categories ranging from entry level sweepers to engineers and managers. College graduates, unable to find suitable employment, are outraged at being forced to work at jobs such as as retail clerks selling products made in China.

A longer list of Occupy issues, compiled by Occupy Washington, DC organizers, covers more ground, e.g., the endless wars and universal health care, (tho it does not include civil liberty violations, which I believe is a concern of many Occupiers) [Occupy DC]. The cited reference includes a pointer to an essay detailing studies showing that there is very strong popular support for the Occupy positions.

What's Different about OWS?

Quick! Name one OWS leader! A unique feature of OWS is the absence of identifiable leadership. Altho some prominent individuals such as Chris Hedges and Michael Moore have expressed support for, and participated to some extent in, the movement, they in no way can be considered as leaders or spokespeople. Nor have any previously unknown people emerged as conspicuous leaders.

It appears that OWS leadership is widely diffused, with young people playing a dominant role. There are also many occupiers who have been activists for years on issues such as civil rights, environmental matters, and opposition to wars.

Meetings are held in which "facilitators" act only to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak. Groups of people make various decisions largely by consensus. There are numerous committees organized to perform such functions as food preparation and distribution, medical treatment, security, and the formulation of goals. The claim by OWS people is that, rather than being leaderless, they are all leaders.

Despite this lack of conventional organization, OWS was able to react quickly and effectively to compel Mayor Bloomberg to reverse his decision to evict them from Liberty Park on October 14. When, a month later, the mayor sent in police, at 1:00 am, to clear the park, the response was a series of demonstrations all over the city involving over 32,000 people.

Unlike radical groups of the sixties, OWS has taken a strong position prohibiting the use of drugs and alcohol in their territory. They are also strongly committed to nonviolence and have exhibited great discipline in the face of a number of attacks by police. This has not been easy, as they are also following a policy of inclusion, allowing participation by people with many different backgrounds.

In at least one Occupy camp site, in Washington, DC, those wishing to become part of the group must pledge (by signing a statement) not to carry weapons, use alcohol or illegal drugs, or vandalize or steal property. They must agree to be reasonably quiet from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m [McCartney].

OWS has, thus far, not compiled a specific set of demands or goals, altho it is clear that its central concern is with the control of our government by corporate interests, and the gross economic inequality that this has produced. OWS activists have also spoken out against the wars and violations of habeas corpus and the Bill of Rights, racism, and environmental abuse.

Problems and Pitfalls

The ideal of being open to all makes it difficult for OWS to avoid distractions from immature or unstable people, or from those with hostile or far-out views. When such people post irrelevant or antagonistic items on Occupy websites, it is counterproductive to respond. The best tactic is simply to ignore them.

Perhaps even more serious is the danger from provocateurs sent by government agencies or by political groups trying to discredit OWS, perhaps by instigating violence. Thus far, OWS has been successful in minimizing damage from this quarter, tho there have been some unpleasant incidents.

A more subtle hazard is Democrats trying to "harness" the movement to help them defeat those terrible Republicans [Greenwald]. Of course, a major theme of the Occupy movement is the way Republicans and Democrats engage in mock combat while both are firmly under the control of the corporate elite [Unger-2]. This co-option effort is thus far being successfully resisted.

Perhaps the single most important factor is adhering to nonviolence in the face of rough treatment by police. So far, in most places, OWS has been quite successful, and it is clear that the contrast between violent police action and the disciplined nonviolence of the protestors has been an important element in the growth of the movement. Many people, seeing videos of police deliberately pepper spraying an 84 year old woman, and a number of young women, none of whom were actively resisting, were moved to think about what was going on.

Formulating proposals and demands is a complex matter. Including some specific item might alienate some potential supporters, while omitting that item might alienate others. Probably it would be wise to limit the number of "official" OWS platform planks (if indeed such is needed at all) to a compact set of fundamental items.

Getting Results

There is some satisfaction to be gained by speaking out publicly to protest injustice and to demand a redress of grievances (to use the terminology of the US constitution). But it would be far better to see these demands producing real results.

The Occupy movement has already had a significant effect in stimulating public discussion of issues such as corporate domination, unemployment, and the endless wars. It has almost certainly affected public opinion in a positive way.

But those now running this country as servants of the corporate elite are not going to change direction merely because a lot of Americans are expressing unhappiness with the status quo. Saying "pretty please" to these people will not be effective. Nor will threats that are not credible. So eventually, after demonstrations of various kinds have built up sufficient popular support, action of some sort will be necessary to effectuate actual change.

Violent revolution is not a viable tactic, for several reasons. First, even if successful in overthrowing the government, the use of such means would almost certainly corrupt the outcome. We are not likely to achieve a just and peaceful society by slaughtering a lot of people. Furthermore, the current rulers feel quite comfortable with violence. They are the experts, and would have no difficulty coping with rock throwers, or even gun toters.

It seems to me that the best chance for the overturning the clever system whereby a small elite effectively rules the country by orchestrating a noisy struggle between two political parties is to develop a new political party that, if elected to office, would form a true government "of the people". Such a party might be started from scratch, or the Green Party, already in existence in most states, might be used as the foundation [Unger-2].

The Occupy movement itself might morph into the new party, or it might remain as an independent force focussing on certain core principles, and urging people to support them by voting for the new party, which must pledge to fight to implement them.

References

Glenn Greenwald, "Here's what attempted co-option of OWS looks like", Salon, Nov 19, 2011

Robert McCartney, "Washington's Occupy movement emerges as model for others", Washington Post, November 19, 2011

Occupy DC, "Issues", Occupy Washington, DC

Stephen Unger-1, "The Rich and the Rest of Us: Gross Inequality Versus Democracy", Ends and Means, January 13, 2009

Stephen Unger-2, "Our Fake Two-Party System" Ends and Means, January 5, 2011

Stephen Unger-3, "Money Talks, and Nominates--and Elects", Ends and Means, April 10, 2007

Occupy San Diegans Join Occupy LA In Solidarity in Face-off With Police

from the OB Rag

by Frank Gormlie on November 29, 2011 · 4 comments

in California, Civil Rights, Organizing

Occupy Los Angeles - November 27, 2011.

Update:  “uneventful” Monday night at Occupy LA .

Two dozen local activists join LA protesters at the hour of their eviction

When a few of us in Occupy San Diego this past weekend heard that our sisters and brothers in Occupy LA were facing eviction early Monday morning, about two dozen of us traveled up to LA and camped out with them in solidarity.

When OSD veteran Julie M. put up on facebook that she wanted to drive up to LA and show support for their occupation, a number of us jumped at the chance to drive up there with her.  So Howard, Humberto, Claudia and I crammed into Julie’s Prius and headed out for LA, leaving from the Civic Center Plaza on Sunday, the 27th. We had plans to stay at least one night and be there when the occupiers at the LA City Hall faced off with their eviction – which was set for 12:01 a.m. Monday morning.

 
One carload from San Diego: Howard, Claudia, Humberto and Julie. I took the photo.

We arrived at downtown LA in the late afternoon, and after wandering around in wonder at the sight of hundreds of tents in the sprawling encampment that surrounded the LA City Hall – the largest occupation on the West Coast – we set up a San Diego occupation of one small section of the concrete steps next to where their General Assemblies were held.  Music was playing and a large crowd was partying in the middle of the small plaza – the atmosphere being one of a grand festival.

And even though the site was facing an eviction by the police that night, there was virtually no great police presence.  In fact, during our first hours there, we only saw a couple of cops.  We muttered to ourselves, “if this was San Diego ….”

To us, in comparison, there was a real lack of any tension in the air, and we couldn’t help but contrast what we found in LA with what Occupy San Diego has been facing over these last few weeks with the stand-offs with police and city government in general.   LA was so much more laid-back even as it was so much larger in scale than the height of OSD’s tent city at our City Hall in early October.

LA had 400 – 500 tents at its peak, and even though it was evident by the time we got there that many tents had been removed, there were still so many standing, that it didn’t matter. We watched the scene in envy – and as LA is the place to people watch – their tent city was no different.  There was a huge media tent, a “Kids Village”, several tributes to sacred land and other symbols.

Other San Diegans arrived – and by night’s end we counted nearly 25 of us who had traveled north in a half dozen vehicles. A bunch of us gathered around where Julie had set up her tent – two San Diegans were already slumbering in it.

 
Police and protesters face off at about 5:00 am, Monday, Nov. 28th.

The massive city hall buildings were surrounded by tents, and as I took a walk around the building, I found several committees meeting near the great entrance to the place.  There was a legal observer training at one place, and about 50 yards away, a GA-process type committee was planning for the assembly meeting itself.  They had more people at this committee meeting that we have sometimes at our own GA.

As night drew its curtains, we returned to the steps where we had raised our invisible San Diego banner. Being LA, I was not that surprised when I saw my first actress briefly milling about near the GA steps by 5:30. More and more people showed up and by time the GA started at about 7:30 pm, there were literally thousands in the park-like setting that engulfed this corner of LA. Later, organizers had declared this was the largest GA ever in the history of Occupy LA.

The co-moderators and others who spoke and guided the assembly were so-LA; they were polished, experienced, accomplished, and were immersed in a self-deprecating humor that strengthened the patience and energy of the crowd. The guy in charge of the stage craft sounded like a professional radio announcer. The “Raid Committee” gave their report, as did the other important committees at this crucial time. Committee reports were timed and everything flowed fairly well.

 
Ron Kovic makes an impassioned speech before the General Assembly.

Ron Kovic – the fairly famous anti-Vietnam war protester – whose antics had been made into a movie, “Born On the Fourth of July” with Tom Cruise – gave a very stirring speech, praising the occupiers as the hope of the nation.

Over the next couple of hours, two resolutions passed – each with a tight consensus of thousands of people. The one I recall blasted the Supreme Court’s classification of corporations as people coupled with an affirmation of  freedom of speech. Somewhere between 10:00 and 10:30 the GA broke up – there had been an announcement that a march was to begin soon after.  We along with the other masses waited for the anointed hour – 12:01 – the moment of supposed eviction.  One former San Diegan had gone around collecting cigarette donations to be ostensibly handed out at that minute.

The park was packed and around 11, many people poured out into the darkened, empty streets. Banners and chants dominated  a couple of street corners. Some people sat down in the middle of the street, some began dancing to a drum circle, most simply milled about. Lots of people wore bandanas and had some form of mask on top of their head, waiting for the tear gas or mace or pepper spray which they were convinced would be sprayed that night. The excitement was growing and when the cops finally showed up in mass about a block away from the encampment, hundreds ran down to greet them.  A bunch of young men climbed on top of a bus stop and took a defiant posture.

Others pleaded with the crowds to return to the park with bullhorns and chants. Some did. But as those who were persuaded to go back to the encampment moved away, others flowed over to the police lines as they were the sites of excitement.

Predictably, more police showed up and began to block off entrances to the area. One police vehicle closed in and broadcast a warning that those in the streets would be subject to arrest. Each time the police formed a line, protesters formed up in front of them. This went on for a couple of hours it seemed. The stream of protesters leaving the scene began to tell on those numbers remaining.

Finally, police announced that the street was an illegal assembly.  When that happened, most did return to the park, and as the cops closed in after 4:45 am, the intensity of the scene climbed to the scorching zone.  Three protesters were arrested as they sat in the street.  People lining the street linked arms. Chants and yelling intensified.

Back at the center of the encampment, dozens had encircled several tents and were prepared to be arrested in one final act of resistance if the police had moved into the camp itself.  At least two of our San Diego compatriots had been part of that circle.

There was some minor pushing and shoving at the camp’s front lines when police tried to grab somebody.  But the line held and even though the streets were declared off-limits to the protesters, eventually police withdrew before the dawn of light.  It would be rush-hour soon. As they witnessed the withdrawal, scores sang Steam’s one-song wonder: “nah-nah-nah-han, hey-hey-hey, good-by”. (Three years ago, at Obama’s inauguration as Bush flew out of DC in his helicopter, thousands had sang the same thing.)

There hadn’t been much food and water at the camp for several hours as much of the camp’s infrastructure had been carted away in anticipation of the mass eviction.

With the tension over for the time, the crowds melted into the camp, some collapsing where they could as most had been up all night, others remained upright still on their adrenalin.  I found refuge in a space formed by large tree roots, later in a chair, and finally laid down next to other San Diegans slumbering over at our corner of the encampment site.

With the sun coming up, more tents vanished even while a few were freshly erected.  Hungry and in need of coffee, I got up and wandered around downtown LA for what seemed like hours looking for something, anything. Finally, I did locate a coffee and breakfast place not far from the demonstration site.  As soon as I made my way up to the counter, a dozen police officers walked in to get their share of the java.  But all were polite.

Back at the camp, the dozen porta-potties were overflowing. Parts of the camp looked evacuated. People mingled about in a state of numbness and exhaustion.  The thousands of the night before had disappeared and there were only hundreds at the camp. Pizza slices and jelly and peanut butter sandwiches were handed out. There was now water, the medical tents were functioning again as the camp began to pick up its pieces and move back to its regularity. Speculation that the police would move in over the next 48 hours was very easy to hear.

Yet, things were different. Hundreds of tents were gone. And the intensity of the weekend faded into rumors of the next “raid” which some were convinced would come at 2 am Monday morning.  Many of the San Diegans wanted to stay another night, assured of this.  I joined a car that was heading home and we left the encampment at 1pm and returned two hours later to hear stories of the “mini-tents” at our own Plaza.   Most of us had only had an hour of sleep so we collapsed back into our San Diego lives and back to the hazards and pain of Occupy San Diego, where the cops are meaner than their LA counter-parts and the cold, harsh aloof posture of the local mayor here in our southern citadel of paradise remains simply amazing.

But we had been part of history. We had stood in solidarity with our sisters and bros up north at the hour of their need.  We had experienced something that we could only imagine down here, a real “tent city” that has lasted for some sixty days now in downtown LA.

UPDATE: I called one of our San Diego activists camped out at Occupy LA late this morning, and he reported that they had had “an uneventful night.”  And they were packing up to come home.

Balboa Park, San Diego Project to Eliminate Auto Traffic and Enhance Pedestrian Experience

 

The Democratic Promise of Occupy Wall Street

Published on Monday, November 28, 2011 by The Nation

by William Greider

Regular politics in Washington now resembles an ecological dead zone where truth perishes in a polluted environment. Democrats and Republicans shadowbox over their concocted fiscal crisis, neither willing to tell voters the truth, both eager to avoid blame for the damage they are doing to the country.

Occupy Oakland

Out in the streets, meanwhile, the contrast with brain-dead politics is exhilarating. In Occupy Wall Street, we are witnessing a rare event—the birth of a social movement. Ordinary people are engaging in sustained grassroots protest against the political order and against citizens’ exclusion from the decision-making that governs their lives. They seek to rearrange the distribution of power, and they are doing so by injecting a creative, often playful vitality that has been missing in our decayed democracy. The protesters have slipped around the soul-deadening, high-gloss marketing of mass-communication culture. Instead, they insist that politics starts with citizens talking to one another and listening—agreeing and disagreeing with mutual respect. The open-door, nonhierarchical membership commits people to engage in what historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls “democratic conversation.”

The Occupy protesters are acting like citizens, believing they have the power to change things. Their ambition reflects a core mystery of American democracy—the fact that humble people can acquire power when they convince themselves they can. Warmhearted and broad-minded, these citizens audaciously claim to speak for the 99 percent—and despite initial ridicule and dismissal of them by much of the press, polls show they have strong public support. The Occupiers have even managed to make uptight reporters write about corporate greed.

Authentic new social movements do not appear very often, and most of them fail. Throughout the nation’s history, rebellions have typically been derailed by their own mistakes and divisions or snuffed out by entrenched power. Even when they endure, it can take years, sometimes generations, to overcome the resistance of the status quo. Think of the abolitionists and the civil rights movement, women’s demand for the vote and equal rights, working people collectively asserting their power in unions.

As with earlier movements, governing elites have grasped the radical nature of this noisy intrusion into their privileged domain, and they have attempted to crush OWS with a series of melodramatic police raids from New York to California. But repression has failed to intimidate the rebellious citizens. Indeed, each attack only seems to strengthen the movement.

But will it last? Skeptics are entitled to their doubts, but for important reasons I am confident this movement will endure. First, because it is very unlikely the establishment will respond substantively to OWS’s grievances—and that will only make the protesters more determined. OWS has brilliantly focused its many complaints on the very sector—the megabankers and financiers—on whom the politicians are dependent. In different ways, Republicans and Democrats are aligned with the greedheads and are thus unwilling to punish their crimes or cut them down to size.

This new movement is probably more threatening to President Obama, because many of the young people and minorities who campaigned and voted for him in 2008 might drift away to Occupy’s direct action. If Obama refuses to get tougher on reining in Wall Street, these former supporters may just skip voting in 2012. Yet this new force can ultimately help Obama if he responds to its message. Led by the young, the movement is aligning with the reviving militancy of labor and other progressive constituencies. The spirit is open-armed and patriotic, not negative and divisive. Obama should dare to lead it rather than dodge or oppose it. The Republicans are hopeless, of course, utterly in thrall to banking industry demands.

In any case, this movement is not about electoral politics—not yet, anyway. It is about saving the country, an objective bigger than politics and politicians. Its vision is nothing less than halting the degradation and fostering the rebirth of the nation’s original democratic promise. It is the nature of authentic movements to seek large and majestic goals that seem impossible to pedestrian politicians—and, at first, to most citizens. Standing up requires both uncommon courage and severe provocation.

Another reason I’m optimistic about the Occupy movement is its distinctiveness from other movements. Its horizontal, leaderless quality confuses outsiders but ensures its autonomy as a free-standing force not beholden to political parties or financial patrons that might restrict its behavior. OWS’s creativity depends on its independence.

And finally, I am optimistic about Occupy because I see similarities with earlier movements that led to significant reforms. Odd as it may seem, Occupy’s situation resembles in some ways the agrarian revolt of the late nineteenth century. I say odd because the Populists were poverty-plagued farmers; but like today’s protesters, they were getting crushed by the banking system and monopoly capitalism. For an inspiring portrait of what ordinary Americans can accomplish in adversity, read Lawrence Goodwyn’s epic history The Populist Moment. The Populists well understood that nobody was on their side, neither the government nor the bankers. As industrial capitalism advanced, the brutal credit system was converting yeoman farmers of the South and Midwest into landless peasants (a bit like the foreclosure crisis impoverishing homeowners in our time). In deep crisis, the Populists had to save themselves. They launched agricultural cooperatives and developed farsighted reform proposals, many of which were ultimately embraced by the New Deal. The Populists lost in their own time, but they planted seeds for the future and changed the nation in the long run.

Like the Populists, the Occupiers are acting in the American spirit of self-reliance, doing whatever they can to counter a destructive system and force change upon it. In the absence of serious financial reform from Congress, for example, the “move your money” campaign uses direct action to take money and power away from the megabanks. But Occupy is also demanding a new kind of government, one not captured by corporate power and rigged against ordinary people. Occupy DC, for example, has proposed a humane plan for deficit reduction. Others urge a constitutional amendment that would disarm the money power’s capture of democracy. OWS can bring about a change in laws, but first it must cleanse our degraded political culture. This is a staggering challenge, of course, but radical reform will originate only from ordinary citizens—not policy experts and their Wall Street supporters, who led the nation into ruin. The movement can inspire the people to become creative citizens again. Are we up to it? Let us find out. Let the democratic conversations begin.

© 2011 The Nation

William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation. He is author of "Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country" and, most recently, "Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country."

Time to Retake Politics From the One Percent in Both Political Parties

Published on Monday, November 28, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

 

by Dean Baker

The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the One Percent. As it stands, the One Percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.

The deficit is the agenda of the One Percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the One Percent.

This is not a statement of morality; it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However, it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.

This is what the financial markets are telling us every day as interest rates on long-term government bonds hover near 2.0 percent. If deficits were really crimping the economy, we would be seeing interest rates of 6 or 7 percent, or even higher. The deficit hawks do not have an economic case to support their argument, just money and influence.

In the longer term, the deficit hawks can point to projections of outsized deficits, which they invariably attribute to Social Security and Medicare. The first part of this story is completely untrue.

Under the law, Social Security is financed from its designated tax. It, therefore, cannot contribute to the deficit unless Congress changes the law. (The payroll tax credit in 2011, which was replaced with general revenue, is an exception to this rule.)

According to the most recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security benefits will be fully funded through the year 2038. After that date, if Congress does nothing to increase revenue, then the program would pay a bit more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits. (This would still be about 10 percent more than current retirees receive since benefits are projected to rise by approximately 1 percent a year.)

The real story of the soaring long-term deficits is exploding Medicare costs, which are in turn driven by our broken health care system. We already pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as the average for other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. This gap is projected to continue to grow in the years ahead.

To anyone who looks at the facts, the obvious answer to our deficit problem is fixing the health care system. This is difficult to do given the enormous political power of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, highly paid medical specialists, and the other members of the One Percent who profit from the waste in the system as it exists now.

If we can't immediately change the system, then why not take advantage of the gains from trade? If we change rules to make it possible for Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the health care systems in other countries or make it easier for patients to have medical procedures done at far lower cost elsewhere, it should be an enormous win-win, offering gains that could be in the trillions of dollars. And what free-market fundamentalist can argue against the principle of giving people a choice?

In fact, conservatives and self-described free traders run screaming from the idea of opening medical care to trade. They want trade that will lower the wages of auto workers and textile workers by putting them in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world; they hate trade when it threatens to reduce the income of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and others in the One Percent.

It's time to expose the lies for what they are. The One Percent have rigged the deck over the last three decades to accomplish the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. These are not people who care about budget deficits or free trade or free markets. They care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.

© 2011 Dean Baker

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer and the more recently published Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy. He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

more Dean Baker

The Poor, the Near Poor and You

Editorial Published November 23, 2011 by the New York Times

What is it like to be poor? Thankfully, most Americans do not know, at least not firsthand. And times are tough for the middle class. But everyone needs to recognize a chilling reality: One in three Americans — 100 million people — is either poor or perilously close to it.

The Times’s Jason DeParle, Robert Gebeloff and Sabrina Tavernise reported recently on Census data showing that 49.1 million Americans are below the poverty line — in general, $24,343 for a family of four. An additional 51 million are in the next category, which they termed “near poor” — with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line.

As for all of that inspirational, up-by-their-bootstrap talk you hear on the Republican campaign trail, over half of the near poor in the new tally actually fell into that group from higher income levels as their resources were sapped by medical expenses, taxes, work-related costs and other unavoidable outlays.

The worst downturn since the Great Depression is only part of the problem. Before that, living standards were already being eroded by stagnating wages and tax and economic policies that favored the wealthy.

Conservative politicians and analysts are spouting their usual denial. Gov. Rick Perry and Representative Michele Bachmann have called for taxing the poor and near poor more heavily, on the false grounds that they have been getting a free ride. In fact, low-income workers do pay up, if not in federal income taxes, then in payroll taxes and state and local taxes.

Asked about the new census data, Robert Rector, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation told The Times that the “emotionally charged terms ‘poor’ or ‘near poor’ clearly suggest to most people a level of material hardship that doesn’t exist.” Heritage has its own, very different ranking system, based on households’ “amenities.” According to that, the typical poor household has roughly 14 of 30 amenities. In other words, how hard can things be if you have a refrigerator, air-conditioner, coffee maker, cellphone, and other stuff?

The rankings ignore the fact that many of these are requisites of modern life and that things increasingly out of reach for the poor and near poor — education, health care, child care, housing and utilities — are the true determinants of a good, upwardly mobile life.

Government surveys analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities indicate that in 2010, just over half of the country’s nearly 17 million poor children lived in households that reported at least one of four major hardships: hunger, overcrowding, failure to pay the rent or mortgage on time or failure to seek needed medical care. A good education is also increasingly out of reach. A study by Martha Bailey, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, showed that the difference in college-graduation rates between the rich and poor has widened by more than 50 percent since the 1990s.

There is also a growing out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem. A study, by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford, shows that Americans are increasingly living in areas that are either poor or affluent. The isolation of the prosperous, he said, threatens their support for public schools, parks, mass transit and other investments that benefit broader society.

The poor do without and the near poor, at best, live from paycheck to paycheck. Most Americans don’t know what that is like, but unless the nation reverses direction, more are going to find out.

 

Looking Back on the Road to Folly

Published on Saturday, November 26, 2011 by EricMargolis.com

by Eric Margolis

In October, 2002, I wrote an analysis of the impending Iraq War for “American Conservative” entitled “The Road to Folly.”

I observed, “A war that fails to achieve clear political objectives is merely an exercise in violence and futility.”   Having covered 14 conflicts as a war correspondent and the Mideast, I’ve seen a lot of violence and futility. 

The White House launched a thunderous, utterly shameless propaganda campaign about phony threats to America and the world from President Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

On cue, US forces invaded Iraq in March, 2003. 

In America, the “bodyguard of lies” that Churchill said accompanies every war swelled into an army of liars. The Bush administration’s neocons played a leading role in engineering the Iraq conflict. Media acted as megaphones for the war party.

Thanks to the drumbeat of lies and insinuations, over 80% of Americans believed the canard that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

A few observers who dared critique George W. Bush’s rush to war, this writer included, were  denounced by the neocon media as “un-American,” “traitors,” or Saddam apologists – rather rich in my case since in 1991 the fun-loving Iraqi secret police had threatened to hang me as an Israeli spy! 

Invading Iraq would be a disaster for all concerned, I predicted, except for Israel, which would see a potential nuclear rival and the most technologically advanced Arab nation crushed by US power. Iran would also cheer the ruin of the hated Saddam, who had invaded Iran at the behest and with the support of the US and its Arab oil allies. 

“Bush is wrong if he thinks Iraq can be turned into another docile American protectorate like Kuwait or Bahrain.   He is committing an act of imperial overreach,” I wrote.  I also insisted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

In the event, Iraq, a nation of only 24 million, was shattered by US military power.  The war laid waste to large parts of this formerly advanced nation, already ravaged by a 12-year US-led economic embargo and daily bombing.  

Absurdly, Iraq was even denied lead pencils for its schools lest they be somehow turned into weapons of mass destruction.  During the 1990-91 first Gulf War, the US Air Force destroyed most of Iraq’s water purification plants and sewage systems.  Iraq was denied imports of chlorine to purify it fouled water.  The result, according to the UN, was true mass destruction: 500,000 children died from water-borne disease and lack of medicines. 

The overthrow of Saddam’s Sunni-led regime opened a religious-ethnic Pandora’s Box in Iraq, an artificial state created by Imperial Britain out of Sunni, Shia, Jews and Kurds to encompass its newly discovered Mesopotamian oil fields.

In a supremely idiotic act, US proconsul Paul Bremer fired all Baath Party military and civilian officials, gutting Iraq’s organs of government.   When US forces failed to put down fierce resistance by Sunni fighters, a much ballyhooed US troop “surge” supposedly crushed the uprising.   This is a Republican political myth.

As the Romans used to say, “divide et impera.”  Divide and rule.  In reality, Sunni resistance was broken by US-supervised ethnic cleansing: the unleashing of Shia death squads that inflicted untold barbarities on Sunnis, creating four million refugees, half of them driven abroad.  Millions in American bribes temporarily bought off other Sunni fighters.

The butcher’s bill for conquering Iraq and its vast oil fields: at least 4,483 US soldiers killed and over 33,000 seriously wounded, many with brain injuries.  But these figures are likely far too low.   Estimates of Iraqi dead run from 112,000 to over one million. The Pentagon knows, but won’t release the figures.

Remember the grubby Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neocon architect of the war? He glibly predicted invading Iraq would cost a mere $40 billion and be paid for by plundering its oil. 

Wrong. Wolfie’s jolly little war has so far cost $1 trillion.  In spite of the draw-down of US troops in Iraq, funding the remaining US garrison and the American-installed Baghdad regime remains enormously costly.  Much of the cost is hidden in CIA’s $54.1 billion “black” budget.

The Bush and now Obama administrations have concealed the war’s cost from Americans by refusing to pay for it through a war tax.  Instead, the total cost of  this war was put on the surging national debt, leaving future generations to pay for Bush’s folly.

Meanwhile, Iranian-backed Shia militias gained ascendency in Baghdad.  Rigged elections produced a compliant Shia regime. Allowing Washington to trumpet the arrival of democracy in Iraq – the same kind of “democracy”  it long nurtured in Mubarak’s Egypt.

 

Up north, US and Israeli-backed Kurds established a virtually independent oil state that infuriated Washington’s ally Turkey.  The Iraqi Humpty Dumpty is broken and won’t easily be put together again.

The expected Iraqi oil bonanza never materialized.  Today, Iraq pumps less oil than under Saddam. He threw out western big oil; today, the big US and foreign oil firms are creeping back, hoping to exploit Iraq’s riches.  Some 34,000 guards are being hired to protect Iraq’s pipelines.  Perhaps Libya’s “liberated” oil may lessen some of the disappointment over Iraqi oil.

President Obama has vowed all US combat troops will quit Iraq by December, 2011.   But a shell game is under way.  Two or more heavy US mechanized combat brigades are moving just a few hours drive south to new bases in Kuwait, ready to quickly intervene to prop up the tame Maliki regime in Baghdad.

Washington is trying to keep 10,000-20,000 US combat troops in Iraq, rebranded “trainers” and “anti-terrorism forces.”  Iraq has balked but may yet give in.   The new, huge, heavily fortified US Embassy in Baghdad will have 16,000 employees and its own private army of mercenaries.  What happens to the 100,000 other US-paid mercenaries in Iraq is uncertain.  One certainty: $34 billion US aid lost through fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan will never be recovered.

In the flat, arid Mideast, air power is decisive.
The most important indicator of Iraq’s future will be who controls its air space.   The US may continue to do so from Kuwait and other Gulf bases, just as Imperial Britain ruled Iraq by means of the RAF.  Iraq won’t be truly independent until it rules its own air space and once again has a real air force.

So what’s the bottom line on the “liberation of Iraq?”
A foe of Israel, removed. Hundreds of Iraqi nuclear scientists mysteriously murdered.  

$1 trillion spent.  Burning hatred for America across the Muslim world. Animosity in Europe, which warned against Bush’s modern crusade. Huge future expenses to sustain an obedient Iraqi regime while anti-US nationalist sentiment there is boiling. A big boost for Iran’s regional influence. The deaths and wounding of thousands of American servicemen.  

The original plan to dominate Iraq’s oil and set up US bases there to rule the Mideast has so far failed, and at titanic cost.   As we look back on this epic folly and again hear calls for war against Iran, we hear the famed words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, “one more such victory and we are lost.”

© 2011 Eric Margolis

Columnist and author Eric Margolis is a veteran of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was featured in a special appearance on Britain’s Sky News TV as “the man who got it right” in his predictions about the dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq. His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World

A Thanksgiving Reflection: Looking Beyond Election Day

by Robert Reich

Friday, November 25, 2011

Most political analysis of America’s awful economy focuses on whether it will doom President Obama’s reelection or cause Congress to turn toward one party or the other. These are important questions, but we should really be looking at the deeper problems with which whoever wins in 2012 will have to deal.

Not to depress you, but our economic troubles are likely to continue for many years — a decade or more. At the current rate of job growth (averaging 90,000 new jobs per month over the last six months), 14 million Americans will remain permanently unemployed. The consensus estimate is that at least 90,000 new jobs are needed just to keep up with the growth of the labor force. Even if we get back to a normal rate of 200,000 new jobs per month, unemployment will stay high for at least ten years. Years of high unemployment will likely result in a vicious cycle, as relatively lower spending by the middle-class further slows job growth.

This, in turn, could make political compromise even more elusive than it is now, as remarkable as that may seem. In past years, politics has been greased by the expectation of better times to come – not only more personal consumption but also upward mobility through good schools, access to college, better jobs, improved infrastructure. It’s been a virtuous cycle: When the economy grows, the wealthy more easily accept a smaller share of the gains because they still came out ahead of where they were before. And everyone more willingly pays taxes to finance public provision because they share in the overall economic gains.

Now the grease is gone. Fully two-thirds of Americans recently polled by the Wall Street Journal say they aren’t confident life for their children’s generation will be better than it’s been for them. The last time our hopes for a better life were dashed so profoundly was during the Great Depression.

But here’s what might be considered the good news. Rather than ushering in an era of political paralysis, the Great Depression of the 1930s changed American politics altogether — realigning the major parties, creating new coalitions, and yielding new solutions. Prolonged economic distress of a decade or more could have the same effect this time around.

What might the new politics look like? The nation is polarizing in three distinct ways, and any or all of could generate new political alignments.

Anti-establishment

A vast gulf separates Tea Party Republicans from the inchoate Wall Street Occupiers. The former disdain government; the latter hate Wall Street and big corporations. The Tea Party is well organized and generously financed; Occupiers are relentlessly disorganized and underfunded. And if the events of the last two weeks are any guide, Occupiers probably won’t be able to literally occupy public areas indefinitely; they’ll have to move from occupying locations to organizing around issues.

But the two overlap in an important way that provides a clue to the first characteristic of the new politics. Both movements are doggedly anti-establishment — distrusting politically powerful and privileged elites and the institutions those elites inhabit.

There’s little difference, after all, between the right’s depiction of a “chablis-drinking, Brie-eating” establishment and the left’s perception of a rich one percent who fly to the Hamptons in private jets.

In political terms, both sides are deeply suspicious of the Federal Reserve and want it to be more transparent and accountable. Both are committed to ending “corporate welfare” — special tax breaks and subsidies for specific industries or companies. And for both, Washington’s original sin was the bailing out of Wall Street.

Mere mention the bailout at any Tea Party meet-in or Occupier teach-in elicits similar jeers. The first expression of Tea Party power was the Utah Tea Party’s rejection of conservative Republican senator Robert Bennett because of his vote for the bailout. At the Republican state convention, which ultimately led to the election of Senator Mike Lee, the crowd repeatedly shouted “TARP! TARP! TARP!” The Occupiers, too, began on Wall Street.

The historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote a famous essay about the recurring strain of, as he put it, a “paranoid style in American politics” — an underlying readiness among average voters to see conspiracies among powerful elites supposedly plotting against them. He noted that the paranoia arises during periods of economic stress.

But the web of interconnections linking Washington and Wall Street over the last decade or so — involving campaign contributions, revolving doors, and secret deals — has been so tight as to suggest that this newer anti-establishment activism is based on at least a kernel of truth.

Isolationist

Economic stresses caused Americans to turn inward during the Great Depression, and we’re seeing the same drift this time around. Republican fulminations against the “cult of multiculturalism” are meeting similar sentiments in traditional Democratic precincts — especially when it comes to undocumented immigrants. Alabama and Arizona have spearheaded especially vicious laws, yet polls show increasing percentages of voters across America objecting to giving the children of illegal immigrants access to state-supported services.

Meanwhile, Americans are turning against global trade. Notwithstanding new trade agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia, only a minority of Americans now believes trade agreements benefit the U.S. economy. A growing percentage also want the U.S. out of the World Trade Organization. China has emerged as a special bogeyman. The Democratic-controlled Senate recently passing a bill to punish China for under-valuing its currency, but China-bashing is becoming bipartisan. Mitt Romney accuses former U.S. leaders of having “been played like a fiddle by the Chinese.”

Neither immigration, nor trade, nor China’s currency manipulation is the cause of America’s high unemployment. All three predated the crash of 2008, before which unemployment was only 5 percent. Yet the current drift toward isolationism is not entirely irrational. As hundreds of millions of workers in emerging economies — especially in Asia — continue to enter the global workforce with steadily-improving skills and higher productivity, more and more Americans are losing ground. Meanwhile, immigration and trade are boons to top executives and professionals who gain access to cheaper labor and larger markets for their own skills and insights.

Generational

A third division likely to widen if the economy remains bad runs along a demographic fault-line. Many aging boomers whose nest eggs have turned the size of humming-bird eggs are understandably anxious about their retirement, while America’s young — whose skins are more likely than those of boomer retirees to be brown or black — face years of joblessness.

The jobless rate among people under 25 is already over 17 percent. For young people of color it’s above 20 percent. For young college grads — who assumed a bachelors’ degree was a ticket to upward mobility — unemployment has reached 10 percent. Yet these percentages are likely to rise if boomers decide they can’t afford to retire, and thereby block the jobs pipeline for younger people seeking employment.

Old and young will also find themselves increasingly at odds over public spending. In many communities retirees already resist property tax hikes to pay for local schools. Expect that resistance to grow as boomers have to live on fixed incomes smaller than they expected, and a new wave of young people swarm into the nation’s educational systems. The federal budget will also be a scene of generational conflict. Medicare and Social Security, the two giant entitlement programs for seniors that cost more than $1 trillion a year and account for about a third of the federal budget, will be traded off against programs that benefit the young: Title I funding for low-income school-age students; Head Start; food stamps; child nutrition; children’s health; and vaccines. It’s likely that Medicaid — Medicare’s poor stepchild, half of whose recipients are children — will also be on the cutting board.

After the enactment of Medicare in 1965, poverty among the elderly declined markedly. But poverty among America’s children continues to rise. Yet children don’t have nearly as effective a lobbying presence in Washington. AARP spent $9.7 million on lobbying during first six months of this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By contrast, the Children’s Defense Fund spent just $48,245 last year. Yet because the future lies with the young and with an increasingly diverse America, politicians and parties looking toward the longer term will have to take heed.

Solutions?

How our political parties and leaders will cope with these three fault lines is far from clear, partly because the lines don’t all move in same direction. Young Americans tend to be more anti-establishment than older Americans, for example, but are also more open to other nations and cultures. By the same token, a generational war over the budget might be avoided if anti-establishment movements succeed in reducing corporate welfare, raising taxes on the rich, and limiting Wall Street’s rapacious hold over economic decision making.

What seems certain, however, is that continued high unemployment coupled with slow or no growth will create a new political landscape. This will pose a special challenge — and opportunity. If our political leaders don’t manage the new dividing lines effectively they could invite a politics of resentment that scapegoats certain groups while avoiding the hard work of setting priorities and making difficult choices.

On the other hand, if political leaders take advantage of the energies and possibilities this new landscape offers, they could usher in an era in which the fruits of growth are more widely shared: between elites and everyone else; between the beneficiaries of globalization and those most burdened by it; and between older Americans and young. This itself could reignite a virtuous cycle — a broad-based prosperity that not only generates more demand for goods and services and therefore more jobs, but also a more inclusive and generous politics.

There is a precedent for the second alternative. The structural reforms begun in the depression decade of the 1930s generated just this kind of virtuous cycle in the three decades after World War II. And in devising and implementing these reforms, the Democratic Party came to represent Americans with little power relative to the financial and business elites that had dominated the country before the great crash of 1929. That political realignment was the most profound and successful of the twentieth century.

Will it happen again? At this point, both parties are doing remarkably little given the gravity of the continuing jobs depression and the widening gap of income and wealth. Taming the budget deficit is the only significant issue anyone in Washington seems willing to raise yet Congress seems incapable of achieving any significant progress on this. And the budget itself is only indirectly related to the deeper questions of how to restart economic growth, how much of that growth should be allocated to public goods such as the environment or education, and how the benefits of that growth are to be shared.

Political elites are worried about thunder on the right and the left, but they show scant understanding of what these growing anti-establishment forces signify. Meanwhile, the nation drifts.

Occupy Movement Inspires Rise in US Campus Activism

Published on Friday, November 25, 2011 by Reuters

by Noel Randewich

DAVIS, Calif. - Violent confrontations between police and protesters at two University of California campuses have drawn a new cadre of students into the Occupy Wall Street movement and unleashed what some historians call the biggest surge in campus activism since the 1960s.

While Occupy Wall Street protesters have a broad set of grievances that include income inequality and perceived corporate greed, many students have more specific concerns: soaring tuition, campus budget cuts, and fear of heavy student loan debt and lack of job opportunities upon graduation.

The Occupy protests - and the police response to them - have swelled the ranks of campus activists in recent weeks. (photo: Kelly Schott)

Student protests related to these issues have broken out sporadically on U.S. college campuses over the past few years, but the Occupy protests - and the police response to them - have swelled the ranks of campus activists in recent weeks.

A crowd of about 2,000 students, professors and parents held a rally at UC Davis on Monday and called for university Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign after police last week pepper-sprayed students sitting passively on the campus quad.

Video of an officer spraying an orange-colored pepper spray directly into the faces of cross-legged students circulated heavily on television and the Internet, prompting outrage as well as a wave of cartoon parodies.

"We didn't really know what it was until we actually were here on the quad (quadrangle) seeing fellow students getting maced," said John Caccamo, an 18-year-old biology student at UC Davis. The campus, near Sacramento, is not known as a hotbed of activism.

"This is the first time in the 11 years I've been here that students have said - 'Wait a minute, I need to wake up to where I am and what's going on,'" UC Davis art professor Robin Hill told Reuters at the Davis rally.

At UC Berkeley, a cradle of 1960s student activism, students and faculty members were hit with nightsticks earlier this month when campus police moved to break up an Occupy encampment.

The president of the 10-campus UC system, Mark G. Yudof, said he was "appalled" by the Berkeley and Davis incidents and has hired William J. Bratton, former police chief of New York and later Los Angeles, to lead an investigation.

TUITION HIKES

The uptick in student activism has coincided with the efforts by authorities in many cities to shut down Occupy encampments. College campuses are increasingly a focal point of the movement in California and elsewhere.

In New York, protesters at Baruch College who were demonstrating against tuition increases scuffled with police earlier this week, leading to a dozen arrests.

At UC Davis, an encampment of some 100 tents has sprung up since Monday's rally. Encampments are also in place at UC Berkeley and other California campuses.

New York University historian Robert Cohen said the Occupy movement on California campuses is accelerating quickly compared with the student movement of the 1960s.

photo: Johanna Clearfield

"If you date things from the Port Huron Statement and the summer of '62, it wasn't really until the fall of '64 that there was a mass student movement on campus," he said. The Port Huron Statement was the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the key groups of the 1960s New Left movement in the United States.

The 1960s and early 1970s were a time of great social unrest as college students rallied against the Vietnam war and in support of minority and women's rights.

Angus Johnston, a historian at City University of New York, said, "What we have had up until now is something very similar to the early 1960s, where you had not a huge number of activists but a committed core who were working really hard but weren't getting huge amount of traction from media or fellow students."

California students have regularly protested tuition hikes since the economy slumped three years ago. Tuition for in-state students in the ten campuses of the University of California reached $12,192 this year, up from $2,274 two decades ago.

At the 23 campuses of the California State University system, which is increasingly plagued by overcrowding, tuition this year is $5,472, up from $1,572 as recently as 2002-2003.

In part because of the tuition hikes, a growing number of students now face large student loan debts, with two-thirds of 2010 graduating seniors nationally in debt an average of $25,250, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. That is up 5 percent from the year before.

Some earlier California demonstrations over tuition resulted in serious scuffles with police that included use of pepper spray and Tasers. One woman had reconstructive surgery after a UC Berkeley police officer hit her with a nightstick.

But those incidents received far less attention than those recently associated with the Occupy movement.

"When a cop pepper-sprays a student, everyone can sort of imagine their children, or their nieces or nephews, their friends who are students," said Kyle Arnone, a 26-year old teaching assistant at the University of California's Los Angeles campus.

"It's harder for the public to stigmatize student protesters as being a bunch of hippie, unemployed people that are difficult to relate to."

(Additional reporting by Laird Harrison in Berkeley and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Paul Simao.)

© 2011 Reuters

GlobalPost: Eurozone crisis a blow to democracy

This post originally appeared on GlobalPost.

November 14, 2011

ATHENS, Greece -- In recent days, technocrats have taken control of Italy and Greece, after debt-related political turmoil toppled the democratically elected leaders of both countries.

In Athens, the new prime minister is Lucas Papademos -- a smart guy who is expected to keep Greece out of bankruptcy by staying above party politics. He was sworn in Friday, and tasked with securing a massive bailout. He replaced George Papandreou, who was chased out of office after proposing that Greek voters decide on the bailout.

In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned on Saturday. He had lost his parliamentary majority earlier in the week, and borrowing costs on Italy's massive debt skyrocketed to potentially unsustainable levels.

On Sunday, respected economist Mario Monti was tapped to take Berlusconi's place.

"Super Mario" tapped to fix Italy's economy
Italy's Berlusconi resigns, marking end of era
Greek banker Lucas Papademos named new PM

Markets have applauded these new leaders. Stocks rallied as Greece resolved its political crisis. And pressure on Italian bonds eased Thursday on news that Monti was the frontrunner to replace Berlusconi.

Investors welcome Papademos and Monti because they are viewed as fixers. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- who hold the reins of the euro zone's bailout fund -- like them for the same reason.

The catch is this: Nobody voted for them. They are unelected technocrats called on to do the sometimes messy task of governing.

It's a short-term solution. New elections are expected in Greece, and likely later in Italy. But it's leading some to ask whether the euro zone crisis is undermining democracy.

"We don't have a real democracy here in Greece," said Stratos Georgoulas, a sociologist at the University of the Aegean.

"People who believe Lucas Papademos is the best person to run the country are bankers, business people in the capital, and the media," he said. "He's not a politician. He's a banker. He's not one of us."

The developments in Greece and Italy highlight concerns in some capitals that the European Union disregards the will of the people -- especially as the euro zone crisis has worsened.

Observers including Trevor Evans, an economics professor at the Berlin School of Economics and Law, say a small group of power brokers are calling the shots.

"It's a shift toward an undemocratic, authoritarian way of making decisions in Europe on economic policy," Evans said.

"Effectively, economic democracy has been suspended for Greece and Portugal and Ireland," he said of euro zone countries that have received bailouts. "They have no voice in what's going on. It's going to be a real problem for legitimacy of the institution."

The so-called "Frankfurt Group" of power brokers who have largely taken charge includes Merkel, Sarkozy, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, IMF director Christine Lagarde, leaders of the European Commission, the Eurogroup of finance ministers and the European Council.

During the continuing euro zone crisis, they've structured bailouts that come with tough conditions, such as austerity measures that make recipient governments unpopular with their citizens.

Leaders who challenge them -- even in the name of democracy -- do so at their peril.

Papandreou, tired of pushing austerity measures with his party's slim majority, called for a referendum a few days after completing negotiations on a $180 billion bailout package that includes a 50 percent write-off of privately held Greek debt.

In response, Merkel and Sarkozy called an emergency meeting with the Greek leader. A "no" vote on a referendum would send Greece into default and possibly undermine the euro itself.

On the eve of the meeting, Papandreou said his message would be that decisions must be made "which will ensure democracy prevails over any desires of the markets." He later said ratings agencies "cannot have greater power than the parliaments."

But when they warned that Greece could be kicked out of the euro zone, Papandreou scrapped the referendum. Having spent his political capital, he announced he would step down.

Papademos, an MIT-trained economist, is a former vice president of the European Central Bank. He's also a past governor of the Bank of Greece, having overseen Greece's currency switch to the euro. Now his job is to make sure parliament approves the bailout.

Even the tough-talking Berlusconi was taken to task by his European partners for failing to implement badly needed reforms, leaving the EU's third-largest economy at risk of being unable to roll over its debt because of high borrowing costs.

The Italian billionaire barked back, in an Oct. 24 statement: "Nobody in the Union can appoint themselves administrators and speak in the name of elected governments and the peoples of Europe. No one is in a position to be giving lessons to their partners."

But within two weeks, he was on his way out. His expected successor, Monti, a former European commissioner, will try to rebuild market confidence and oversee reforms.

While not elected, the new Greek premier and likely new Italian leader have financial expertise to steer their countries out of trouble -- and would seem to be less beholden to political interests.

Another consideration is that it was elected officials who put their countries at risk in the first place. Before Papandreou took office two years ago, Greek officials lied to the EU about the country's debt, amassed by years of overspending. And then opposition parties refused to help Papandreou deal with the mess. In Italy, Berlusconi was unwilling to push reforms.

And in times of crises, referendums carry high risks. Voters in tiny Slovenia rejected pension reforms in a June referendum but the country's borrowing costs have risen ever since -- potentially putting it on a path for a bailout. A snap election scheduled next month will bring a new government that, observers say, will have little choice but to impose the reforms that voters rejected.

Merkel, in a recent speech to the German parliament, said these are dangerous times. Unless contained, the crisis could cause a global recession and bring down the EU. She wasn't apologizing for aggressive moves taken to protect the union.

There's a "historical obligation," she said, to protect Europe's unification process begun more than 50 years ago "after centuries of hatred and bloodshed."

"If the euro fails, Europe fails," Merkel said.

The Shocking Truth About the Crackdown on Occupy

Published on Friday, November 25, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality.

by Naomi Wolf

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

Oakland, California riot police advance on peaceful Occupy Oakland, November 3, 2011.

But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists. The New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests. Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering, and penned far from the site in which the news was unfolding. Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being – falsely – informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."

In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up; in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons. The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.

To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force, and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping.

I noticed that right-wing pundits and politicians on the TV shows on which I was appearing were all on-message against OWS. Journalist Chris Hayes reported on a leaked memo that revealed lobbyists vying for an $850,000 contract to smear Occupy. Message coordination of this kind is impossible without a full-court press at the top. This was clearly not simply a case of a freaked-out mayors', city-by-city municipal overreaction against mess in the parks and cranky campers. As the puzzle pieces fit together, they began to show coordination against OWS at the highest national levels.

Why this massive mobilization against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people? After all, protesters against the war in Iraq, Tea Party rallies and others have all proceeded without this coordinated crackdown. Is it really the camping? As I write, two hundred young people, with sleeping bags, suitcases and even folding chairs, are still camping out all night and day outside of NBC on public sidewalks – under the benevolent eye of an NYPD cop – awaiting Saturday Night Live tickets, so surely the camping is not the issue. I was still deeply puzzled as to why OWS, this hapless, hopeful band, would call out a violent federal response.

That is, until I found out what it was that OWS actually wanted.

The mainstream media was declaring continually "OWS has no message". Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online "What is it you want?" answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.

The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.

No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.

When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.

For the terrible insight to take away from news that the Department of Homeland Security coordinated a violent crackdown is that the DHS does not freelance. The DHS cannot say, on its own initiative, "we are going after these scruffy hippies". Rather, DHS is answerable up a chain of command: first, to New York Representative Peter King, head of the House homeland security subcommittee, who naturally is influenced by his fellow congressmen and women's wishes and interests. And the DHS answers directly, above King, to the president (who was conveniently in Australia at the time).

In other words, for the DHS to be on a call with mayors, the logic of its chain of command and accountability implies that congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS to authorize mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarized reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the "scandal" of presidential contender Newt Gingrich's having been paid $1.8m for a few hours' "consulting" to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies' profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.

Since Occupy is heavily surveilled and infiltrated, it is likely that the DHS and police informers are aware, before Occupy itself is, what its emerging agenda is going to look like. If legislating away lobbyists' privileges to earn boundless fees once they are close to the legislative process, reforming the banks so they can't suck money out of fake derivatives products, and, most critically, opening the books on a system that allowed members of Congress to profit personally – and immensely – from their own legislation, are two beats away from the grasp of an electorally organized Occupy movement … well, you will call out the troops on stopping that advance.

So, when you connect the dots, properly understood, what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war; a civil war in which, for now, only one side is choosing violence. It is a battle in which members of Congress, with the collusion of the American president, sent violent, organized suppression against the people they are supposed to represent. Occupy has touched the third rail: personal congressional profits streams. Even though they are, as yet, unaware of what the implications of their movement are, those threatened by the stirrings of their dreams of reform are not.

Sadly, Americans this week have come one step closer to being true brothers and sisters of the protesters in Tahrir Square. Like them, our own national leaders, who likely see their own personal wealth under threat from transparency and reform, are now making war upon us.

© 2011 Naomi Wolf

Author, social critic, and political activist Naomi Wolf is the author of The New York Times bestseller "The End of America" (Chelsea Green) and, more recently, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. Wolf’s landmark international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing of unrealistic standards of beauty, launching a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s.

more Naomi Wolf

The First Amendment Upside Down. Why We Must Occupy Democracy.

by Robert Reich, November 22, 2011

 

You’ve been seeing this across the country … Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed … Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly — protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

And what’s Washington’s response? Nothing. In fact, Congress’s so-called “supercommittee” just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are people. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year ended all limits on political spending. Millions of dollars are being funneled to politicians without a trace.

And a revolving door has developed between official Washington and Wall Street – with bank executives becoming public officials who make rules that benefit the banks before heading back to the Street to make money off the rules they created.

Other top officials, including an increasing proportion of former members of congress, are cashing in by joining lobbying power houses and pressuring their former colleagues to do whatever their clients want.

Millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street and in executive suites aren’t contributing all this money out of sheer love of country. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.

Why else do you suppose tax rates on the super rich are now lower than they’ve been in three decades, and why – even though the long-term budget deficit is horrendous – those rates aren’t rising? Why else do the 400 richest Americans (whose wealth is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans) now pay an average tax rate of only 17 percent?

Why do you think Wall Street got bailed without a single string attached – not even being required to help homeowners to whom they sold mortgages, who are now so far under water they’re drowning? And why does the financial reform legislation have loopholes big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through?

And why else are oil companies, big agribusinesses, military contractors, and the pharmaceutical industry reaping billions of dollars of government subsidies and special tax breaks?

Experts say the 2012 presidential race is likely to be the priciest ever, costing an estimated $6 billion. “It is far worse than it has ever been,” says Republican Senator John McCain.

If there’s a single core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top endangers our democracy. With money comes political power.

Yet when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they’re told the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Instead, they’re treated as public nuisances – clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces.

Across America, public officials are saying Occupiers have to go. Even in universities – where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct – peaceful assembly is being met with clubs and pepper spray.  

The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force.

This is especially worrisome now that so many Americans are in economic trouble. The jobs recession grinds on, seemingly without end. Homes are being foreclosed upon. Qualified students cannot afford college. Or they’re forced to take on huge debt loads they can’t repay in a jobless economy. Schools are firing teachers. Vital social services are being axed.

How are Americans to be heard about what should be done about any of this if they are not allowed to mobilize and organize?  When the freedom of speech goes to the highest bidder, moneyed interests have a disproportionate say.

Now more than ever, the First Amendment needs to be put right side up. Nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.

Occupy Wall Street and the Importance of Creative Protest

Published on Monday, November 21, 2011 by The Nation

by Allison Kilkenny

Perhaps the single biggest factor that helped lead to the Occupy movement’s success in capturing the media and public’s attention has been its creativity. Novel protest strategies have served as OWS’s foundation since its first days. The very idea of occupying, and sleeping in, a park twenty-four hours a day was new and exciting.

Up until Occupy, most protests had become exercises in futility. Protesters would show up with their sad, limp carboard signs, march around for a little while—maybe press would show up, but most likely not—and then everyone would go home. Hardly effective stuff.

Even when the protests were massive, say during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, media had learned to ignore protests as being the hallmark of a bygone era of granola-munching hippies. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the media helped hand protesters loss after loss, perhaps recognizing the fact that protest waged within the perimeters constructed by city officials is completely ineffective.

Demonstrators need a permit to march, and even then must remain on the sidewalk and never disrupt traffic; they need a permit to use a bullhorn, a permit to play music, etc. Protesters, in other words, can protest as long as they never disrupt the normalcy of everyday living, which of course defeats the concept of meaningful protest in the first place.

After a while, all protests began to look the same. Protesters show up, march around, chant X or Y slogan, and if it’s super-exciting, clash with the police and everyone goes to jail. Repeat chorus. It’s no wonder the corporately controlled media were so easily able to write off protest culture as being unimportant or ineffective. The horrible truth was, it had become futile.

That is, of course, until Occupy showed up and refused to play by the city-written rules. No, they wouldn’t be getting permits. No, they wouldn’t be going home at curfew. They would remain in camps as permanent monuments to the injustice and inequality of America’s society. There was no “normal” anymore. There was only what Occupy chose to do, and to not do.

Beyond the creativity of the camps themselves with their libraries, clinics, food tents, media centers and very own newspapers, Occupy chapters are full of young protesters who are extremely savvy to what captures the media’s attention.

Hero Vincent, a young man who is one of the more well-known Occupy protesters and who has been arrested four times since the beginning of the occupation, one day casually remarked, “We need a bat signal. The 99%.”

And that idea came to fruition as thousands of protesters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge Friday. (photo by @OccupyJudaism)

Business Insider reports that a single mother of three named Denise Vega volunteered her apartment in a subsidized housing building across the way to set up the projector. When Occupy tried to pay her for the use of her apartment, she refused the money. “This is for the people,” she said.

From Denise’s windowsill, the projector shone the massive “99%” image across the side of the Verizon building. Not only was the image perfect media bait, it served as a profound statement. Verizon, famous for tax dodging and mistreating union members, has been an Occupy target for a long time. Here was the protesters’ chance to not only defiantly march by an archetype of corporate greed but also physically leave a mark, albeit temporary, on Verizon’s face.

The symbolic moment: the candlelight march, the projector’s alternating messages, including, “We are winning,” every element expressed awesome power. You could see it in the faces of the marchers that they had never experienced a profoundly empowering feeling like this before.

And it wasn’t just happening in New York. It was happening everywhere. The projector’s shutter closed and reopened, presenting a new message, “Occupy Earth.”

The Occupy protesters talk about Tahrir and Egypt’s youth not like they’re some foreign, abstract concept, but rather comrades in a common struggle. They express genuine love and solidarity for people who live 5,000 miles away from them, whom they’ll never meet, but with whom they recognize they have more in common with than Bank of America’s CEO.

Perhaps one of the eeriest and most powerful recent Occupy moments occurred when UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi left a press conference in which she was responding to the horrible images and video of UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike nonchalantly pepper-spraying peaceful protesters.

Students must have been overwhelmingly tempted to shout at the chancellor, or chant “shame,” but such scenes have unfolded a thousand times before, and would have run the risk of being drowned out by similar displays in Oakland, New York City and elsewhere.

Katehi, who hadn’t leaved the press conference for three hours because “the crowd outside was perceived to be hostile,” finally exited the building and was not greeted with lobbed insults or slogans.

Rather, she was greeted with deafening, crushing silence.

Katehi cannot conceal the emotion from her face as she walks past the hundreds of stoic students, the chancellor’s heels clicking upon the pavement serving as the moment’s soundtrack.

When a reporter asks her if she still fears her students, she turns and softly says, “No…no…” But the look in her eyes is unmistakable. She has just attended the funeral of her legacy.

Where Occupy has flourished and other movements have perished is in the group’s refusal to be swept under the rug. Part of this resistance is displayed in moments of pure grit where protesters simply don’t give up when confronted with snow, rain, derision or the unyielding brutality of the police state.

But resistance also occurs when activists adopt guerilla tactics, including non-traditional protest. Much like Anonymous, OWS is a new wave of protest, a direct and significant challenge to the elite who are unaccustomed to such confrontation.

And the one percent find such evolved protest—this kind of global awakening—absolutely bone-chillingly terrifying. If the elites can no longer exploit xenophobia, red state–blue state civil war, racism, sexism or homophobia, how will they keep the underclass bickering while they run off with the country’s wealth?

This is why a well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry proposed a $850,000 plan to smear the activists, or as they put it, “opposition research” in order to construct “negative narratives.”

This is also why Mayor Bloomberg had the NYPD raid Liberty Park’s encampment in the dead of night, and perhaps offers a clue as to why he chose yesterday to parade around yet another alleged bad guy, whom the NYPD had been tailing for two years, yet chose Sunday night as a good time for the Big Bust.

As Bloomberg’s popularity wanes, and the public cries out about vanishing First Amendment rights and police brutality, what better time to simulate a terrorist attack on television and remind everyone to remain terrified and compliant to the billionaire mayor and his army?

I’ve seen countless speculations about “What’s next?” for Occupy, but such theorizing is made in vain. No one knows what’s next for Occupy because the group isn’t like any protest movement that came before it. Yes, OWS borrows from concepts like Hooverville and the global justice movement, but in other ways it’s completely new, so speculating about what they’re going to do a month from now is pointless.

However, there has been some indications that in the coming cold winter months, the occupations will move indoors to condemned buildings and foreclosed homes. Such a maneuver would again place Occupy at the forefront of creative protest.

Ever since the wave of foreclosures began, there have always been rogue sheriffs who refused to kick people out of their homes, and community organizers who help move homeless people into abandoned houses, but there has never been a serious, organized national movement to reclaim the homes.

If ever there was a protest group equipped to attempt such a feat, it’s Occupy.

© 2011 The Nation

Allison Kilkenny is the co-host of the progressive political podcast Citizen Radio (wearecitizenradio.com) and independent journalist who blogs at allisonkilkenny.com. Her work has appeared in The American Prospect, the L.A. Times, In These Times, Common Dreams, Truthout and the award-winning grassroots NYC newspaper The Indypendent

Stop the Austerity Train Wreck!

by Robert Reich

Friday, November 18, 2011

The biggest question right now on Planet Washington is whether the congressional supercommittee will reach an agreement.

That’s the wrong question. Agreement or not, Washington is  on the road to making budget cuts that will slow the economy, increase unemployment, and impose additional hardship on millions of Americans.  

The real question is how to stop this austerity train wreck, and substitute the following: 

FIRST: no cuts before jobs are back – until unemployment is down to 5 percent. Until then, the economy needs a boost, not a cut. Consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the economy – don’t have the money to boost the economy on their own. Their pay is dropping and they’re losing jobs.  

SECOND: Make the boost big enough. 14 million Americans are out of work, and 10 million are working part time who need full-time jobs. The President’s proposed jobs program is a start but it’s tiny relative to what needs to be done. It would create fewer than 2 million jobs. We need a big jobs program – rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, and including a WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps.

THIRD: To pay for this, raise taxes on the super-rich. It’s only fair. Never before has so much income and wealth been concentrated at the very top, and taxes on the top so low. Go back to the 70 percent marginal tax we had before 1980. And include more tax brackets at the top. It doesn’t make sense that any income over $375,000 is taxed at the same 35 percent, even if it’s a billion dollars. And tax all sources of income at the same rate, including capital gains.  

FOURTH: Cut the budget where the real bloat is. Military spending and corporate welfare. End weapons systems that don’t work and stop wars we shouldn’t be fighting to begin with, and we save over $300 billion a year. Cut corporate welfare – subsidies and special tax breaks going to big agribusiness, big oil, big pharma, and big insurance – and we save another $100 billion.

Do you hear me, Washington? Do these four things and restore jobs and prosperity. Fail to do these, and you’ll make things much, much worse.

IPCC Report: Climate Change 'Likely' to Increase Heat Waves, Extreme Weather Events

from the State Column, November 18, 2011

According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is “virtually certain” that the 21st century will see more hot day and fewer cold days. The IPCC report provides a wealth of information on the relationship between climate change and extreme weather as well as ways in which organizations and communities can “reduce exposure and vulnerability” to extreme weather events.

A fact sheet, released by the IPCC, outlines the key information contained in the IPCC Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. The most important piece of information provided by the IPCC report is that natural climate change and human-generated climate change have a direct impact on the “frequency, intensity, spatial extent, and duration of some extreme weather and climate events.”

 

Furthermore, the IPCC reports suggests that communities and organizations can alleviate the impact of extreme weather and climate events through “adaption to climate change” and a thorough understanding of how “different development pathways” can determine an organization or community’s vulnerability to extreme weather events.

According to the IPCC fact sheet, the primary theme of the IPCC report is that “further increases” in extreme weather and climate events are “projected” to take place in the 21st century.

Qin Dahe, an IPCC co-chair, said that “there is high confidence that both maximum and minimum daily temperatures have increased on a global scale due to the increase of greenhouse gases.” Dahe went on to posit that “changes in other extremes, such as more intense and longer droughts are observed in some regions, but the assessment assigns medium confidence due to a lack of direct observations and a lack of agreement in the available scientific studies. Confidence in any long-term trend in tropical cyclone intensity, frequency or duration is assessed to be low.” Dahe’s comments come from an IPCC press release.

Another IPCC co-chair confirms that heatwaves are likely to be exacerbated by climate change in the 21st century. “For the high emissions scenario, it is likely that the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world,” Thomas
Stocker said. “Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease,” Thomas added.

Despite the seriousness of the IPCC’s findings, another co-chair explains that communities and organizations can mitigate the impact of extreme weather events in a number of ways. “Nevertheless, there are many options for decreasing risk. Some of these have been implemented, but many have not. The best options can provide benefits across a wide range of possible levels of
climate change,” co-chair Vicente Barros said.

According to the Telegraph, the IPCC dealt with an onslaught of criticism after suggesting that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. The latest IPCC reports is careful to call various scenarios “likely.” However, the IPCC report calls an increase in heatwaves “virtually certain” in the 21st century.

The negative backlash from the incident or “Himalaya-gate” stemmed from a 2007 IPCC report that said: “Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” In response to “Himalaya-gate,” India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh called the 2007 IPCC report “alarmist.”

Expect the IPCC to feel the heat in the coming days as climate change skeptics mull over the IPCC’s findings. However, there are environmental experts who believe that this report should be taken seriously. “This report should be a wake-up call to those that believe that climate change is some distant issue that might impact someone else,” Jake Schmidt of Natural Resources Defense Council said as quoted by the Guardian.

“The report documents that extreme weather is happening now and that global warming will bring very dangerous events in the future. From the report you can see that extreme weather will impact everyone in one way or another. This is a window into the future if our political response doesn’t change quickly,” Schmidt added. Schmidt’s comments were made prior to the release of the IPCC report.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is scheduled to take place in Durban, South African in November. Leaders in government, academia and in international organizations will discuss the Kyoto Protocol, the Bali Action Plan and the Cancun Agreements.

Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/science/ipcc-report-climate-change-likely-to-increase-heatwaves-extreme-weather-events/#ixzz1e7fMCdiB

Welfare for Millionaires

Nov 14, 2011 12:00 AM EST from Newsweek

by Daniel Stone and Laura Colarusso

A startling new report reveals the billions in government dollars that benefit America’s wealthiest citizens.

Class warfare is a politically charged term these days, from the Wall Street protests to the Capitol Hill negotiations over curtailing the nation’s debt. But a new congressional analysis, obtained by Newsweek, may fuel populist outrage by showing the extent of government subsidies that go to the wealthiest people in America.

From unemployment payments to subsidies and tax breaks on luxury items like vacation homes and yachts, Americans earning more than $1 million collect more than $30 billion in government largesse each year, according to the report assembled by Sen. Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, who is so often at odds with members of both parties that colleagues call him “Dr. No.” The Internal Revenue Service provided the data showing how much money was going to the much-referenced top 1 percent.In all, millionaires receive hefty help from Uncle Sam. The $30 billion in handouts, to put it in perspective, amounts to twice as much as the government spends on NASA, and three times the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. On the other hand, it would only cover the cost of fighting about three months in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, eliminating them would help make a small dent in the $1.5 trillion congressional leaders are trying to find by Thanksgiving.

Jon Bon Jovi, the millionaire rock star cited in the report, took federal dollars to raise honeybees on his property. Together billionaire moguls David Rockefeller and Ted Turner have also accepted more than half a million dollars in farm payments. Basketball legend Scottie Pippen took $210,520 in agriculture subsidies while making his fortune playing for the Chicago Bulls. To make matters worse, the government disclosed to Coburn that some recipients of farm subsidies got it by mistake. Tax records show that more than three fourths of high earners collecting farming money list their primary residence in a city—land unsuitable for farming.

Top earners, surprisingly, also get significant amounts of unemployment insurance and disaster payments. Since 2004, people with seven-figure salaries have accepted more than $9 billion in Social Security. A small band of GOP senators, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, have proposed “means testing” to shrink Social Security payments for people who probably don’t need them.

The biggest money comes—or goes, rather—through unpaid taxes. More than 1,500 millionaires paid no income tax last year, according to federal records, mainly due to tax loopholes and savvy accountants. Tax breaks taken by millionaires on things like mortgage interest ($27.7 billion), rental expenses ($64.2 billion) and electric vehicles ($12.5 million) keep cash from entering the federal coffers.

Part-time actor Dave Glennon dressed as a corporate executive at Occupy L.A. , Robyn Beck / AFP-Getty Images

“The country is sucking wind right now,” Coburn says. “We end up subsidizing the very wealthy and not helping the ones who really need the help.” The Oklahoman is one of few Republicans who support tax increases as part of a plan to reduce the deficit. Meanwhile, antitax activist Grover Norquist, a frequent nemesis for Coburn, says the whole system is too complex, and too unfair, and that lawmakers need to get rid of loopholes and to lower rates across the board.

Many federal programs maintain broad appeal, especially in such a volatile economy. Agricultural subsidies help farmers handle large swings in commodity prices.

But Coburn’s report is certain to generate arguments on the other side about tax fairness. Why, some might wonder, shouldn’t people who feed the government get to reap its benefits? Millionaires “pay a lot into the system,” says Joseph Thorndike, head of the Tax History Project, a Washington analysis group. “The government comes to the rescue of people in bad moments, and it should do that blindly.”

Yet the crux of the argument—that millionaires are using the social safety net as a luxury hammock—fuels an ongoing campaign by the White House to raise some taxes on top earners. “Republicans need to stop supporting tax breaks for the richest Americans so we can use some of that money to create jobs and reduce the deficit,” says White House spokesperson Amy Brundage. Or as Obama likes to put it, folks like him can afford to give more and take less.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

 Daniel Stone is Newsweek's White House correspondent. He also covers national energy and environmental policy.

Laura Colarusso is a reporter at The Daily Beast. She previously worked as a senior news editor at Talking Points Memo. She has also written for The Boston Globe, The Star-Ledger (Newark), AOL, and New Jersey Monthly Magazine.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at [email protected].

Congress and a 16-year Study of ‘Insider Trading’

6:07 pm November 16, 2011, from agc.com

by Jim Galloway

Whether you are Republican or Democrat, an occupier or a tea partyist, the report last Sunday by CBS’ “60 Minutes” on insider trading by members of Congress should have steam whistling from your ears.

But there’s more to tell. And the news will not make you any happier.

The most egregious example cited by CBS was U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, who three years ago was the ranking Republican on the House banking committee, and is now its chairman.

In September 2008, Bachus and other congressional leaders were privately briefed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on the economy’s imminent meltdown.

The next day, Bachus was buying option funds that would increase in value if the economy tanked. It did. While your 401(k) and all thoughts of retirement melted into a never-ending job at Wal-Mart, the House chairman made a tidy profit on his country’s misfortunes.

And he didn’t do anything illegal.

Financial investments by House Speaker John Boehner and former speaker Nancy Pelosi also earned mentions. And yet, there is the temptation is to write such incidents off as exceptions that prove the rule of good behavior.

But in fact, the insider trading problem in Congress is systemic and longstanding. Though it received no mention, the foundation of the “60 Minutes” report was 16 years of analysis by an academic quartet led by Alan Ziobrowski, a professor of real estate finance at Georgia State University.

His wife, Augusta State University professor Brigitte Ziobrowski, James Boyd of Lindenwood University and Ping Cheng of Florida Atlantic University served as fellow researchers – as did an army of grad students.

“For years, we went through financial disclosure forms and we digitized their stock transactions. And then we ran a series of tests to see how [members of Congress] compared to the market,” Alan Ziobrowski said this week.

“The bottom line was that they considerably beat the market. In academic finance, we consider that to be prima facie evidence of insider trading,” he said. “They were even better than corporate insiders at it.” Senators were the best and even outperformed hedge fund managers.

Technically, Ziobrowski said, what members of Congress (and their staffers, one presumes) are engaged in isn’t insider trading. That’s a term reserved for executives within a particular corporation.

“What we claim they have is an informational advantage,” he said. “These guys have information that’s outside the corporation. Probably, companies would love to know what they know.”

Little things like regulations that can be added or subtracted, defense spending that might be cut or increased. That sort of thing.

The Ziobrowski crew has eschewed anything that might smack of partisanship – which explains its absence from the “60 Minutes” report.

A first study, covering investments of U.S. senators from 1993 to 1998, was published in 2004. A second, larger study took the measure of 16,000 stock transactions by U.S. House members from 1985 to 2001. It was just published this spring in an academic journal, with this priceless title: “Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Partisan differences in investment returns were minimal. Senators beat the market by 12 percent per year, House members by 6 percent – a difference that could be explained by the fact that the Senate is a smaller club, where access to fruitful information is more concentrated.

In the House, younger members made greater gains in the market than senior members. Possibly because younger members are less financially secure and more likely to take financial risks.

A large part of me wants to believe that members of Congress are simply brighter than the rest of us, perhaps more aware of societal and financial trends. It is a sliver of hope that Ziobrowski politely demolishes.

“From my perspective, it’s fairly simple. If I’m sitting on a pile of $50,000 worth of stock of XYZ Company, and I find out that something’s coming down the pike that’s not going to be good for XYZ, how could you resist the temptation to unload it?” he asked.

Democrats and Republicans have introduced legislation this week to prohibit members of Congress and their staffs from using nonpublic information for investing or personal gain. Investment transactions would have to be reported within 90 days.

Ziobrowski said the legislation would be better than nothing. “The problem is the system is rigged. The whole notion that, somehow, financial disclosure solves all the ethical issues is really quite a joke. Financial disclosures are not audited. There’s nobody to check them to see if they’re accurate. Even if they are accurate, the public doesn’t see them for a year, year-and-a-half after the transactions have been made,” he said.

Corporate insiders are required to report their stock transactions immediately. Ziobrowski would like to see Congress adopt that rule. Though there’s no chance that it will.

But the House-Senate “super committee” in charge of formulating a deficit reduction deal has a deadline coming up next week. The impact on your economic fortune and mine may hang in the balance.

It sure would be nice to know if any members of Congress are saying the right things in public – and betting against us in private.

- By Jim Galloway, Political Insider

For instant updates, follow me on Twitter, or connect with me on Facebook.

Millionaires Take Case to Congress: Tax Us More

from msnbc

By LAURIE KELLMAN

updated 11/16/2011 8:29:10 PM ET 2011-11-17T01:29:10

Chilly reception at the Capitol as GOP warily meet them, cop says they need visitor badges

WASHINGTON — Lobbyists for a day, a band of millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday to urge Congress to tax them more.

They had a little trouble getting in. It turns out there are procedures, even for the really rich.

But once inside, their message was embraced by liberals and tolerated by some conservatives — including the ideological leader of anti-tax lawmakers, who had some advice for them, too.

"If you think the federal government can spend your money better than you can, then by all means" pay more in taxes than you owe, said Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform, a group that has gotten almost all congressional Republicans to pledge to vote against tax hikes. The IRS should have a little line on the form where people can donate money to the government, he suggested, "just like the tip line on a restaurant receipt."

One of the millionaires suggested that if Norquist wanted low taxes and less government, "Renounce your American citizenship and move to Somalia where they don't collect any tax."

In the silence left by the private efforts of the "supercommittee" to find $1.2 trillion or more in deficit cuts by Thanksgiving, free advice flowed in public.

And not just any advice: pie-in-the-sky suggestions from those not connected to the talks, mostly to reopen debates that have led nowhere. The millionaires want the panel to raise taxes on people who earn more than $1 million, even though most Republicans are committed against the idea. And 150 House member and senators urged a much bigger debt-and-deficit deal, even as a small-scope agreement is proving elusive.

While they were at it, the lawmakers insisted that bipartisanship was not, in fact, dead.

This group of House members and senators shared a stage and some jokes and signed a letter urging the supercommittee of Republicans and Democrats to find the required $1.2 trillion in cuts — plus about $2.8 trillion more. They all want the panel to avoid triggering automatic cuts as a penalty for failing.

So this uneasy alliance of 150 Republicans and Democrats will vote for whatever deal the supercommittee strikes?

"No," said House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer. "Nobody's going to commit to the deal until they see the deal."

What deal? There is no evidence that one is near, so the millionaires tried to meet with anyone who would meet with them.

The progressive caucus did, eagerly and on-camera. The rest wasn't so easy.

At a basement entrance to the Capitol, a police officer pointed to the name badges that identified each wearer as "Patriotic Millionaire."

"That is not a visitor's badge," the officer said. "Go to the visitors desk and get a visitor's badge."

Off they trudged, a group mostly of men in business-casual clothing toting laptops and umbrellas, to a desk visited by tourists and lobbyists. Badges secured, they headed in.

Lawrence Benenson, vice president of Benenson Capitol Co., ran into freshman Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., in an elevator.

"I'm with the Patriotic Millionaires and we want to pay more in taxes," he told her.

Noem grinned.

"How much more?" she asked.

Then it was off to meet, not with senators but their staffs — and not in the Capitol but in offices across the street.

Progress was not made, by all accounts.

A meeting with an aide to Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., opened with his aide announcing that the senator believes the wealthy pay more taxes than their fair share, according to one of the millionaires, Matthew Palevsky, a consultant and founder of the Council on Crime Prevention.

"We defined it as not paying our fair share," Palevsky said of the 20-minute chat. "It was clear we were coming from different points of view."

In a meeting with Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, the congressman faux-proposed — apparently — to an aide to the millionaires. She declined.

Then it was off, on a bus not a limo, across town to see Norquist.

Why were they bothering with him?

"That's what I asked this morning," said one of the millionaires, Frank Jernigan, a former senior software engineer for Google.

"It's a media hook," offered another, Guy Saperstein, a retired lawyer and former president of the Sierra Club Foundation.

Such candor is not the norm in these parts.

For his part, Norquist said he was ready for the group with a tongue-in-cheek Torah lesson: Maimonides and his "eight degrees of charity." That's what Norquist says the millionaires are essentially proposing with their tax-me-more pitch. Perhaps there should be a ninth, Norquist suggested.

"Nobody's holding them back" from donating money to the federal government, he said as he prepared for the group's arrival. "They're saying, 'Gee, I'd sure like to write a big check to the federal government, if someone would just stop stopping me.'"

Occupy San Diego Raided by 200 Cops (for 50 Protesters)

from the OB Rag

Lobbying for War: Lockheed Martin and the Military-Industrial Complex

by John Lawrence

Lockheed Martin has one client: the US government. They make no products which are sold to the general public. But they employ an army of lobbyists who have Congress men and women in their pocket. They insist on funding Lockheed Martin products like the F-22 Raptor fighter plane even though it has proven to be a piece of shit that the Pentagon doesn't even want. They lobby for war and the weapons of war at every turn because it is profitable for Lockheed Martin and Wall Street demands higher and higher profits. And like Northrup-Grumman, their partner in crime, they run TV ads to lobby and convince the general public that they are the good guys looking out for our interests. Northrup-Grumman sells no products to the general public. Yet they besiege us with their TV ads. To what end? Here's why. They want the TV networks to be dependent on a huge hunk of cash from them. This makes it less likely that any of the news magazines like Meet the Press or 60 Minutes will ever do a critical study of their industry with the extra added benefit of creating a warm, fuzzy feeling in the general public for their industry which is war. There is the same rationale for the oil, coal and gas industries. Their TV ads essentially amount to lobbying the TV industry and the general public. This is in addition to the amounts of money they spend lobbying Congress.

This is from "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex," by William D Hartung:

It is a striking ad. An intimidating combat aircraft soars in the background, with the slogan up front in all capital letters: 300 MILLION PROTECTED, 95,000 EMPLOYED. The ad—for Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor fighter plane—was part of the company's last-gap effort to save one of its most profitable weapons from being "terminated," as they say in standard budget parlance. The pro—F-22 ad ran scores of times, in print, on political websites, and even in Washington's Metro. One writer at the Washington Post joked that at a time when many companies had been cutting back on their advertising budgets, Lockheed Martin's barrage of full-page ads in February and March 2009 was the main thing keeping the paper afloat. When an arms company starts bragging about how many jobs its pet project creates, hold on to your wallet. It often means that the company wants billions of dollars' worth of your tax money for a weapon that costs too much, does too little, and may not have been needed in the first place. So it is with the Raptor, which at $350 million per plane is the most expensive combat aircraft ever built. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that the F-22 needs to be cut because even with wars raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has never been used in combat. In fact, in its first "mission"—flying to Japan for deployment at a US air base there—the plane had technical difficulties and had to land in Hawaii, far short of its final destination.

So the plane is a piece of shit, but it creates jobs, jobs, jobs. And jobs are what the country needs, right? And more profits for Lockheed Martin and higher salaries for Lockheed Martin's CEO. Not to mention the lobbying industry. Those poor suckers need jobs too—desperately.

Hartung continues:

But Lockheed Martin insists that the Raptor's unique capabilities more thsn justify its huge price tag. For example, did you know that it is the "first and only 24/7/365 All-Weather Stealth Fighter"? That it has a radar signature "approximately the size of a bumblebee"? Or that it provides "first-look, first-shot, first-kill air dominance capability"? Lockheed Martin has a lot to say, and it is serious about selling you its most profitable plane. How else to explain the statement from the F-22 Raptor web page that, "when we meet the enemy, we want to win 100—0, not 51—49"? It is hard to take this claim seriously. The Raptor has never seen combat—and it may never do so given that it was designed to counter a Soviet plane that was never built—so at best the score is 0—0. But the statement has a grain of truth—it describes Lockheed Martin's lobbying efforts a whole lot more accurately than its fighter plane's mission success rate. The company never reached its goal of 100—0 support in the Senate, but not for lack of trying. As soon as there was even a whimper of a possibility that the F-22 program would be stopped at "only" 187 planes—about what the Pentagon wanted, but only half of what the Air Force and Lockheed Martin were striving for—the company started racking up big numbers on its side. By early 2009, months in advance of President Obama's first detailed budget submission to Congress—which would decide the fate of the F-22—Lockheed Martin and its partners in the F-22 project (Pratt & Whitney and Boeing) had lined up forty-four Senators and two hundred members of the House of Representatives to sign on to a "save the Raptor" letter. A similar letter was sent by twelve governors—including prominent Democrats like David Paterson of New York and Ted Strickland of Ohio. R. Thomas Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), also weighed in. The governors' letter reads as if it was drafted by Lockheed Martin, which it probably was. "We urge you," it begins, "to sustain 95,000 jobs by certifying continued production of the F-22 Raptor—a defense program that is critical to our defense industrial base." After describing it as "the world's only operationsl 5th Generation fighter" (a popular Lockheed Martin description of the Raptor), the letter returns to the jobs argument asking the President to "carefully consider the economic impact of your decision."

Ah, there it is—their ace in the hole— the jobs argument! How can we cut the bloated military-industrial complex without eliminating jobs and making the unemployment situation even worse? Think of all those college graduates—engineers and the like—who work in the military-industrial complex. Think of all those good middle class jobs! Why Lockheed Martin is doing us all a favor by hiring Americans when every other corporation is outsourcing jobs to China. Lockheed Martin claims that the F-22 program created jobs in forty-four states including 132 lobbying jobs in Washington, DC. But other "job creators" don't have the well-oiled lobbying machine that Lockheed Martin can bring to bear. It has a bevy of ex-Senators and ex-Congressmen in its fold ready to deploy at a moment's notice to all the watering holes in Washington, DC and even to the House steam room to argue with this Senator or that Congressman about the fact that the country needs the F-22 Raptor or whatever other piece of crap weapon Lockheed Martin is selling lest the economic and defense base of the country fall into disrepute and disrepair.

...Lockheed Martin pulled out all the stops, deploying Republican ex-Senator Matt Mattingly of Georgia and former House members like Democrats "Buddy" Darden of Georgia and G. V. "Sonny" Montgomery of Mississippi as paid lobbyists. From a luxury box at a Baltimore Orioles game to the steam room of the House gymnasium—fair game to ex-members like Montgomery and Darden—the urgent message went out that allowing funding to slip for even a few months might strike a devastating blow to our security and our economy. Representative James Moran (D-VA) was taken aback when Sonny Montgomery confronted him in the House steam room: "We sat on the sauna naked together and talked about the F-22.... That's the advantage former members have."

Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff has nothing on these guys. In fact Abramoff is coming forward, now that he's out of jail, and blowing the whistle on how the lobbying industry works. It's job security for ex-Senators and ex-Congressmen and their staffers. The promise of a lucrative job after the member or staffer exits Congress is enough to make the current House and Senate members drool at the possibilities. They can come back to Washington at triple their Congressional salary and use the same House steam room that they used before and sit naked chitchatting with their old buddies ... about the F-22 Raptor among other things. "Hey what did you think about that blonde who waited on us yesterday?"

But Lockheed Martin and their lobbyists never give up. They are a force of nature. Other forms of Federal spending—like education, health care, mass transit and weatherizing buildings—need to be cut so that dollars can be provided for Lockheed Martin and the military-industrial complex. These other prospects for Federal dollars lack the well-oiled lobbying machine of Lockheed Martin.

The F-22's growing cost caused its own concerns. It was so expensive that it threatened to crowd out spending on other combat aircraft. It was a question of blowing billions now on a plane with no clear mission or saving up some money to buy the planes of the future.

Why save up money when you have a cash cow in progress. A cash cow in the hand is worth two in the bush. And then there is the time honored boondoggle of the military-industrial complex—the cost-plus contract. The government pays all costs and then adds a fixed percentage profit over and above that so that Lockheed Martin's CEO and investors do not have to starve. This gives Lockheed Martin every incentive to run up the costs after they low bid and receive the contract. This is called "gold-plating."

At this point the plan was to buy 339 planes for a projected cost of over $62 billion—up from an initial proposal to buy 750 planes for a total price of $25 billion. That's less than half as many planes for well over twice the price. How could this happen? Unfortunately, all too easily. First, Lockheed Martin put in a low bid, knowing full well that the planes would cost far more than its initial estimates. This approach, known in the business as "buying in," allows a company to get the contract first and then jack up the price later. Then the Air Force [their partner in crime] engaged in what is known as "gold plating"—setting new and ever more difficult performance requirements after the plane was already in development. Last but not least, Lockheed Martin simply screwed up certain aspects of the plane's production, even as it gouged the Pentagon on costs for overhead and spare parts. ...this is a time-tested approach that virtually guarantees massive cost overruns.

And those cost overruns lead to higher profits because of the cost-plus contract. The tax paying public is being ripped off by the military-industrial complex to pay for the largest military budget in the world, more than all the rest of the world's military budgets combined. But don't forget about all those well paying middle class jobs it provides. Why the unemployment rate would go up by several points if all of a sudden the Pentagon's budget were to be cut in half back to the level it was when George W Bush came to office in 2000. So the US is stuck in an ever increasing spiral of militarization and mobilization for war simply because it provides so many jobs and such high profits. No rational conversion to a peace time budget could ever take place without a massive transfer by the Federal government of funds spent on war to funds spent on peaceful projects like health, education and welfare. Because the US can spend in an unlimited fashion on war and the preparations for war without any bloviating from the right wing, but as soon as it spends on health, education and welfare—well, that's socialism. The old socialism argument trumps everything, and we're right back to the point that spending on war is the only way to keep unemployment down and to create profits. That's capitalism, don't you know?

Lessons from Iceland: The People Can Have the Power

Published on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 by the Guardian/UK

 

As early progress in Iceland shows since the banking collapse, the 21st century will be the century of the common people, of us

 

by Birgitta Jónsdóttir

The Dutch minister of internal affairs said at a speech during free press day this year: "Law-making is like a sausage, no one really wants to know what is put in it." He was referring to how expensive the Freedom of Information Act is, and was suggesting that journalists shouldn't really be asking for so much governmental information. His words exposed one of the core problems in our democracies: too many people don't care what goes into the sausage, not even the so-called law-makers, the parliamentarians.

If the 99% want to reclaim our power, our societies, we have to start somewhere. An important first step is to sever the ties between the corporations and the state by making the process of lawmaking more transparent and accessible for everyone who cares to know or contribute. We have to know what is in that law sausage; the monopoly of the corporate lobbyist has to end – especially when it comes to laws regulating banking and the internet.

The Icelandic nation only consists 311,000 souls, so we have a relatively small bureaucratic body and can move quicker then in most countries. Many have seen Iceland as the ideal country for experimentation for new solutions in an era of transformation. I agree.

We had the first revolution after the financial troubles in 2008. Due to a lack of transparency, corruption and nepotism, Iceland had the third largest financial meltdown in human history, and it shook us profoundly. The Icelandic people realized that everything we had put our trust in had failed us. One of the demands during the protests that followed – and that resulted in getting rid of the government, the central bank manager and the head of the financial authority – was that we would get to rewrite our constitution. "We" meaning the 99%, not the politicians who had failed us. Another demand was that we should have real democratic tools, such as being able to call directly for a national referendum and dissolve parliament.

As an activist, web developer and poet, I never dreamt of being a politician and nor have I ever wanted to be a part of a political party. That was bound to change during these exceptional times. I helped create a political movement from the various grassroots movements in the wake of the crisis. We were officially created eight weeks prior to the election, and based our structure on horizontalism and consensus. We had no leaders, but rotating spokespeople; we did not define ourselves as left or right but around an agenda based on democratic reform, transparency and bailing out the people, not the banks. We vowed that no one should remain in parliament longer then eight years and our movement would dissolve if our goals had not been achieved within eight years. We had no money, no experts; we were just ordinary people who'd had enough and who needed to have power both within the system and outside it. We got 7% of the vote and four of us entered the belly of the beast.

Many great things have occurred in Iceland since our days of shock in 2008. Our constitution has been rewritten by the people for the people. A constitution is such an important measure of what sort of society people want to live in. It is the social agreement. Once it is passed, our new constitution will bring more power to the people and give us proper tools to restrain those in power. The foundation for the constitution was created by 1,000 people randomly selected from the national registry. We elected 25 people to put that vision into words. The new constitution is now in the parliament. It will be up to the 99% to call for a national vote on it so that we inside the parliament know exactly what the nation wants and will have to follow suit. If the constitution passes, we will have almost achieved everything we set out to do. Our agenda was written on various open platforms; direct democracy is the high north of our political compass in everything we do.

Having the tools for direct democracy is not enough though. We have to find ways to inspire the public to participate in co-creating the reality they want to live in. This can only be done by making direct democracy more local. Then people will feel the direct impact of their input. We don't need bigger systems, we need to downsize them so they can truly serve us and so we can truly shape them.

The capital city of Reykjavík has launched a direct democracy platform, where everyone can put in a suggestion in a community forum about things they want to be done in the city. The city council has to take the top five suggestions and process them every month. Next step is to have a similar system for the parliament, and the logical step after that is to have the same system for the ministries.

From conversations I have had with people from Occupy London it is obvious we are all thinking along the same lines. All systems are down: banking, education, health, social, political – the most logical thing would be to start a fresh system based on values other than consumerism, which maximises profit and self-destruction. We are strong, the power is ours: we are many, they are few. We are living in times of crisis. Let's embrace this time for it is the only time real changes are possible by the masses.

© 2011 Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Birgitta Jónsdóttir is a poet who has served since April 2009 as an MP in the Icelandic parliament for the Movement, a political movement for democratic reform beyond party politics, which she helped create. Birgitta was chief sponsor for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), and is chair of the International Modern Media Institute. She is also on the Bradley Manning advisory board

more Birgitta Jónsdóttir

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

Published on Tuesday, November 15, 2011 by TruthDig

by Chris Hedges

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Occupy Denver

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

Occupy Oakland

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backwards from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

© 2011 Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Occupiers Occupied: The Hijacking of the First Amendment

by Robert Reich

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted. 

First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats. 

Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations. 

Wall Street is punishing Democrats for enacting the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (weak as it is) by shifting its money to Republicans. The Koch brothers’ petrochemical empire has financed, among many other things, candidates who will vote against environmental protection.

This tsunami of big money into politics is the real public nuisance. It’s making it almost impossible for the voices of average Americans to be heard because most of us don’t have the dough to break through. By granting First Amendment rights to money and corporations, the First Amendment rights of the rest of us are being trampled on. 

This is where the Occupiers come in. If there’s a core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy. 

Yet  when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard — in one of the few ways average people can still be heard — they’re told their First Amendment rights are limited. 

The New York State Court of Appeals along with many mayors and other officials say Occupiers can picket — but they can’t encamp. Yet it’s the encampments themselves that have drawn media attention (along with the police efforts to remove them). 

A bunch of people carrying pickets isn’t news. When it comes to making views known, picketing is no competition for big money .

Yet if Occupiers now shift tactics from passive resistance to violence, it would spell the end of the movement. The vast American middle class that now empathizes with the Occupiers would promptly desert them. 

But there’s another alternative. If Occupiers are expelled from specific geographic locations the Occupier movement can shift to broad-based organizing around the simple idea at the core of the movement: It’s time to occupy our democracy. 

Will Anyone Rescue Europe from its Economic Crisis?

from the Washington Post

By Robert J. Samuelson, Tuesday, November 15, 10:37 AM

Amid Europe’s economic turmoil, a question nags: Where is the IMF? Created in 1945 — and reflecting the breakdown of global cooperation in the Great Depression — the International Monetary Fund was intended to prevent a few countries’ problems from dragging down the world economy. Countries that got in trouble would borrow temporarily from the IMF. Under IMF supervision, they would adjust their economies gradually so that they wouldn’t destabilize the entire system. Well, that’s exactly the danger now posed by Europe.

It’s tempting to think that new governments in Rome and Athens will resolve Europe’s deepening economic crisis. Perhaps they will, but the odds against this are long: more like 20-1 than 2-1. Already, high interest rates have barred Greece, Portugal and Ireland from borrowing in private markets. In 2012, Italy has to refinance 360 billion euros (nearly $500 billion) of maturing debt. If it can’t, it will default or require a huge rescue that, for the moment, seems beyond any European or global entity.

The fallout could be tumultuous. A default would probably cause mass failures among Italian banks, which hold 164 billion euros ($220 billion) of Italian government debt. Depositors might stage a run. French banks, with 53 billion euros of Italian debt ($72 billion), would also be imperiled. If Italy defaulted, bond buyers might abandon France and Spain. Already, financial markets have raised interest rates on Italian, Spanish and French debt.

Facing these grim possibilities, the IMF has been mostly missing in action. It has provided some funds for Greece, Portugal and Ireland. But more is needed, as economist Arvind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute makes clear in an open letter to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde. What the IMF should do is organize a huge rescue fund — at least $1 trillion to $2 trillion, says Subramanian — to backstop Europe in case more countries lose access to private credit markets.

Countries could tap it in return for agreeing to IMF conditions to overhaul their economies. This way, the IMF might fulfill its basic mission. It couldn’t avert a European recession, which may have already started. But it could preempt a chaotic implosion of credit, confidence and spending that would threaten the wider world economy.

Three realities define Europe’s situation.

First, the crisis is as much political and social as it is economic. The “European model” of generous social benefits and secure jobs is besieged. Welfare states have become too costly for many countries’ economies to support. Benefits must be curtailed. The austerity now being imposed or recommended inflicts direct hardship and assaults beliefs and expectations that have been nurtured for decades.

Second, Europe can no longer rescue itself. There are too many potentially needy debtors and too few credible lenders. The main rescue mechanism — the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) — has already committed about 250 billion euros of its 440 billion euros to Greece, Ireland and Portugal, reports the Institute of International Finance, an industry group (and the source of most data cited here). Even an expanded EFSF probably couldn’t handle Italy and certainly not Spain and France. The European Central Bank — Europe’s Federal Reserve — could buy unlimited amounts of government bonds. But it has so far disdained this role, fearing the inflationary consequences.

Finally, the IMF is in no position today to rescue Europe. At last count, it had about $400 billion in available funds. This wouldn’t cover Italy’s refinancing needs for a year. So the IMF needs more money.

Getting it would be a chore, notes Subramanian. The Europeans don’t want to admit they need help. The United States, he says, is resistant because its own high debts would prevent it from contributing, thereby diminishing its power. China fears being hoodwinked into throwing good money after bad; but without China, contributions from other countries (Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia) would be meaningless. Against these obstacles, he says, Lagarde could argue that absent IMF help, a financial meltdown might cause a new global slump.

When created, the IMF was a political institution dedicated to stabilizing the world economy. Does it still work? “A tectonic shift has occurred in the global economy,” Subramanian writes. Traditional creditors (rich countries) and traditional debtors (poor countries) have switched places. Meanwhile, the social contracts written by most advanced nations, including the United States, will be rewritten by either design or events. Economic stability depends on managing political change.

Can China, Brazil, India and some major oil exporters deploy their financial power for the collective good — including the health of their export markets? Can Europe modify its welfare systems without being paralyzed by civil strife and feuds among nations? Or are we on a collision course with some future crisis whose advancing outlines we can dimly perceive but seem powerless to stop?

Way To Go Ohio! A Huge Victory For the 99%

from the OB Rag

by Jim Miller on November 14, 2011 · 2 comments

in Election, Labor, Politics, Under the Perfect Sun

Last Tuesday citizens of the bellwether state of Ohio handed Republican John Kasich a crushing defeat as they voted overwhelmingly to repeal Senate Bill 5 that would have undermined collective bargaining rights for public sector workers.  This and other Republican losses across the country last week has excited many Democrats who are hoping these elections are a signal that the Tea Party wave has crested and the gloomy horizon for President Obama and his party may be brightening.

As the New York Times reported, Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, claimed that, “Republicans were rebuked for their partisan overreach and their anti-worker, anti-middle class, anti-immigrant and anti-women policies.”  The same article then noted, “For more than a year, Democrats have been wringing their hands about the prospect that their voters are weary and lack enthusiasm. Party leaders have wondered: Can they be fired up again? And if so, how?  . . . The Ohio vote could spell good news in that respect. A huge effort by national labor unions to fire up their workers was joined by a largely unnoticed push by Mr. Obama’s campaign to organize his supporters in the state. The result, Democrats said Wednesday, was proof that Mr. Obama’s supporters can be revved up and turned out.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that Ohio’s overwhelmingly pro-union vote is evidence of a renewed enthusiasm for Obama and a Democratic Party that has been taking working and middle class voters for granted for far too long.

This is also true of much of the mainstream media analysis of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that might seem to be good for Democrats, but one that should also make the corporate donkeys uncomfortable since OWS is driven by anger at BOTH parties because of their subservience to Wall Street, corporate interests, and the rich.

Perhaps the folks in Democratic Party Headquarters ought to stop talking about the need for voters to get “revved up” and think instead about how they might actually start standing for something other than austerity-lite.

In a recent Harpers piece about the need for a 21^st century WPA, Thomas Frank adeptly diagnoses what ails the Democrats, noting that his list of populist economic programs like those implemented by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not “not radical or complicated”:

They are, however, extremely unlikely to be enacted.  Even among Democrats, there is little agreement on the desirability of federal jobs programs, for the most part, the party long ago accepted the small-government ideal of the G.O.P., outsourcing, downsizing, and deregulating with relish when it was their turn to rule in the 1990s.  Over the past two years, they have tried to bring about recovery with tax breaks, bailouts, and big paydays for private contractors.  Even the president’s Council on Jobs is filled with CEOs.

…the choice between shitty and catastrophic fails to inspire the masses.

Indeed, across the country we see Democrats as well as Republicans attacking unions, imposing austerity budgets, and then flinching when it comes to challenging corporations and the rich to be held accountable or pay their fair share in taxes.  Encouraged by the Obama Administration, Democrats and Republicans in Congress just voted for a new slate of crappy trade deals that will only help speed the race to the bottom for workers while further enhancing capital flight and corporate profits.  The president wants workers to head to the phone banks to wage war for him, but his response to Governor Walker’s war against unions in Wisconsin was tepid at best. Democrats have put Social Security and Medicare cuts “on the table” in the super committee negotiations.  The list goes on . . .

What the Democrats saw in Ohio and elsewhere last week was the beginning of a wave.  And if they want to ride that wave, they are going to have to abandon the course they have been on since they threw labor (and much of non-union working America) under the bus in the nineties and embraced neoliberal economic policies.  They need less Bill Clinton and more FDR.

And while I am aware that there are still many solid progressives in the Democratic Party, they desperately need to take it back from the corporate interests that now dominate it.  Otherwise, more and more Americans will be legitimately skeptical about whether there is much difference between the parties on economic matters.

Of course there are important differences between how the two parties are proposing to cut budgets at all levels, but the Democrats have ceded more and more ground to the Republicans. Hence the whole game is being played on the turf of the Right.  People start to wonder whether the Democrats stand for anything at all anymore.  Bluntly put: the choice between shitty and catastrophic fails to inspire the masses.

Thus what the election in Ohio vote signifies is not so much a swing back to the Democrats as it is a vote in favor of the rights of workers.  It is a huge victory for unions in the face of an unprecedented corporate-funded national assault.  If anything, it is big victory for the 99% against the interests of the 1%.  It is a recognition that, in America’s bellwether state, people would rather stand with unions than plutocracy.  So, from here deep in the Wisconsin of the West, I say: way to go, Ohio!

‘Occupy’ Movement in Bid to Save German Democracy

Published on Saturday, November 12, 2011 by RT - Russia Today

The pro-equality Occupy movement is rapidly gathering pace in Germany, with fresh protests starting in the capital Berlin and the country's financial heartland of Frankfurt.

 
Demonstrators stand on a road near Deutsche Bank, seen in background, in Frankfurt, Germany, Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011. Thousands of people formed a human chain around the Frankfurt bank towers protesting against the power of banks. German police say more than ten thousand people are protesting for an end to excesses of financial speculation and urge the government to dismantle big banks. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

­Thousands are set to join the demonstrations on Saturday, seeking to draw attention to rampant corporate greed and the increasing poverty of the masses. The German Occupy movement has also made significant steps in legitimizing itself, having earned the support of two major political factions.

According to police, more than 10,000 people took to the streets of two major German cities, protesting against the banks' dominance.

In Berlin, demonstrators have formed a human chain surrounding parts of the government district to call for an end to excesses of financial speculation and urge the authorities to dismantle big banks, AP reports.

Frankfurt police said some 9,000 people were peacefully protesting in the city center near the European Central Bank's office block.

“We want more democracy and more transparency, and that the big banks and other big companies [stop] abusing the power of their money,” one of the “Occupy Frankfurt” campaigners, Thomas Leuten, told RT. “Only a mass of people will change this.”

RT spoke to one of the organizers of the event and a spokesperson for the pro-equality movement “Attac Germany”, Max Bank. He believes that if democracy is to survive in Germany, now is the time to make a stand.

“We have a worldwide problem in the financial sector, which is absolutely deregulated, and we need further regulation in order to make the sector compatible with democratic societies,” he told RT. “Otherwise, we will always see such measures as the enlargement of the EFSF that we saw a couple of weeks ago, [when] the German parliament pushed through within days.”

Max Bank referred to the events of 2008 and 2009, when many banks were bailed out without any conditions at the time of the global financial crunch.

“We need clear conditions for those banks [which] were bailed out,” he said. “That hasn’t happened in Germany, and that’s what we criticize, in order to make a clear sign that democratic societies can no longer tolerate … banks that can suppress our societies.”

© 2011 RT - Russia Today

Why We May Be In Store for a Passionless Presidential Race

by Robert Reich

Friday, November 11, 2011

Polls show Americans angrier and more polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War. That’s not surprising. We have the worst economy since the Great Recession and the worst politics in living memory. The rise of the regressive right over the last three decades has finally spurred a progressive reaction. Occupiers and others have had enough.

Yet paradoxically the presidential race that officially begins a few months from now is likely to be as passionless as they come.

President Obama will be supported by progressives and the Democratic base, but without enthusiasm. His notorious caves to Republicans and Wall Street — failing to put conditions on the Street’s bailout (such as demanding the Street help stranded home owners), or to resurrect Glass-Steagall, or include a public option in health care, or assert his constitutional responsibility to raise the debt limit, or protect Medicare and Social Security, or push for cap-and-trade, or close Guantanamo, or, in general, confront the regressive Republican nay-sayers and do-nothings with toughness rather than begin negotiations by giving them much of what they want — are not the stuff that stirs a passionate following.

Mitt Romney will surely be the Republican presidential candidate — and Romney inspires as little enthusiasm among Republicans as Obama does among Democrats. The GOP will support Romney because, frankly, he’s the only major Republican primary candidate who does not appear to the broader public to be nuts.

But Republicans don’t like Romney. His glib, self-serving, say-whatever-it-takes-to-win-the primaries approach strikes almost everyone as contrived and cynical. Moreover, Romney is the establishment personified — a pump-and-dump takeover financier, for crying out loud — at the very time the GOP (and much of the rest of the country) are becoming more anti-establishment by the day.

At this point neither the Republican right nor the mainstream media wants to admit the yawn-inducing truth that Mitt will be the GOP’s candidate. The right doesn’t want to admit it because it will be seen as a repudiation of the Tea Party. The media doesn’t want to because they’d prefer to sell newspapers and attract eyeballs.

The media are keeping the story of Rick Perry’s cringe-inducing implosion going for the same reason they’re keeping the story of Herman Cain’s equally painful decline going — because the public is forever fascinated by the gruesome sight of dying candidacies. With Bachmann, Perry, and Cain gone or disintegrating, the right wing-nuts of the GOP have only one hope left: Newt Gingrich. His star will rise briefly before he, too, is pilloried for the bizarre things he’s uttered in the past and for his equally bizarre private life. His fall will be equally sudden (although I don’t think Gingrich is capable of embarrassment).

And so we’ll be left with two presidential candidates who don’t inspire — at the very time in American history when Americans crave inspiration.

Instead of a big debate about the basics (how to truly restore jobs and wages, financial capitalism versus product capitalism, the place and role of America in the world, how to rescue our democracy), we’re likely to have a superficial debate over symbols (the budget deficit, the size of government, whether we need a “businessman” at the helm).

This means political passions are likely to move elsewhere — finding their voices in grass-roots movements, social media, demonstrations, boycotts, and meet-ups — on the Main Streets and in the backwaters, and only episodically in the mainstream media or in normal election-year events.

In some ways this may not be such a bad thing. The regressive right has had thirty years to build itself into a political power. Newly-energized progressives (Occupiers and others) need enough time to develop concrete proposals and strategies. What’s the rush? If polls are to be believed, most of the nation is progressive, not regressive (witness last Tuesday’s results in Wisconsin and elsewhere). So it is, after all, only a matter of time.

Yet viewed another way, a passionless presidential race may be dangerous for America. The nation’s problems may not wait. They require bold action, and soon.

Trigger Happy: Why Deficit Cuts Should Be Triggered Only When Unemployment Drops to 5 Percent

by Robert Reich

Thursday, November 10, 2011

On planet Washington, where reducing the federal budget deficit continues to be more important than creating jobs, everyone is talking about “triggers” that automatically go into effect if certain other things don’t happen.

Yet no one is talking about the most obvious trigger of all — no budget cuts until the official level of unemployment falls to 5 percent, its level before the Great Recession. 

The biggest trigger on the minds of Washington insiders is $1.2 trillion across-the-board cuts that will automatically occur if Congress’s supercommittee doesn’t come up with at least $1.2 trillion of cuts on its own that Congress agrees to by December 23. 

That automatic trigger seems likelier by the day because at this point the odds of an agreement are roughly zero.

Here’s the truly insane thing: The triggered cuts start in 2013, a little over a year from now. 

Yet no one in their right mind believes unemployment will be lower than 8 percent by then. 

The cuts will come on top of the expiration of extended unemployment benefits, the end of a payroll tax cut, and continuing reductions in state and local budgets — all when American consumers (whose spending is 70 percent of the economy) will still be reeling from declining jobs and wages and plunging home prices. Even if Europe’s debt crisis doesn’t by then threaten a global financial meltdown, this rush toward austerity couldn’t come at a worse time.  

In other words, what will really be triggered is a deeper recession and higher unemployment. 

Democrats on the supercommittee are acting as if they haven’t met an unemployed person. They’re proposing $2.3 trillion in deficit reductions — half from spending cuts (including $350 billion from Medicare), half from tax increases. To make the tax increases palatable to Republicans, Democrats want to give Congress a chance to find the new revenues by overhauling the tax code. If that effort fails, automatic tax increases would be triggered. The top tax rate won’t rise (another bow to Republicans) but top earners’ itemized deductions will be limited. 

Oh, and by the way, under the Democrats’ proposal, spending cuts and tax increases, triggered or not, would start in 2013.

The President (remember him?) is still hawking his $450 billion jobs bill, but he’s having a hard time being heard above the deficit-reduction din — in large part because he himself is simultaneously calling for deficit reduction, and most people outside Washington can’t make sense of how we do both.  

The public is confused because they don’t get it’s a matter of sequencing. We need to do more spending now in order to bring back jobs and growth, then do less spending in the future — after the economy is once again generating jobs and growth. 

That’s why it make more sense for Democrats to propose a deficit reduction plan that goes into effect only when jobs are back. The trigger should be the rate of unemployment — and a 5 percent rate would signal we’re back on track. 

True, the unemployment rate is an imperfect measure of how bad things are (it doesn’t include everyone who’s working part-time but needs a full-time job, and those too discouraged to look for work), but at least it’s a useful way of comparing how much worse or better we are than we’ve been. And it can’t be fiddled with (the Bureau of Labor Statistics guards the calculation like gold in Fort Knox). 

Deficit hawks in both parties fear if we put off the spending cuts we’ll never do them. But if we cut now, the ratio of deficit to the total economy just gets worse — because the economy stagnates and the swelling ranks of unemployed don’t pay taxes. 

So the best of all worlds is to have a big jobs plan now, and also commit to automatic cuts triggered when unemployment falls to 5 percent. 

The hawks should find this acceptable. Reasonable Republicans (if any are left) will, too. Democrats, if they still care about jobs, should lead the way.

Europe’s Banks Turned to Safe Bonds and Found Illusion

from the New York Times

By LIZ ALDERMAN and SUSANNE CRAIG

Published: November 10, 2011

Komercni Bank in the Czech Republic bought Greek government bonds when the subprime mortgage crisis intensified.

PARIS — As the bets that European banks made on United States mortgage investments went bust a few years ago, bankers piled into what they saw as a safe refuge: bonds issued by countries in Europe’s seemingly ironclad monetary union.

Now, the political and financial crisis engulfing the Continent has turned much of that European sovereign debt into the latest distressed asset, sending tremors through global financial markets not seen since the demise of the investment bank Lehman Brothers more than three years ago.

This week, shortly after European leaders formally conceded that Greece could not pay its debts and forced banks to accept losses, the shock waves reached Italy, the third-largest economy in the euro zone after France and Germany. And despite frantic efforts by politicians to contain the damage, market analysts said that France, one of the strongest countries in the euro zone, may soon feel the impact.

“When people started buying more European sovereign debt, there was not a cloud in the sky,” said Yannis Stournaras, director of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, based in Athens. Now, he said, “This crisis is going to last because the perceptions of risk have changed dramatically.”

European banks face tens and possibly hundreds of billions of dollars in losses on loans to nations that use the euro. Worried about even greater losses if the crisis worsens, the banks have been scrambling to reduce their holdings of an investment that, like triple-A-rated subprime mortgage bonds, was once thought to be bulletproof.

The French bank Société Générale, for instance, this week marked down 333 million euros of its Greek sovereign debt holdings and in October slashed its exposure to that country to 575 million euros, from 2.4 billion euros at the beginning of 2011. Another French bank, BNP Paribas, has cut its holdings of Italian government debt 40 percent since July, to 12.2 billion euros.

How European sovereign debt became the new subprime is a story with many culprits, including governments that borrowed beyond their means, regulators who permitted banks to treat the bonds as risk-free and investors who for too long did not make much of a distinction between the bonds of troubled economies like Greece and Italy and those issued by the rock-solid Germany.

Banks had further incentive to overlook the perils of individual euro zone countries because of the fees they earned for underwriting sovereign debt sold to other investors. Since 2005, several dozen banks in Europe and the United States have earned $1.1 billion in fees from selling bonds for European governments, according to Thomson Reuters and Freeman Consulting Services.

Like other investors, banks clung for a long time to the seemingly inviolable belief that all the countries using the euro would make good on their debts. For years, Greek and Italian bonds did not pay much more than German ones, but banks were always hungry to chase even a fraction of additional profit. For much of the last decade, they bought the higher-yield bonds, ignoring the growing political and fiscal problems of those countries as well as other peripheral euro zone nations like Ireland, Spain and Portugal.

Regulators bear much of the responsibility. Before 1999, when Europe forged its monetary union, regulators permitted banks to treat as risk-free the debt of any country that belonged to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a club of developed nations that includes the United States and most of Europe.

“There was encouragement from European authorities for banks to load up on more debt, because it was seen as safe,” said Nicolas Véron, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a research firm in Brussels. “In hindsight, it was unwise risk management.”

Some regulators realized that allowing banks to set aside no capital for sovereign defaults could be a problem and moved to address it in a 2006 accord known as Basel 2. They mandated that big, complex banks use their own models to determine if individual countries were at risk and hold some capital against them. But the European Union never enforced the stiffer regime. And amid the subprime mortgage crisis, Europe’s regulators added to the problem by demanding that banks hold more safe assets, much of it sovereign debt.

As a result, banks were not discouraged from placing their most liquid assets “into the worst possible government debt,” Achim Kassow, a former Commerzbank board member, wrote in a study published by the European Parliament.

Now, Société Générale, Commerzbank and other banks cannot get rid of the shaky debt fast enough. In the last several months, they have booked billions of euros in losses from unloading it, although their exposure remains substantial. Including the effect of hedges, European banks had a net exposure of about $120 billion to Greek government borrowings and private debt at the end of June, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Even more worrisome, analysts say, is the banks’ exposure of $643 billion to Spain and $837 billion to Italy.

Banks in the United States are also caught in the crossfire. For Italy alone, they had $47 billion in net exposure to government borrowings and private debt at the end of June, the B.I.S. data show.

Goldman Sachs has $700 million in exposure to Italy, according to a regulatory filing released this week, and could feel the fallout if the bonds were marked down.

The loss from a write-down similar to that on the Greek debt — 50 cents on the dollar — would erase 10 percent of the $3.43 billion in profit Goldman earned in the first nine months of the year.

Regulators are requiring European banks to raise 106 billion euros in new capital by next summer to protect themselves against further losses.

Banks insist the risks are manageable. But the big fear is that they do not have enough capital to cover potential losses from the euro zone. That kind of crisis of confidence drove MF Global, the large New York brokerage firm, into bankruptcy last week after its $6.3 billion bet on European debt alarmed investors.

While the markets are now being brutally efficient in telegraphing the differing debt risks among European countries, they failed in that function for a long time, just as they failed to reflect the risks of subprime mortgage loans as a real estate bubble formed in the United States.

For most of the last decade, bond yields among Germany, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain traveled in a tight pack. That meant investors buying and selling those bonds acted as if the countries were almost equally safe simply because they were members of the euro zone, despite shaky finances in Greece, real estate bubbles in Ireland and Spain and high debt in Italy.

The phenomenon rang alarm bells as far back as 2005, when banks, national treasuries and the European Commission held intense internal debates on why the spreads between Germany and other countries did not seem to reflect the differing risks, said a senior Brussels official involved with bank regulation.

When the subprime crisis started to buffet Wall Street in 2007, banks sought shelter by turning even more to European sovereign debt, especially countries with the best returns. The B.I.S. data show that bank lending to the governments of Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain, largely through bond purchases, rose faster than usual, by 24.2 percent, to $827 billion, between the second quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2009, when the crisis in Greece first started to taint European sovereign debt.

Banks across the world joined in this lending binge as they chased higher yields. Emblematic of those that took the plunge was Komercni Bank, a large bank in the Czech Republic that is majority-owned by Société Générale.

As the subprime crisis in America began mounting, Komercni veered into the seemingly safe Greek government bonds. The bank’s entire board, more than half of whom were long-time veterans of Société Générale, signed off on Greek debt purchases from 2006 through 2008. Now the bank is expected to write down an additional 2 billion koruna, or $111 million, on its Greek debt this year, after taking a 1.66 billion koruna hit in the second quarter. That is a manageable amount, but the bank would have been barely affected if it had bought the safer German bonds.

A spokesman for Société Générale refused requests for interviews with officials and declined to comment.

As the subprime crisis peaked on Wall Street, banks sharply increased their underwriting of European sovereign debt. In 2007, the world’s big banks made $113.9 million in underwriting fees; by 2009, that number had more than doubled to $273 million.

Société Générale went from issuing no Greek debt in 2005 to being the world’s eighth-largest underwriter just a year later. The bank has made $61.5 million in fees from underwriting debt for euro zone countries since 2005, according to Thomson Reuters. Deutsche Bank, the top underwriter of euro zone debt in that period, took in $87 million in fees.

Banks in the United States also profited. Since 2005, Goldman Sachs has earned $44.5 million in fees underwriting euro zone debt, and Morgan Stanley has earned $47.4 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

Their special relationship with governments sometimes also presented a unique dilemma: it gave banks little incentive to publicize red flags even if they were suspicious about sovereign debt.

In 2005, Marc Flandreau was a senior adviser in Paris at Lehman Brothers, one of several banks selling sovereign bonds for the French government. He suddenly wondered whether France’s finances were solid enough to merit the low interest rates at which it and the other members of the euro zone were selling their bonds. He wrote a memo to the French Treasury expressing his concerns.

“They went totally ballistic,” Mr. Flandreau recalled. “They said, ‘You guys should shut up, you’re selling our stuff.’ “

Benoît Coeuré, an official at France’s debt-issuing agency at the time, insisted that the policy was not to discourage the banks from analysis. But “if it had a negative tone on French policies,” he said bluntly, “my role was to object to it.”

Today, with Europe’s sovereign debt crisis seemingly spinning out of control, regulators are pressing governments and banks to divulge as much risk as they can and are asking banks to set aside billions of euros to protect against possible losses.

“Sovereign debt has lost its apparent risk-free status,” Hervé Hannoun, deputy director general of the Bank for International Settlements, said in a recent speech in which he called for an end to “the fiction.”

To restore confidence, he concluded, the world needs to move “from denial to recognition.”

 

Liz Alderman reported from Paris and Susanne Craig from New York.

Published on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Occupy America

by Michael Parenti

Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization.

So we heard that the protestors were unclear about what they were protesting and they were “far removed from the mainstream.” Media cameras focused on the clown who danced on Wall Street in full-blown circus costume, and the youths who pounded bongo drums: “a carnival atmosphere” “youngsters out on a spree,” with “no connection to the millions of middle Americans” who supposedly watched with puzzlement and alarm.

Such coverage, again, was in sharp contrast to the respectful reportage accorded the Tea Party. House Majority Leader, the reactionary Republican Eric Cantor, described the Occupy movement as “growing mobs.” This is the same Cantor who hailed the Tea Party as an unexcelled affirmation of democracy.

The big November 2 demonstration in Oakland that succeeded in closing the port was reported by many media outlets, almost all of whom focused on the violence against property committed by a few small groups. Many of those perpetrators were appearing for the first time at the Oakland site. Some were suspected of being undercover police provocateurs. Their actions seemed timed to overshadow the successful shutdown of the nation’s fourth largest port.

Time and again, the media made the protestors the issue rather than the things they were protesting. The occupiers were falsely described as hippie holdovers and mindless youthful activists. In fact, there was a wide range of ages, socio-ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles, from homeless to well-paid professionals, along with substantial numbers of labor union members. Far from being a jumble of confused loudmouths prone to violence, they held general assemblies, organized themselves into committees, and systematically took care of encampment questions, food, security, and sanitation.

One unnoticed community protest was Occupy Walnut Creek. For those who don’t know, Walnut Creek is a comfortable conservative suburb in northern California (with no known record of revolutionary insurrections). Only one local TV station gave Occupy Walnut Creek brief attention, noting that about 400 people were participating, average age between 40 and 50, no clowns, no bongos. Participants admitted that they lived fairly prosperous lives but still felt a kinship with the millions of Americans who were enduring an economic battering. Here was a contingent of affluent but rebellious “middle Americans” yet Walnut Creek never got mentioned in the national media, as far as I know.

The Occupy movement has promulgated a variety of messages. With a daring plunge into class realities, the occupiers talk of the 1% who are exploiting the 99%, a brilliant propaganda formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, now widely embraced even by some media commentators. The protestors carried signs condemning the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses perpetrated by giant corporations, the tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies, the growing inequality of incomes, and the banksters and other gangsters who feed so lavishly from the public trough.

Some occupiers even denounced capitalism as a system and hailed socialism as a humane alternative. In all, the Occupy movement revealed an awareness of systemic politico-economic injustices not usually seen in U.S. protests. Remember, the initial and prime target was Wall Street, finance capital’s home base.

The mainstream news outlets not only control opinions but even more so opinion visibility, which in turn allows them to limit the parameters of public discourse. This makes it all the more imperative for ordinary people to join together in demonstrations, hoping thereby to maximize the visibility and impact of their opinions. The goal is to break through the near monopoly of conservative orthodoxy maintained by the “liberal” media.

So demonstrations are important. They have an energizing effect on would-be protestors, bringing together many who previously had thought themselves alone and voiceless. Demonstrations bring democracy into the streets. They highlight issues that have too long been buried. They mobilize numbers, giving a show of strength, reminding the plutocracy perched at the apex that the pyramid is rumbling.

But demonstrations should evolve into other forms of action. This has already been happening with the Occupy movement. It is more than a demonstration because its protestors did not go home at the end of the day. In substantial numbers they remained downtown, putting their bodies on the line, imposing a discomfort on officialdom just by their numbers and presence.

At a number of Occupy sites there have been civil disobedience actions, followed by arrests. In various cities the police have been unleashed with violent results that sometimes have backfired. In Oakland ex-Marine Scott Olsen was hit by a police teargas canister that busted his skull and left him hospitalized and unable to speak for a week. At best, he faces a long slow recovery. The day after Olsen was hit, hundreds of indignant new protestors joined the Occupy Oakland site. Police brutality incites a public reaction, often bringing more people out, just the opposite of what officials want.

Where does this movement go? What is to be done? The answers are already arising from the actions of the 99%:

• Discourage military recruitment and support conscientious objectors. Starve the empire of its legions. Organize massive tax resistance in protest of corrupt, wasteful, unlawful, and destructive Pentagon spending
   
• Transfer funds from corporate banks to credit unions and community banks. Support programs that assist the unemployed and the dispossessed. It was Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s embattled finance minister who declared: “Salvate il popolo, non le banche” (“Save the people, not the banks”). It would be nice to hear such sentiments emanating from the U.S. Treasury Department or the White House.
   
• Coordinate actions with organized labor. Unions still are the 99%’s largest and best financed groups. Consider what was done in Oakland: occupiers joined with longshoremen, truckers, and other workers to close the port. Already there are plans for a general strike in various communities. Such actions improve greatly if organized labor is playing a role.
   
• We need new electoral strategies, a viable third party, proportional representation, and even a new Constitution, one that establishes firm rules for an egalitarian democracy and is not a rigmarole designed to protect the moneyed class. The call for a constitutional convention (a perfectly legitimate procedure under the present U.S. Constitution) seems long overdo.
   
• Perhaps most of all, we need ideological education regarding the relationship between wealth and power, the nature of capitalism, and the crimes of an unbridled profit-driven financial system. And again the occupiers seem to be moving in that direction: in early November 2011, people nationwide began gathering to join teach-ins on “How the 1% Crashed the Economy.”

We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, and Asian communities into the fight, reminding everyone that the Great Recession victimizes everyone but comes down especially hard on the ethnic poor.

We need to educate ourselves regarding the beneficial realities of publicly owned nonprofit utilities, publicly directed environmental protections, public nonprofit medical services and hospitals, public libraries, schools, colleges, housing, and transportation--all those things that work so well in better known in some quarters as socialism.

There is much to do. Still it is rather impressive how the battle is already being waged on so many fronts. Meanwhile the corporate media ignore the content of our protest while continuing to fulminate about the occupiers’ violent ways and lack of a precise agenda.

Do not for one moment think that the top policymakers and plutocrats don’t care what you think. That is the only thing about you that wins their concern. They don’t care about the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink, or how happy or unhappy or stressed and unhealthy or poor you might be. But they do want to know your thoughts about public affairs, if only to get a handle on your mind. Every day they launch waves of disinformation to bloat your brains, from the Pentagon to Fox News without stint.

When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. It is already happening. It may eventually fade away or it may create a new chapter in our history. Even if it does not achieve its major goals, the Occupy movement has already registered upon our rulers the anger and unhappiness of a populace betrayed.

Michael Parenti's recent books include: God and His Demons (Prometheus), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Wadsworth); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

Here Comes the Sun

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by The New York Times

by Paul Krugman

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore’s Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook.

Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same as they were a generation ago.

But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power.

If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let’s talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, a k a fracking.

Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it’s also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads.

Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to “internalize” those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation’s infrastructure.

Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that “there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don’t want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all.”

So it’s worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government “pick winners,” yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner.

And now for something completely different: the success story you haven’t heard about.

These days, mention solar power and you’ll probably hear cries of “Solyndra!” Republicans have tried to make the failed solar panel company both a symbol of government waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy.

But Solyndra’s failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, “there’s now frequent talk of a ‘Moore’s law’ in solar energy,” with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year.

This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we’re just a few years from the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal.

And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it’s likely that we would already have passed that tipping point.

But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach?

Let’s face it: a large part of our political class, including essentially the entire G.O.P., is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers’ money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar.

So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we’re willing to let it in.

© 2011 The New York Times

Paul Krugman is professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University and a regular columnist for The New York Times. Krugman was the 2008 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is the author of numerous books, including The Conscience of A Liberal, and his most recent, The Return of Depression

The Globalization of Protest

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by Project Syndicate

by Joseph Stiglitz

NEW YORK – The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

This is not to deny that some of the 1% have contributed a great deal. Indeed, the social benefits of many real innovations (as opposed to the novel financial “products” that ended up unleashing havoc on the world economy) typically far exceed what their innovators receive.

But, around the world, political influence and anti-competitive practices (often sustained through politics) have been central to the increase in economic inequality. And tax systems in which a billionaire like Warren Buffett pays less tax (as a percentage of his income) than his secretary, or in which speculators, who helped to bring down the global economy, are taxed at lower rates than those who work for their income, have reinforced the trend.

Research in recent years has shown how important and ingrained notions of fairness are. Spain’s protesters, and those in other countries, are right to be indignant: here is a system in which the bankers got bailed out, while those whom they preyed upon have been left to fend for themselves. Worse, the bankers are now back at their desks, earning bonuses that amount to more than most workers hope to earn in a lifetime, while young people who studied hard and played by the rules see no prospects for fulfilling employment.

The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: the rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth – and their influence. The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn’t allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone.

The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: they echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear. And, to avoid interrupting the “dialogue” by clapping, they used forceful hand signals to express their agreement.

They are right that something is wrong about our “system.” Around the world, we have underutilized resources – people who want to work, machines that lie idle, buildings that are empty – and huge unmet needs: fighting poverty, promoting development, and retrofitting the economy for global warming, to name just a few. In America, after more than seven million home foreclosures in recent years, we have empty homes and homeless people.

The protesters have been criticized for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.

The anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999, at what was supposed to be the inauguration of a new round of trade talks, called attention to the failures of globalization and the international institutions and agreements that govern it. When the press looked into the protesters’ allegations, they found that there was more than a grain of truth in them. The trade negotiations that followed were different – at least in principle, they were supposed to be a development round, to make up for some of the deficiencies highlighted by protesters – and the International Monetary Fund subsequently undertook significant reforms.

Protesters believe that capitalism as an economic system has failed the 99%. (Gallo/Getty)

So, too, in the US, the civil-rights protesters of the 1960’s called attention to pervasive institutionalized racism in American society. That legacy has not yet been overcome, but the election of President Barack Obama shows how far those protests moved America.

On one level, today’s protesters are asking for little: a chance to use their skills, the right to decent work at decent pay, a fairer economy and society. Their hope is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But, on another level, they are asking for a great deal: a democracy where people, not dollars, matter, and a market economy that delivers on what it is supposed to do.

The two are related: as we have seen, unfettered markets lead to economic and political crises. Markets work the way they should only when they operate within a framework of appropriate government regulations; and that framework can be erected only in a democracy that reflects the general interest – not the interests of the 1%. The best government that money can buy is no longer good enough.

© 2011 Project Syndicate

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University. Among many books, he is the author of Globalization and Its Discontents. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for research on the economics of information. He is the co-author, with Linda Bilmes, of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Costs of the Iraq Conflict.  His most recent book is Free Fall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy.

The War Against the Poor and Occupy Wall Street

Published on Monday, November 7, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

The Politics of Financial Morality

by Frances Fox Piven

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

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem." (Creative Commons | Wikimedia | Brian Sims)

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

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

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

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

Being Poor By the Numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaigning Against the Poor

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Movement for a Moral Economy

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

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

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

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

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

© 2011 Frances Fox Piven

Frances Fox Piven is professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she has taught since 1982. Her latest book, just published, is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate (The New Press). She is the author and co-author of numerous books, including The War at Home: The Domestic Costs of Bush's Militarism (2004) and Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (2006), and has received career and lifetime achievement awards fromt he American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. Frances has been featured on Democracy Now!, and regular contributor to The Nation

In Turmoil, Greece and Italy Deepen Euro Crisis

from the New York Times

By RACHEL DONADIO

Published: November 7, 2011

ROME — With political turmoil still plaguing Greece and descending upon the much larger economy of Italy on Monday, the fate of the euro and market stability worldwide hinged on whether two of Europe’s most tangled and unresponsive political cultures could deal with their tightening fiscal gridlock.

The prospect of a new transitional, technocratic government in Greece, and signs that Silvio Berlusconi’s resilient hold on power in Italy was weakening, did little to reassure investors that either country was prepared to grapple with the deep structural changes that investors are demanding to restore growth and reduce deficits. In both places, it is not only the economy that is on trial, but also the ability of democratic government to make highly unpopular choices.

The crisis gripping Mr. Berlusconi’s government deepened as interest rates on the country’s debt rose on Monday to over 6.6 percent, the highest since the introduction of the euro more than a decade ago and nearing levels that have led to bailouts elsewhere. Financial markets advanced early in the day on word that the prime minister was negotiating his exit, but lost ground after he denied the reports.

In Greece, where political chaos last week threatened to plunge the euro zone into crisis, doubts remained about the capacity of the political class to form a coalition government to push through reforms it has agreed to in return for a financial lifeline. So strong is the distrust that Europe’s finance ministers refused to release the next $11 billion in aid for Greece until the two leading political parties signed a letter affirming their commitment to meeting the conditions of the loan deal reached last month with European lenders.

Greece and Italy have famously complex political cultures, but today they are both driven by a simple dynamic: no established parties want to assume the full political cost of pushing through unpopular austerity measures and changes to the labor market. And they are jockeying for positions in a new political constellation after eventual elections — as well as for greater bargaining power with the European Union.

“It’s a big mess,” said Roberto D’Alimonte, a political science professor at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. “I don’t think it’s that the markets are too strong, but that democracy is weak.”

Forceful leadership also now seems to be in short supply. In Greece, Prime Minister George A. Papandreou agreed to step down to make way for a new unity government after his proposal for a referendum on the debt deal cost him support within his own Socialist coalition (and with European leaders). In Italy, some members of Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition would readily bring him down and replace him with a technocrat — Mario Monti, a former European commissioner, is commonly mentioned— but others want elections and a new political formation.

After denying reports about his imminent resignation, Mr. Berlusconi said he would face a vote on a state financing bill on Tuesday that could potentially take down his government, and in coming days would call for a confidence vote on austerity measures meant to quell market concerns about Italy.

“I want to look at those who want to betray me in the face,” he said.

With high debts, vast underground economies, low birth rates and more pensioners than workers, there is no doubt that Greece and Italy need structural changes to survive. But with deeply entrenched political patronage societies, governments in both countries have been unwilling or unable to carry out such changes, which would require striking the heart of their own constituencies.

Italy first proposed those austerity measures — including pension reform, changes to labor laws and privatization of state industry — in a letter to the European Central Bank the same day the European Union reached its debt deal with Greece and promised to pass them by Nov. 15. But the government has yet to draft the measures into a bill, let alone put the measure to Parliament.

Instead, it has been deadlocked for weeks, as the conflicting interest groups within Mr. Berlusconi’s center-right coalition refuse to budge. The powerful Northern League party, for one, has opposed raising the retirement age to 67 from 65.

The center-left opposition ranges from neoliberals to former Communists opposed to changes in labor laws, making it difficult to imagine how it could push through structural changes in a future political order.

In Greece, Mr. Papandreou’s Socialist government has passed radical legislation aimed at cutting the public sector, but implementation has been slow, even as the economy shrinks under tax hikes and wage cuts that are pushing the country to the brink.

It has been struggling to forge a coalition government led by a technocrat that could share the political cost of imposing more austerity. Lucas Papademos, a former deputy president of the European Central Bank, was widely mentioned as the most likely candidate. But his ascension rapidly became mired in Greece’s political swamps, after he demanded a strong voice in naming ministers and a government of more than three months’ duration, reports said.

Throughout the crisis, long-suffering Greek citizens have said that it matters little who is in power, and growing numbers of policy intellectuals are starting to agree with them. Transforming Greece is a task “beyond Hercules,” said Daniel Gros, the Director of the Center for European Policy Studies. “It’s beyond the capacity of a single person, because you need much more to change a country, to change an administrative apparatus, to change political habits.”

But Italy, he added, is different. “There’s enough social cohesion left so that one could do something if you had the right leader,” he said, echoing the view that Mr. Berlusconi’s government had lost credibility and that borrowing rates would drop if he left, as Monday’s events suggested.

In Italy, the government passed some belt-tightening measures in August under market pressure, but few Italians believe the Berlusconi government is capable of carrying them out.

“Reforms? Where? Here?” said Anna Russo, 43, a salaried worker in Rome. “This country is totally incapable and unwilling to implement reforms. I don’t believe any of what they are claiming on TV these days.”

“What really happens is that the middle class gets squeezed between the crisis and their inaction,” she added of politicians. “Salaries stay the same, taxes, V.A.T. and the cost of living rises. How are we supposed to believe them, if they have not shown one time that they genuinely wanted to improve our situation?”

At bottom, the euro zone crisis is a result of imbalances in which weaker countries like Italy and Greece are forced to compete in the same currency with mighty Germany, something that will cause recurring crises even if the current one is fixed, experts say.

“In the longer run, the Euro zone cannot be viable unless something is done to tackle the imbalances that gave rise to the crisis,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform, a London research institute. “Either there has to be a convergence of unit labor costs, via effective reform in the south, or there must be permanent transfer union, with payments flowing from north to south.”

For now, Italy and Greece are eying each other warily and buying time before the European Union can come up with a better strategy to shore up the euro. “In a certain sense, Italy has the advantage that it’s seen Greece,” said Mr. Gros. “And that’s of course not an example that anyone wants to follow.”

Elisabetta Povoledo and Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome, and Stephen Castle from Brussels.

 

Inchoate Demands of Occupy Wall Street: Can They Be Accomplished Without a Revolution?

by John Lawrence

Much has been said about Occupy Wall Street's lack of particular demands. However, their inchoate demands are numerous and plentiful, and what they amount to when totaled up is a complete repudiation of the organization of business and government and the way they are now constituted which isn't the way the Founding Fathers envisioned them at all. The way business is being conducted in the US amounts to a transmogrification of American values under the guise of an evolution of those values. America has morphed into a pseudo republic based on lies and hypocrisy, on militarism in the name of rationality, on the worship of money and the legitmation of any means to obtain it. Without getting specific the Occupy movement represents a repudiation of these abhorrent values which represent the corruption of everything Americans used to hold dear in the service of unmitigated greed and a glorification of unlimited wealth regardless of the plight of the vast majority of the people.

What the Occupy movement really wants in a vague indefinite way among other things is

(1) Getting money out of politics. That encompasses two ideas: that political campaigns should be publicly funded instead of funded by Wall Street and other wealthy interests and that lobbyists should be gotten out of Washington. Right now 40,000 lobbyists swarm Capitol Hill writing legislation in favor of the corporations that pay them an average of $300,000. starting salary to obtain legislation that stacks the cards in the corporations' favor. Is it any wonder tax policy favors the rich and exploits the poor? Does anyone truly think that getting money out of politics can be accomplished without a revolution? No way. The wealthy and the powerful will never back off. They have morphed American democracy into a plutocracy, and Democrats, who by and large have been bought off by the same wealthy interests, are not a true opposition party. They talk out of one side of their mouth while fund raising out of the other. True democracy cannot exist again until politics becomes something other than the tool of monied interests.

(2) The rich must pay their fair share of taxes. Tax policy as a result of frenetic lobbying has favored the rich while exploiting the poor. That's the whole purpose of lobbying: to seek tax advantages for the rich at the expense of the poor. That's the whole raison d'etre for lobbyists getting paid their obscene salaries. Reagan and Greenspan were experts at raising taxes on the poor while lowering them on the rich and at the same time obfuscating what they were doing and convincing the middle class that taxes were being fairly raised or lowered on everyone. Not true. Implicit in the tax code is favorable treatment for the upper 1% and an albatross around the neck of the poor and middle class - the 99%. Wealthy Wall Streeters pay only a 15% capital gains tax and benefit from "carried interest" which gives them the same tax rate no matter how many billions they make. And Republicans fight like hell to preserve these tax advantages for the rich, every last penny of them. They will never agree to tax capital gains as ordinary income, a millionaires's tax or a financial transactions tax. Does anyone think that any of these things can be accomplished without a revolution?

(3) The filibuster rule. The most antidemocratic tool of the Republican dominated Senate. A return to democracy would require the abolition of the filibuster rule. Does anyone think this can be accomplished without a revolution? The filibuster rule means that the majority does not rule and never will again as long as the present regime holds sway.

(4) Health care as a right. Medicare for all. Medicare's overhead is 3%. Private health insurance's overhead is 30%. Health insurance corporation CEOs made an average of $11 million last year while the highest salary paid to anyone in Medicare administration was less than $200,000. That's the reason why health care is becoming so expensive with paltry outcomes. Private health insurance  corporations are under Wall Street's thumb. Wall Street demands higher and higher profits and increasing returns for investors. The result comes about from reducing the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) which is the percentage paid out for actual medical care compared to the percentage paid out to investors and CEOs. I'ts a classic case of profit over people and again Wall Street is the culprit. Is there a theme developing here? Wall Street has its finger in every pie of the economy demanding that profits be placed over people. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pointed its finger at the exact culprit in every facet of American life that needs changing and Wall Street is at the heart of it. Does anyone think the US will join the rest of the world in providing a universal, cost contained health care system without a revolution? There is no way that "reform" will accomplish this. Obamacare was a valiant effort, but, ultimately, it is no complete solution, and its provisions are subject to being rolled back at the first opportunity by Republicans who want to eliminate not only Obamacare but also social security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other social program benefitting the poor and middle class.

(5) The student loan crisis. The heart of the student loan crisis is the privatization of the student loan industry. Instead of assisting or subsidizing students to get a college education, privatization has led to the exploiting of students in order to maximize profits. Again Wall Street is at the heart of the problem demanding higher and higher returns for investors. Instead of assisting students, the private student loan industry exploits them burdening them for life with debt which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Republicans and Wall Street worked together to change the law in 2006 which now requires students to pay for life to discharge their debt even going so far as to allow garnishing of their social security benefits. Democratic legislation under Obama has rolled back some of these draconian measures but has done nothing to reverse the bankruptcy law of 2006. Again Wall Street has been catered to and profits have been placed above people. Does anyone think students will ever be able to dischartge student loan debt in bankruptcy without a revolution?

(6) The foreclosure crisis. Wall Street was allowed to get completely off the hook with regard to mortgage loan modification. The performance of Obama's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has been underwhelming at best. Housing experts say the $1,000 payments mortgage servicers get for successful modifications, and the lack of consequences for disobeying program guidelines, don't provide enough incentive to modify many mortgages. The well intentioned Obama administration made mortgage modification voluntary on the part of the banks. Guess what? Wall Street has decided it would not "volunteer" to reduce its profits by giving underwater home owners a break. Again the middle class gets screwed in order to maximize Wall Street profits. What was Obama thinking? Does anyone think Wall Street will write down mortgages giving themselves a voluntary haircut without a revolution? Does anyone think Republicans will have a change of heart and suddenly decide to do the right thing with respect to the middle class against the wishes of Wall Street as long as they control at least one branch of Congress or even if Democrats control both branches of Congress and the Presidency as long as the filibuster rule is in effect? Does anyone think mortgages will ever be modified favoring the middle class without a revolution?

(7) Jobs. Does anyone think the government will ever create jobs directly by reinstating an FDR style Works Progress Administration (WPA) or Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) or even an infrastructure bill without a revolution? Will it ever be the policy of the US to be the employer of last resort without a revolution? It'll never happen. Instead, homelessness on an ever increasing scale will become a "normal" part of American life because this is perfectly consistent with capitalism. The impoverishment of millions will become normalized. As Herman Cain says, "If you don't have a job, blame yourself." THe US will join the rest of the underdeveloped world in a world class regression to a society composed of the very rich and an extremely impoverished class of everyone else.

(8) Corporations are people; money is speech. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision verified that corporations are people and money is speech. In particular corporations can spend as much money as they want on political advertising. They have an unlimited right to spend as much as they want to get the candidates elected who will do their bidding. They can propagandize to their heart's content, and the easily led lemmings will buy it and follow them off a cliff. There is no other consideration in electoral politics than money. Democracy is irrelevant; plutocracy shall rule the day. Does anyone think that anything short of a revolution will change this state of affairs?

(9) The war in Afghanistan should be ended, and the $2 billion per week that the US is spending there should be spent on improving the lives of American citizens. The military-industrial complex budget should be cut in half. The US spends more on its military than all the rest of the world combined. It has over 1000 military bases located in just about every country in the world. This money is being wasted because defense contractors have some of the strongest and most prolific lobbyists on Capitol Hill. According to Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex by William D Hartung: Lockheed Martin "spent $15 million on lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. Add to that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have a prescence in forty-six states, and the scale of its potential influence starts to become clear. And while its current political activities are perfectly legal, the company has also been known to break the rules: It ranks number one on the database on contractor misconduct maintained by the Washington-based watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO); according to POGO, Lockheed Martin has '50 instances of criminal, civil or administrative misconduct since 1995.'" So the military-industrial complex of which Lockheed Martin is the leading exponent uses its poltical influence in Washington to make sure it keeps its profits high as Wall Street demands. Again Wall Street is implicated as it demands the highest possible profits for its investors in the military-industrial complex.

Instead of overspending on the military-industrial complex, the US should adopt the model that was successfully used recently in Libya. Military goals were accomplished by joining with NATO partners to spread the cost, and not one American life was lost. Does anyone think the powerful defense contractor lobby will back down, and American taxpayer money will be spent primarily on benefitting the American people instead of trying to control and dominate the world without a revolution?

The social contract which implied that, if you studied hard, obtained a college degree and tended to your knitting, you would be rewarded with a good job has completely broken down. Corporations have no responsibility to provide anyone with a job. Instead their only allegiance at the behest of Wall Street is to their bottom line. Wall Street demands that they increase profits. They do so not by providing American jobs but by outsourcing jobs to wherever in the world labor is cheapest. Then they turn around and demand that their taxes be lowered and regulations be gutted, and say disingenuously that that is the only way they will hire more people. But they continue to outsource jobs even though their taxes are the lowest of any historical period since the Great Depression and they are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that they prefer not to use employing people. Instead they buy back their own stock and gamble on Wall Street.

So what is a college education worth these days? Not much. It does not represent the promise of a happy future but instead a burden of debt which may last a life time. The education industry goes on an advertising binge to convince potential students that the only way they will have a promising future is to matriculate and borrow money. Hopefully, students are waking up to this sham. A college diploma used to be a ticket of admission to employment with a corporation. Certainly most college diplomas do not prepare one to become self-employed, only  employed by others. If a person seeks to be self-employed, they do not need a college diploma in most cases. They don't need a ticket of admission to the corporate world in order to start their own business. Steve Jobs had no college diploma. Bill Gates has no college diploma. Larry Ellison has no college diploma. These are billionaires in the world of high tech. They do, however, want their employees to have college diplomas, and it matters little to them whether these employees come from the US, India, China, Korea or someplace else. In fact they prefer overseas college graduates because they will work cheaper. Most contractors and tradesmen do not need college diplomas, and the work they do for the most part is localized and can't be exported. A word to the wise ...

Each and every public space and institution is under attack by Republicans. Public schools, public parks, public libraries are being defunded as are public teachers, park rangers, librarians, police and firemen. Republican goals are to diminish public spaces and the jobs supporting them so that they can "drown them all in the bathtub" as Grover Norquist wants. Public spaces are being impoverished at the same time private wealth is being enhanced by every means available. Public America is being turned into poverty while private America gains. And when public spaces and public jobs are diminished, the poor and middle class suffer because the rich only use private spaces - private resorts, private universities, private security companies, private libraries, private schools. A country can be rich in private wealth but poor and in debt with respect to public wealth. Such is the fate of the US under Republican rule.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is joining with movements all over the world in waking up to the fact that Wall Street is at the heart of the world's problems. They are wise not to particularize their demands because then they would be offered some sham, watered down solution which would do nothing to curtail Wall Street's power and its dominance over not only America's but Europe's political systems. Neither the US nor the euro zone has the guts to stand up to Wall Street and its extensions in Europe because this might lead to another recession. Instead, they put bandaids on the present system in the hopes that they will be able to normalize things even though "normal" means the impoverishment and the indenturization of the majority of the people.

The One Percent Scrambles to Maintain Profits – and Order

Published on Saturday, November 5, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Brian Tierney

“The next few months will be crucial for avoiding a dramatic downturn in employment and a further significant aggravation of social unrest.”

That’s is the first sentence in a report released this week by the International Labor Organization studying the effects of the economic crisis and its impact on global labor markets. On the one hand, it sounds like common sense: as working and poor people see their livelihoods wracked by joblessness and social cuts while the rich enjoy lavish wealth, low taxes and increased profits, popular anger begins to boil over.

photo: Sam Wolff

But sometimes it takes an agency of the United Nations to spell out logic that is more elusive for the ruling one percent – that class of CEOs and policymakers which persists on cutting costs and expanding profits while sitting on mountains of capital.

As a share of GDP, corporate profits in the U.S. are at their highest levels since 1950. Last week the Congressional Budget Office reported that between 1979 and 2007 the income for the top 1 percent rose 275 percent while income for the bottom 20 percent rose only 18 percent. And that data, which predates the record unemployment, home foreclosures and rising poverty brought on by the Great Recession, dramatically understates where economic inequality stands today. At the same time, a report this week revealed that 30 of some of the largest corporations in the country paid no income taxes between 2008 and 2010.

The extreme class disparities in the U.S. are rooted in the outright theft of the poor by the rich, an exploitative relationship written into the DNA of capitalism. But the situation has left many to wonder if the U.S. is on the path to becoming a “third-world” nation.

Under the dictates of international financial institutions, decades of debt and austerity imposed on poor countries in the Global South produced widespread social unrest in the form of civil wars and other conflicts throughout Latin American, Africa and Asia. Today, policies that were so economically unjust that they needed to be forcibly implemented by autocratic regimes are being introduced in the North.

The financial crisis of 2008 has led to a merciless reign of austerity that is being forced on workers and the poor in Europe and North America. Decades of stagnant wages and falling living standards have been compounded by the costs of a crisis that the one percent dumped onto the 99 percent, who are now fighting back like never before.

Lit from the dried tinder of class anger piled up in the world’s financial capital, the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread like a prairie fire, engulfing hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. and beyond. In Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, Oakland, Atlanta and elsewhere, authorities have only fanned the flames in their attempts to crack down on the movement.

But weeks of evictions, mass arrests and police brutality meted out against protesters came to a head in Oakland last week where plumes of tear gas, stun grenades and other projectiles produced chaos and left one Iraq War veteran, Scott Olsen, in critical condition. The ensuing outrage in turn sparked calls for a general strike, organized on short notice and supported by local unions throughout the Bay Area. On Wednesday thousands marched on the Port of Oakland, effectively shutting down the fifth busiest port in the country. A banner that hung outside City Hall read “Occupy Everything. Death to Capitalism.”

Scenes like these seem less remarkable nowadays in cities like Athens, where general strikes and riots against harsh austerity have shaken the Greek government close to the point of total collapse. A debt crisis in Greece that can also be traced back to Wall Street has plunged the eurozone into a financial maelstrom. The attendant onslaught of painful austerity measures in Europe has led to a surge of class struggle – or what the ILO more academically refers to as “social unrest.”

Youth unemployment has been one of the major factors behind class anger and its expression in the streets. In Spain, a stunning 48 percent of young people are jobless. This summer Spain became a focal point of struggle with the movement of the “Indignados” who occupied public squares in Madrid and other cities.

In turbulent Greece, where youth unemployment officially stands at 43 percent, general strikes, marches and riots have been an ongoing reality in a country where punishing austerity is being pushed by the European Central Bank in order to rescue the Greek economy from bankruptcy. Greece’s sovereign debt crisis has for weeks left Europe teetering on the precipice of a full-blown financial meltdown.

The latest bailout deal, which includes more cuts and promises to exacerbate unemployment, is being pushed hard by Germany, France and the U.S. as President Obama and European leaders met this week for the G20 summit. Meanwhile, the turmoil in Greece has Prime Minister Papandreou’s government hanging on by a thread.   

Youth unemployment and discrimination of marginalized groups were also the fuel behind huge riots that rocked London and other parts of the U.K. this summer.

In the U.S., unemployment and low wages is compounded by soaring student debt, which averaged $25,250 for recent graduates in 2010. Young people in the U.S. have been moved to fight back in various ways over the past year, joining the labor movement’s fight against union-busting legislation in Wisconsin last winter, organizing flash mob actions targeting tax-dodging corporations, and now occupying parks and squares all over the country.

But workers and the poor of all ages have been drawn into the Occupy struggle. The new movement against corporate greed and economic inequality has been strengthened by the involvement of organized labor, which has successfully thwarted police evictions of Occupy encampments in New York and San Francisco as unions called on rank-and-file members to defend the occupations. This fact alone is eloquent testimony for why the Occupy movement needs labor at its side.

Likewise, the Occupy movement has reinvigorated the labor movement. Not only has the movement’s rhetoric about the 99 percent entered the lexicon of labor leaders, but Occupy activists have bolstered labor struggles as well, including the fight among locked out art handlers in New York and thousands of Verizon workers still fighting for a fair contract.

There are fears among some Occupy activists about the danger of being co-opted by labor and its dead-end electoral allegiance to the Democratic Party. But so far, labor leaders appear to recognize that unions need the Occupy movement as much as the Occupy movement needs labor. That alliance would be shattered if labor officials were to push an electoral agenda within the movement because most occupiers have come to reject – or at least become extremely suspicious of – both of the ruling political parties in this country.

Now, with the general strike in Oakland this week, workplace action has been added to the arsenal of the 99 percent in this new struggle. And, as the Occupy movement plans for colder weather, there are serious discussions happening about possibly taking over vacant buildings and foreclosed homes.   

This week, as Bank of America backed off from plans to charge a hugely unpopular $5 debit card fee, there were signs that the ruling one percent is beginning to understand some of the reasoning behind the ILO’s observations about social unrest.

There is a profound sentiment beginning to pulse through the veins of working-class consciousness. It’s a sense that not only have we paid enough for a crisis produced by the rich and their spokespersons in Washington, but it’s time for us to take back what has been stolen from us.

After decades of unbridled class warfare against the 99 percent, soaring profits and relative calm in the streets, workers and the poor are saying something to the one percent: you can’t have it all.

Brian Tierney is a freelance labor journalist in Washington, DC. Read more of his work at Subterranean Dispatches, where this article first appeared.

more Brian Tierney

Washington Pre-Occupied

by Robert Reich

Thursday, November 3, 2011

The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy.

The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent.

The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.

Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.

Have your eyes already glazed over?

Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit.

President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.

Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.

The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.  

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.

I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.

Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989?

I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.

Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.

More Money Spent on Prison Than on Higher Education

Created by: Public Administration 

Ordinary Greeks Are Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands

Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, as people give up on mainstream politics

by Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis

In early October, a peculiar news item barely made its way into the back pages of Greek national press: in the northern city of Veria, a small group of people had started reconnecting the electricity supply of households disconnected from the national grid due to bill non-payment. This kind of solidarity action seemed rather abnormal.

Then again, it is difficult to define what constitutes normality in the country nowadays – the upper echelon of political power is in an unprecedented turmoil, and Tuesday's referendum announcement by prime minister George Papandreou, followed by him reportedly preparing to step down, has thrown his political allies and foes into a tailspin. Parliamentary opposition parties are calling for a "national unity" government, snap elections, or a succession of the two; the entire mainstream political spectrum in the country seems to have entered a delirious state of panic. In a stunningly surreal scene, eurozone leaders and global markets are nervously waiting for people in Greece to cast a vote.

And yet, at this precise moment, Greek people are realising they are left with what they had at the outset – that is, absolutely nothing to hope for from the mainstream political scene.

Take Yannis, a 43 year-old man working in a bank in Athens, who doesn't want to return home because it is going to be cold again. The heating will be off, as nobody in the block can afford the heating prices. His 16-year old daughter, Sophia, does not want to go to school, as she finds little meaning in preparing for her exams: why would she want to enter university knowing full well she will never find a job in Greece, anyway? Or take Eleftheria's father, a 72-year old pensioner leaving in the village of Kymi, who called her today while she was returning home and hesitantly asked her for money to buy his medicine that the state fund no longer covers for. His pension was recently cut by 50%. "But, please," he pleaded, "do not tell your mother." Back in the city, Eleftheria's streets are lined with garbage which has been lying there for more than three weeks.

Thousands of workers are to be put on reduced pay schemes across the country and hundreds are being fired on a daily basis. The government has raised already existing taxes and introduced a variety of new ones across the board, while slashing salaries and pensions in both the public and private sector. Official unemployment rose by more than 35% year-to-year and now stands at just under 20%; homelessness is on an enormous increase across the country, while tax on food consumption has shot up from 13 to 23%. At the same time, public transport is being dismantled and hospitals across the country barely function. For the first time, there were no books to be distributed in public schools and universities are in utter disarray. The "bloated" public sector has been portrayed as responsible for all the misery the country has to endure. At the same time, social services have been intentionally abandoned, making it easier for enraged citizens to accept the privatisation of the public sector in return.

People here feel the country is gradually sinking, carrying them down a path dug in arbitrariness and injustice. Yet at this very moment – when it is not only the rules of the game that are challenged but the game itself – they seem to feel empowered to act in ways that would not have appeared feasible in the past: they physically attack politicians, mock and cancel military-inspired national public parades and humiliate army officials attending them, participate in neighbourhood assemblies and mass demonstrations (irrespective of the amount of tear gas thrown against them by the police), create grassroots trade unions to demand their labour rights, occupy workplaces, disrupt public services and protest in violent, impulsive, unpredictable ways.

In these peculiar times, when there is nothing to lose for so many, everything becomes possible. In the northern Athens suburb of Nea Ionia, the municipality is now actively calling for locals to shun the new tax, offering instructions to avoid its payment on its official website and promising legal support and even volunteers to reconnect potentially disconnected supplies. Grassroots refusal to put up with austerity is quickly gaining momentum, regardless of everyday politics of fear and emergency, or never-ending market crashes. In return, the realisation is sinking in that a possibility for tangible change only lies in people changing their understandings, their habits, the ways in which they do politics: while asked to cast a vote, Greek society sees a major role recast.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

Hara Kouki is a 32-year-old historian and a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck College,
currently living in Athens and working as a researcher

more Hara Kouki

Antonis Vradis is a doctoral candidate at LSE Geography, member of the Occupied London collective and alternatives editor of CITY

Bill Gates (the .001%) Joins the 99% for Robin Hood Tax

Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 by Institute for Policy Studies Blog

One of the world's richest and many of the poorest agree on something, but the Obama administration is holding out.

by Sarah Anderson

The world's second-richest man and a group of American nurses on the frontlines of the Occupy Wall Street protests came to the G20 summit in Cannes, France this week to advocate for the same thing.Bill Gates backs the financial transactions tax. (Photo by Tristan Nitot)

Bill Gates came because French President Nicolas Sarkozy asked him to give G20 leaders recommendations on how to raise funds to meet the needs of the world's poorest. Among Gates' proposals: a small tax on trades of stocks, derivatives, and other financial instruments, also known as a financial transactions tax (FTT), Wall Street speculation tax, or the Robin Hood tax.

According to an advance copy of Gates's report, "FTTs already exist in many countries, where they generate significant revenue, so they are clearly technically feasible. According to the IMF, 15 G20 countries have some form of securities transaction tax. In the seven countries where the IMF estimates revenue, these taxes raise an estimated $15 billion per year."

"It is very plausible that certain kinds of FTTs could work," Gates told the Guardian. "I am lending some credibility to that. This money could be well spent and make a difference."

Gates has a net worth of $59 billion. So forget the 1 percent, he'd be in what, the top 0.001 percent? Meanwhile, representatives of the 99 percent were outside the summit security zone, plugging the same idea.

National Nurses United, the largest union representing U.S. nurses, came to France from the Occupy Wall Street protests across the United States where they have been providing first aid for the encampments. In Cannes, they dressed in their scrubs and joined nurses from Australia, France, Ireland, and Korea. This global group then administered an FTT saline drip to an ailing world economy — represented by a man painted in full body art as the Earth.

"The economic decline is literally making our patients sick," said one of the U.S. nurses. "We see more and more children with conditions related to poor nutrition and stress." The solution, according to the nurses, is a Wall Street tax that could generate the revenues needed to address human needs.

Bill Nighy, an actor famous for his roles in "Love, Actually" and other British films, jumped right into the world economy's hospital bed and posed for photos. "People around the world are dying of illnesses that should have been eliminated hundreds of years ago," Nighy said, noting that a new Wall Street tax could help raise the money required to stop those scourges.

One of his contributions to the campaign for such a tax in the UK was a video that went viral, in which he plays a banker trying to argue against the idea. Ultimately, his character can't find a good reason why not to raise huge amounts of money for the things people need through a tiny tax on financial transactions.

 

 Back inside the summit venue, there's a frenzy of last-minute lobbying going on to try to line up a group of G20 governments to launch a “coalition of the willing on FTT.” The Obama administration isn't expected to be on the list.

But RoseAnn DeMoro, National Nurses United's executive director, said, “Nurses don’t give up on people and they won’t give up on this.” The union also spearheaded a rally in Washington, DC today, with more than a thousand nurses and their allies targeting opponents of the Wall Street tax in the Treasury Department and Congress.

© 2011 Institute for Policy Studies

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive multi-issue think tank, in Washington DC. She’s also the co-author of the IPS report, America’s Bailout Barons: Taxpayers, High Finance, and the CEO Pay Bubble.

Greece’s Choice — and Ours: Democracy or Finance?

by  Robert Reich

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Which do you trust more: democracy or financial markets?

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou decided in favor of democracy yesterday when he announced a national referendum on the draconian budget cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding from Greece in return for bailing it out.

(Or, more accurately, the cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding for bailing out big European banks that have lent Greece lots of money and stand to lose big if Greece defaults on those loans – not to mention Wall Street banks that will also suffer because of their intertwined financial connections with European banks.)

If Greek voters accept the bailout terms, unemployment will rise even further in Greece, public services will be cut more than they have already, the Greek economy will contract, and the standard of living of most Greeks will deteriorate further.

If Greek voters reject the terms and the nation defaults, it will face far higher borrowing costs in the future. This may reduce the standard of living of most Greeks, too. But it doesn’t have to. Without the austerity measures the rest of Europe and the IMF are demanding, the Greek economy has a better chance of growing and more Greeks are likely to find jobs.

Shouldn’t Greek citizens make this decision for themselves?

Of course, if Greek defaults on its loans, global investors (fearing that a default in Greece sets a dangerous precedent) may yank their money out of Italy. This would almost certainly bust several big European banks – and generate panic on Wall Street. That’s why Tim Geithner has been pressing Europe to bail out Greece.

We’ve been here before, remember? Specifically, here in the United States — at the end of 2008 and start of 2009. Wall Street had made lots of bad loans, and the question we faced then was whether to bail out the Street.

The difference is, we didn’t hold a referendum. Instead, the Bush administration told Congress the nation risked “economic Armageddon” if it didn’t immediately authorize a giant bailout of the Street – with no strings attached. Of course Congress hastily agreed. Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner (as head of the New York Fed) then doled out the money. And the Obama administration (with Geithner installed as Treasury Secretary) gave out more.

So instead of allowing the Street to live with the consequences of its negligence, we bailed it out – and allowed the Main Streets of America to suffer the consequences.

If Americans had been consulted about the 2008-2009 Wall Street bailout, I doubt it would have happened the way it did. At the very least, strict conditions would have been placed on the banks in return for the money. The banks would have had to eat the losses of the predatory mortgages they sold, and help homeowners reduce those mortgages. They’d be required to improve the capitalization of small banks in communities across the country. They’d be forced to accept stringent new regulations, including resurrection of Glass-Steagall.

But Americans weren’t really consulted. It was an inside job.

As a result, Wall Street has prospered but the rest of the nation hasn’t. One out of four homeowners is underwater, owing more on their homes than the homes are worth.

And with the worst economy since the Great Depression, we’re now embarking on fiscal austerity. Either Congress’s super-committee comes up with $1.2 trillion of federal budget cuts that Congress agrees to – going into effect a little over thirteen months from now – or $1.5 trillion of cuts are made across the board. Meanwhile, states and cities have been slashing public services for the past three years.

So which is it? Rule by democracy or by financial markets? Based on what’s happened in America, I’d choose the former.

The Occupiers’ Responsive Chord

by Robert Reich

Monday, October 31, 2011

A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.

As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.

Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news – it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s.

But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers.

Why? Because for the first time in more than half a century, a broad cross-section of the American public is talking about the concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.

Score a big one for the Occupiers.

Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.

A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

I remember the days when even raising the subject of inequality made you a “class warrior.” Now, it seems, most Americans have become class warriors.

And they blame Republicans for stacking the deck in favor of the rich. In that New York Times/CBS News poll, 69 percent of respondents said Republican policies favor the rich (28 percent said the same of Obama’s policies).

The old view was anyone could make it in America with enough guts and gumption. We believed in the self-made man (or, more recently, woman) who rose from rags to riches – inventors and entrepreneurs born into poverty, like Benjamin Franklin; generations of young men from humble beginnings who grew up to became president, like Abe Lincoln. We loved the novellas of Horatio Alger, and their more modern equivalents – stories that proved the American dream was open to anyone who worked hard.

In that old view, being rich was proof of hard work, and lack of money proof of indolence or worse. As Herman Cain still says “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.”

But Cain’s line isn’t hitting a responsive chord. In fact, he’s backtracked from it (along with much of the rest of what he’s said).

A profound change has come over America. Guts, gumption, and hard work don’t seem to pay off as they once did – or at least as they did in our national morality play. Instead, the game seems rigged in favor of people who are already rich and powerful – as well as their children.

Instead of lionizing the rich, we’re beginning to suspect they gained their wealth by ripping us off.

Mitt Romney is defensive about his vast wealth (reputed to total a quarter of a billion). He’s reverted to scolding his audiences on the campaign trail for “attacking people based on their success.”

The old view was also that great wealth trickled downward – that the rich made investments in jobs and growth that benefitted all of us. So even if we doubted we’d be wealthy, we still gained from the fortunes made by a few.

But that view, too, has lost its sheen. Nothing has trickled down. The rich have become far richer over the last three decades but the rest of us haven’t. In fact, median incomes are dropping.

Wall Street moguls are doing better than ever – after having been bailed out by the rest of us. But the rest of us are doing worse. CEOs are hauling in more than 300 times the pay of average workers (up from 40 times the pay only three decades ago), as average workers lose jobs, wages, and benefits.

Instead of investing in jobs and growth, the super rich are putting their money into gold or Treasury bills, or investing it in Brazil or South Asia or anywhere else it can reap the highest return.

Meanwhile, it’s dawning on Americans that in the real economy (as opposed to the financial one) our spending is vital. And without enough jobs or wages, that spending is drying up.

The economy is in trouble because so much income and wealth have been going to the top that the rest us no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services we would produce at or near full employment.

The jobs depression shows no sign of ending. Personal disposable income, adjusted for inflation, was down 1.7 percent in the third quarter of this year – the biggest drop since the third quarter of 2009. Housing prices have stalled, home sales are down.

The only reason consumer spending rose in September is because we drew from our meager savings – mostly in order to pay medical bills, health insurance, and utilities. That’s the third month of savings declines, according to the Commerce Department’s report last Friday.

This can’t and won’t continue. Savings are now down to 3.6 percent of personal disposable income, their lowest level since the recession began.

Americans know a rigged game when they see one. They understand how much money is flowing into politics from the super rich, big corporations, and Wall Street — in order to keep their taxes low and entrench their privileged position.  

The Occupy movement is gaining ground because it’s hitting a responsive chord. What happens from here on depends on whether other Americans begin to march to the music — and organize.

Wendell Potter: Health Insurance Industry Spinmeister Turned Whistleblower

by John Lawrence

In his book, "Deadly Spin," Wendell Potter lays bare the inner workings of the health insurance industry. It's another reason for Occupy Wall Street to exist because the private health insurance industry is dicated to by Wall Street which demands an ever increasing bottom line. The infamous Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) is a figure which Wall Street is determined to lower. It indicates how much premium money is spent on medical services versus how much is spent on overhead including advertising, CEO salaries, shareholders etc. At a MLR of 97%, Medicare spends 97% of its premiums on medical services and only 3% on overhead. The private health insurance industry under pressure from Wall Street has pushed the MLR down to around 80%. That means that 20% of premiums go to CEO salaries, advertising, and to investors. How the private health care industry manages to drive the MLR downwards is by denying health care to those it insures who develop sicknesses that are too expensive to treat.

After being enlisted by CIGNA to discredit Michael Moore's movie, Sicko, Potter found himself assigned to the spinning of the case of a California girl who needed a liver transplant in order to live. Nataline Sarkisyan was denied a liver transplant by CIGNA. Her family enlisted the media in its attempts to get CIGNA to cover the girl's plight. The situation became a cause celebre with CIGNA being the villain. Potter's job was to protect CIGNA's image, and quite frequently, when a "horror story" became known to the public, he would recommend that CIGNA reverse its decision and go ahead and cover the cost of the procedure in question. Such was the case in Nataline's situation. At the last minute, at Potter's request, CIGNA reversed itself and okayed the liver transplant. However, before the procedure could take place, Nataline died.

That was the last straw for Potter who had had moral qualms concerning his job for some time that required him to sedate himself nightly with a six pack of beer. He went to a free health clinic near his home in Tennesee at which he found scores of people who might have been his neighbors, some even with health insurance, being treated for free in animal stalls at the county fairgrounds. His moral anguish reached the point where he knew he had to resign his job. There is such a thing as "right livelihood" and some people just can't go on day after day in a job that they know is immoral even though it's perfectly legal. Other people have no such moral qualms. They are the ones including the CEOs of these health insurance companies who will do anything for money.

Potter said: "Not only was I no longer "engaged" in my responsibilities as chief flack for the company, but I also didn't see eye to eye [with his bosses], and I had simply had it with trying to "protect, defend and enhance" the  company's reputation. I didn't have it in me to handle any more horror stories. Nataline Sarkisyan's life and death had affected me profoundly.

"My last day as a CIGNA employee was May 2, 2008, the day after we anonounced that we had earned $265 million, or ninety-four cents a share, on revenues of $4.6 billion during the first three months of the year. The stock price closed that afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange at $42.26, up 3.5 percent from the day before.

"CIGNA had had a very good day on Wall Street. Investors were happy because CIGNA had exceeded their expectations. CIGNA executives on the lead team, all of whom had stock options - me included - were richer financially.

"But I was richer in every way thinkable."

Potter points out how health insurance CEOs and other executives use stock options to enrich themselves. Their gains are tied to how well the stock does on Wall Street so they have every incentive to drive up the stock price in every way imaginable. The ways they do this are to deny health care to consumers and to drive down the amount they pay to providers. While the highest paid administrator in the Medicare program earns less than $200,000 a year, most health insurance CEOs take home on the order of $10 million annually. "In 2007, the CEOs at the ten largest publicly traded health insurance companies collected a combined total compensation of $118.6 million - an average of $11.9 million each."

So it's Wall Street again that is at the heart of the health care crisis in the US just as it's at the heart of the foreclosure crisis, the student debt crisis and just about every other crisis including the US national debt crisis because they were bailed out by the taxpayers to the tune of trillions of dollars.

Wendell Potter has gone on to become the health insurance industry's chief critic appearing on countless TV and radio shows and writing columns for magazines and newspapers. Fortunately, one man's moral qualms overpowered his greed. He is an exception, however. For most people avarice and the need to support their families overpower their moral qualms and so the system marches on deedicated to increasing shareholder value at the expense of human value.

Wall Street Is Still Playing Us For Suckers

By Richard Cohen, Published: October 31, 2011 by the Washington Post

As a mere youth, I bought a used car in New York to drive to California to be with the woman of my dreams. Inexplicably, she decided to rush back to New York, so I promptly took the car back to the dealer. He made a shockingly low offer. The car had been in an accident, he explained. The chassis was bent. I was flabbergasted. I had just bought the car from him. If the chassis was bent, it was bent when I bought it. The salesman offered me a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He probably now works on Wall Street.

That the morality of the used car lot has been adopted by Wall Street is now abundantly clear. Citigroup recently settled a civil complaint in which it was accused of selling mortgage-related investments that it knew were dogs. It was so certain that the investments were the financial equivalent of my used car that it bet against them — heads I win, tails you lose — and even selected the investments themselves, choosing from a cupboard of depleted and exhausted financial instruments. An investment in the Brooklyn Bridge would have been safer.

These investments are known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and they consisted of the sort of mortgage securities that nearly sunk the U.S. financial system. According to federal regulators, they were sold with the full knowledge that they were careening toward worthlessness and that, by deduction, their buyers were patsies. The bank made substantial profits on them. But when the Securities and Exchange Commission decided to act, it got Citigroup to pony up a mere $285 million fine that, to presumed chuckles, will doubtlessly be taken out of petty cash. The bank last quarter reported a profit of $3.8 billion.

Mirth must have turned to guffaws when Citigroup read on. It did not even have to admit guilt — “without admitting or denying” is the language the SEC used — and no single executive was held culpable. The CDOs, apparently, were contrived by no one and sold by no one. There’s a Nobel Prize in something (maybe alchemy) for anyone who can explain how that happened.

The Citigroup settlement is being reviewed by a perplexed U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff. Among other things, he wants to know why he should authorize a settlement “in which the SEC alleges a serious securities fraud but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing.” This is a marvelous question that goes to the heart of the matter. The settlement is itself a CDO, a legal version of a black hole in which next to nothing is disclosed. Why no guilt? Why no guilty people? Why such a non-punishing punishment? The SEC will have to tell it to the judge.

I do not want to be excessively harsh on dear Citigroup. It was not the only one selling smoke. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan did something similar. In the words of Jesse Eisinger of the online journalistic group ProPublica, “This was the Wall Street business model.” And it was a model permitted and encouraged from the top, by people who became filthy rich from filthy practices and now take umbrage when President Obama calls out their industry for approbation. They should first spend a year in community service and then, if they still feel slighted, denounce Obama.

As for Obama’s government, it has been too gentle with these miscreants. Why not a single major banker has been cuffed and frog-marched to some Financial District Guantanamo is unclear. Why their firms have gotten off with modest fines and non-confession confessions is not clear, either. That, in itself, is a crime.

Somebody has to break this culture. In this sense, Wall Street is no different than the New York Police Department, where it apparently has been customary to fix traffic tickets for friends, family and — almost certainly — the odd person with some cash. When 16 of the alleged ticket-fixers were arraigned last week, hundreds of off-duty cops came to cheer them, denounce the DA and manhandle reporters. Their union took a firm position in defending this behavior. An appalled city awaits firm action by the mayor and police commissioner.

An appalled nation awaits a similar response to what went on in the financial sector. What we would like to see is some version of a public hanging, the appropriate reaction to the breathtaking fleecing of investors. In the end, those investors got their money back. That’s more than we can say about our lost faith in justice.

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