Is OWS over? The Washington Post writes its obituary today:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-insiders/post/ows-is-over/2011/11/16/gIQAk5okRN_blog.html
Friday, November 25, 2011
Ed Koch backs Bloomberg for President
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat who endorsed George W. Bush in 2004 and has backed Obama for reelection, said he believes Bloomberg should mount a presidential bid to address the “lack of leadership” in Washington. Read More
Thanksgiving in Zuccotti Park
And it was quite wonderful yesterday in Zuccotti Park, despite the newly erected NYPD guard tower on the northwest corner, the double row of barricades that keep folks from sitting on the northern ledge, the private security guards (who were involved in any number of absurd hassles: the last one I witnessed being blocking a BANJO from entering for fear it might be a terrorist weapon (move over Pete Seeger!)) and all sorts of official crazyness.
But the joyous spirit of the people and the wonderful free vegan food (not allowed to serve it inside the park) -- as well as turkey, Ben & Jerry's ice cream (Ben was spotted wandering around), absolutely yummy peach cobbler, oh rapture! -- provided all afternoon ... it just kept coming and coming and coming .... Great peaceful and yet absurd day.
By the way, for those who simply can't figure out the complexities of what the occupyers want, please check out the new post to my website:
But the joyous spirit of the people and the wonderful free vegan food (not allowed to serve it inside the park) -- as well as turkey, Ben & Jerry's ice cream (Ben was spotted wandering around), absolutely yummy peach cobbler, oh rapture! -- provided all afternoon ... it just kept coming and coming and coming .... Great peaceful and yet absurd day.
By the way, for those who simply can't figure out the complexities of what the occupyers want, please check out the new post to my website:
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Mayor Bloomberg's take on OWS
“This is not the Vietnam era when you had 400,000 people on the Mall saying ‘let’s get out of Vietnam,’” Bloomberg told MSNBC Tuesday. “This is more a frustration kind of protest. They were chanting, ‘We don’t know what we want, but we want it now.’”
Bloomberg then went on to to suggest that the protesters are also ill-informed.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mayor-bloomberg-occupy-wall-street-protesters-don-t-problem-article-1.981342#ixzz1eeeR7rYT
Bloomberg then went on to to suggest that the protesters are also ill-informed.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mayor-bloomberg-occupy-wall-street-protesters-don-t-problem-article-1.981342#ixzz1eeeR7rYT
What It Means to Occupy Los Angeles
Why the Whole Movement Should Be Watching
What It Means to Occupy Los Angeles
Los Angeles
All across Los Angeles you’ll find small, quiet occupations, clusters of tents sheltered by overpasses or erected in communities that emerge in the twilight and disappear at dawn. Most have been there for years, in places like Watts and Skid Row, a fact of life for much of Los Angeles south and east of City Hall.
Last night, the newest one, the biggest and noisiest, was offered a building, housing, and a farm. Occupy Los Angeles, just a little over 50 days old, has rattled the bars of City Hall, the building it surrounds, so emphatically that the monolith that is the City has rocked. Yesterday, the City signaled a buy-out deal to OccupyLA in exchange for removing the part of the encampment from City Hall’s south lawn.
Many of Los Angeles’s long-term advocates for social and economic change are trying to figure out what just happened. City Hall politicians played “divide and conquer” on a much bigger scale than deciding who gets to stay and who gets to leave the encampment. Community activists have whispered that the Occupy Wall Street movement across the United States is driven by people formerly of privilege, mostly white and with dashed expectations of a middle-class life. The City has forced Occupy Los Angeles to address that challenge, and where the movement goes next depends in great part on their next move.
Occupy Los Angeles, ensconced on the north and south lawns of Los Angeles’s City Hall, is the nation’s largest encampment associated with the ubiquitous Occupy Wall Street movement since Occupy Wall Street NYC in Zuccotti Park was dismantled in a police raid a week ago.
Although without a defining set of demands, Occupy Wall Street participants cite social justice, political accountability, and economic realignment as reasons to claim possession of land and visibility. The police raid on Zuccotti Park triggered a week of coordinated police incursions into Occupy encampments across the country, dismantling the sites and displacing the protesters. Except in Los Angeles.
Since before its inception OccupyLA has been unique in that it negotiated its encampment with City officials before the protesters took up residence on the City Hall lawn. Most in OccupyLA have asserted that the police belong with the occupiers as members of the 99% and have avoided encounters with police that might signal hostility. With the exception of an unexpected clash with police on Thursday morning and a nonviolent civil disobedience action that resulted in planned arrests Thursday night, OccupyLA as a whole has had no significant conflicts with LAPD.
Occupiers have come to know and chat with the uniformed police who stroll across the grounds in pairs. OccupyLA’s City Liaison committee has continued conversations with police and City officials, and after weeks of rumors, they announced an exchange offered by the City to the occupiers that would cede the most visible part of the lawn for some security for the occupiers. But it’s not that neat, and it’s not that easy. Dealings with City Hall never are.
First, there is the farmland. A couple of weeks ago, LAPD demanded the removal of garden boxes that some occupiers had carried to the lawn to grow food, apparently signaling to the City some interest among the occupiers in farming. And mind you, this is not a garden. A garden would be ambiguous; a Farm has special resonance in Los Angeles.But elected city officials have a more self-serving motive in offering a farm to the occupiers.
Just last week, at the behest of mayoral candidate Jan Perry, the City Council sold off land promised for a soccer field at the site of the former South Central Farm. In doing so, they most likely paved the way to turn the former urban gem into another pollution-pumping, gray and cold, low-wage manufacturing site. The grassroots blowback has been harsh on Mayor Villaraigosa who is busy defining himself as the green mayor of the Million Trees program, and, after he hit a taxicab while riding his bicycle, the champion of bike lanes. And it’s been harsher on LA City Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Jan Perry, who’s tying her election campaign to developers for the money, even as she paints herself to voters as the advocate for healthy eating and green space.
So, instead of paving the way to restore the South Central Farm for the low-income and predominantly African-American, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Chicano residents of the Central Alameda neighborhood, instead of leaving them even two and a half acres for a soccer field, Villaraigosa and Perry offer farmland to the predominantly white, until recently mostly middle-class occupiers of City Hall, people widely perceived as the symbolic children of Westside liberals. The offer itself will undoubtedly get more attention and add more to the environmental credibility of the two elected officials than the nail in the coffin of the South Central Farm ever will.
Then there is the building. The City’s offer includes 10,000 sq. ft. across from City Hall for a dollar a year. The offer on the table is, almost assuredly, tied up with the City’s frantic divestiture of its Community Redevelopment Agency money before the state Supreme Court rules in January on the legality of the governor’s plan to redirect CRA funds from developers to schools and public safety.
The exact location is still undisclosed, as are most of the details of the City’s offer to the occupiers, but a likely site is the mostly-vacant Parker Center, the former headquarters of LAPD, now used mostly for its jail and communications facilities. Parker Center is also where protesters who attempted to set up tents at the Bank of America plaza on Thursday were booked. In spite of that, OccupyLA is renowned for its cordial working relationship with LAPD, and a neighborly arrangement between the police and at least some of the Occupying protesters, perhaps, not a contradiction.
And there is the offer of housing for the homeless now encamped on the south lawn of City Hall. In the geography of the encampment, the south lawn is perceived as the residence of the homeless, the drug users, and the stoners, all sources of friction for the activists on the north lawn. The City is asking for its front lawn back, and it’s willing to let the north lawn campers remain, at least for now. In exchange, the City is offering to open up new shelter for the homeless who will be displaced. The effort to fracture the 99% along existing seams of class and political tension is transparent. What’s not so evident is that if the City can establish that it has provided 1,250 new beds in low-income housing since 2007, they get out from under a 9th Circuit order that allows sleeping on the sidewalk. That would leave the City free to resume citing and arresting those who do sleep outside or even sit on the sidewalk, the infamous practice Perry was fond of for cleaning up Skid Row in her district. As recently as 2010, Perry was railing against feeding people on the street. The entwinement of the protesters and the homeless, and the City’s insistence on not feeding people in public spaces, already has led to the closing of kitchen facilities at City Hall encampment.
Ironically, the court order allowing the homeless to sleep on the sidewalks is the basis for the occupiers’ encampment now going on at City Hall. Allowing the City to relocate the people on the south lawn to new low-income housing could precipitate the eventual end of the OccupyLA encampment at City Hall.
Back at the encampment, the occupiers are in the throes of debate about persistent key organizational questions, issues that the City’s offer are forcing to resolution. The determinedly direct and horizontal democracy of the Occupation, in which everyone is heard and everyone has equal weight, is being tested by the City’s insistence in dealing with a designated group. The line between those perceived as activists and those perceived as needing assistance turns out not to be as clear cut as the line between the north and south lawns. The impetus to cooperate with the police to avoid violence, long a mantra in this Occupation, has morphed into a corollary that, among the more confrontational of the occupiers, now looks like a blanket acquiescence to authority. On one hand, the deal is being hailed as a victory for the 99% and the power of OccupyLA and its tactics. On the other, it’s being denounced as a set up. And if there’s such a thing as a third hand, a large contingent of occupiers want to ask the City for more, up to and including the wholesale resignation of the mayor and city council.
And in the community, calls are already going out among grassroots groups for their own deals for 10,000 square feet in a city building and farmland, and people who’ve worked for low-income housing for years are shaking their heads. Wittingly or not, even before the deal has been consummated, the offer itself is throwing into bright relief the economic and racial divisions that simmer in Los Angeles. It remains to be seen whether those calling themselves the 99%, there on the City Hall lawn, can figure out how they can transcend the history of fissures that is Los Angeles.
Thus far, the inertia of OccupyLA has left it out of the Occupy Wall Street limelight. That may change in the next few days, as the largest standing encampment determines what course it and the Occupy Wall Street movement will take. Can the Los Angeles occupiers navigate their way and the movement though the seas churned by more experienced politicos, or will they inadvertently crash up against the complexities of realpolitik and real tensions in Los Angeles? The Los Angeles Times is already marshaling public support for the City’s offer.
STOP PRESS
At Tuesday night’s General Assembly, the people roundly rejected the City’s offer. A number of reasons were cited, but it seemed to me that chief among them was rejecting the whole idea of City Hall setting the terms of settlement.
It was reported that in meetings held since city officials made their original proposal, they have thought better of some or all of it. Negotiators reported that the terms were a lot less sure than they were yesterday. It was also reported that the City gave the occupiers until Monday to vacate. I’m not clear if the expectation to vacate was for just the south lawn or for the entire occupation. In either case, people clearly anticipated a confrontation on Monday. I missed the very end of the GA, but unless there was a hard block, the City’s offer was rejected.
LESLIE RADFORD is an adjunct professor of communications and a freelance journalist living in Los Angeles. She can be reached at LRadford@RadioJustice.net.
All across Los Angeles you’ll find small, quiet occupations, clusters of tents sheltered by overpasses or erected in communities that emerge in the twilight and disappear at dawn. Most have been there for years, in places like Watts and Skid Row, a fact of life for much of Los Angeles south and east of City Hall.
Last night, the newest one, the biggest and noisiest, was offered a building, housing, and a farm. Occupy Los Angeles, just a little over 50 days old, has rattled the bars of City Hall, the building it surrounds, so emphatically that the monolith that is the City has rocked. Yesterday, the City signaled a buy-out deal to OccupyLA in exchange for removing the part of the encampment from City Hall’s south lawn.
Many of Los Angeles’s long-term advocates for social and economic change are trying to figure out what just happened. City Hall politicians played “divide and conquer” on a much bigger scale than deciding who gets to stay and who gets to leave the encampment. Community activists have whispered that the Occupy Wall Street movement across the United States is driven by people formerly of privilege, mostly white and with dashed expectations of a middle-class life. The City has forced Occupy Los Angeles to address that challenge, and where the movement goes next depends in great part on their next move.
Occupy Los Angeles, ensconced on the north and south lawns of Los Angeles’s City Hall, is the nation’s largest encampment associated with the ubiquitous Occupy Wall Street movement since Occupy Wall Street NYC in Zuccotti Park was dismantled in a police raid a week ago.
Although without a defining set of demands, Occupy Wall Street participants cite social justice, political accountability, and economic realignment as reasons to claim possession of land and visibility. The police raid on Zuccotti Park triggered a week of coordinated police incursions into Occupy encampments across the country, dismantling the sites and displacing the protesters. Except in Los Angeles.
Since before its inception OccupyLA has been unique in that it negotiated its encampment with City officials before the protesters took up residence on the City Hall lawn. Most in OccupyLA have asserted that the police belong with the occupiers as members of the 99% and have avoided encounters with police that might signal hostility. With the exception of an unexpected clash with police on Thursday morning and a nonviolent civil disobedience action that resulted in planned arrests Thursday night, OccupyLA as a whole has had no significant conflicts with LAPD.
Occupiers have come to know and chat with the uniformed police who stroll across the grounds in pairs. OccupyLA’s City Liaison committee has continued conversations with police and City officials, and after weeks of rumors, they announced an exchange offered by the City to the occupiers that would cede the most visible part of the lawn for some security for the occupiers. But it’s not that neat, and it’s not that easy. Dealings with City Hall never are.
First, there is the farmland. A couple of weeks ago, LAPD demanded the removal of garden boxes that some occupiers had carried to the lawn to grow food, apparently signaling to the City some interest among the occupiers in farming. And mind you, this is not a garden. A garden would be ambiguous; a Farm has special resonance in Los Angeles.But elected city officials have a more self-serving motive in offering a farm to the occupiers.
Just last week, at the behest of mayoral candidate Jan Perry, the City Council sold off land promised for a soccer field at the site of the former South Central Farm. In doing so, they most likely paved the way to turn the former urban gem into another pollution-pumping, gray and cold, low-wage manufacturing site. The grassroots blowback has been harsh on Mayor Villaraigosa who is busy defining himself as the green mayor of the Million Trees program, and, after he hit a taxicab while riding his bicycle, the champion of bike lanes. And it’s been harsher on LA City Councilwoman and mayoral candidate Jan Perry, who’s tying her election campaign to developers for the money, even as she paints herself to voters as the advocate for healthy eating and green space.
So, instead of paving the way to restore the South Central Farm for the low-income and predominantly African-American, Mexican, Salvadoran, and Chicano residents of the Central Alameda neighborhood, instead of leaving them even two and a half acres for a soccer field, Villaraigosa and Perry offer farmland to the predominantly white, until recently mostly middle-class occupiers of City Hall, people widely perceived as the symbolic children of Westside liberals. The offer itself will undoubtedly get more attention and add more to the environmental credibility of the two elected officials than the nail in the coffin of the South Central Farm ever will.
Then there is the building. The City’s offer includes 10,000 sq. ft. across from City Hall for a dollar a year. The offer on the table is, almost assuredly, tied up with the City’s frantic divestiture of its Community Redevelopment Agency money before the state Supreme Court rules in January on the legality of the governor’s plan to redirect CRA funds from developers to schools and public safety.
The exact location is still undisclosed, as are most of the details of the City’s offer to the occupiers, but a likely site is the mostly-vacant Parker Center, the former headquarters of LAPD, now used mostly for its jail and communications facilities. Parker Center is also where protesters who attempted to set up tents at the Bank of America plaza on Thursday were booked. In spite of that, OccupyLA is renowned for its cordial working relationship with LAPD, and a neighborly arrangement between the police and at least some of the Occupying protesters, perhaps, not a contradiction.
And there is the offer of housing for the homeless now encamped on the south lawn of City Hall. In the geography of the encampment, the south lawn is perceived as the residence of the homeless, the drug users, and the stoners, all sources of friction for the activists on the north lawn. The City is asking for its front lawn back, and it’s willing to let the north lawn campers remain, at least for now. In exchange, the City is offering to open up new shelter for the homeless who will be displaced. The effort to fracture the 99% along existing seams of class and political tension is transparent. What’s not so evident is that if the City can establish that it has provided 1,250 new beds in low-income housing since 2007, they get out from under a 9th Circuit order that allows sleeping on the sidewalk. That would leave the City free to resume citing and arresting those who do sleep outside or even sit on the sidewalk, the infamous practice Perry was fond of for cleaning up Skid Row in her district. As recently as 2010, Perry was railing against feeding people on the street. The entwinement of the protesters and the homeless, and the City’s insistence on not feeding people in public spaces, already has led to the closing of kitchen facilities at City Hall encampment.
Ironically, the court order allowing the homeless to sleep on the sidewalks is the basis for the occupiers’ encampment now going on at City Hall. Allowing the City to relocate the people on the south lawn to new low-income housing could precipitate the eventual end of the OccupyLA encampment at City Hall.
Back at the encampment, the occupiers are in the throes of debate about persistent key organizational questions, issues that the City’s offer are forcing to resolution. The determinedly direct and horizontal democracy of the Occupation, in which everyone is heard and everyone has equal weight, is being tested by the City’s insistence in dealing with a designated group. The line between those perceived as activists and those perceived as needing assistance turns out not to be as clear cut as the line between the north and south lawns. The impetus to cooperate with the police to avoid violence, long a mantra in this Occupation, has morphed into a corollary that, among the more confrontational of the occupiers, now looks like a blanket acquiescence to authority. On one hand, the deal is being hailed as a victory for the 99% and the power of OccupyLA and its tactics. On the other, it’s being denounced as a set up. And if there’s such a thing as a third hand, a large contingent of occupiers want to ask the City for more, up to and including the wholesale resignation of the mayor and city council.
And in the community, calls are already going out among grassroots groups for their own deals for 10,000 square feet in a city building and farmland, and people who’ve worked for low-income housing for years are shaking their heads. Wittingly or not, even before the deal has been consummated, the offer itself is throwing into bright relief the economic and racial divisions that simmer in Los Angeles. It remains to be seen whether those calling themselves the 99%, there on the City Hall lawn, can figure out how they can transcend the history of fissures that is Los Angeles.
Thus far, the inertia of OccupyLA has left it out of the Occupy Wall Street limelight. That may change in the next few days, as the largest standing encampment determines what course it and the Occupy Wall Street movement will take. Can the Los Angeles occupiers navigate their way and the movement though the seas churned by more experienced politicos, or will they inadvertently crash up against the complexities of realpolitik and real tensions in Los Angeles? The Los Angeles Times is already marshaling public support for the City’s offer.
STOP PRESS
At Tuesday night’s General Assembly, the people roundly rejected the City’s offer. A number of reasons were cited, but it seemed to me that chief among them was rejecting the whole idea of City Hall setting the terms of settlement.
It was reported that in meetings held since city officials made their original proposal, they have thought better of some or all of it. Negotiators reported that the terms were a lot less sure than they were yesterday. It was also reported that the City gave the occupiers until Monday to vacate. I’m not clear if the expectation to vacate was for just the south lawn or for the entire occupation. In either case, people clearly anticipated a confrontation on Monday. I missed the very end of the GA, but unless there was a hard block, the City’s offer was rejected.
LESLIE RADFORD is an adjunct professor of communications and a freelance journalist living in Los Angeles. She can be reached at LRadford@RadioJustice.net.
We Are the 99.9%
By PAUL KRUGMAN
If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.
And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.
Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.
The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.
For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.
Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?
Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.
After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.
But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.
Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.
For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.
Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”
So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.
Published: November 24, 2011
If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.
And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.
Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.
The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.
For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.
Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?
Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.
After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.
But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could — and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent — be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.
Still, don’t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.
For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.
Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.’s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England’s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking — risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, “If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.”
So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Occupy Wall Street Thanksgiving
Posted 5 hours ago on Nov. 23, 2011, 10:51 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us.
"This is all about supporting the 99%,” said Megan Hayes, an organizer with the #OWS Kitchen working group, and a former high end chef. “So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community. We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that – community."
More than three thousand individually wrapped plates will be distributed on Thursday in accordance with New York State Health Code. People in the community have opened their homes to cook meals. Roger Fox in New Jersey will be making 250 meals, Mia Valh and Alia Gee are also making large numbers of meals. A lot of community organizations are involved and Liberty Cafe in East NY donates space for the #OWS Kitchen working group.
Locally owned family business, Texas BBQ will be providing 2,000 of the meals. They are being purchased with donated funds and will be served along with the home-cooked meals from supporters and food from the People’s Kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. The Owners of Texas BBQ are Egyptian and are supporters of the Occupy Movement.
Indigenous voices, religious leaders, food justice activists and leaders from peoples’ movements around the world are speaking on Thursday at Liberty Square. Occupy Thanksgiving is a celebration for the entire New York community. All are invited.
There will also be a can food drive. Donations of cans will go to local food banks and pantries throughout NYC.
This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us.
"This is all about supporting the 99%,” said Megan Hayes, an organizer with the #OWS Kitchen working group, and a former high end chef. “So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community. We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that – community."
More than three thousand individually wrapped plates will be distributed on Thursday in accordance with New York State Health Code. People in the community have opened their homes to cook meals. Roger Fox in New Jersey will be making 250 meals, Mia Valh and Alia Gee are also making large numbers of meals. A lot of community organizations are involved and Liberty Cafe in East NY donates space for the #OWS Kitchen working group.
Locally owned family business, Texas BBQ will be providing 2,000 of the meals. They are being purchased with donated funds and will be served along with the home-cooked meals from supporters and food from the People’s Kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. The Owners of Texas BBQ are Egyptian and are supporters of the Occupy Movement.
Indigenous voices, religious leaders, food justice activists and leaders from peoples’ movements around the world are speaking on Thursday at Liberty Square. Occupy Thanksgiving is a celebration for the entire New York community. All are invited.
There will also be a can food drive. Donations of cans will go to local food banks and pantries throughout NYC.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Why ‘Occupy Wall Street’ will keep up the fight
By Kalle Lasn and Micah White, Published: November 18
On Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg evicted the Occupy movement from its spiritual home near Wall Street. Soon afterward, a longtime Occupier sent us his testimony from the streets of New York:
“Lost my stuff, including power cord for my laptop, in the raid, something or someone cleared out my bank account, and it’s raining. I could just write a country song. I’ll tell you this: the resolve is still here. People I talk to are a healthy mixture of rage, comedy, resolve, and excitement. Also exhaustion. Maybe the raid was the best thing that could happen? Winning at last, winning at last, thank God Almighty, we are winning at last.”
For two heady months, the amorphous encampment in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park had been the symbolic heart of Occupy Wall Street, the birthplace of the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era. 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.
The Occupy Wall Street meme was launched by a poster in the 97th issue of our international ad-free magazine, Adbusters, the hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and a “tactical briefing” that we sent to our 90,000-strong “culture jammer” global network of activists, artists and rabble-rousers in mid-July. The movement’s true origins, however, go back to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. That was when the world witnessed how intransigent regimes can be toppled by leaderless democratic crowds, brought together by social media, that stand firm and courageously refuse to go home until their demands for change are met. Our shared epiphany was that America, too, needs its Tahrir Square moment and its own kind of regime change. Perhaps not the hard regime change of Tunisia and Egypt, but certainly a soft one.
Only a soft regime change can end the pervasive corruption at the heart of our political system, in which corporate money wins elections, drafts laws and trumps citizen desires. Only the plural voices of everyday Americans, the 99 percent, have the capacity to wake up the 1 percent to their greedy, self-serving ways, and to dismantle the global casino in which $1.3 trillion worth of derivatives, credit default swaps and other financial instruments slosh around every day without a hint of concern or regard for the millions of lives that such speculation can destroy.
Occupy was born because we the people feel that our country and our economy are moving precipitously in the wrong direction; that America has evolved into a kind of corporate oligarchic state, a “corporatocracy”; and yes, that what is needed is a regime change — a Tahrir moment of truth in America.
For several weeks Occupy Wall Street had a rare magic going for it. We held the high ground, stuck doggedly to our Gandhian, nonviolent ways and blindsided the cynical world with our optimism, our camaraderie and our determination to forge a way forward. It was a passionate, hopeful, democratic upsurge. Anyone who walked into Zuccotti Park was immediately captivated by the idealism of youth. Spectators of our direct-democracy process were drawn in and became politically engaged participants in our general assemblies. With nothing more than a commitment to consensus-based transparency, twinkling fingers that signal assent, “mike checks” that amplify our voices, an ethos of mutual respect and hope for the future, Occupy sparked a global democracy moment.
By mid-October, there were occupations happening in 1,000 cities around the world. Hundreds of thousands of us, mostly young people, were suddenly vibrantly alive, politically engaged and living without dead time in a way that the world had not seen since 1968. That was the year that an insurrection in Paris’s Latin Quarter suddenly exploded in cities and campuses around the world. The viral speed of that movement was uncannily similar to the way that general assemblies ricocheted around the Earth from Zuccotti Park. But whereas in 1968 we lost the thread and the movement fizzled out, this time the horizontal, open-source, peer-to-peer ways of the Internet-savvy generation, living in a much more dangerous era of multiple synergetic crises, just might be able to succeed.
Why didn’t Bloomberg come down to talk to us? Or Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein? Why didn’t President Obama acknowledge the protesters — largely the people who elected him — and mingle in the open-air town halls? What a grand gesture that would have been. How come our political leaders are so isolated, our discourse so rigid? Why can’t the American power elite engage with the nation’s young?
Instead, they stayed aloof, ignored us and wished us away. We wanted a Tahrir moment, an American Spring, a new vision of the future, and they 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.
When the youth in Tunisia rose up demanding change, Ben Ali scoffed. When they occupied Tahrir Square, Mubarak resorted to paternalism and mob violence. In Syria, Assad’s troops fire daily into the crowds. 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.
Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement. The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions — rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, “occupy squads” and edgy theatrics. And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them a “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 with a bit of luck, perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.
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.
editor@adbusters.org
Kalle Lasn and Micah White are editor in chief and senior editor, respectively, of Adbusters magazine.
On Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg evicted the Occupy movement from its spiritual home near Wall Street. Soon afterward, a longtime Occupier sent us his testimony from the streets of New York:
“Lost my stuff, including power cord for my laptop, in the raid, something or someone cleared out my bank account, and it’s raining. I could just write a country song. I’ll tell you this: the resolve is still here. People I talk to are a healthy mixture of rage, comedy, resolve, and excitement. Also exhaustion. Maybe the raid was the best thing that could happen? Winning at last, winning at last, thank God Almighty, we are winning at last.”
For two heady months, the amorphous encampment in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park had been the symbolic heart of Occupy Wall Street, the birthplace of the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era. 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.
The Occupy Wall Street meme was launched by a poster in the 97th issue of our international ad-free magazine, Adbusters, the hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and a “tactical briefing” that we sent to our 90,000-strong “culture jammer” global network of activists, artists and rabble-rousers in mid-July. The movement’s true origins, however, go back to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. That was when the world witnessed how intransigent regimes can be toppled by leaderless democratic crowds, brought together by social media, that stand firm and courageously refuse to go home until their demands for change are met. Our shared epiphany was that America, too, needs its Tahrir Square moment and its own kind of regime change. Perhaps not the hard regime change of Tunisia and Egypt, but certainly a soft one.
Only a soft regime change can end the pervasive corruption at the heart of our political system, in which corporate money wins elections, drafts laws and trumps citizen desires. Only the plural voices of everyday Americans, the 99 percent, have the capacity to wake up the 1 percent to their greedy, self-serving ways, and to dismantle the global casino in which $1.3 trillion worth of derivatives, credit default swaps and other financial instruments slosh around every day without a hint of concern or regard for the millions of lives that such speculation can destroy.
Occupy was born because we the people feel that our country and our economy are moving precipitously in the wrong direction; that America has evolved into a kind of corporate oligarchic state, a “corporatocracy”; and yes, that what is needed is a regime change — a Tahrir moment of truth in America.
For several weeks Occupy Wall Street had a rare magic going for it. We held the high ground, stuck doggedly to our Gandhian, nonviolent ways and blindsided the cynical world with our optimism, our camaraderie and our determination to forge a way forward. It was a passionate, hopeful, democratic upsurge. Anyone who walked into Zuccotti Park was immediately captivated by the idealism of youth. Spectators of our direct-democracy process were drawn in and became politically engaged participants in our general assemblies. With nothing more than a commitment to consensus-based transparency, twinkling fingers that signal assent, “mike checks” that amplify our voices, an ethos of mutual respect and hope for the future, Occupy sparked a global democracy moment.
By mid-October, there were occupations happening in 1,000 cities around the world. Hundreds of thousands of us, mostly young people, were suddenly vibrantly alive, politically engaged and living without dead time in a way that the world had not seen since 1968. That was the year that an insurrection in Paris’s Latin Quarter suddenly exploded in cities and campuses around the world. The viral speed of that movement was uncannily similar to the way that general assemblies ricocheted around the Earth from Zuccotti Park. But whereas in 1968 we lost the thread and the movement fizzled out, this time the horizontal, open-source, peer-to-peer ways of the Internet-savvy generation, living in a much more dangerous era of multiple synergetic crises, just might be able to succeed.
Why didn’t Bloomberg come down to talk to us? Or Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein? Why didn’t President Obama acknowledge the protesters — largely the people who elected him — and mingle in the open-air town halls? What a grand gesture that would have been. How come our political leaders are so isolated, our discourse so rigid? Why can’t the American power elite engage with the nation’s young?
Instead, they stayed aloof, ignored us and wished us away. We wanted a Tahrir moment, an American Spring, a new vision of the future, and they 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.
When the youth in Tunisia rose up demanding change, Ben Ali scoffed. When they occupied Tahrir Square, Mubarak resorted to paternalism and mob violence. In Syria, Assad’s troops fire daily into the crowds. 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.
Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement. The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions — rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, “occupy squads” and edgy theatrics. And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them a “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 with a bit of luck, perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.
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.
editor@adbusters.org
Kalle Lasn and Micah White are editor in chief and senior editor, respectively, of Adbusters magazine.
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