Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

a sensitive area, no . . .

How to occupy a bank
By Ellen Brown

Occupy Wall Street has been both criticized and applauded for not endorsing any official platform. But there are unofficial platforms, including one titled the "99% Declaration", which calls for a "National General Assembly" to convene on July 4, 2012, in Philadelphia. [1]

The 99% Declaration seeks everything from reining in the corporate state to ending the Federal Reserve to eliminating censorship of the Internet. But none of these demands seems to go to the heart of what prompted Occupiers to camp out on Wall Street in the first place - a corrupt banking system that serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%. To redress that, we need a banking system that serves the 99%.

Occupy San Francisco has now endorsed a plan aimed at doing just that. In a December 1 Wall Street Journal article titled "Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea", David Weidner writes:

[P]rotesters in the Bay Area, especially Occupy San Francisco, have something their East Coast neighbors don't: a realistic plan aimed at the heart of banks. The idea could be expanded nationwide to send a message to a compromised Washington and the financial industry.

It's called a municipal bank. Simply put, it would transfer the City of San Francisco's bank accounts - about $2 billion now spread between such banks as Bank of America Corp, UnionBanCal Corp and Wells Fargo & Co - into a public bank. That bank would use small local banks to lend to the community. [2]

The public bank concept is not new. It has been proposed before in San Francisco and has a successful 90-year track record in North Dakota. Weidner notes that the state-owned Bank of North Dakota earned taxpayers more than $61 million last year and reported a profit of $57 million in 2008, when Bank of America had a $1.2 billion net loss. The San Francisco bank proposal is sponsored by city supervisor John Avalos, who has been thinking about a municipal bank for several years.

Weidner calls the proposal "the boldest institutional stroke yet against banks targeted by the Occupy movement."

Responding to the critics
He acknowledges that it will be an uphill climb. In a follow-up article on December 6, Weidner wrote:

Of course, there are critics. ... They argue that public banks would put public money at risk. Would you be surprised to know that most of the critics are bankers?

That's why you don't hear them talking about the $100 billion they lost for the California pension funds in 2008. They don't talk about the foreclosures that have wrought havoc on communities and tax revenues. They don't talk about liar loans and what kind of impact that's had on the economy, employment and the real estate market - not to mention local and state budgets. [3]

Risk to the taxpayers remains the chief objection of banker opponents. "There is no need for such lending," they say. "We already provide loans to any creditworthy applicant who comes to us. Why put taxpayer money at risk, lending for every crackpot scheme that some politician wants to waste taxpayer money on?"

Tom Hagan, who pays taxes in Maine, has a response to that argument. In a December 3 letter to the editor in the Press Herald (Portland), he maintained there is no need to invest public bank money in risky retail ventures. The money could be saved for infrastructure projects, at least while the public banking model is being proven. The salubrious result could be to cut local infrastructure costs in half. Making his case in conjunction with a Maine turnpike project, he wrote:

Why does Maine pay double for turnpike improvements? Improvements are funded by bonds issued by the Maine Turnpike Authority, which collects the principal amounts, then pays the bonds back with interest.

Over time, interest payments add up to about the original principal, doubling the cost of turnpike improvements and the tolls that must be collected to pay for them. The interest money is shipped out of state to Wall Street banks.

Why not keep the interest money here in Maine, to the benefit of all Mainers? This could be done by creating a state-owned bank. State funds now deposited in low- or no-interest checking accounts would instead be deposited in the state bank.

Those funds would be used to buy up the authority bonds and municipal bonds issued by the Maine Bond Bank. All of them. Since all interest payments would flow into the state treasury, we would end up paying half what we now pay for our roads, bridges and schools.

North Dakota has profited from a state-owned bank for 90 years. Why not Maine? [4]

The state bank could generate "bank credit" on its books, as all chartered banks are authorized to do. This credit could then be used to buy the bonds. The government's deposits would not be "spent" but would remain in the government's account, as safe as they are in Bank of America - arguably more so, since the solvency of the public bank would be guaranteed by the local government.

Critics worry about the profligate risk-taking of politicians, but the trusty civil servants at the Bank of North Dakota insist that they are not politicians; they are bankers. Unlike the Wall Street banks that had to be bailed out by the taxpayers, the Bank of North Dakota invests conservatively. It avoided the derivatives and toxic mortgage-backed securities that precipitated the credit crisis, and it helped the state avoid the crisis by partnering with local banks, helping them with capital and liquidity requirements. As a result, the state has had no bank failures in at least a decade.

With intelligent use of the ever-evolving Internet, truly effective public oversight can minimize any cronyism. California's pension funds might have avoided losing $100 billion if, instead of gambling in the Wall Street casino, they had invested in infrastructure through the state's own state bank.

The constitutional challenge
In Weidner's Wall Street Journal article, he raises another argument of opponents - that California law forbids using taxpayer money to make private loans. That, he said, would have to be changed.

The US Supreme Court, however, has held otherwise. In 1920, the constitutional objection was raised in conjunction with the Bank of North Dakota and was rejected both by the Supreme Court of North Dakota and the US Supreme Court. See Green v. Frazier, 253 US 233 (1920), [5]. (For further discussion on this, see note 6 below.)

A municipal bank would be doing with the public's funds only what Bank of America does now: it would be lending "bank credit" backed by the bank's capital and deposits. The difference would be that the local community, not Florida or Europe, would get the loans; and the city of San Francisco, not Bank of America, would get the profits.

California and many other states already own infrastructure banks that use the states' funds to back loans. If that use of public monies is legal, and if public funds can be deposited in Bank of America and used as the basis for loans to multi-national corporations, they can be deposited in the Bank of San Francisco and used as the basis for loans to the local community.

Better yet, they can be used to buy municipal bonds. Investing in municipal bonds would avoid the constitutional issue with "private loans" altogether, since the loans would be to local government.

Sending a message to Wall Street
The campaign to "move your money" has gotten a groundswell of support, but move your money into what? Weidner repeats the complaint of critics that private credit unions have gotten too big and threaten commercial banking. Having greater impact would be to "move our money" - move our local government revenues out of Wall Street banks into our own publicly owned banks, which could then generate credit for the local economy and public works.

Notes
1. See here.
2. Occupy Shocker: A Realistic, Actionable Idea, Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2011.
3. Dump your bank, MarketWatch, December 6, 2011.
4. Maine pays double for I-95 upgrades, The Portland Press Herald, December 3, 2011.
5. See GREEN V. FRAZIER, 253 U. S. 233 (1920).
6. Do State-owned Banks Violate State Constitutional Provisions? No., The Web of Debt Blog, December 2, 2011.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, PublicBankingInstitute.org. In Web of Debt, her latest of 11 books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are WebofDebt.com and EllenBrown.com.

sustained demonstrations for a public bank would draw what kind of response?

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

How to occupy a bank

Hear hear.

A good idea.

[jk]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

neat to combine this idea with debt write-down just implemented in hungary. it leads to the model of a mortgage debt write down on instruments held by the tbtf and a withdrawal of deposits from the tbtf to use locally via a local bank. win, win, win except for the tbtf.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

neat to combine this idea with debt write-down just implemented in hungary. it leads to the model of a mortgage debt write down on instruments held by the tbtf and a withdrawal of deposits from the tbtf to use locally via a local bank. win, win, win except for the tbtf.

From a systemic perspective, true.

But the municipal bank idea isn't dependent on debt writedown, whereas debt writedown requires significant political willpower in federal government and Fed which is noticeably absent.

Note also Hungary's actions are populist - the bankers are foreign whereas the victims are domestic. In the US, both are domestic and more importantly the banksters have their hooks deep into the US political system.

[jk]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

From a systemic perspective, true.

But the municipal bank idea isn't dependent on debt writedown, whereas debt writedown requires significant political willpower in federal government and Fed which is noticeably absent.

Note also Hungary's actions are populist - the bankers are foreign whereas the victims are domestic. In the US, both are domestic and more importantly the banksters have their hooks deep into the US political system.

yes, i know i was only dreaming about that part. the other part, though, moving both private and public funds to more local institutions should be doable. i have taken my professional accounts from bca to a regional, and already had my personal accounts at a regional.

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

the Ehrenreich's (liberally) weigh-in . . . .

The Making of the American 99%

And the Collapse of the Middle Class

by BARBARA EHRENREICH AND JOHN EHRENREICH

“Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.”
– E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

The “other men” (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the wealth distribution — the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the “super-rich,” in recent years.

Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellishedwith gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.

Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating “the identity of their interests.” It contained, and still contains, most “ordinary” rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly by race and ethnicity — a division that has actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed. On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to have come out of the 99% before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and, on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.

But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99% had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99% was the one between what the right calls the “liberal elite” — composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. — and pretty much everyone else.

As Harper’s Magazine columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that “liberal elite,” which supposedly favors reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports “redistributive” social policies and programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on “ordinary” middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and politically incorrect. The “elite” was the enemy, while the super-rich were just like everyone else, only more “focused” and perhaps a bit better connected.

Of course, the “liberal elite” never made any sociological sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly trained engineers may favor latte over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?

A Greased Chute, Not a Safety Net

“Liberal elite” was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1% who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.

The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in their daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers, and professors. These groups (along with middle managers and other white-collar corporate employees) occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy. They made up what we described in a 1976 essay as the “professional managerial class.” As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there have been real, longstanding resentments between the working-class and middle-class professionals. These resentments, which the populist right cleverly deflected toward “liberals,” contributed significantly to that previous era of rebellion’s failure to build a lasting progressive movement.

As it happened, the idea of the “liberal elite” could not survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.

There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in the right-wing populist strategy: even by 2000, and certainly by 2010, the class of people who might qualify as part of the “liberal elite” was in increasingly bad repair. Public-sector budget cuts and corporate-inspired reorganizations were decimating the ranks of decently paid academics, who were being replaced by adjunct professors working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were shrinking their newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms had startedoutsourcing their more routine tasks to India. Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap foreign radiologists. Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in the arts and public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.

These trends were in place even before the financial crash hit, but it took the crash and its grim economic aftermath to awaken the 99% to a widespread awareness of shared danger. In 2008, “Joe the Plumber’s” intention to earn a quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of plausibility. A couple of years into the recession, however, sudden downward mobility had become the mainstream American experience, and even some of the most reliably neoliberal media pundits were beginning to announce that something had gone awry with the American dream.

Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices dropped off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and professionals were staggered to find that their age made them repulsive to potential employers. Medical debts plunged middle-class households into bankruptcy. The old conservative dictum — that it was unwise to criticize (or tax) the rich because you might yourself be one of them someday — gave way to a new realization that the class you were most likely to migrate into wasn’t the rich, but the poor.

And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering: the downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic 99% first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free-fall.

Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.

In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60% of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.

Making Sense of the 99%

The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99%’s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people — we may never know the exact numbers — from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities.

General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.

Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase? All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist within that 99%, including distrust between members of the former “liberal elite” and those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn’t. The life experience of a young lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic to at least the 90%. “Middle class” prejudice against the homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its grip.

Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments — for example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles — but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no “Altamont moment”: no major fires and hardly any violence. In fact, the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.

Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most decisively when people are prepared to nourish and build it. If the “99%” is to become more than a stylish meme, if it’s to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action — the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recentlyBright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/...e-american-99/

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

plans are afoot - spring will tell . . .


Dec. 20, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST
99% plan new tax war on Super Rich in 2012

Commentary: Jobless youth enraged, ready with aggressive tactics


By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Warning to America’s Super Rich: Think Occupy Wall Street disappeared in winter’s cold? Wrong: The 99% just declared a new aggressive, covert special-ops war strategy to take back our democracy in 2012.

No more peaceful tent encampments in parks. No more Mahatma Gandhi nice-guy stuff. Not enough. Escalation time. Wall Street, the Super Rich and their Washington lobbyists are tone deaf, blinded by greed, trapped in their post-2008 business-as-usual bubble.

Christopher Hinton/MarketWatch

Warning, OWS tells us America’s going to be shocked by not one but hundreds of wake-up calls in 2012.

How? In a recent Washington Post op-ed column, OWS leaders are clearly accelerating their battle strategy in 2012. In what amounts to a new declaration of war that promises to electrify the 2012 elections, OWS will be using new asymmetrical warfare strategies, write the two men who’ve been the driving force behind the movement since early this year, Kalle Lasn editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine and senior editor Micah White.

Listen to some of the specific guerilla tactics they warn will be used in their coming 2012 “American Spring” assault: A “marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions, rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, ‘occupy squads’ and edgy theatrics.” And in a New Yorker magazine interview shortly after New York Mayor Bloomberg’s “military-style operation,” Lasn warned: “this means escalation, pushing us one step closer to a revolution.”

So get ready: 2012 promises to be a relentless succession of hit-and-run attacks during what already promises to be a hotly-contested presidential campaign. So forget Zuccotti Park. No long camp-outs and sit-ins. That’s so ‘60s. So last fall. Instead, be prepared for endless surprise attacks, albeit non-violent amateur versions of Seal Team Six, in-and-out fast.

‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ … a thousand times!

Kalle and White also noted in the Post that their 1,000 plus global allies are governed as separate democracies: Each picks their own targets, tactics, the timing and goals. So there may not be a coordinated D-Day re-launch attack date, like there was last Sept. 17. But lots of surprise attacks making the local and regional as well as national news throughout 2012.

As Kalle and White warned: “In this visceral, canny, militantly nonviolent phase of our march to real democracy, we will ‘float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.’ We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring.”

One big target are events related to the proposed constitutional amendment to get money out of voting and reverse corporate personhood … presidential debates venues are high-profile … Supreme Court rulings on health care, immigration, voter redistricting … any events tied to “voting out incumbents” … supporting “Occupy Colleges” anger at oppressive student loans and no jobs … Federal Reserve System money and credit to Wall Street … special interest K-Street lobbyists … state recall campaigns … Keystone XL pipeline … Congressional hearings on jobs … taxes benefits for the rich … and the too-greedy-to-fail banks … corporations who pay less in taxes than CEO salaries … occupy state and local campaign headquarters … support young Millennials rejecting America’s failed two-party system … occupy lawns of elderly citizens being evicted … protesting states who repealed voting and union rights … and many more.

Revolutionary overhaul of American politics, no compromising

Taxing the Super Rich 1% is a given. Kalle and White’s counterattack also other specific, demands for game-changing reforms that would rival anything America saw back in the Great Depression years:

“Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions and currency trades; a ban on high-frequency ‘flash’ trading; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate investment banking from commercial banking; a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate personhood and overrule Citizens United; a move toward a true cost market regime in which the price of every product reflects the ecological cost of its production, distribution and use;” and they are in favor of “the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.”

There are already several proposed amendments, like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders 28th Amendment overturning Citizens United. That’s tough. But taxes on Wall Street trading? Remember, Goldman’s traders made over $100 million net profits a day for 23 days one month a couple years ago. They’ll spend billions to fight any such tax reform.

My prediction: Wall Street will never change, never, until they suffer another catastrophic meltdown, with no bank bailouts. We haven’t completed the natural economic cycle Paulson’s team aborted in 2008. Only then can we restore Glass-Steagall and reverse that totally irrational Citizens United ruling that corporations—whose sole allegiance is merely to their stockholders, not to all Americans—have the same rights as a living human. That ruling’s not only bad law, it is bad logic, bad morals, bad economics, and ultimately, it’s bad for capitalism.

War rises from a black hole in the souls of our enraged youth

Listen to Kalle and White describing the energy driving OWS movement. It comes from deep within the collective soul of a new generation of young Americans who have been disenfranchised by clueless politicians who are trapped deep inside a corrupt two-party political system no longer capable of changing. And our youth are enraged. Listen:

“This primal cry for democracy sprang from young people who could no longer ignore the angst in their gut — the premonition that their future does not compute, that their entire lives will be lived in the apocalyptic shadow of climate-change tipping points, species die-offs, a deadening commercialized culture, a political system perverted by money, precarious employment, a struggle to pay off crippling student loans, and no chance of ever owning a home or living in comfort like their parents. Glimpsing this black hole of ecological, political, financial and spiritual crisis, the youth and the millions of Americans who joined them instinctively knew that unless they stood up and fought nonviolently for a different kind of future, they would have no future at all.”

Yes, America’s youth are the voice of the 99%, Americans inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions. American youth are fueling “the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era.”

But never lose sight of the real war here. Yes, there’s a war between the richest 1% of Americans who have seen their income grow 265% the past generation while the incomes of the other 99% have stagnated or fallen. Yes, the wealth gap is bigger now than it was in 1929 just before the market crashed.

Super Rich vs. America’s future

But to truly understand how this class war is predicting what lies ahead, know that class war is not just between the Super Rich and the 99%. It is more a generational war between America’s youth and a wealthy entrenched establishment. The young helped elect the president. Expected “change we can believe in.” Unfortunately it got worse, and they’re mad as hell.

Investors especially better watch out: This pent-up energy in America’s youth is building to a critical mass (as happened in Europe and the Arab world, and now in China and Russia), and it will explode across the economic and political landscape in 2012.

In the final analysis, however, you sense that in spite of their accelerating rage against the establishment, America’s youth, our next great generation, also had a sudden epiphany and learned a crucial lesson. Oh yes. Because their enemies didn’t just give them a great gift, but also inadvertently trained them in using a more aggressive special-ops, guerilla, quick-strike strategy. Listen and you’ll see what they learned in one night raid against them:

“Why can’t the American power elite engage with the nation’s young? Instead, they stayed aloof, ignored us and wished us away,” then “attacked us in Zuccotti Park in the dead of the night. Bloomberg’s raid was carried out with military precision. The surprise attack began at 1 a.m. with a media blackout. The encampment was surrounded by riot police, credentialed mainstream journalists who tried to enter were pushed back or arrested, and the airspace was closed to news helicopters.

What happened next was a blur of tear gas; a bulldozer; confiscation or destruction of everything in the park, including 5,000 books; upward of 150 arrests; and the deployment of a Long Range Acoustic Device, the infamous ‘sound cannon’ best known for its military use in Iraq. … This kind of military mind-set and violent response to nonviolent protesters makes no sense. It did not work in the Middle East, and it’s not going to work in America either. This is the bottom line: You cannot attack your young and get away with it.”

Repeat that “bottom line: You cannot attack your young and get away with it” And yet, that’s exactly what Wall Street, America’s Super Rich, their lobbyists, and all their bought politicians are doing: “Attacking our young.” Attacking our next generation. Attacking America’s future.

Our leaders are ideologically blind to the need to invest and invest big in jobs before this accelerating rage reaches a critical mass and ignites, triggering another American Revolution and the Second Great Depression.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/99-...012-2011-12-20

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I was riding public transit yesterday towards a meeting in the East San Francisco Bay, the BART signs were all saying northbound BART trains were delayed due to a "police action" at San Francisco airport.

I cannot find any mention of this anywhere, however - either crime or Occupy activity.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

I was riding public transit yesterday towards a meeting in the East San Francisco Bay, the BART signs were all saying northbound BART trains were delayed due to a "police action" at San Francisco airport. I cannot find any mention of this anywhere, however - either crime or Occupy activity.

Is this the cause? http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_19626896

BART delayed at West Oakland station by search for missing elderly man

Bay City News Service Posted: 12/27/2011 02:51:46 PM PST OAKLAND -- BART trains are recovering from delays Tuesday afternoon after the agency stopped a train at the West Oakland station to search for an elderly man who was reported missing, a spokesman said. The man, who is in his 80s, suffers from dementia and does not speak English, was reported missing at about 1 p.m. and was thought to be on a BART train, agency spokesman Jim Allison said. Authorities searched about a half-dozen stations and after making a public address announcement, were told that the man was possibly on a train at the West Oakland station, Allison said. Police stopped the train at about 1:45 p.m. to look for the man but could not find him, he said. The train has since been released from the station but caused delays of 15 to 20 minutes for trains the San Francisco International Airport, Daly City and Millbrae directions. The delays were expected to clear up by 3 p.m., Allison said. Authorities have not located the missing man nor confirmed that he was actually on a BART train, Allison said.

[c1ue]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

TABIO - I think you are correct.

I was misled by the sign which pointed to SFO airport - and BART didn't post any advisories on their web site.

Much ado about nothing...

[lektrode]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

TABIO - I think you are correct.

I was misled by the sign which pointed to SFO airport - and BART didn't post any advisories on their web site.

Much ado about nothing...

classic/typical overreaction by public 'works' types (and THEN theres the TSA): all you people on the BART, hundreds of yaz, depending on our SCHEDULE? = too bad for you, "...WE're going to stop the train/trash your sched, because there MIGHT be some alzheiming dude lost on the system somewhere, or maybe not? WE dont know, nor do WE care - but YOUR DAY has now been ruined - THAT IS ALL, move along - nothing to see here; have a nice day..."

that might just be the first warning/hint, mr c1ue, of whats to come, eh?

So get ready: 2012 promises to be a relentless succession of hit-and-run attacks during what already promises to be a hotly-contested presidential campaign. So forget Zuccotti Park. No long camp-outs and sit-ins. That’s so ‘60s. So last fall. Instead, be prepared for endless surprise attacks, albeit non-violent amateur versions of Seal Team Six, in-and-out fast.

i'm getting a sense theres going to be a LOT of schedules trashed in 2012...
under the heading of (and style of anonymous) "well.. since WE have nothing else better to do, WE will be screwing with the system/schedule, every chance WE get... expect us..."

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"There Will Be Violence, Mark My Words"

By Michael Thomas, Newsweek
28 December 11

magine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers' club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the '11 is ready to drink and who'll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants' joy.

Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.

Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement - I hesitate to call it "a career" - in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude's home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York's most esteemed writers and editors.

"So," he asked, "how do you like what you're doing now?"

"I like it quite a lot," I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful:

"There's one thing that bothers me, though. It's this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943."

I then added, "But here's the thing. At the same time as Funston's out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he'll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always." I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, "I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle."

And that was back when Wall Street was basically honest, brought into line thanks in part to Ferdinand Pecora's 1933 humiliation of the great bankers of the Jazz Age and even more so because of the communitarian exigencies forced on the nation by war. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, greed was definitely not good, and that proscriptive spirit lingered on right up to 1970, when everything started to change, and the traders began their long march through our great houses of finance, with the inevitable consequence that the Street's moral bookkeeping grew more and more contorted, its corruptions more elaborate, its self-interest less and less governable.What someone has called the "Greed Wars" began.

But now, I think, the game is at long last over.

As 2011 slithers to its end, none of the major problems that led to the crisis point three years ago have really been solved. Bank balance sheets still reek. Europe day by day becomes a financial black hole, with matter from the periphery being sucked toward the center until the vortex itself collapses. The Street and its ministries of propaganda have fallen back on a Big Lie as old as capitalism itself: that all that has gone wrong has been government's fault. This time, however, I don't think the argument that "Washington ate my homework" is going to work. This time, a firestorm is going to explode about the Street's head - and about time, too.

It's funny; the Big Lie has a long pedigree. A year or so ago, I was leafing through Ron Chernow's indispensable history of the Morgan financial interests, and found this interesting exchange between FDR and Russell Leffingwell, a Morgan partner and Washington fixer, a sort of Robert Strauss of his day. It dates from the summer of 1932, with FDR not yet in office:

"You and I know," wrote Leffingwell, "that we cannot cure the present deflation and depression by punishing the villains, real or imaginary, of the first post war decade, and that when it comes down to the day of reckoning nobody gets very far with all this prohibition and regulation stuff." To which FDR replied: "I wish we could get from the bankers themselves an admission that in the 1927 to 1929 period there were grave abuses and that the bankers themselves now support wholeheartedly methods to prevent recurrence thereof. Can't bankers see their own advantage in such a course?" And then Leffingwell again: "The bankers were not in fact responsible for 1927–29 and the politicians were. Why then should the bankers make a false confession?"

This time, I fear, the public anger will not be deflected. Confessions, not false, will be exacted. Occupy Wall Street has set the snowball rolling; you may not think much of OWS - I have my own reservations, although none are philosophical or moral - but it has made America aware of a sinister, usurious process by which wealth has systematically been funneled into fewer and fewer hands. A process in which Washington played a useful supporting role, but no more than that.

Over the next year, I expect the "what" will give way to the "how" in the broad electorate's comprehension of the financial situation. The 99 percent must learn to differentiate the bloodsuckers and rent-extractors from those in the 1 percent who make the world a better, more just place to live. Once people realize how Wall Street made its pile, understand how financiers get rich, what it is that they actually do, the time will become ripe for someone to gather the spreading ripples of anger and perplexity into a focused tsunami of retribution. To make the bastards pay, properly, for the grief and woe they have caused. Perhaps not to the extent proposed by H. L. Mencken, who wrote that when a bank fails, the first order of business should be to hang its board of directors, but in a manner in which the pain is proportionate to the collateral damage. Possibly an excess-profits tax retroactive to 2007, or some form of "Tobin tax" on transactions, or a wealth tax. The era of money for nothing will be over.

But it won't just end with taxes. When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street's tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell's head under the Christmas tree?) There will be kleptocrats who threaten to take themselves elsewhere if their demands on jurisdictions and tax breaks aren't met, and I say let 'em go!

At the end of the day, the convulsion to come won't really be about Wall Street's derivatives malefactions, or its subprime fun and games, or rogue trading, or the folly of banks. It will be about this society's final opportunity to rip away the paralyzing shackles of corruption or else dwell forever in a neofeudal social order. You might say that 1384 has replaced 1984 as our worst-case scenario. I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.

There should be more to America, Gore Vidal has written, than who pays tax to whom. It has been in Wall Street's interest to shrivel our sensibilities as a nation, to shove aside the verities of which General MacArthur spoke at West Point - duty, honor, country - in favor of grubby schemes and scams and "carried interest" calculations. Time, I think, to take the country back.

http://www.readersupportednews.org/o...42-the-big-lie

[don]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

[reggie]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

"There Will Be Violence, Mark My Words"

By Michael Thomas, Newsweek
28 December 11

But isn't this obvious? Was this not one of the central purposes of the OWS "movement"?

For Power Laws to apply to society, entropy must increase, and OWS certainly increases societal entropy.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Occupy Movement: First Fruit - Paradigm Shift

In late November, the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, ordered every precinct in his domain to read a statement. Officers, the commissioner said, must “respect the public’s right to know about these events and the media’s right of access to report.”

Any officer who “unreasonably interferes” with reporters or blocks photographers will be subject to disciplinary actions.

These are fine words. Of course, his words followed on the heels of a few days in mid-November when the police arrested, punched, kicked and used metal barriers to ram reporters and photographers covering the Occupy Wall Street protests.

And recent events suggest that the commissioner should speak more loudly. Ryan Devereaux, a reporter, serves as Exhibit 1A that all is not well.

On Dec. 17, Mr. Devereaux covered a demonstration at Duarte Square on Canal Street for “Democracy Now!,” a news program carried on 1,000 stations. Ragamuffin demonstrators surged and the police pushed back. A linebacker-size officer grabbed the collar of Mr. Devereaux, who wore an ID identifying him as a reporter. The cop jammed a fist into his throat, turning Mr. Devereaux into a de facto battering ram to push back protesters.

“I yelled, ‘I’m a journalist!’ and he kept shoving his fist and yelling to his men, ‘Push, boys!’ ”

Eventually, with curses and threats to arrest Mr. Devereaux, the officer relaxed his grip.

You don’t have to take his word. An Associated Press photograph shows this uniformed fellow grinding a meat-hook fist into the larynx of Mr. Devereaux, who is about 5 feet 5 inches. A video, easily found online, shows an officer blocking a photographer for The New York Times at the World Financial Center, jumping to put his face in front of the camera as demonstrators are arrested in the background.

And three nights ago, at a New Year’s Eve demonstration at Zuccotti Park, a captain began pushing Colin Moynihan, a reporter covering the protest for The Times. After the reporter asked the captain to stop, another officer threatened to yank away his police press pass. “That’s a boss; you do what a boss tells you,” the officer said, adding a little later, “You got that credential you’re wearing from us, and we can take it away from you.”

Reporting and policing can be a high-adrenaline business. But the decade-long trajectory in New York is toward expanded police power. Officers routinely infiltrate groups engaged in lawful dissent, spy on churches and mosques, and often toss demonstrators and reporters around with impunity.

When this is challenged, the police commissioner and the mayor often shrug it off and fight court orders. The mayor even argued that to let the press watch the police retake Zuccotti Park would be to violate the privacy of protesters. “It wouldn’t be fair,” he said.

As arguments go, this is perversely counterintuitive. But the mayor’s words reflect, as State Senator Eric Adams, the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel and two others wrote in a recent letter to the commissioner, a misunderstanding of long-established patrol guide procedures. The regulations are clear:

“The media will be given access as close to the activity as possible, with a clear line of sight and within hearing range of the incident.”

Precisely the opposite occurred on Nov. 15, when police officers herded reporters into a pen out of sight and sound of Zuccotti Park.

The next day, the protesters moved north and briefly occupied a lot owned by Trinity Church. As the police closed in on demonstrators, they also handcuffed and arrested Associated Press and Daily News reporters. Mayoral press representatives stoutly insisted that the police acted properly. “It is impossible to say the reporters were not breaking the law,” a spokesman wrote to me.

Let me venture into the world of the impossible then. The police patrolmen’s guide is explicit. “Members of the media,” it states, “will not be arrested for criminal trespass unless an owner expressly indicates ... that the press is not to be permitted.”

I checked with the landlord, Trinity Church. They’d made no such call. Paul J. Browne, a deputy police commissioner, agreed. That is why, he noted in an e-mail, “The reporter arrests at Duarte were voided.”

Senator Adams retired as a police captain. He loved the blue and all it implied, and acknowledges he was not above cursing the laws that restrained him.

“Who wouldn’t like unlimited power?” he said.

That is precisely why the past decade worries him so. “If the police and the mayor won’t follow their own rules, whose rules will they follow?” he says. “And very few people ask any questions.”

New York, Mr. Adams says, “is leading the way in not wanting to know where it’s going.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/ny...-policing.html