This is kind of looking and sounding familiar….
A little too modern…
A little too now….
Category Archives: Occupy Wall Street
A Yogi at Occupy Wall Street
This is a very interesting interview with a Yogic Monk at Occupy Wall Street in New York….
Much ado has been made about this being a young people’s protest, but he shows the diversity and depth of the protest.
He also makes an interesting point that some are trying to turn this into a conflict between protesters and the police, instead of protesters verses Wall Street. He also points out the police have been as victimized by income disparity as anyone else….
It will be interesting to see how this all continues to play out.
I’m getting flashbacks to the 1960’s- in a good way.
Filed under Occupy Wall Street, Yoga
Ben & Jerry’s Backs Occupy Wall Street Protesters
Another reason to go out and buy some ice cream!
From HuffingtonPost.com:
The Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Board of Directors has announced their support for the Occupy Wall Street protests writing in a press release:
We, the Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors, compelled by our personal convictions and our Company’s mission and values, wish to express our deepest admiration to all of you who have initiated the non-violent Occupy Wall Street Movement and to those around the country who have joined in solidarity. The issues raised are of fundamental importance to all of us.
Founded in 1977 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Ben & Jerry’s is known for taking social stands.
In the company’s press release, the Ben & Jerry’s team outlined past positions it has taken as a company such as “support for a Constitutional amendment that would limit corporate spending in elections” and “opposition to FDA approval of foods from cloned animals.”
The company is also known for its quirky ice cream flavors like Cake Batter and Phish Food ice cream. The newest addition, Schweddy Balls, was recently reviewed by The Huffington Post.
In 2000, Ben and Jerry’s was acquired by the consumer goods conglomerate Unilever. It is now a subsidiary of Unilever, which trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol UN.
In November 2010, the New York Times quoted the original founders who were no longer in charge and disheartened by the corporate takeover. Founder Ben Cohen was quoted as saying in a BBC 4 radio interview, “What we are learning is, if you are owned by a corporate that, despite whatever words they might say, does not share those values, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain those values.”
Nevertheless, the company has continued to carry take social stands such as this one in support of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Filed under Occupy Wall Street
It’s Official: Obama Has Embraced Occupy Wall Street
Great. It’s about time…..
I hate that it takes pressure to make President Obama support the Progressive policies he was elected to implement. I know the arguments about practical politics, etc, but he tends to play it way too safe and compromise way too much.
This support for the Occupy Wall Street movement is a calculated risk. The Wall Street gang whose campaign cash he is counting on aren’t going to like this….
But he kind of had to start supporting this or completely lose his already down-spirited base….
In any event, I’m glad to see the President and the White House publicly lining up on the right side of the issues….
From Business Insider:
White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe embraced the Occupy Wall Street protests on behalf of President Barack Obama in an interview with Good Morning America on Tuesday.
“The protests you’re seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America,” Plouffe told George Stephanopoulos. “People are very frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don’t seem to play by the same set of rules. The question is, on Wall Street reform, which the president passed, for instance most of the Republicans in Congress, and I believe all the Republicans on the stage tonight in New Hampshire, they want to unwind Wall Street reform.”
“If you’re concerned about Wall Street and our financial system, the president is standing on the side of consumers and the middle class and a lot of these Republicans are basically saying, you know what, let’s go back to the same policies that led us to the great recession in the first place,” he added.
Filed under Occupy Wall Street
Rupert Murdoch Uses His Media Empire to Declare War On Occupy Wall Street
Sounds like some folks are getting a little scared….
The Murdoch machine, headlined by Fox News and the NY Post, is going to war against Occupy Wall Street.
I hate to tell them, but no one who would support Occupy Wall Street pays attention to their right-wing media machine anyway….
Still, this is truly getting interesting when Murdoch’s gang is threatened enough to start portraying Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of dirty, drug addicted, over-sexed hippies…
Isn’t that what they tried to do in the 1960’s?
This really is back to the future…
Murdoch is using his vast media empire to declare war on Occupy Wall Street and the 99%. News Corp is now coordinating their message and attacks. The anti-Occupy message has been appearing on several News Corp owned properties individually, but the media giant is now trying to unify the dissemination of their misinformation. News Corp has gone from mocking the protests, to denying the size of the protests, to launching an all-out coordinated misinformation campaign against Occupy Wall Street.
News Corp and the right wing media have been trying for over a week now to slow down the growth of this movement with no success. More people are joining the existing protests, and new protests are springing up around the country. The 99% don’t have a Rupert Murdoch, but they do have thousands of people taking to Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites to report the truth about these protests.
The one percent have their media machine churning out their propaganda 24/7, but they are fighting a message war that they are destined to lose.
MORE: Rupert Murdoch Uses His Media Empire to Declare War On Occupy Wall Street.
Filed under Media, Occupy Wall Street, Uncategorized
Occupy Wall Street: Why?
If you are wondering what Occupy Wall Street stands for, Keith Olbermann reads their statement below…
Sounds good to me!
Filed under Occupy Wall Street
Protesters Against Wall Street
Very nice statement in today’s New York Times on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
At least one mainstream media outlet seems to be getting it….
Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full article:
As the Occupy Wall Street protests spread from Lower Manhattan to Washington and other cities, the chattering classes keep complaining that the marchers lack a clear message and specific policy prescriptions. The message — and the solutions — should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention since the economy went into a recession that continues to sock the middle class while the rich have recovered and prospered. The problem is that no one in Washington has been listening.
At this point, protest is the message: income inequality is grinding down that middle class, increasing the ranks of the poor, and threatening to create a permanent underclass of able, willing but jobless people. On one level, the protesters, most of them young, are giving voice to a generation of lost opportunity.
The jobless rate for college graduates under age 25 has averaged 9.6 percent over the past year; for young high school graduates, the average is 21.6 percent. Those figures do not reflect graduates who are working but in low-paying jobs that do not even require diplomas. Such poor prospects in the early years of a career portend a lifetime of diminished prospects and lower earnings — the very definition of downward mobility.
The protests, though, are more than a youth uprising. The protesters’ own problems are only one illustration of the ways in which the economy is not working for most Americans. They are exactly right when they say that the financial sector, with regulators and elected officials in collusion, inflated and profited from a credit bubble that burst, costing millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. As the bad times have endured, Americans have also lost their belief in redress and recovery.
Filed under Jobs, Occupy Wall Street
There’s Something Happening Here – Occupy Wall Street
Great column from Paul Krugman in the New York Times…
I see he’s getting the same Buffalo Springfield vibes I got the other night….
It’s so good, I’m reprinting almost the entire column:
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.
What can we say about the protests? First things first: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.
A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.
In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.
Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddly dressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the open character of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth to government guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Bear in mind, too, that experience has made it painfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom, they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mock the protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us that there was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budget deficits would send interest rates soaring.
A better critique of the protests is the absence of specific policy demands. It would probably be helpful if protesters could agree on at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But we shouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds of things the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job of policy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.
Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian of social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become a central plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economy recover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment — not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to become law in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is to change that political climate.
And there are real political opportunities here. Not, of course, for today’s Republicans, who instinctively side with those Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, for example — who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than many middle-class Americans — was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare.”
But Democrats are being given what amounts to a second chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good will early on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economic recovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now, however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is take these protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.
And if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success.
Filed under Occupy Wall Street, Politics, Uncategorized
If Top 1% Hadn’t Ripped Off Trillions, You’d Likely Be Making Thousands of Dollars More Right Now
There are some very important numbers in this post from AlterNet.org.
This really illustrates, historically speaking, how disparate income distribution is now compared to past years.
Entire article is worth a read; here is a brief excerpt along with the link to the full version:
Contained in that simple message is an implied demand, whether or not people recognize it: undoing several decades of increasing inequality in this country.
Economists Thomas Picketty and Emanuel Saez sliced and diced America’s income going all the way back to 1913, and their results tell us exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement is about, at least in broad terms.
Choose a year from some fondly remembered past when the American economy generated broadly shared prosperity. How about 1947? That year, the top 1 percent of U.S. households grabbed a bit less than 12 percent of the nation’s pre-tax income, and the other 99 percent shared around 88 percent of the take. It wasn’t a perfect time, but it was an era when a large middle-class was emerging.
Or maybe you think 1967 was a great time to be an American worker. That year, the top 1 percent grabbed 10.7 percent of the pile, and the other 99 percent divvied up around 89 percent of our income.
Between 1949 and 1979, those at the top never took in more than 12.8 percent of the total. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, they grabbed 10 percent of our economic output, and the rest of us shared 90 percent. And that’s when things started to shift, relatively rapidly. In Reagan’s final year in office, the top 1 percent of American households grabbed 15.5 percent of the nation’s income.
By the time George W. Bush was elected, they were taking in 21.5 percent. And in 2007, the year before the crash, they were pulling in 23.5 percent of our pre-tax income, leaving the other 99 percent to share just 76.5 percent of the fruits of our output.
Filed under Occupy Wall Street, Politics
White House on Occupy Wall Street: `We understand’ – The Washington Post
The fact that the mainstream media is finally paying attention and that the White House is having to address this is a really, really big change….
This movement is getting too big to ignore- which is a very good thing!
I knew there was an Anit-Tea Party alternative out there and it looks like the sleeping giant has awakened….
From Greg Sargent in the Washington Post:
The story here is not what the White House said but that it was asked to weigh in on the protests at all — another sign of the remarkable speed with which it has grown from a crowd chanting at police two weeks ago. As for the substance of the White House response, it would have been a mistake for it to go any further than it did here — registering an understanding of economic frustration. Because if there’s one thing that’s growing clearer by the hour, it’s that this is an entirely organic effort, one that’s about nobody but the protesors themselves. In this sense, we’re seeing a replay of the Wisconsin protests. Those ended up falling just short of what activists had hoped to achieve, but their months-long showing was still important — it demonstrated that left wing populism is still alive and well and sent an important message about the mood of the country. The key was that it grew organically with little to no involvement from Beltway Dems and the White House.
If anything, Occupy Wall Street’s lack of outside encouragement from bigfoot Dems has been a strength, rather than a weakness. As major progressive groups debate how they can contribute to strengthening the movement — and how to give it specific direction and a specific agenda — the need to preserve its grassroots nature will remain paramount. Who knows where this will end up, but for now, this is another reminder that the Tea Party isn’t the only voice of popular discontentment over the economy. We don’t necessarily live in Tea Party Nation, after all.
More: White House on Occupy Wall Street: `We understand’ – The Plum Line – The Washington Post.
Filed under Elections, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The Economy
Lost in the 21st Century 