Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Here in the Bay Area the OWS people have called for a General Strike, set for tomorrow. A rash move, pre-mature, blah, blah, blah. That's only my two-cents. What it will indicate is the depth of feeling among a broad spectrum of Oaklanders. Poor participation . . . strong support . . . who knows? A spot check on a phenomenon that's going to have it stops and starts.

yes, the outcome of this will be VERY interesting indeed.

Does anybody think Wall Street and the TBTFs will be as public as in the past when announcing their year-end bonuses? Will the government take even greater steps to conceal additional public bailouts?

methinks we're already seeing this, what with GS reporting a loss for Q3?
likely to be followed by more 'bad news' for the banks bottom lines, however its clear that they are already positioning for the 'santa claus' rally, just in time for year-end bonus calculations?:

today (just now, at the moment) we see on: http://online.wsj.com/home-page

Fed Shows Modest Optimism on Economy

Fed officials refrained from taking new steps as they expressed modest optimism about the recovery, though Chicago's Evans dissented in favor of more action.

ADP: Private Sector Adds 110,000 Jobs

Private businesses added slightly more jobs than expected in October, according to a report by payroll firm ADP. Other job data also suggest some improvement in the labor markets

• Analysis: Bernanke Q&A Recap
  
  In an interview with reporters, Bernanke kept the option of additional stimulus on the table but declined to say what would prompt a new move.

Personal-Bankruptcy Filings Fall


but... uh oh...
all is not as well as it would appear:

Filene's Files for Chapter 11 Protection

Discount retailer Syms and its Filene's Basement subsidiary filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with plans to liquidate.

FBI Eyes MF Global's Collapse

• Short Sellers Seize on LinkedIn
  
  
  
  MasterCard Profit Jumps 38%

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

and in other news...

kim kardashian has GASP!!! just filed for divorce....

we'll be back with all the breathtaking details after this...

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty."
- H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come - (1936)

simply amazing just how prescient, even back in the 30's, H.G. was, eh?
(2nd only perhaps to EJ himself, in the early 'naughties' (2000's) on the gathering storm we have now...)

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
-- Cicero, 66 B.C. (Translation by W.W. Fowler, 1909)



"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
-- Cicero, 55 BC



"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt!"
-- Marcus Tullinus Cicero, Roman Senator, 63 B.C.


"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that men of good will do nothing."
-- Cicero (attributed)

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

thanks bart! great stuff!
yourself being highly enriched in the vitamin P (for presciency) dept

kinda 'funny' isnt it, that with all this history to draw on, that _most_ of our present day 'ciceros' cant seem to grasp the simplest lessons in finance, eh?

"If some lose their whole fortunes, they will drag many more down with them . . . believe me that the whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome in the Forum, is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic province. If Those revenues are destroyed, our whole system of credit will come down with a crash."
-- Cicero, 66 B.C. (Translation by W.W. Fowler, 1909)



"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced, if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
-- Cicero, 55 BC



"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt!"
-- Marcus Tullinus Cicero, Roman Senator, 63 B.C.


"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that men of good will do nothing."
-- Cicero (attributed)

[cobben]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Rickards I believe it was that said something like, now that they know that there is a let's say EUR 1T financial black hole in Europe, all that remains is the political bickering down to the wire about whose real capital will be used to fill that hole. That is the traditional capitalist view of the rather limited possibilities.

Graeber "the best anthropological theorist of his generation" is the only person I have run across who might just could have the foundation for a non-capitalist new world order within his grasp.

There is of course Iceland.




David Graeber studied 5,000 years of debt: real dirty secret is that if the deficit ever completely went away, it would cause a major catastrophe


. . .

I think it's significant that growing opposition to the "debt crises" being inflicted on people in Europe, in places like Greece and Spain, is a call for "real democracy."
What they're effectively saying is, "In 2008, the financial elites let the cat out of the bag when they refused to let their banks fail like the textbooks say they were supposed to. As a result, we learned that the story about capitalism we'd been hearing for all these years wasn't really true. Markets don't really run themselves, and debts can be finagled out of existence if you really want them to be.
"But if that's true, if debt is just a promise and promises can be renegotiated, then if democracy is going to mean anything, it has to mean that it’s us, the public, that gets the ultimate say over how that happens – not some hedge fund manager.”
If they win, then we're going to be talking about a very different economic system. Whether you even want to call it "capitalism" is probably just a matter of taste. But it gives you a sense of just how much is at stake.
__________________________________________________ _______________



OWS ground zero.

David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet

. . .

I quickly spotted at least one Wobbly, a young Korean activist I remembered from some Food Not Bomb event, some college students wearing Zapatista paraphernalia, a Spanish couple who’d been involved with the indignados in Madrid… I found my Greek friends, an American I knew from street battles in Quebec during the Summit of the Americas in 2001, now turned labor organizer in Manhattan, a Japanese activist intellectual I’d known for years… My Greek friend looked at me and I looked at her and we both instantly realized the other was thinking the same thing: “Why are we so complacent? Why is it that every time we see something like this happening, we just mutter things and go home?” – though I think the way we put it was more like, “You know something? Fuck this shit. They advertised a general assembly. Let’s hold one.”

. . .

Even the commitment to direct action, so often confused with breaking windows or the like, really refers to the refusal of any politics of protest, that merely appeals to the authorities to behave differently, and the determination instead to act for oneself, and to do what one thinks is right, regardless of law and authority. Gandhi’s salt march, for example, is a classic example of direct action. So was squatting Zuccotti Park. It’s a public space; we were the public; the public shouldn’t have to ask permission to engage in peaceful political assembly in its own park; so we didn’t. By doing so we not only acted in the way we felt was right, we aimed to set an example to others: to begin to reclaim communal resources that have been appropriated for purposes of private profit to once again serve for communal use—as in a truly free society, they would be—and to set an example of what genuine communal use might actually be like. For those who desire to create a society based on the principle of human freedom, direct action is simply the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

. . .

[bart]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

thanks bart! great stuff!
yourself being highly enriched in the vitamin P (for presciency) dept

It must be kind to geezers day? ;-)

(thanks, that was very kind)

kinda 'funny' isnt it, that with all this history to draw on, that _most_ of our present day 'ciceros' cant seem to grasp the simplest lessons in finance, eh?

The 'best' part in my opinion is that most of them really do know the basics in finance and practice them in their personal lives... and 'know better' in their public lives, in the phantasmagorical & delusional & vested interest based worlds known as Foggy Bottom or Wall & Broad... or various edookashunal places (and some wonder why they call them institutions ;-) etc.







Thought for the day:

[jiimbergin]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Huge Crowds Strike in Oakland … Shutting Down Nation’s 5th Largest Port

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/...gest-port.html

Go to the link to see pictures.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Huge Crowds Strike in Oakland … Shutting Down Nation’s 5th Largest Port

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/...gest-port.html

Go to the link to see pictures.

Yes, I was on the Alameda/SF Ferry yesterday; there were 4 black helicopters circling over the Port of Oakland (The Ferry goes right by the Port on its was to Alameda and Oakland).

Cue the tin foil hats...

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

The Empire, FIRE. the Neoliberal Order - call it what you like - is being challenged by its domestic population.

This is one of the last things they want to see on labor's agenda:

"One of the reasons why they are doing it is because they are trying to defend ILWU workers in Longview, Washington, who are facing a behemoth of agribusiness, EGT. The driving force behind EGT is a leading agribusiness concern called Bunge. . . . Longshoremen have a debt of gratitude to the people who have organized this action today. . . . 30% of the funding of our pensions comes from that grain operation in the Pacific Northwest. This is an attempt to rupture the jurisdiction of longshore workers that we've had for over 77 years in this country. Wall Street is on the move, on the waterfront, looking for new profits, and the community are standing with the ILWU. They are standing with us for a reason. They know about 1984, when longshoremen refused to unload cargo from South Africa for 11 days. They know about the ILWU shutting down all 29 ports in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal. They know about the ILWU shutting down all 29 ports on May Day, International Workers' Day, to protest the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand about the ILWU and the actions that we took by not crossing the picket line in response to the murder on the high seas of those humanitarian activists taking supplies to Gaza. The ship was shut down for 24 hours, the Zim Line ship from Israel. They know about the actions that we took last October in support of Oscar Grant. And this resonates with the community. So now the community is saying: We want to stand in support of the ILWU. So, this connection is genuine, it's legitimate, and we embrace it."

Clarence Thomas is a former officer and long-time labor activist with ILWU Local 10.

How will it strike back?

When something similar happened in Seattle, it didn't happen again.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment

POSTED: November 3, 11:00 AM ET

Matt Taibbi


Last year I had a chance to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg up close at the Huffington Post’s "Game Changers" event. I was standing right behind the guy when he was introduced by Nora Ephron, and watched as the would-be third party powerhouse wowed the liberal crowd with one zinger after another.

He started off with a crack about Ephron, saying he had agreed to say something nice about her book, which he blithely noted he hadn’t read. Still, he knew the title, "I Remember Nothing," which he said he'd "heard is also the title of a new book by Charlie Sheen." (He pronounced Sheen like "Shine").

From there he cracked that he was honored to be a "Game Changer," although he was only the last-minute replacement for Snooki. (Zing!) Then he went into a riff about Halloween.

"Does everyone have their costume?" he asked. (This is the old "Did you hear this? Have you heard about this?" Jimmy-Vulmer-style standup routine). "I thought about going in a... dress," he began. "But then I decided I would just go as the fiscally-conservative, pro-choice, anti-smoking, anti-trans-fat Jewish billionaire mayor of the World’s Greatest City."

The crowd roared. Bloomberg smiled, looked up, extended his hands, and said, "Maybe that’s just too much of a stretch, I don’t know."

Man, I thought. This guy is really sure of himself. If there is such a thing as infinite self-satisfaction, he was definitely approaching it that night.

And it wasn’t hard to see why. Bloomberg’s great triumph as a politician has been the way he’s been able to win over exactly the sort of crowd that was gathering at the HuffPost event that night. He is a billionaire Wall Street creature with an extreme deregulatory bent who has quietly advanced some nastily regressive police policies (most notably the notorious "stop-and-frisk" practice) but has won over upper-middle-class liberals with his stances on choice and gay marriage and other social issues.

Bloomberg’s main attraction as a politician has been his ability to stick closely to a holy trinity of basic PR principles: bang heavily on black crime, embrace social issues dear to white progressives, and in the remaining working hours give your pals on Wall Street (who can raise any money you need, if you somehow run out of your own) whatever they want.

He understands that as long as you keep muggers and pimps out of the prime shopping areas in the Upper West Side, and make sure to sound the right notes on abortion, stem-cell research, global warming, and the like, you can believably play the role of the wisecracking, good-guy-billionaire Belle of the Ball for the same crowd that twenty years ago would have been feting Ed Koch.

Anyway, I thought of all of this this morning, when I read about Bloomberg’s latest comments on Occupy Wall Street. I remembered how pleased Bloomberg looked with himself at the HuffPost ball last year when I read what he had to say about the anticorruption protesters now muddying his doorstep in Zuccotti Park:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but congress.
Speaking at a business breakfast in midtown featuring Bloomberg and two former New York City mayors, Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the Occupy Wall Street protesters.
"I hear your complaints," Bloomberg said. "Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that."

To me, this is Michael Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette moment, his own personal "Let Them Eat Cake" line. This one series of comments allows us to see under his would-be hip centrist Halloween mask and look closely at the corrupt, arrogant aristocrat underneath.

Occupy Wall Street has not yet inspired many true villains outside of fringe characters like Anthony Bologna. But Bloomberg, with this preposterous schlock about congress forcing banks to lend to poor people, may yet make himself the face of the 1%’s rank intellectual corruption.

This whole notion that the financial crisis was caused by government attempts to create an "ownership society" and make mortgages more available to low-income (and particularly minority) borrowers has been pushed for some time by dingbats like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who often point to laws like the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act as signature events in the crash drama.

But Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are at least dumb enough that it is theoretically possible that they actually believe the crash was caused by the CRA, Barney Frank, and Fannie and Freddie.

On the other hand, nobody who actually understands anything about banking, or has spent more than ten minutes inside a Wall Street office, believes any of that crap. In the financial world, the fairy tales about the CRA causing the crash inspire a sort of chuckling bemusement, as though they were tribal bugaboos explaining bad rainfall or an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth, ghost stories and legends good for scaring the masses.

But nobody actually believes them. Did government efforts to ease lending standards put a lot of iffy borrowers into homes? Absolutely. Were there a lot of people who wouldn’t have gotten homes twenty or thirty years ago who are now in foreclosure thanks to government efforts to make mortgages more available? Sure – no question.

But did any of that have anything at all to do with the explosion of subprime home lending that caused the gigantic speculative bubble of the mid-2000s, or the crash that followed?

Not even slightly. The whole premise is preposterous. And Mike Bloomberg knows it.

In order for this vision of history to be true, one would have to imagine that all of these banks were dragged, kicking and screaming, to the altar of home lending, forced against their will to create huge volumes of home loans for unqualified borrowers.

In fact, just the opposite was true. This was an orgiastic stampede of lending, undertaken with something very like bloodlust. Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could.

They lent to anyone with a pulse and they didn’t need Barney Frank to give them a push. This was not social policy. This was greed. They created those loans not because they had to, but because it was profitable. Enormously, gigantically profitable -- profitable enough to create huge fortunes out of thin air, with a speed never seen before in Wall Street's history.

The typical money-machine cycle of subprime lending took place without any real government involvement. Bank A (let’s say it’s Goldman, Sachs) lends criminal enterprise B (let’s say it’s Countrywide) a billion dollars. Countrywide then goes out and creates a billion dollars of shoddy home loans, committing any and all kinds of fraud along the way in an effort to produce as many loans as quickly as possible, very often putting people who shouldn’t have gotten homes into homes, faking their income levels, their credit scores, etc.

Goldman then buys back those loans from Countrywide, places them in an offshore trust, and chops them up into securities. Here they use fancy math to turn a billion dollars of subprime junk into different types of securities, some of them AAA-rated, some of them junk-rated, etc. They then go out on the open market and sell those securities to various big customers – pension funds, foreign trade unions, hedge funds, and so on.

The whole game was based on one new innovation: the derivative instruments like CDOs that allowed them to take junk-rated home loans and turn them into AAA-rated instruments. It was not Barney Frank who made it possible for Goldman, Sachs to sell the home loan of an occasionally-employed janitor in Oakland or Detroit as something just as safe as, and more profitable than, a United States Treasury Bill. This was something they cooked up entirely by themselves and developed solely with the aim of making more money.

The government’s efforts to make home loans more available to people showed up in a few places in this whole tableau. For one thing, it made it easier for the Countrywides of the world to create their giant masses of loans. And secondly, the Fannies and Freddies of the world were big customers of the banks, buying up mortgage-backed securities in bulk along with the rest of the suckers. Without a doubt, the bubble would not have been as big, or inflated as fast, without Fannie and Freddie.

But the bubble was overwhelmingly built around a single private-sector economic reality that had nothing to do with any of that: new financial instruments made it possible to sell crap loans as AAA-rated paper.

Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with Merrill Lynch selling $16.5 billion worth of crap mortgage-backed securities to the Connecticut Carpenters Annuity Fund, the Mississippi Public Employees' Retirement System, the Connecticut Carpenters Pension Fund, and the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association. Citigroup and Deutsche Bank did not need to be pushed by Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi to sell hundreds of millions of dollars in crappy MBS to Allstate.

And Goldman, Sachs did not need Franklin Raines to urge it to sell $1.2 billion in designed-to-fail mortgage-backed instruments to two of the country’s largest corporate credit unions, which subsequently went bust and had to be swallowed up by the National Credit Union Administration.

These banks did not need to be dragged kicking and screaming to make the billions of dollars in profits from these and other similar selling-baby-powder-as-coke transactions. They did it for the money, and they did it because they did not give a fuck who got hurt.

Who cares if some schmuck carpenter in Connecticut loses the pension he’s worked his whole life to save? Who cares if he’s now going to have to work until he’s seventy, instead of retiring at fifty-five? It’s his own fault for not knowing what his pension fund manager was buying.

And, of course, in a larger sense, the entire crisis was the fault of that janitor in Oakland, who took out too big of a loan, with the help of do-gooder liberals in congress and their fans in bleeding-heart liberal la-la land – you know, the same people Bloomberg wowed with his hep jokes about Snooki and Charlie Sheen.

This is the evil lie Bloomberg is now trying to dump on the Occupy movement; this is where he's choosing to spend all that third-way cred he built up over the years with the HuffPost sect. And the mayor put a cherry on the top of his Marie-Antoinette act with the rest of his speech:

"But [congress] were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for."
Bloomberg went on to say it's "cathartic" and "entertaining" to blame people, but the important thing now is to fix the problem.

Jesus … I mean, for one thing, Fannie and Freddie don’t even make loans. That’s how absurd this whole thing is.

And the condescension levels here are unbelievable, his air of aristocratic superiority almost breathtaking to behold. Listen to Bloomberg paternally conceding in one breath that it is certainly nice that some struggling people now have homes ("I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that"), just before chiding us with the next that there are sometimes negative consequences to doing something that sounds like goodness, like giving people a place of their own to live.

And then there’s this whole line in which he professes to indulgently understand the need for the "catharsis" and "entertainment" of protest, again almost like a Dad who tells his idiot teenage son that he understands the need to sow a wild oat or two, but please don’t wreck the family Mercedes next time.

Well, you know what, Mike Bloomberg? FUCK YOU. People are not protesting for their own entertainment, you asshole. They’re protesting because millions of people were robbed, by your best friends incidentally, and they want their money back. And you’re not everybody’s Dad, so stop acting like you are.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...oment-20111103

[Starving Steve]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

The Empire, FIRE. the Neoliberal Order - call it what you like - is being challenged by its domestic population.

This is one of the last things they want to see on labor's agenda:

"One of the reasons why they are doing it is because they are trying to defend ILWU workers in Longview, Washington, who are facing a behemoth of agribusiness, EGT. The driving force behind EGT is a leading agribusiness concern called Bunge. . . . Longshoremen have a debt of gratitude to the people who have organized this action today. . . . 30% of the funding of our pensions comes from that grain operation in the Pacific Northwest. This is an attempt to rupture the jurisdiction of longshore workers that we've had for over 77 years in this country. Wall Street is on the move, on the waterfront, looking for new profits, and the community are standing with the ILWU. They are standing with us for a reason. They know about 1984, when longshoremen refused to unload cargo from South Africa for 11 days. They know about the ILWU shutting down all 29 ports in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal. They know about the ILWU shutting down all 29 ports on May Day, International Workers' Day, to protest the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand about the ILWU and the actions that we took by not crossing the picket line in response to the murder on the high seas of those humanitarian activists taking supplies to Gaza. The ship was shut down for 24 hours, the Zim Line ship from Israel. They know about the actions that we took last October in support of Oscar Grant. And this resonates with the community. So now the community is saying: We want to stand in support of the ILWU. So, this connection is genuine, it's legitimate, and we embrace it."

Clarence Thomas is a former officer and long-time labor activist with ILWU Local 10.

How will it strike back?

When something similar happened in Seattle, it didn't happen again.

None of the protests to-day have anything to do ( nor should have anything to do ) with this or that bunch of insane Middle-East causes, labour-aristocrats, May Day causes, or this or that Abu-Jamal in jail.

Here is what the protests are all about: a.) WE HAVE NO WORK. Got it? At any wage, no matter how low, we have no work.
b.) WE HAVE NO INCOME. Got it? Zero. Even our interest income has been reduced to zero. c.) WE CAN NOT AFFORD OUR RENTS NOR THE MORTGAGES ON OUR HOMES. Got it? d.) WE HAVE NO MEDICAL CARE. Got it? Nothing in America and all but nothing in British Columbia. e.) WE CAN'T AFFORD OUR UTILITY BILLS. Got it? The eco-frauds destroyed atomic power and destroyed hydro-electric power in B.C. and in America. They also destroyed the coal industry, the natural-gas industry, --- and all in the cause of preserving this or that "rare and endangered field-mouse". They are now attempting to destroy the tar sands project in Alberta, and they have all but killed deep-sea drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. f.) WE HAVE NO CONGRESS IN AMERICA. The Congress was bought by lobbyists for agriculture, banking, Wall Street, and big business. g.) PUBLIC EDUCATION IN AMERICA IS A BABY-SITTING SERVICE, and sometimes not even that much. h.) WE HAVE NO DOLLAR IN AMERICA; it was inflated away to 5cents or 10cents of the purchasing power of the old silver dollar of the 1950s. i.) WE HAVE GANGS THAT NOW RULE THE STREETS AT NIGHT in many California cities. j.) WE HAVE NO UNIONS because we have no jobs. No-one represents us except for maybe Bernie Saunders in Vermont and President Obama in Washington, D.C. k.) WE HAVE NO EXPORTS because the U.S. is not competitive with China, nor competitive with much of the world. Inflation has destroyed the ability of America to compete; costs are too high, including land/site costs, electrical costs, medical costs, housing costs, wage costs, fuel costs, shipping costs, insurance costs, and planning/approval costs.

Sad-to-say, we don't even have a labour movement in America that represents us to-day.

Sad-to-say, we don't even have long-term planning nor long-term solutions in America ( or British Columbia ). When it comes to planning issues for the people's needs, the solution has been to do-without, or to defer the planning, or to attempt to muddle-through with micro-solutions, or to down-size. Rachael Maddow on MSNBC stands in front of the Hoover Dam constructed in the 1930s in the New Deal by our grandparents' generation who had to endure the Great Depression. She goes on: that generation did not down-size nor try to muddle-through with mini-solutions. Small was not beautiful to them.... She continues, that our parents and grandparents solved problems and built structures like this, and she points to the cement impoundment wall of the Hoover Dam. She continues: small solutions, doing the least possible, and trying to muddle-thru doesn't sound American. It doesn't feel American. It is not what America has ever been about in this world.... Other countries might work with micro-solutions and doing-without. We don't. Muddling-thru and trying to do the least possible has never been the American way of solving any problem.... It was not how our grandparents and our parents planned for our future now..... She then asks, what are we doing now for our children's future? What kind of future will we leave them? How will our generation be remembered? What engineering projects will we leave them?

[ Hopefully, some of the readers here might make a copy of these comments and tack them onto the door of your local Sierra Club office, or onto the door of your university's Ecology Department. Maybe a copy of this blog (including Rachael Maddow's remarks above) might be in order for the Democratic Party in America and also for the NDP in Canada. ]

[oddlots]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

Damn, I really wish I could have articulated half of what Taibbi does above. The sheer intellectual dishonesty of so much of what one hears / reads etc. is almost too hard to get your arms around, much less wrestle to the mat. And you know, I'm really trying if it isn't obvious.

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

...
Here is what the protests are all about: a.) WE HAVE NO WORK. Got it? At any wage, no matter how low, we have no work.
b.) WE HAVE NO INCOME. Got it? Zero. Even our interest income has been reduced to zero. ....

no work: check
no income: check
but hey, at least we have a new 'healthcare' plan - right?
wrong! = why we will shortly have no medical service at all, unless yer in the welfare class or work for the .gov or the fortune500

No-one represents us except for maybe....

and while i _never_ thot i would hear myself say this, it would appear even the communist from VT is starting to make sense, but the other idiot - 'represents' US???
mr steve, you gotta be in sarcastic mode again, right?

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

has Michael Hudson nailed where OWS is at this moment in time?

http://michael-hudson.com/wp-content...sky_Greece.mp3