...the One Percent has an old saying: If you can't beat them, beat them up....
The US government expects an unsuspecting world to believe that a washed-up car salesman in Texas was tasked by a select intelligence arm of the Iranian government to fish for anyone who looked like a Mexican drug gangster and then order them a US$1.5 million hit on the Saudi ambassador in Washington - in the meantime promising them unfettered access to "tons of opium".After all, wouldn't it be useful to distract attention from all those annoying demonstrators? (sarcasm)
...we should strive to convince the movement that the problem in the US today is not just Wall Street or the corporations or the fact that the economic system is somehow being "gamed" or "rigged" by tricky selfish individuals. We need to explain that the cause of the crisis is the capitalist system itself, a system in which production is carried on only when it results in profits, the vast majority of which go to the tiny elite that runs the country. Correspondingly, we should work to persuade the movement that its ultimate aim should be the radical democratization of our entire society, in other words, a revolution in which the vast majority of people seize control of the economy and the country as a whole from the rich and disperse power and direct control of all aspects of social life as widely as possible. As a result, we should propose and support radical demands that both point in this direction and unite the broadest sectors of the population.I couldn't agree more except to argue that political education along these lines should be THE focus (not direct action) of activist activity--effective direct action will naturally flow from a politically educated movement.
One can only hope that the use of consensus does not become a road block – consensus is a nice goal to aim for in any group decision-making, but it should rarely be a rigid requirement and can sometimes act as an impediment to timely or democratic results.This adds some confusion to what consensus is, and the function it serves. Most activists have gone far beyond the notion that consensus means 100% agreement. It can be any percentage beyond majority rule. Consensus is only another tool to insure that everyone has an equal opportunity to influence decisions. It is critically important that everyone feels that the structure under which decisions are made is fair, that the structure itself was an outcome of equitable participation, and that there is a participatory way of changing or modifying the structure. Activists completely reject all the fake democratic processes of formal political decision making as now exists in Western societies.
...let’s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less.
Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters held a march, dubbed the millionaire’s march, to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. They marched past the New York City homes of billionaire David Koch, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. For some strange reason, they did not march past the offices of the Democratic governor.Democratic party leaders are currently trying to adopt the Occupiers by issuing statements in sympathy with them in order to gain votes in next years election. (See this.) Once again, we see these fake populists trying to pretend that they are on the side of ordinary workers. This is especially galling after nearly three years of the Obama administration, the party of "change and hope", that has seamlessly continued ruling class policies after the retirement of their previous agent, George Bush, Jr. (See this.) Hopefully, the protestor's march was only an oversight and not a disturbing a lack of political maturity among the activists.
Warren decided to investigate the reasons why Americans were ending up in bankruptcy court. “I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters,” she said in a 2007 interview. “I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us.” What she found, after conducting with two colleagues one of the most rigorous bankruptcy studies ever, shook her deeply. The vast majority of those in bankruptcy courts, she discovered, were from hardworking middle-class families, people who lost jobs or had “family breakups” or illnesses that wiped out their savings. “It changed my vision,” she said.Unlike a growing number of others of her class, she still believes in the system and is planning to run for a US Senate seat from Massachusetts apparently thinking that it can be changed by working within the system. She definitely has more to learn.
Probably the most debunked economic fiction spinner of them all, the NFAP, is used. The NFAP is also these very multinational's personal white paper spin machine.This report provides more evidence that the middle class in the US is being abandoned by the ruling class, and thus, is increasingly losing their support. This is a dangerous development for the ruling class.
Boston police charge Veterans for Peace and take down an American flag to break up the Occupy Boston protest
Yesterday at noon, this blog's trusty mentor, the Slovenian philosopher-scholar Slavoj Žižek, spoke at Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protests are being held.This is a sample of the kind of political consciousness raising that is occurring in Zuccotti Park, NY City, where Occupy Wall Street protests are being held.
The major lessons from our Red October Campaign include the fact that we must not just satisfy ourselves by becoming professional critics, permanent protestors and lamentors in the face of the many challenges facing our country. But that [it] is essential for the working class to take the lead on concretely what is to be done, through concrete actions and campaigns!Although there are some different issues confronting working people in South Africa than here in the US, there are also many common ones. We must compare notes with activists all over the world in order to raise our level of political consciousness and improve our knowledge about effective strategies and tactics as we engage in our own class war which is a part of a global class war. And, we must not be deterred from using some sources of information simply because the political operatives of the governing class disapprove of them.
Camila, who lives in Cuba, holds a degree in sustainable development from the University of Berkeley, California. She is a professor at the Centre for Studies on the Cuban Economy at Havana University, and her works have been published both in Cuba and outside the island. She is also, incidentally, the daughter of Chilean-Cuban journalist and author Marta Harnecker and her late husband, Manuel "Red Beard" Piñeiro, who headed revolutionary Cuba's state security and intelligence service for many years.Again, we have much to learn from the experience of other activists across the globe.
The rationality that drives a cooperative, as with all forms of genuine self-management, is the necessity for a group of people to satisfy common needs and interests. It is based on the recognition that they share collective interests that correspond to some degree with their own individual interests, and that it is collective action that allows them to pursue these interests most effectively. This, together with the recognition that all its members are human beings with the equal right to participate in decision-making, results in democratic management in which the cooperative members decide not only who the leaders are and how revenues should be allocated, but also how to organise the process of production: what is produced, how and for whom.
At every stage of the process, then—extraction, manufacture, and market—Apple’s business practices have hurt the people on whom the company relies for its prosperity.This article provides another antidote to the extravagant praise heaped on Jobs by mainstream media. (See also my commentary on Jobs in yesterday's article.)
The New Yorker reports on a conservative multimillionaire's successful efforts to buy North Carolina's elections, and a report from campaign finance reform groups describe how an elite group of donors have laundered unlimited contributions to presidential campaigns.The points made in this article are probably obvious for many politically aware people, but still there are many Americans who naively believe in the capitalist version of democracy which, of course, is designed to hide the real truth. There has never been a genuine democracy in the US or any other significant country simply because the capitalists have ruled the world since the land owning aristocratic class lost the world to this new class back in the 17th and 18th centuries.
These protesters have not come to work within the system. They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.
Natalia Amado, a student leader, says they are not rebels. “We are not just protesting for the sake of it,” she says untying a colourful flag from her back. “Colombia needs decent public education so the masses can attend universities, it is their right.” She added that the introduction of profit-making universities would mean that the public universities would be neglected and important subjects like humanities would most likely be dropped for business-minded studies. “This would really damage our society,” she says.In an otherwise good report on a neo-liberal attack on higher education in Columbia, I don't understand why this alternative news source parrots the words of mainstream propagandists. In this case I'm referring to the use of the word "reforms" in the title and throughout the article. Here is a standard definition of the word "reform":
Noun
The writer instead uses a newspeak definition of the word commonly used by ruling class media to obscure measures which benefit their class at the expense of working people, or in other words, that benefit the one percent to the disadvantage of the 99 percent. Whenever you see the word "reform" used by ruling class media, you must assume that it is bad for you.
- A change for the better; an improvement.
- Correction of evils, abuses, or errors.
- Action to improve social or economic conditions without radical or revolutionary change.
In these troubled waters, the Jeju base would host up to 20 American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers, several of which would be fitted with the Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.You won't see any news of this in US ruling class media. While our schools, welfare, and community programs are being slashed to the bone, guess where all the money is going? More military bases to insure that the Empire's ruling class can rule supreme!
For the United States, the base’s purpose is to project force toward China – and to provide a forward operating installation in the event of a military conflict. The last thing the world needs is brinksmanship between the U.S. and China.
The Papandreou regime, acting as the agent for the Troika, has been methodically destroying the livelihoods, hopes, and longer term prospects of millions of people, who have suddenly discovered themselves under foreign, mainly German, occupation yet again.The article makes some interesting points about the parallels with the earlier history of German occupation during WWII when capitalist countries were engaged in a war of inter-capitalist rivalry and dominance, and uses the parallels to compare today's neo-liberal policies of the integrated capitalist empire with those of the Third Reich--not much difference.
There is one foreign aid program that is not on the chopping block — not Obama's, and not House Republicans or Senate Democrats. And it happens to be the largest single foreign assistance program of them all: $3.5 billion in aid to Israel. As the Times puts it, defending this particular program shows that "even in times of austerity, some spending is inviolable."
The trick is that the money paid will now not be a ‘bail out’ it will be an ‘investment’. We won’t be bailing out the banks, they’ll be bailing us out (with money we have given them and to asset strip the Greek people – but we won’t talk about that will we). We will have all been pulled through the financial looking glass. And better yet, the amount of return will not be simply what the banks could get by forcing Greece to flog its ‘assets’ today, but will be the whole future income from those assets as well. Rather than give Greece what it needs or even just force it to sell what you want as payment of its debts, even better is to force the nation and its people in to a long term debt peonage.
For ten years, the “superpower” American population has sat there, being terrified by the government’s lies. While Americans sit in fear of non-existent “terrorists” sucking their thumbs, millions of people in six countries have had their lives destroyed. As far as any evidence exists, the vast majority of Americans are unperturbed by the wanton murder of others in countries that they are incapable of locating on maps.Because American citizens are being placed into perpetual debt servitude, unemployment, homelessness, etc, they are now emerging from the 9/11 induced coma, they are beginning to examine all these lies thanks to writers like Roberts, and they are testing the waters of a genuine, direct democracy, and--most dangerous of all to the reigning 1%--feeling their power.
Activists wandering back from the bridge are greeted by strangers with open arms, as members of the 'comfort' team dash around taking care of everyone. There is free coffee, free food, a young lady with a lip-ring offering free hugs, and painted signs saying "Freedom". Nobody expected the occupation at Liberty Plaza to last this long or to become this important, but the mass arrests today have ignited public anger and drawn the attention of the press across the world. Whatever happens next, Occupy Wall Street is sending a message to the American people: the 99 percent are still here, in the shadow of the glittering palaces of global finance, and they are beginning to dream dangerously, and they will not go away quietly.
...once we learn to talk about the realities of class power, we are on our way to talking critically about capitalism, another verboten word in the public realm. And once we start a critical discourse about capitalism, we will be vastly better prepared to act against it and defend our own democratic and communal interests.
So while the creativity, flair and visibility of the occupation movement has been crucial to spreading the struggle, a lot of patient and systematic organizing is necessary, too--as any Egyptian or Greek activist will tell you.
Welcome to OCCUPY TOGETHER, an unofficial hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. As we have followed the news on facebook, twitter, and the various live feeds across the internet, we felt compelled to build a site that would help spread the word as more protests organize across the country. We hope to provide people with information about events that are organizing, ongoing, and building across the U.S. as we, the 99%, take action against the greed and corruption of the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street educates the newly arrived in a philosophy of consensus building and creative solutions to problems that consider not just two, but three or more possible creative solutions.
Occupy Wall Street is determined to stay as long as necessary to achieve tangible objectives of recognition, substantial growth and future prospects before ending the current protest action.
Hundreds continue to camp out in a park in Manhattan’s Financial District for the "Occupy Wall Street" protest. The encampment got a boost this week when one of New York City’s largest unions, the Transit Workers Union, announced its backing. In this report, Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke gets a tour of the private park, open to the public, that people have occupied, and and speaks with demonstrators, including a woman who was pepper sprayed by New York City Police Department Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna last Saturday. Special thanks to Hany Massoud.One occupier said:
I’m definitely not scared. It gives me more reason to want to be out there now, to participate in every march, and every general assembly. I want to be more active. I want to be more a part of it because people out there have seen what happened and they want us to keep going, and I’m going to keep going. I see no ending for me in the future. I’m going to keep fighting.
A Call to Action - Oct. 6, 2011 and onward
October 2011 is the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the 2012 federal austerity budget. It is time to light the spark that sets off a true democratic, nonviolent transition to a world in which people are freed to create just and sustainable solutions.
We have the power to be the media, to spread the word and tell vast networks of people the truth. Media is being democratized and we can speed that process by recognizing we are the media. When you come to Freedom Plaza in October one of your roles will be to be the media.(Note: there is one error in the article referring to a meeting at Bus Boys and Poets in Washington, DC: the meeting was held on September 13th not October 13th.)
What this tells us is that we are not actually having a debate about economics. Our free-market advocates aren’t actually operating from a model of how the economy works; they’re operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of the haves against the rest and mystical faith [my emphasis] that self-interest always leads to the common good.But, why not also explain the marketeer's (capitalist's) resistance to account for all the devastating costs to workers that their capitalism causes: unemployment, devastation to the communities because many jobs have been outsourced to cheap and oppressed labor areas of the world leaving behind these effects: poverty, poor health care, poor education, high crime rates, divorce, etc?
I think that when it comes to Israel and ‘Jewish power’ every humanist, including myself, has a conflict to handle. I would formulate it as such: ‘how can I tell the truth about Israel, the Lobby, and Zionism and still maintain my position as a humanist’. It took me very many years to learn to differentiate between the wheat and chaff. I learned to distinguish between Jews (the people), Judaism (the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology).
CADTM: In most cases, the ruling class has no interest in seeing an authentic audit carried out under the auspices of civil society. In other cases, it may resign itself to the idea in order to circumvent the problem.And "go even further" is exactly what is needed. Reforms that will only save the system, a system that produces these economic crises and a number of other crises such as war, must no longer be tolerated.
Eric Toussaint: That is quite true. The case I mentioned earlier corresponds to a situation where strong popular mobilization brings left-wing forces into government who will adopt policies in the interests of the people or go even further.
There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.Very few people can express this better than Chris Hedges!
...disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies.People all across our country are saying, "I'm mad as hell, and I ain't gonna take it anymore!" See this website for coverage of many courageous people doing just that. No, you will not see these many protests covered on mainstream corporate media. They don't want you to know about it. (They prefer to cover Tea Party events.) They want you to continue to feel helpless and cynical. But, it's really happening. For example, in San Francisco:
There could be no better proof of the revolution – care of the internet – occurring in the accessibility of information and informed commentary than the reaction of our mainstream, corporate media.Read this article to find out how, in the age of the internet, liberal media act as thought police for the ruling class. The author focuses on the UK's Guardian coverage of dissident writers as an illustration.
For the first time, Western publics – or at least those who can afford a computer – have a way to bypass the gatekeepers of our democracies. Data our leaders once kept tightly under wraps can now be easily searched for, as can the analyses of those not paid to turn a blind eye to the constant and compelling evidence of Western hypocrisy. Wikileaks, in particular, has rapidly eroded the traditional hierarchical systems of information dissemination.
From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.
When legalisms take center stage in a situation like this, think of magicians. Their skill is to focus your attention on the space where nothing that matters is happening -- the wrong hand, the wrong face, the wrong part of the stage -- while they perform their “magic” elsewhere. Similarly, pay attention to the law right now and you’re likely to miss the plot line of our world.US government public relations offices (President, Sec. of State, etc.) are hard at work concocting new justifications for their war crimes in order to continue keeping the consent of its citizens for its never ending "war on terror".
It’s true that, at the moment, articles are pouring out focused on how to define the limits of future drone warfare. My advice: skip the law, skip the definitions, skip the arguments, and focus your attention on the drones and the people developing them instead.
The establishment by the Bush and Obama administrations of a parallel system of secret military courts, where the Bill of Rights and other democratic protections do not apply, and where the death penalty can be imposed, is a dire warning of things to come.
An essay exploring the real origins of the Iraq War, written before the war started.It is important to keep in mind that this plan could never have been implemented if the 9/11 tragedy had not occurred. Either it was one of the most fortuitous events in ruling class history or it was at least a partially engineered event by the perpetrators of this plan.
In an effort to show the diversity of people involved in the occupation, we will be running a series of interviews highlighting some their stories. For our first installment, The Indypendent spoke with Melissa Kleckner, 31, who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and is studying social work at Hunter College-CUNY.
...the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. For banks that have filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the sum stands at an astounding $2.2 trillion. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion,....***********************
...banks take risks, get paid for the upside, and then transfer the downside to shareholders, taxpayers, and even retirees. In order to rescue the banking system, the Federal Reserve, for example, put interest rates at artificially low levels; as was disclosed recently, it also has provided secret loans of $1.2 trillion to banks. The main effect so far has been to help bankers generate bonuses (rather than attract borrowers) by hiding exposures.************************
The largest, most sophisticated banks have become expert at remaining one step ahead of regulators – constantly creating complex financial products and derivatives that skirt the letter of the rules. In these circumstances, more complicated regulations merely mean more billable hours for lawyers, more income for regulators switching sides, and more profits for derivatives traders.The authors seem bewildered by the contradictions of these bailouts and investors who continue to invest in the large banks:
Why does any investment manager buy the stocks of banks that pay out very large portions of their earnings to their employees?
...Why do portfolio and pension-fund managers hope to receive impunity from their investors? Isn’t it obvious to investors that they are voluntarily transferring their clients’ funds to the pockets of bankers? Aren’t fund managers violating both fiduciary responsibilities and moral rules? Are they missing the only opportunity we have to discipline the banks and force them to compete for responsible risk-taking?They don't understand why the alter of the market at which all capitalists worship is skewed to serve a narrow ruling class of financiers. The latter have concentrated so much wealth and power in their hands that they are now able to control the market, the economy, and the government (which they essentially own) to serve their appetite for more wealth and more power. Now, it is no longer just workers who are getting screwed as in earlier stages of capitalism, but the middle class is also, and they don't like it.
The implications of social network unionism are only just starting to dawn on many of us. All of a sudden, workers have the ability to build their own free, open networks, with or without the involvement of their union. They have begun to do so already, and we can expect a cumulative curve. Networks are popping up within workplaces, across organizations, and within occupations, industries, sectors and even across borders (especially in transnationals). These groups do not distinguish between members and non-members, or between full-time and part-time employees.
The crisis is far from over. Even if we only consider the financial aspects, we must be aware that private banks have continued to play an extremely dangerous game which profits them as long as nothing goes wrong, but which is prejudicial to the majority of the population. The amount of bad assets on their balance-sheets is enormous. ...The risks are colossal and the policies adopted by the ECB, the EC and the member States of the EU will not solve anything – indeed quite the contrary.
Instead of one to two thousand people a day joining in the occupation there needs to be tens of thousands of people protesting the fat cats driving Bentleys and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of champagne with money they looted from the financial crisis and then from the bailouts while Americans literally die on the streets.Real democracy can be a messy affair, but there is no shortcut to it. The only alternative is what we have witnessed during the past 10,000 years (which is less than 2% of human existence)--class rule by priesthoods, warrior castes, landed aristocracies, and now capitalists.
On October 15th people from all over the world will take to the streets and squares. From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent protest.
The ruling powers work for the benefit of just a few, ignoring the will of the vast majority and the human and environmental price we all have to pay. This intolerable situation must end.
United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future.
We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers who do not represent us.
On October 15th, we will meet on the streets to initiate the global change we want. We will peacefully demonstrate, talk and organize until we make it happen.
It’s time for us to unite. It’s time for them to listen.
The key of 15 Oct should not be just mobilizing people, and doing some actions simultaneously, but being conscious that the world is acting together, and therefore starting to build a network between all of us, for deciding all together, because that’s the only possible way, what the world should be. We know that the powers are global, that we live in a globalized world, and therefore our answer should be global too.
Voting in America is a bad joke. Maybe local elections are legit, but Federal elections are a set-up sham to put in the best person that can provide corporate income. A corporation is not a person and does not deserve person-hood. If you examine the corporate model of any large corporation, most could be diagnosed as sociopaths, with interest not in community or the people working for them (except those at the top), with no other interest but the bottom line. That is no way to run a country. Some of these despicable psychopathic Defense Industries would love to have a big war with Russia or China? WTF?
Today China is the world's second largest importer of oil after the United States and the gap is rapidly closing.
...right up until the AIG disaster and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the ECB repeatedly claimed that CDSs were a new product that offered excellent guarantees against risks (see the box on CDSs). Since then, their discourse has changed, but nothing, absolutely nothing, has been done to regulate the CDS market. Meanwhile, in view of the size of the phenomenon, CDSs constitute a huge time-bomb hanging over the international finance system. The fact is that CDS should be outlawed.
Protesters at Liberty Plaza speaking to The Indypendent this afternoon noted a substantial increase in attendance at their general assembly meetings, a direct democratic process that has become central to the protest community’s evolution and self-government. Their one demand has become an evolving series of inter-connected resolutions that they are still refining but generally focus on freeing the American political system from the corrupting grip of Big Finance.
Particularly shocking...was the fact that the bankers weren't aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, "it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents," Noll explained. "And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents."Take a look at this stock trader and financial analyst for this type of personality disorder that even shocked the BBC staff:
As we assess some of the key components of today’s Global Financial, Currency and Banking Model in this article, readers will hopefully get a better understanding as to why we are all in such a crisis, and that it will tend to get much worse in the months and years to come.
Physical and psychological abuse is built into many of these programs by design. According to several different experts on the subject, the exhaustion and pressure that is induced by sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue and emotional manipulation, "unfreezes" the psychological framework. Through this orchestrated crisis, a new identity is instilled by manipulating the environment and the emotions of the subject to an extreme degree until the "changed" mind of the subject has undergone "re-freezing."
Egypt’s lessons acutely demonstrate that liberated squares must become liberated workplaces, neighborhoods, and eventually cities. This is exactly Liberty Plaza’s aim—not to be a self-contained, pre-figurative mini-society, but a decisive tipping point in the belly of the economic beast that can collaborate with this widening network to transform global society altogether.Nathan Schneider's report from the same source describes the escalation of police violence on Saturday against the demonstrators and the typical coverage in mainstream media.
Around 3 p.m., near Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, the police attacked. Unrolling plastic orange barriers, they isolated a crowd of marchers, along with the reporters following them, and began mass arrests for blocking traffic. This was a brutal process. Caught on cameras were scenes of one protester being dragged by her hair, others being slammed into the pavement, and a group of women, netted and helpless, being downed by pepper spray. In total, police say they arrested 80 people. With not enough room for them in vans, many were taken away in regular city buses.While the above report focused on the dramatic events on Saturday, Chaz Valenza from OpEd News reports on a more benign day Sunday when participants were doing house keeping chores, reviewing past events, and discussing more legal hassles.
...Warren's message is a potent one, expressing progressive values in terms that are almost intoxicating to the base of the Democratic Party, hungry as they are for someone to take up the cause of the American middle class, workers and families who are being unbearably squeezed and yet asked to give even more - even as the wealthy fatuously declare themselves to be "job creators" and therefore absolved of any duty to pay their fair share.Elizabeth Warren does, indeed, speak reason to madness, but nonetheless, her voice will continue to be marginalized within the Democratic party. Why? Because the ruling class has abandoned the middle class and all of America except for the industrial-financial-military complex which serves the Empire as enforcer and a huge profit center. Her policies are only progressive in the sense of a national capitalist orientation. But, national capitalism has grown up into global capitalism and the elites who control this new system, and profit from it, view national boundaries as barriers to their profit extracting enterprises.
Money has value because of skilled people, resources, and infrastructure, working together in a supportive social and legal framework. Money is the indispensable lubricant that lets them “run.” It is not tangible wealth in itself, but a power to obtain wealth. Money is an abstract social power based in law; and whatever government accepts in payment of taxes will be money. Money’s value is not created by the private corporations that now control it.This Institute is focused on bringing the issuance of money under complete government control:
...the money issuing power should never be alienated from democratically elected government and placed ambiguously into private hands as it is in America in the Federal Reserve System today.I see this as a worthy objective, but there are several problems I see with this limited objective. First, bringing the issuance of money under full government control does not in the least provide for a genuine "democratically elected government." A privately owned and controlled economy cannot provide for a meaningful democracy.
Instead of being a document drawn up by patriotic men for the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the [US] Constitution was the work of consolidated economic groups--...property interests....But, I agree completely with the Institute's objective of bringing the issuance of our money under complete government control, but we must not stop there. We must bring the whole economy under genuine democratic control.
Around 56 million years ago a mysterious surge of carbon into the atmosphere sent global temperatures soaring. In a geologic eyeblink life was forever changed. ...Today the evolutionary consequences of that distant carbon spike are all around us; in fact they include us. Now we ourselves are repeating the experiment.
Humankind will slip next week into ecological debt, having gobbled up in less then nine months more natural resources than the planet can replenish in a year, researchers said Tuesday.Isn't it interesting that we have to go to an obscure Australian online newspaper to find the results of this research whose origin was from a French news service? Then, I find that the research was done by the Global Footprint Network. Guess where that is located? Oakland, California! Isn't the Internet wonderful? Anyway, check out their report.
It’s official. The Europeans have lost it completely concerning the sovereign debt crisis and what to do about it. Herr Schäuble, in charge of the EU kommandantur [headquarters], is now hinting that the agreement about a second Greek bailout, reached on July 21st, may not go ahead as planned. Greece is already being put through the hoop by the creditors over the first bailout, agreed in 2010, since the Papandreou regime has disastrously failed in everything it promised to do, while the country is disintegrating thanks to a catastrophic depression caused directly by the Troika-imposed insane austerity that turned, not unexpectedly, into a poisoned chalice which is killing millions of Greek families.
It is clear...that the Chilean student movement has become a major development for the left not only in Chile, but in Latin America as a whole. The students are presenting one of the leading neoliberal administrations in the region with a major political challenge. Crucially, they have managed to do so by building their own power outside of pre-established political institutions. Importantly, the movement has done so without simply avoiding the state, but rather through direct confrontation with it, and with a demand for its transformation and democratization. At a time when the electoral road to social transformation in the region appears blocked, this development holds much potential.In highly class stratified societies, it is often much easier to see how ruling classes function to keep their power, wealth, and privileges. The writers of this article touch on many of these methods: placate the dissenters by advocacy of ineffective reforms and change of personnel, use of co-optation, infiltration, agent provocateurs, intimidation in the forms of cuts to education, threats of state violence, and finally, direct police violence.
The fact that it wasn’t hard to find someone in Tahrir who would express disillusionment with A6Y is indicative of the larger challenge that he and colleagues face today: after the political sphere is broken open by uprising, how do you maintain and build upon support among the highly-wired crowd while simultaneously recruiting offline Egyptians?
Social incompetence and an individualistic mentality are acquired in the competitive educational system. Collective action, as opposed to personal status climbing, becomes more difficult as a consequence. Cynicism is learned from doing meaningless assignments and busy work. This serves to negate any serious political thought. As long as the worker does not take himself seriously and is cynical about his world, it does not matter much what his politics are.This article, although very important, only skims the surface of how the capitalist ruling class has taken control of education in the US, particularly higher education. But then, there are references to source materials where one can learn more. Although not addressed in the article, I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of "endowed professorships", also known as "endowed chairs" where foundations sponsor professors in our institutions of higher learning.
The senior executive of the Middle East’s most recognizable news television network has resigned following revelations that he met with American intelligence officials and complied with their requests to alter the content of news reports.
To top off the challenges of the past year, I spent hundreds of hours working to protect my self, my family and community from the onslaught of two private military companies using assault weapons and detonating explosives at an illegal weapons range near our homes. It was stressful, frightening, costly, unpaid work, unavoidable and unrewarding. It was hell. The local police were involved. These guys worked for Blackwater, and they routinely kill people in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was really, really hard on my family and I and there's been a lot of harassment and retaliation and it's not over.
..the U.S. is fulfilling President Obama's pledge that it will "not stand idly by" in the face of a tyrant's oppression of his own people, as the U.S. is actively feeding that regime new weapons; that, by definition, is not "standing idly by."