Seems he’s in the minority on this- at least among the GOP.
Mayor Bloomberg certainly doesn’t seem to agree with this opinion…
The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are “as American as apple pie,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. According to Powell, there is plenty of justification for the movement’s outrage, but also some reason for concern over its direction.
Powell began by recalling his upbringing in Harlem and the Bronx at a time when his parents didn’t make much, but were at least able to find stable employment.
“I don’t think either of them ever made more than 50 or 60 dollars a week,” Powell said. “Both my parents worked for as long as I can remember, they always worked, they always had work.”
But this sort of job stability is no longer present, the retired four-star Army general said, a fact that is now serving as a catalyzing force for the Occupy movement.
“People are concerned now that there is not that source of an income, there isn’t that work source that I remember,” Powell continued. “What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.”
I’ve been trying to follow the news about the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park.
The problem is, there isn’t any. Or at least not much….
That is because New York Mayor Bloomberg is acting more like he runs Cairo than New York.
I still can’t quite believe he actually implied Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Assembly are situational, not intrinsic American Rights.
I still can’t believe he actually stopped the Media from covering the eviction by arresting journalists.
I can believe the mainstream media is not covering this as it is all Corporate owned now…
This is simply not the way things are supposed to work in America….
The actions of the Mayor of New York and the NYPD under his direction make Zucotti Park look like Cairo during the Arab spring or a potential Tiananmen Square.
These were not actions consistent with respect for Democracy and peaceful protest and assembly.
These were the actions of an oligarch protecting the assets of the 1%. He moved against the many to protect the interests of the few.
He just proved the Occupy Wall Street movement is right- and very necessary…
Hopefully, this will only make the Occupy Wall Street movement grow stronger.
I’ll be watching nervously and hopefully.
This is scary stuff when Americans are treated this way by the Police and the agents of the Ruling Class….
Here is a report from reporter Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones. I’m just trying to do my bit to spread the news, since the mainstream media sure isn’t.
“Can I help you?” an burly officer asked me, his helpfulness belied by his scowl.
“I’m a reporter,” I told him.
“This is a frozen zone, all right?” he said, using a term I’d never heard before. “Just like them, you have to leave the area. If you do not, you will be subject to arrest.”
By then, riot police were moving in, indiscriminately dousing the peaceful protesters with what looked like pepper spray or some sort of gas. As people yelled and screamed and cried, I tried to stay calm.
“I promise to leave once the arrests are done,” I replied.
“This is a frozen zone,” one cop insisted. “You could be injured.” His meaning was clear.
“No, you are going to leave now.”
He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park’s slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.
“I just want to witness what is going on here,” I yelped.
“You can witness it with the rest of the press,” he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.
“Why are you excluding the press from observing this?” I asked.
“Because this is a frozen zone. It’s a police action going on. You could be injured.”
His meaning was clear. I let myself be hustled across the street to the press pen.
“What’s your name?”
His reply came as fast as he could turn away: “Watch your back.”
Another brilliant article from former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich….
Click the link at the bottom to see his actual proposed “pledge” for the Corporations:
Words of Wisdom from RobertReich.org:
Despite what the Supreme Court and Mitt Romney say, corporations aren’t people. (I’ll believe they are when Georgia and Texas start executing them.)
The Court thinks corporations have First Amendment rights to spend as much as they want on politics, and Romney (and most of his fellow Regressives) think they need lower taxes and fewer regulations in order to be competitive.
These positions are absurd on their face. By flooding our democracy with their shareholders’ money, big corporations are violating their shareholders’ First Amendment rights because shareholders aren’t consulted. They’re simultaneously suppressing the First Amendment rights of the rest of us because, given how much money they’re throwing around, we don’t have enough money to be heard.
And they’re indirectly giving non-Americans (that is, all their foreign owners, investors, and executives) a say in how Americans are governed. Pardon me for being old-fashioned but I didn’t think foreign money was supposed to be funneled into American elections.
Romney’s belief big corporations need more money and lower costs in order to create jobs is equally baffling. Big corporations are now sitting on $2 trillion of cash and enjoying near-record profits. The ratio of profits to wages is higher than it’s been since before the Great Depression. And a larger and larger portion of those profits are going to top executives. (CEO pay was 40 times the typical worker in the 1980s; it’s now upwards of 300 times.)
Brilliant article in “Rolling Stone” by Matt Taibbi. Finally, someone truly both gets and can articulate the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Here is a very brief excerpt and a link to the full article. I strongly encourage you to click the link and read the entire article.
It’s not very long, so don’t be afraid….
…Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.
Occupy Wall Street is a serious, grass-roots uprising of normal citizens try to force society into recognizing and dealing with income inequality and the Corporate ownership of our government.
I guess that’s a little more important than some no-talent, plastic pre-pubescent “entertainer” who is a manufactured product of the very mass-produced culture generated by these corporations, strictly to make money from gullible Americans, and forced down their throats via distribution, broadcast and media empires owned by said Corporations…
Besides, I’m still not convinced Justin Bieber isn’t really a 24 year-old Lesbian being marketed by the Corporations as a teenage boy.
Call me cynical, but remember Milli Vanilli…
From Huffington Post:
The Occupy Wall Street movement topped Justin Bieber as the most popular story on Twitter, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Despite the teen heart-throb’s over 14 million Twitter followers, Occupy Wall Street was the top story on Twitter between October 24 and 28, followed by Bieber, who has made the New Media Index charts three times in the last five weeks. Steve Job’s death, the news of which broke October 6, came in third and the 2012 presidential elections ranked fourth.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was the third most popular news story on blogs (Bieber didn’t make the cut!) and the New Media Index notes that the protests “inspired very different conversations on blogs and Twitter.”
“On Twitter, the tone was markedly pro-protestor, with Twitter users sharing images and videos of police using tear gasduring protests in Oakland,” wrote the New Media Index in its report.
Recent analysis by Google found that search interest in Occupy Wall Street had waned slightly from its peak on October 15.
An NMIncite study released October 19 concluded that social media “buzz” about Occupy Wall Street “reached its peak on October 6th with 13,133 messages being posted in one day,” though the New Media Index’s findings suggest conversations about the movement are up again on Twitter.
Bieber enjoys such high popularity on Twitter that employees at the social media company have joked that the star has his own servers.
“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter,” tweeted Dustin Curtis last year.
This is great news! As a happy Credit Union Member for over 20 years, all I can say is welcome! You will be very happy here.
I’ve said it again and again: I don’t understand why anyone wants to bank with the big national banks. They will screw you on fees and treat you like dirt. Take your money to a Credit Union where you are one of the owners helping other owners and community members.
From ThinkProgress.org:
One of the tactics the 99 Percenters are using to take back the country from the 1 percent is to move their money from big banks to credit unions, community banks, and other smaller financial unions that aren’t gambling with our nation’s future.
Now, the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) reports that a whopping 650,000 Americans have joined credit unions since Sept. 29 — the date that Bank of America announced it would start charging a $5 monthly debit fee, a move it backed down on this week.
To put that in perspective, there were only 600,000 new members for credit unions in all of 2010. “These results indicate that consumers are clearly making a smarter choice by moving to credit unions where, on average, they will save about $70 a year in fewer or no fees, lower rates on loans and higher return on savings,” said CUNA President Bill Cheney.
This Saturday, 99 Percenters are calling on Americans to move their money from big banks to credit unions and community banks on what is being called “Bank Transfer Day.” If you want to stand with the 99 Percent and take part in this action, use the Move Your Money project’s community bank and credit union finder tool to find out how.
I was in BB&T last week and saw a sign saying they would charge either $8 or $12 to cash a check drawn on their bank for people without an account of their own. That should be illegal.
And now I see this?
Evil… just plain evil.
If banks are going to administer Government benefits, they should be required, by contract, not to charge the people receiving the benefits. They still make money from merchants when debit/credit cards are used and that’s fine. It’s soaking the beneficiaries, who can least afford it, that is just plain wrong….
Evil…just plain evil.
I don’t know why anyone deals with these banks who doesn’t have to do so. The rest of us should be moving our money out to Credit Unions or, at the very least, local community banks….
Out of work and living on a $189-a-week unemployment check, Rob Linville needs to watch every penny. Lately, he has been watching too many pennies disappear into the coffers of the bank that administers his unemployment check via a prepaid debit card.
The state of Oregon, where Linville lives, deposits his weekly benefits on a U.S. Bank prepaid debit card. The bank allows him to make four withdrawals per month free of charge. After that, he must pay $1.50 for each visit to the ATM and $3 to see a teller. Managing his basic expenses, including rent, bus fare and groceries, typically requires more than four withdrawals, he says. Unexpected needs — Linville recently bought a sport coat for $20 to prepare for a job interview — entail more. He’s afraid to withdraw his full benefits in one shot, knowing that the bank could sock him with a $17.50 overdraft fee if he exceeds his balance. So he pulls out small amounts of cash as he needs it, incurring about $15 in fees in the last two months he says.
“I’m so broke,” Linville said, his voice expressing resignation that this is simply how the world works. “But I don’t really have any other options.”
Across the nation, people receiving a range of state-furnished benefits — from unemployment insurance and food stamps to cash assistance for poor families — are facing similar options and reaching the same conclusion. In 41 states major banks and financial firms have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits via prepaid debit cards. And banks are increasingly extracting hefty cuts of these funds through an assortment of small fees. U.S. Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and other institutions hold contracts to distribute these benefits on prepaid debit cards.
These guys and gals live in a little bubble called Washington, DC, sheltered by their wealth, and have no idea how the real world operates…
Nothing will change as long as the Congress is run by the rich for the rich….
Part of the reason the richest 1 percent of Americans have captured our politics is because they are able to finance political races, issue campaigns, and lobbyists. But the other reason some of the richest Americans have been able to control our politics is because they themselves have gotten elected to positions of power at a much higher rate than the rest of us.
As Roll Call points out today, the estimated median net worth for a member of Congress in 2010 was $513,000 (this is strictly an estimate as assets are reported in ranges). Meanwhile, the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s David Rosnick points out that the net worth of the median household in the United States that same year was closer to $100,000:
It will be interesting to see how the GOP handles this report from the non-partisan and highly respected Congressional Budget Office.
Well, not really. They will just loudly spread lies and propaganda while impugning the reputation of the CBO.
At this point, their reaction to news and facts not supportive of their goals is really rather predictable.
From ThinkProgress.org:
The Congressional Budget Office today released a new report on the growth in income that’s occurred in the U.S. over the last three decades. CBO found that, “for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income, average real after-tax household income grew by 275 percent between 1979 and 2007,” while it grew by just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent of the income scale. “As a result of that uneven income growth, the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979,” CBO said.
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.
Lost in the 21st Century 