Category: politics

“Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good.” —Chesterton

Prepare thine purposes.

Tom Ferguson, professor at UMass-Boston, spells out the damaging effects of big money.

“Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees.

“You want it — you buy it… !

“They even sell on the installment plan: You want to chair an important committee? That’ll be $200,000 down….”

I’m as worried that this matter is not, has not been, in every newspaper every day. That’s corruption too.

Let’s be as disobedient as protest is required and as civil as progress is necessary !

Ornery is important and calm is crucial. Ben Franklin used people skills and social powers. All else denied.  A talker, a schemer. Guile. Cunning. Persuasion.

But in England. So in England let’s look:

After riots spread across England in August, Cameron briefly raised the idea of giving British authorities greater power to disrupt the use of cell phone services or social networking tools during civil unrest.

The prime minister frets.

After the riots, Cameron summoned executives from Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry for crisis talks to disrupt cell phone services and social networks during disorder.

Police accuse young criminals of using Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry.

Governments “cannot leave cyberspace open to the criminals and the terrorists that threaten our security and our prosperity but at the same time we cannot just go down the heavy-handed route. The balance we have got to strike is between freedom and a free-for-all.”

The debate continues.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the fact that criminals and terrorists can exploit digital networks is not “justification for states to censor their citizens.”

He asserts Britain must reject “the view that government suppression of the Internet, phone networks and social media at times of unrest is acceptable.”

The Internet. Let’s look at the Internet:

Russia and China are asking for tighter regulation of the Internet through binding international treaties.

America?

Yes. Let’s know what America is doing:

“What citizens do online should not, as some have suggested, be decreed solely by groups of governments making decisions for them somewhere on high,” said U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.

Will government seek new powers to shut down the web in times of crisis?

There’s more than 60 members of the House Finance Committee.

Why so many? Because Wall Street lobbyists make their votes pay !

It’s time to erect a wall. A wall we really need.

Why? Because our Representatives aren’t !

• Few Americans want Washington to adopt a laissez faire approach to energy issues.   Only about one in four Americans (27 percent) – including 47 percent of Republicans, 27  percent of Independents, 11 percent of Democrats and a surprisingly small 57 percent of Tea Party supporters  — say “Congress and the President should stay out of the energy markets and let private enterprise have a free hand in picking energy sources and setting prices.”
• Excessive corporate influence may explain the gap between where some in Washington are on energy policy … and where mainstream America is.   More than seven in 10 Americans (72 percent) – including 62 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of Independents, 83 percent of Democrats, and over half of Tea Party supporters (54 percent) — think that “America’s oil, coal and natural gas companies have a disproportionate influence on Congress and the White House when it comes to making national energy policy.”
• Americans do not see more clean energy as a roadblock to economic recovery.  More than two thirds of Americans (69 percent) – including 59 percent of Republicans, 73  percent of Independents, 78 percent of Democrats and a plurality of Tea Party supporters (48 percent) – think it would be a “bad idea” for the U.S. ” to ‘put on hold’ progress towards cleaner energy sources during the current economic difficulty.”
• Most Americans want continued movement away from fossil fuels.   About three in four Americans (76 percent) – including 62 percent of Republicans, 76 percent of Independents, 90 percent of Democrats and half of Tea Party supporters – agree strongly or somewhat with the following statement:  “Smarter energy choices are the key to creating a future that is healthy and safe because fossil fuels create toxic wastes that are a threat to our health and safety.”
• Most Americans would favor a moratorium on coal-fired power plants.  Nearly two thirds of Americans (65 percent) – including 55 percent of Republicans, 68 percent of Independents, 72 percent of Democrats, and about half (49 percent) of Tea Party backers — would support a phase-out of coal fired power plants in the United States” if “increased energy efficiency and off the shelf renewable technologies such as wind and solar could meet our energy demands.”
• Concerns about water are present in America on a strongly bipartisan basis.  More than three in four Americans (78 percent) – including 68 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Independents, 85 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Tea Party backers — agree with the following statement:  “Water shortages and clean drinking water are real concerns.  America should put the emphasis on first developing new energy sources that require the least water and cause minimal water pollution.”
• Few Americans dismiss a connection between extreme weather events and climate change.   Fewer than one in five Americans (17 percent) think that “climate change is not a factor” in “at least 10 weather related disasters caused by so called extreme weather – (that) have occurred so far in 2011 involving $1 billion or more each in damages – now totaling about $45 billion.”   Fewer than half (45 percent) of Tea Party members fall into the climate change denial camp on this question.

Other findings include the following:

• Nearly three in five (58 percent) of Americans are now aware of “the natural gas drilling process sometimes referred to as ‘fracking.'”   About four in five Americans (79 percent) – including 66 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Independents, 91 percent of Democrats, and 55 percent of Tea Party supporters — say they are very or somewhat concerned “about this issue (fracking) as it relates to water quality.”
• Roughly three out of four Americans (74 percent) – including 68 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of Independents, 81 percent of Democrats, and 58 percent of Tea Party backers – agree with the following statement:  “The cost of electricity paid by consumers is only part of the price of energy. We have to look at the whole picture — including water quality, environmental damages and human health problems — when we talk about what a particular source of energy costs America.”

Full survey findings are available on online at http://www.CivilSocietyInstitute.org.

The Seventh Amendment. Do you know the Seventh Amendment is one of our most important?

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Yes folks. You may bring any complaint more than $20 to a jury of your peers. Guaranteed.

Then why is there a steady increase in mandatory arbitration?

“Corporate America does not trust the jury.” —Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick asks, Will corporations continue to immunize themselves against ordinary people? Can consumers sue credit repair companies for excessive fees? Can investors bring securities fraud suits for insider trading? Can oil and gas workers injured on the job sue to receive workers’ compensation?

America argues. No, that’s unfair. America answers.

Example of an argument:

“We need to begin to compensate teachers at the same level we do hedge fund managers.”

Example of an answer:

“No. We need to begin to compensate hedge fund managers at the same level we do teachers.”

“Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” -Voltaire

How did we get here?

Consider this thought experiment. If you were really, really, really rich — say, not just part of the routinely opulent 1%, but a card-carrying member of the eye-poppingly decadent .01% — what part of your life would be American?

If you had the money, I’d bet you’d drive a German car, wear British shoes and an Italian suit, keep your savings in a Swiss bank, vacation in Koh Samui with shopping expeditions to Cannes, fly Emirates, develop a palate for South African wine, hire a French-trained chef, buy a few dozen Indian and Chinese companies, and pay Dubai-style taxes.

Were to you have the untrammeled economic freedom to, I’d bet you’d run screaming from big, fat, wheezing American business as usual, and its coterie of lackluster, slightly bizarre, and occasionally grody “innovations”: spray cheese, ATM fees, designer diapers, disposable lowest-common-denominator junk made by prison labor, Muzak-filled big-box stores, five thousand channels and nothing on but endless reruns of Toddlers in Tiaras — not to mention toxic mega-debt, oxymoronic “healthcare,” decrepit roads, and once-proud cities now crumbling into ruins. Sure, you’d probably still choose to use Google on your iPhone to surf the web — but that’s about far as it’d go.

Ponder this:

When you think you are the highest point, you don’t look up !

 
Ponder this:

“…the energy, the optimism, the altruism and the humanity that won the admiration and devotion of so many of my generation who found in America in the postwar decades the idealism and excitement of a society that looked to the future with high hopes and moral purpose.
 
“This perspective has alas threatened to turn sour over the last 30 years as cynicism, greed and fundamentalist clap-trap have been mobilised to occupy the temple of enlightenment.”

 

86 percent of New York voters agree with the protesters’ views.

When it comes to social justice the USA ranks near the bottom.

 

 

New York Magazine:

Rising income inequality, like climate change, is an ideologically inconvenient issue for conservatives. They would prefer not to discuss it altogether. If forced to discuss it, they will generally either deny its existence or simply carry on as if it doesn’t exist.

The underlying facts, like the facts of climate change, are stark.

Over the last few decades, income growth for most Americans has slowed to a crawl, while income for the very rich has exploded. That’s a reversal of the three decades following World War II, when all income groups got richer, with the poor and middle class rising at a faster rate than the rich.

Crucially, the Congressional Budget Office’s new analysis shows that changes in government policy over this period have made inequality worse. (In CBO-speak: “The equalizing effect of transfers and taxes on household income was smaller in 2007 than it had been in 1979.”)

We’re not having a debate about how to reverse or even stop the growth of inequality. Nobody has a real plan to do that.

The Democratic plan is to slightly arrest the growth of inequality by hiking taxes on the rich a few percentage points, so as to minimize the need to cut the social safety net. The Republican plan is to slash taxes for the rich and programs for the poor, thereby massively increasing inequality.

That is a hard position to defend in the context of exploding inequality, and conservatives would rather not defend it. Instead the right’s response has been to persistently deny or ignore the facts.

Election reform !

They tell you we are dreamers.

The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are.

We are not dreamers.

We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare.

We are not destroying anything.

We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. –Slavoj Zizek

 

Occupy Design is a grassroots project connecting designers with on-the-ground demonstrators in the Occupy Together movement. The project’s goal is to create freely available visual tools —the Occupy Design Toolkit— around a common graphic language to unite the 99%.

The New Order Pyramid | October 2011

Is a monument to remember those who have given their lives and spirit standing up to injustice and inequality. It is a space to celebrate our unalienable human right to life and liberty.

The site we propose for the New Order Pyramid would be Tahrir Square. We propose the construction of an inverted pyramid shaped auditorium for people to come and talk and participate to share ideas and to have a focal point.

Steps flow downwards for you to sit and voice your ideas, listen, participate and occupy.

We are seeing sites popping up around the World, they start as make shift campsites demarcating the space where a collective human spirit has chosen to voice dissent.

These spaces in time will grow into architectural signifiers, marking the dawn of the new age of global human co-operation, overturning inappropriate systems of governance, finance and trade.

Paul Fussell in his book Class:

“In the United States everything is coated with a fine layer of fraud.”

Speculation identified as gas, food price driver

“Research analyzing commodity markets for the last 27 years shows that Wall Street’s speculative trading through commodity index funds is causing market disruptions, interfering with price discovery, increasing the costs for businesses to hedge, and needlessly pushing prices higher for all Americans.

“It shows how the biggest banks, all bailed out by the taxpayers in 2008, are lining their pockets at the expense of America’s families and farmers.”

 

Frank Schaefer:

These protesters have not come to work within the system.

They are not pleading with Congress for electoral reform. They know electoral politics is a farce and have found another way to be heard and exercise power. They have no faith, nor should they, in the political system or the two major political parties. They know the press will not amplify their voices, and so they created a press of their own. They know the economy serves the oligarchs, so they formed their own communal system. This movement is an effort to take our country back.

This is a goal the power elite cannot comprehend. They cannot envision a day when they will not be in charge of our lives.

The elites believe, and seek to make us believe, that globalization and unfettered capitalism are natural law, some kind of permanent and eternal dynamic that can never be altered. What the elites fail to realize is that rebellion will not stop until the corporate state is extinguished. It will not stop until there is an end to the corporate abuse of the poor, the working class, the elderly, the sick, children, those being slaughtered in our imperial wars and tortured in our black sites. It will not stop until foreclosures and bank repossessions stop. It will not stop until students no longer have to go into debt to be educated, and families no longer have to plunge into bankruptcy to pay medical bills. It will not stop until the corporate destruction of the ecosystem stops, and our relationships with each other and the planet are radically reconfigured.

And that is why the elites, and the rotted and degenerate system of corporate power they sustain, are in trouble. That is why they keep asking what the demands are. They don’t understand what is happening. They are deaf, dumb and blind.

Eddie McShane:

I live in New York City and until last week had not gone to Zucotti Park to see the Occupy Wall Street protests for myself. I wanted to see who these people were so I decided to set up a portable studio and make formal portraits. I feel that these stripping away all of the background noise and just showing the people demonstrates their undeniable humanity.

Their faces tell their story.

What I learned is that these people are not whackos, anarchists, or indigents.

They are overwhelmingly working and middle class people of all backgrounds who feel that their government has failed them and does not represet their interests. They are there to protest corruption, not to tear the rich from their penthouses and drag them down in to the streets. They just want the basic promise of America; that everyone has a fair chance to live with opportunity and dignity.

These people are your friends and neighbors, their children, and your own.

They are Americans, they are Patriots, and they have a right to be heard.

via Toronto’s Globe & Mail crack research team:

Culture.

http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/

I said culture.

We have a bit of that.

…come to think of it, our world might be way-y-y-y better off if media wasn’t off kilter. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/going-down-hard.html

by Frank Schaeffer

If the Wall Street protests are to mean anything long term they have to also focus on the enablers of the top 1 percent that have raped the 99. Fundamentalist religion made this rape possible.

The source of the empowering of the top 1 percent super wealthy and the economic rape of rest of us is the religion of Evangelical fundamentalism. Note I didn’t say religion per se, but religious fundamentalism is responsible.

Why?

Because without the fundamentalists and their ‘values’ issues the lower 99 percent could not have been convinced to vote against their (our) economic self-interest, in other words, vote for Republicans serving only billionaires instead of the rest of us.

Wall Street is a legitimate target for long overdue protest but so are the centers of religious power that are the gate keepers of Republican Party “values” voters that make the continuing economic rape possible.

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“Many Americans assume that’s just how democracy works, that this is how it’s always been, that it’s the system the Founders created. But what we have today is a far cry from what the Founders intended.“

Dave Winer on Occupy Wall Street:

Look at all the attention this leaderless movement has managed to draw to itself, without any kind of a media budget. And I have a feeling this is just beginning.

Hopefully we will build decentralized communication networks that allow ideas to be distributed instantaneously without being controlled by Time-Warner, News Corp, Comcast, or even Google, Twitter or Facebook.

Of course we already have the technology, it’s just what the Internet already does. But we have to build a critical mass outside the corporate silos to have the independence we’ll need, imho.

What is OWS so angry about?
comment snippet: It’s your legislator, stupid.

Corporate America did not infiltrate the government. The government infiltrated corporate America.

“Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.” 
– Nietzsche

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Dave Winer’s photo-log OccupyWeb.org here.
More insightful OWS pics here: http://richnacin.tumblr.com/.

 *thumbtack map of currently ‘occupied cities’

 

The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy.

The Nation:

Ten years later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world.

*sick of funding war lords*

Salon special report:

“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year.”

LA Times special report:

An entire industry has sprung up to sell an array of products, including high-tech motion sensors and fully outfitted emergency operations trailers. The market is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014.

Like the military-industrial complex that became a permanent and powerful part of the American landscape during the Cold War, the vast network of Homeland Security spyware, concrete barricades and high-tech identity screening is here to stay.

The Department of Homeland Security, a collection of agencies ranging from border control to airport security sewn quickly together after Sept. 11, is the third-largest Cabinet department…

…trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

Harvard’s Umair Haque calculates values; asking:

“Do we know what it means to live well?”

Empire after empire has reached through conquest after conquest for the triumphs of opulence–and all have not just fallen; all have been prone to the glitches and crashes inherent in it’s calculus. Not merely injustice between people–but injustice within people; lives spent in frenzied pursuit of the trivially forgettable.

But please, somebody, say it simple.

Autocrats. Dictators. Power.

“Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the ‘national interest’—or even their subjects—unless they have to.”

How do autocrats and dictators maintain power? Bad behavior!

Julian Assange at TED:

“I’m not sure about the incident. But the core values: well,
capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture them.”

Thaler puts transparency in government above all.

It is essential that people feel they are – and actually are – making a free choice.

But when Richard Thaler says the right outcomes are defined by the people being nudged, it does beg a question about how democracy works.

Do we know there is behavioral economics?

“Some people claim the techniques developed through BE are helping governments and big corporations manipulate us without our knowing.

“Should we be scared?”

We want to look at this 1968 documentary, yes it’s raw, about salesmen, well, let’s just say about bibles, before pots & pans, before encyclopedias and Fuller Brush, before real estate, pink Cadillacs and Tupperware, before gold parties, far before gold parties… [nudge]

How far is our democracy from missionaries and bible sales?

Doorways are forever inviting.