October 25, 2011 · 6:57 am

Peter Smirniotopoulos: Why Occupy Wall Street Scares the Shit Out of the Political Establishment and the MSM, and Why the Movement Shouldn’t Conform to Either

Great article over at Huffington Post that I encourage you to read…

Occupy Wall Street is the first significant genuine grassroots protest I’ve seen in years.  And yes, I am discounting the astroturf Tea Party.  They were financed by the corporate world.  Occupy Wall Street is organic.

That’s what makes it so scary to the Powers That Be and the Corporate owned Press….

I encourage you to click through and read Mr Smirniotopoulos’ entire article, after this brief excerpt:

So, what’s “the thing” about Occupy Wall Street that truly scares the shit out of the political establishment and the MSM? It is that they cannot *control* that which they truly do not understand. And even if the MSM and the political establishment take the time to come to understand Occupy Wall Street, they will never be able to manipulate it for their political gain. And that is a truly scary prospect for them.

There are plenty of talking heads in the MSM and in both political parties offering their avuncular advice to Occupy Wall Street; to clarify and simplify its message; to create a hierarchy of leadership; to anoint spokes models armed with talking points who can appear on–you guessed it–news and political talk shows with panels of political operatives from both parties, as seen on every MSM network. And to what end? For the convenience of the MSM so they don’t have to actually learn what’s really going on in Zuccotti Park; so they can continue to overlook how an organic democratic process actually works; to make it that much easier for the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively, to deify or demonize the movement for their own political gain. None of these outcomes, of course, will advance the cause of Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement.

Occupy Wall Street and the nationwide and global Occupy movement it has spawned should continue to be what it is: A messy yet remarkably effective example of what real democracy looks like. Because, after all, isn’t that the most important message of all here? That people believe in government by the people and for the people, and they plan on taking it back. NOW.

via Peter Smirniotopoulos: Why Occupy Wall Street Scares the Shit Out of the Political Establishment and the MSM, and Why the Movement Shouldn’t Conform to Either.

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October 24, 2011 · 8:04 pm

The 147 Companies That Control Everything

Fascinating article in Forbes….

Confirms a lot of suspicions and breeds more….

This is why Occupy Wall Street is so important….

 

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all. The top 20 are at the bottom of the post. This is, say the paper’s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.The #occupy movement will eat this up as evidence for massive redistribution of wealth. The New Scientist talked to one systems theorist who is “disconcerted” at the level of interconnectedness, but not surprised.

MORE:   The 147 Companies That Control Everything – Forbes.

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October 23, 2011 · 4:01 pm

Iraq By The Numbers: The World’s Costliest Cakewalk

I’ve truly been surprised at how little attention has been paid to President Obama’s announcement that the Iraq War would be ended and almost all troops home by the end of this year.

Maybe people are just numb….

I’m not.

This is a very big deal.  Countless lives were destroyed or changed forever by George Bush’s illegal and immoral war built on lies.  After 8 long years, the end is in sight and we should all be thanking President Obama for keeping his promise to end this war.

Basically, all these people were killed and injured and lives destroyed because Saddam Hussein threatened Daddy Bush and Junior got his faux Texas panties in a wad….and lied to Congress and fed false information to the Press-both of whom willingly accepted it without question.

This is a sorry chapter in our history and I’m glad to see it closed.  I’m also grateful to President Obama for ending this war of choice and bringing the troops home.

From ThinkProgress.org:

Here are some relevant numbers:

8 years, 260 days since Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program

8 years, 215 days since the March 20, 2003 invasion of Iraq

8 years, 175 days since President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln

4,479 U.S. military fatalities

30,182 U.S. military injuries

468 contractor fatalities

103,142 – 112,708 documented civilian deaths

2.8 million internally displaced Iraqis

$806 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011

$3 – $5 trillion in total economic cost to the United States of the Iraq war according to economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes

$60 billion in U.S. expenditures lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001

0 weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq

via Iraq By The Numbers: The World’s Costliest Cakewalk | ThinkProgress.

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October 23, 2011 · 10:30 am

Why Credit Unions Are a Better Financial Choice For Us Than Big Banks

I’ve been with a Credit Union for over 20 years and can offer only praise for their services and costs.  I can’t imagine why anyone would chose a bank-especially a big bank- over a Credit Union.

With Credit Unions, you are not just a customer, but part owner.  Rates are better, service is better and even the smallest Credit Unions generally offer all the same services as big Banks.

My advice:  Move your business to a Credit Union today!  It’s not just best for you, it’s better for the economy and the country as a whole…..

From Daily Finance:

 

With big banks adding new fees or increasing existing fees, credit unions have been able to capitalize on the growing discontent with the financial services behemoths. Bank of Americas BAC $5 debit-card-fee fiasco alone is responsible for 20% to 50% of the new accounts at some credit unions — and new accounts have been growing steadily in recent months.Thats because many credit unions are offering cash back or reward points for debit card usage, not fees. There are other perks, too, to get you to move your business. For example, the Co-op Services Credit Union of Michigan has been successfully offering $105 to those who switch to them from a regular bank.

And credit unions are reaching out to business customers, too. FDIC data has shown bank business lending shrinking over the past year or so, while credit union commercial lending is growing.

Dollars and cents arent the only reason people are moving their money to credit unions. The fundamental setup of the system is vastly different from that at big banks. While a bank is a for-profit business, aiming to maximize earnings for its shareholders, credit unions are nonprofits. While youre simply a customer of a bank, youll be a member of a credit union, owning the whole thing along with your fellow members.

via Why Credit Unions Are a Better Financial Choice For Us Than Big Banks – DailyFinance.

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October 18, 2011 · 8:48 am

What John Edwards Can Teach Barack Obama

Excellent article from Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post today.

This is the message that originally drew me to John Edwards- back before we discovered he was an ego-manical phony who was cheating on his brilliant cancer stricken wife with a bleached blond new age bimbo….

Unfortunately, this message seemed to get lost when we told Johnny boy to get lost….

I’m glad to see it’s come roaring back with the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Here is a brief excerpt and a link to the full article:

John Edwards is persona non grata in the Democratic Party these days. And for good reason.

But, as we’ve written before, Edwards has had considerable influence on the current positioning of his party on the national political scene.

Perhaps Edwards’ largest lasting legacy is his “Two Americas” speech, an address that perhaps best encapsulates the frustrations and anger coursing through the American electorate at the moment — and one that President Obama would do well to read and adapt for his own 2012 re-election campaign. (The term “Two Americas” was actually created by longtime Edwards aide Christina Reynolds.)

Although Edwards had been giving some version of his “Two Americas” speech since late 2003, he drew national attention to it when he delivered it at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It was so well received that he subsequently turned it into the centerpiece of his 2008 presidential bid. (You can read the full speech here.)

Joe Trippi, the lead strategist for Edwards’ 2008 campaign, said that as that campaign wore on the other candidates in the field did everything they could to embrace the rhetorical power of “Two Americas”.

“Coming down the stretch in Iowa in 2008 many of us in the Edwards campaign became worried because Obama was moving closer and closer to the ‘Two Americas’ message,” said Trippi. “Americans responded to that message in 2004. And they responded to that message in 2008. It’s even more relevant in 2012.”

At its heart, “Two Americas” was an economic populist paean — driving home the sense that the distance between the haves and the have-nots was not only widening, but also that the system was somehow rigged to favor those with money and power.

“We have much work to do because the truth is we still live in a country where there are two different Americas,” Edwards said in the speech. “One for all of those people who have lived the American dream and don’t have to worry and another for most Americans, everybody else who struggles to make ends meet every single day. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Edwards went on to offer a series of examples of the “Two Americas” from the health care industry to public education to jobs and the economy.

“You know what happens if something goes wrong, if you have a child that gets sick, a financial problem, a layoff in the family — you go right off the cliff,” he said. “And when that happens what’s the first thing that goes? Your dreams. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Those sentiments are perhaps mor relevant today than when Edwards first uttered them nearly seven years ago. The decline in the American economy has stretched much of the country thin and contributed to an increasing sense that the game is rigged.

That appears to be the central animating principle of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and the other gatherings it has spawned across the country and across the world. The “We are the 99 percent” slogan is, really, just another way of expressing the “Two Americas” message that Edwards put into common parlance in 2004.

And it’s that sentiment that the White House is hoping to tap into as President Obama tries to find a way to re-energize the Democratic base in advance of 2012.

Senior White House adviser David Plouffe openly acknowledged as much to the Post’s Peter Wallsten over the weekend. “We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Plouffe said of the efforts to harness the “Occupy” energy. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it.”

MORE:  What John Edwards can teach Barack Obama – The Washington Post.

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October 16, 2011 · 10:57 am

Ashes To Ammo: How To Reload Your Dead Loved One

From the “Only in the South” files via NPR….

 

When a loved one dies and is cremated, family members face a tough decision on what do with the ashes. Some want the final resting place to be spectacular — spread in the Grand Canyon, launched into space, sprinkled in Times Square; others just keep Aunt Jane’s remains in an urn at home.

“The ashes get put on the mantel, stay there for a couple of years, and then a couple of years later, they get put in the attic,” says Thad Holmes. “A few years later, the house gets sold and, ‘Oh gosh, we forgot the ashes!'”

Holmes, a conservation enforcement officer in Alabama, and his buddy Clem Parnell, came up with an unusual way to honor the dead. Their company, Holy Smoke, takes your loved one’s ashes and turns them into ammunition.

The idea was born one night when Holmes and Parnell were working the late shift, talking about how they wanted to be buried. Holmes said he wanted to be cremated, sprinkled on a nearby lake. His partner had another idea.

“I want my ashes placed into some good turkey-load shotgun shells,” Parnell said. That way, someone could go kill a turkey with him, Holmes tells Robert Smith, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

“He could rest in peace, knowing that one more turkey, the last thing he saw, was Clem screaming at him at 900 feet per second.”

Holmes’ first reaction when he heard his friend? “He just expressed what I’d like to do with my ashes.”

Holmes says his company’s services begin after the funeral. They take the ashes that are sent to them, put them into the requested shells, then ship the ammunition back to the sender. Their biggest concern, he says, is handling the ashes sensitively.

“We want people to understand that each shipment of ash is handled with utmost care,” he says. “So it’s not a simple process, you just going out, finding somebody that can go, ‘Here, I’ll throw ’em in there.’ It just doesn’t work like that.”

Holy Smoke, which has been in business for a couple months, charges $850 for a case of shells. The company has shipped out two orders. The feedback, Holmes says, is positive.

MORE:   Ashes To Ammo: How To Reload Your Dead Loved One : NPR.

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October 16, 2011 · 10:43 am

Occupy Wall Street: America’s ‘Primal Scream’

Great piece in today’s New York Times by Nicholas Kristof.

Occupy Wall Street has definitely become too big for the mainstream media to ignore.  The momentum seems to be on our- Occupy Wall Street’s – side.

Now, let’s see what the politicians do…

And how the 1%, who own the media and Congress, decide to fight back…

From the New York Times.  Link to more at the bottom:

IT’S fascinating that many Americans intuitively understood the outrage and frustration that drove Egyptians to protest at Tahrir Square, but don’t comprehend similar resentments that drive disgruntled fellow citizens to “occupy Wall Street.”

There are differences, of course: the New York Police Department isn’t dispatching camels to run down protesters. Americans may feel disenfranchised, but we do live in a democracy, a flawed democracy — which is the best hope for Egypt’s evolution in the coming years.

Yet my interviews with protesters in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park seemed to rhyme with my interviews in Tahrir earlier this year. There’s a parallel sense that the political/economic system is tilted against the 99 percent. Al Gore, who supports the Wall Street protests, described them perfectly as a “primal scream of democracy.”

The frustration in America isn’t so much with inequality in the political and legal worlds, as it was in Arab countries, although those are concerns too. Here the critical issue is economic inequity. According to the C.I.A.’s own ranking of countries by income inequality, the United States is more unequal a society than either Tunisia or Egypt.

Three factoids underscore that inequality:

¶The 400 wealthiest Americans have a greater combined net worth than the bottom 150 million Americans.

¶The top 1 percent of Americans possess more wealth than the entire bottom 90 percent.

¶In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007, 65 percent of economic gains went to the richest 1 percent.

As my Times colleague Catherine Rampell noted a few days ago, in 1981, the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)

More broadly, there’s a growing sense that lopsided outcomes are a result of tycoons’ manipulating the system, lobbying for loopholes and getting away with murder. Of the 100 highest-paid chief executives in the United States in 2010, 25 took home more pay than their company paid in federal corporate income taxes, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

More:   America’s ‘Primal Scream’ – NYTimes.com.

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October 15, 2011 · 5:54 pm

Tea Party Co-Founder Expresses Support for Occupy Wall Street

Very interesting article.  On many levels

a) He admits the Tea Party was co-opted by the GOP

b) He thinks Occupy Wall Street is smarter

This guy was obviously too bright for the room that held the Tea Party captive…

From RawStory.com

One of the original founders of the Tea Party movement has told RT.com that he believes Occupy Wall Street is not only comparable to the earliest states of the movement he helped launch but can learn from its mistakes.

“The problem with protests and the political process is that it is very easy, no matter how big the protest is, for the politicians to simply wait until the people go home,” financial blogger Karl Denninger observed. “And then they can ignore you.”

“Well, Occupy Wall Street was a little different,” he continued. “And back in 2008, I wrote that when we will actually see change is when the people come, they set up camp, and they refuse to go home. That appears to be happening now.”

Denninger has been complaining for some time that the Tea Party was hijacked by the Republican establishment and used to protect the very prople it had originally opposed. A year ago, he wrote, “Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!”

Now he advises Occupy Wall Street, “Don’t let it happen.”

“One of the things that the Occupy movement seems to have going for it is it has not turned around and issued a set of formal demands,” he explains. “This is a good thing, not a bad thing. Everyone is looking for a set of demands. The problem is that as soon as you pipe up with a list of four or five things — and you’ve got to keep it simple and short — then somebody’s going to say, ‘Well, we gave you 70 percent of it, now go home.’ And the fact is, that’s exactly the sort of thing that happened with the Tea Party.”

“Stay on message, which is that the corruption is not a singular event,” Denninger urged. “You can’t focus in one place. You have to get the money out of politics, which is very difficult to do, but at the same time you can’t silence people’s voice.”

via Tea Party co-founder expresses support for Occupy Wall Street | The Raw Story.

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October 14, 2011 · 9:44 am

Eviction of Occupy Wall Street From NYC Park Postponed

A great Birthday present for me!

The threat is not over, but at least postponed….

From ABC News:

 

ABC News’ Greg Krieg reports from New York City:

City officials today postponed a cleanup of  Zuccotti Park after earlier threatening to evict Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been encamped here. Jubilant protesters later poured from the park to the Wall Street area, some clashing with police. As many as 15 people were reportedly arrested for blocking access.

As the announcement was made via the “people’s mic” at 6:40  a.m., the crowd waved their brooms in triumph.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office tweeted that Brookfield Properties, owner of the park,  (and not the city) decided to postpone cleaning. The city was informed “late last night.”

via Eviction of Occupy Wall Street From NYC Park Postponed – ABC News.

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October 13, 2011 · 9:04 pm

Defend Occupy Wall Street From Eviction

I’m on the phone right now.

Please call and sign the petitions to support Occupy Wall Street!

From Van Jones at the Huffington Post:

 

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is making a cowardly attempt to end Occupy Wall Street, the anchor of a movement that has captured the hearts and minds of the country in just four weeks. Tomorrow at 7 a.m., under Bloomberg’s orders, the NYPD will evict the 99%.

Unless we stop that from happening.

We have very little time to act. There are at least three things you can do right now:

SIGN THIS PETITION now. MoveOn.org has started a major petition drive to tell Mayor Bloomberg: “Respect the protesters’ First Amendment rights. Don’t try to evict Occupy Wall Street.” The petition will be put in the hands of the occupiers TONIGHT, and then delivered to the mayor. A massive stack of signatures will show Occupy Wall Street and Bloomberg that the nation stands with the 99%, not the 1%.

Tell everyone you know in the New York area that they should head to Zuccotti Park at 6:00 AM tomorrow (Friday Oct 14) to prevent Bloomberg from evicting the protesters. If enough people literally stand with the protesters, Bloomberg could back down.

Call 311 (if you live in New York City) or 212-NEW-YORK (if you live elsewhere in the US) and demand that Bloomberg back down from interfering with the occupiers’ brave stand on behalf of the 99% of us.

The mayor’s justification for this eviction is a ruse. Bloomberg says authorities need to “clean” the park. Meanwhile, he refuses to acknowledge that Occupy Wall Street has a functioning sanitation detail, just as they’ve self-organized every other aspect of their dignified, intentional community (including a working library).

Bloomberg says the protestors may return after the “cleaning,” but this also is less than honest. Upon returning to the park, occupiers must follow rules that make the occupation impossible: no camping; no sleeping bags; no tents; no lying down; no storage of personal property.

Make no mistake — this is an eviction. Winter is coming, and the occupiers cannot continue without the ability to stay safe, warm, and dry.

via Van Jones: Defend Occupy Wall Street From Eviction.

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