Tag: TMC Politics

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

We Don’t Need No Permits To March

October 15 Times Sq.

Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) — Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City today culminated with a Times Square rally that drew thousands opposed to economic inequality, echoed by protests from London to Tokyo.

Participants in the month-old movement marched past a JPMorgan Chase & Co. branch early in the day to urge clients to close accounts. Twenty-four were arrested later at a Citigroup Inc. office, the police said, and about 6,000 gathered in Times Square, the organizers estimated.

Hong Kong, Sydney, Toronto and other cities also saw protests, which turned violent in Rome, in what organizers called a “global day of action against Wall Street greed.” Backers say they represent “the 99 percent,” a nod to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s study showing the top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of U.S. wealth.

“The world will rise up as one and say, ‘We have had enough,'” Patrick Bruner, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman, said in an e-mail. A news release from the organization said there were demonstrations in 1,500 cities worldwide, including 100 in the U.S.

NYC Live Updates:

   8:50 p.m. 700 reported in Washington Square Park. Music and food there.

   8:30 p.m. Scanner says riot cops in full gear, nets out, headed to the crowd, 47th and 6th.

   8:11 p.m. White shirt just ordered #NYPD line AWAY from barricades. Crowd ROARS

   8:08 p.m. Tension escalating, police ordering protesters to step away from barricades.

   8:02 p.m. Mario: 4 paddy wagons and arrests at 46 and 6th ave.

   8:00 p.m. Police are arresting occupiers at 46th and 6th.

   7:30 p.m. Unconfirmed estimates ranging as high as 50,000 people in Times Square.

   6:45 p.m. Police have trapped people in times square with barricades.

   6:35 p.m. A horse just went down. Crowd is going wild. NYPD says anyone near barricade is going to jail. This is is inexcusable. (Source)

   6:22 p.m. Police on horseback arrive. Police pulling people out of crowd and attacking them. Protesters are rushing barricades.

   6:10 p.m. Police in riot gear retreat.

   6:05 p.m. Police are in riot gear.

   6:00 p.m. Backup has arrived. Estimated 15,000 in Times Square

   5:49 p.m. Orange nets along Broadway.

   5:45 p.m. Five thousand more on their way from Liberty Square and other locations.

   5:30 p.m. Thousands arrive in Time Square. Now livestreaming: http://www.livestream.com/occu…

Greg Mitchel at The Nation has a great running account of the event in Times Square and from around the world with links: The OccupyUSA Blog: Special Weekend Edition!

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Over 3,000 people gathered at Liberty Plaza in the pre-dawn hours this morning to defend the peaceful Occupation near Wall Street. The crowd cheered at the news that multinational real estate firm Brookfield Properties will postpone its so-called ‘cleanup’ of the park and that Mayor Bloomberg has told the NYPD to stand down on orders to remove protesters. On the eve of the October 15 global day of action against Wall Street greed, this development has emboldened the movement and sent a clear message that the power of the people has prevailed against Wall Street. …

On October 15th, Occupy Wall Street will demonstrate in concert over 951 cities in 82 countries and counting as people around the globe protest in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.

This is the Live Feed of #OWS from The Guardian: Occupy Wall Street live: protesters claim victory as clear-up called off

Follow all the developments after park owners call off a clear-up of the Occupy Wall Street camp in Zuccotti Park in New York

I strongly suspect the decision to call off the cleaning is but a temporary reprieve.  Emperor Mike used some pretty harsh language yesterday accusing the City Council members of “threatening” the owners of the park

Mr. Bloomberg, speaking later in the morning on his weekly radio program on WOR-AM (710), attributed the decision to postpone the cleaning to the company that owns the park, Brookfield Properties, which he said had been pressured to back off by elected officials. Mr. Bloomberg indicated that he had some misgivings about the decision, and was not sure what would happen next.

“Yesterday, as of 8 o’clock at night, they were going ahead to do it, but as of midnight they called and said they wanted to postpone the cleaning operations to see if they could work out an agreement with the protesters,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “My understanding is that Brookfield got lots of calls from many elected officials threatening them and saying if you don’t stop this we’ll make your life more difficult.”

That is an ugly allegation.

Bloomberg and his cronies will be back with some other reason to put an end to the protest. He must protect his fellow oligarchs from the embarrassment by the masses before the world. Right now it might create an international incident.

Solidarity hero Lech Walesa [sic] is flying to New York to show his support for the Occupy Wall Street protesters. “How could I not respond,” Walesa told a Polish newspaper Wednesday. “The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand.” []

Wałęsa says he’s coming to help protest economic “unfairness.” “Union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism,” he warned.

On October 15th people from all over the world will take to the streets and squares.

From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent protest.

The ruling powers work for the benefit of just a few, ignoring the will of the vast majority and the human and environmental price we all have to pay. This intolerable situation must end.

United in one voice, we will let politicians, and the financial elites they serve, know it is up to us, the people, to decide our future. We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers who do not represent us.

On October 15th, we will meet on the streets to initiate the global change we want. We will peacefully demonstrate, talk and organize until we make it happen.

It’s time for us to unite. It’s time for them to listen.

People of the world, rise up on October 15th!

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This woman is an ignorant idiot pandering to uninformed ignoramuses that read the NY Post. Media Matters critiques her latest spew that she is peddling in book stores. Here’s a summation of a chapter:

“Secret halal meat”

In a chapter on “cultural jihad,” Geller covers subjects like “The Islamic/Leftist Alliance,” “The Mosqueing of the Workplace,” and “the Islamization of the Schools.” There’s also a section on “Secret Halal Meat,” in which she highlights “numerous explosive revelations” about “the little-reported fact that much of the meat in Europe is being processed as halal and yet sold without the halal label.” Geller declared this to be “a little-known strike against freedom” and that “we are being forced into consuming meat slaughtered by means of a barbaric, torturous, and inhuman method: Islamic slaughter, the cutting of the animal’s throat without stunning or any other form of mitigation for the animal’s pain.” Geller went on to assert that it “appears clear” that “some of this halal meat is going to public school lunch programs.”

Even a goy, Atrios, got it right, the differences are negligible in the Kosher and Hallal method of slaughter, “slit throat and bleed without stunning.” If you want to nit pick, Go Vegan.

Sorry for the rant but this just got my goat. 😉

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Everyone one of these Democrats should lose the support of the DCCC and be primaried.

Blue Dogs backing corporate tax holiday

House Blue Dogs are on board with a temporary corporate tax holiday they argue will boost economic growth.

The group joined a growing bipartisan chorus pressing the congressional deficit-reduction committee to give U.S. multinational corporations a tax break in exchange for investing at home.

[]

The Blue Dog Coalition is backing a bipartisan bill sponsored by Reps. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) and Kevin Brady (R-Texas) that would remove a barrier keeping upwards of $1.4 trillion in American private-sector money overseas, which is similar to a Senate bill introduced last week by Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

I have no idea what experts they are citing the article doesn’t say. I do know the history if the last time this was done in 2004 when they gave 92% of the money to themselves. Nor did the law which stated the money could not be used to raise dividends or to repurchase shares, stop them.:

There is no evidence that companies that took advantage of the tax break – which enabled them to bring home, or repatriate, overseas profits while paying a tax rate far below the normal rate – used the money as Congress expected.

“Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.& D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” concluded the study by three economists, including a former official of the Bush administration who took part in the discussions leading to enactment of the plan in 2004.

The study, titled “Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act,” was released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was written by Dhammika Dharmapala, a law professor at the University of Illinois; C. Fritz Foley, an associate professor of finance at Harvard Business School; and Kristin J. Forbes, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was a member of the president’s council of economic advisers from 2003 to 2005.

“The restrictions on how the money will be spent seem to have been completely ineffective,” Ms. Forbes said in an interview this week.

“Dell was a great example,” she added, referring to Dell Computer. “They lobbied very hard for the tax holiday. They said part of the money would be brought back to build a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. They did bring back $4 billion, and spent $100 million on the plant, which they admitted would have been built anyway. About two months after that, they used $2 billion for a share buyback.”

The give away also cost the country more than 500,000 jobs:

Following a tax holiday on repatriated foreign earnings in 2004, 58 corporations that benefitted from the holiday slashed a total of nearly 600,000 jobs. These 58 giant corporations accounted for nearly 70 percent of the total repatriated funds and collectively saved an estimated $64 billion from what they otherwise would have owed in taxes.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation this current clamor by for a tax holiday by the multinational corporations that barely pay any taxes now, would cost the US $80 billion and would do nothing to reduce the deficit and wouldn’t protect or create jobs:

Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who is a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, yesterday circulated an estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation pegging the cost of a repatriation bill at $78.7 billion. An unsuccessful effort to create a similar holiday in 2009 would have cost the U.S. government about $30 billion over a decade in forgone revenue.

“This means we will have to borrow more from foreign creditors or shift a greater burden to American small businesses and families,” Doggett said. Congressional estimators projected that companies would repatriate about $700 billion if offered a 5.25 percent rate, compared with $300 billion during the tax holiday enacted in 2004.

[]

Democrats also maintain that the bill does too little to protect jobs at companies that repatriate overseas funds. They have pointed to such examples as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), which returned $14.5 billion to the U.S. at a low rate in 2004 and cut its workforce by 14,500 employees in 2005.

Primary these idiots

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Blogger extraordinaire, Jesse LaGreca, aka MinistryOfTruth, was interviewed by Susie Madrak of Crooks & Liars. Jesse recounted at Daily Kos about being assaulted by a man who was pitching a fit and looking for a fight and discovered that James O’Keefe was lurking in Liberty Park, as well as, some right wing trolls. He warned that the “Empire” is striking back.

The Los Angeles City Council has introduced a three page resolution in support of #OccupyLA that is expected to pass today. h/t Crooks & Liars

From Kevin Gosztola , who has been indefatigable in his coverage of #OWS at FDL:

The issue of the Democratic Party trying to co-opt the growing “Occupy” movement has become a topic of establishment media conversation. It is being discussed through the lens of whether this movement will do for Democrats what the Tea Party did for Republicans in 2010. It is also being discussed in terms of how to use the broad-based anger and energy to advance Democratic policy proposals in Congress. []

Democrats may believe “people are people” but they certainly haven’t done anything to address the issue of corporate personhood in America. The passage of the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights is nothing to tout. As William Greider of The Nation wrote, it basically consisted of regulatory rules that had previously been adopted by the Federal Reserve. It gave the industry nine additional months to “gouge” customers before the new rules went into effect. And, Visa and MasterCard, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were “free to raise future interest rates to the sky-without limit.” Additionally, Schultz must be lunatic if she thinks this group is going to coalesce behind the nomination of Richard Cordray, whom Obama picked because he didn’t want to upset his Wall Street donors and push for Elizabeth Warren to be nominated. []

The people’s ability to influence power has been neutralized by corporate and special interest money. It has been neutralized by bureaucracies whose existence in government is more important than the damage they do to liberty and justice in society. And, it has been neutralized by two parties who give Americans the illusion of choice and cite the other party’s most frightening and upsetting features to intimidate citizens into perpetuating and reinforcing the worst aspects of the system.

The people have woken up. They won’t go to sleep because they realize the last option they have for improving their lives and the greater society is public rebellion. Everything else is futile.

Included in Kevin’s great analysis of the Democrats’ attempts to co-opt the OWS movement was this segment of “Hardball” with Chris Matthews and Ron Reagan

   REAGAN: This is a movement that has a broad-based anger and the challenge it seems to me for the Democratic Party if they want to somehow join the movement or co-opt the movement, however you want to put it, is that these folks are just as mad at them as they are with the Republicans. The Republicans may be more egregiously in the hip pocket of Wall Street and the bankers but the Democrats are too. There are plenty of Democratic congressmen and senators who have staked their whole careers on providing tax loopholes for the richest 1%. They’re not the natural allies of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.

   MATTHEWS: And, by the way, let’s not forget the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House at numerous times in our lifetime and they didn’t fix the tax system when they had all the power in the world. []

   REAGAN:The problem is, again, that these people are angry at a system that has been rigged by both parties to serve moneyed interests. The Democrats have been complicit in that just as the Republicans have been complicit in that. Your question to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, “What are you going to offer these people?” is exactly the question. What are the Democrats going to offer these people? Are they going to throw some bankers in jail? Are they going to close the loopholes for the richest 1%? I’m not so sure that all the Democrats are on board with that.

   MATTHEWS: I wonder if both parties aren’t hoping for colder weather to come soon because then they can say what a great demonstration of unhappiness and how wonderful it’s over because then we don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Matthews is a clueless, twit. The cold didn’t stop the protests in Madison, WI.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It sounded like Senate Majority Leader did just that last week in getting a vote that overrule the Senate parliamentarian’s decision. And while it didn’t end filibuster, it did leave the door open for its eventual demise. This is what took place this evening as initially reported by The Hill:

Reid and 50 members of his caucus voted to change Senate rules unilaterally to prevent Republicans from forcing votes on uncomfortable amendments after the chamber has voted to move to final passage of a bill.

Reid’s coup passed by a vote of 51-48, leaving Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fuming.

The surprise move stunned Republicans, who did not expect Reid to bring heavy artillery to what had been a humdrum knife fight over amendments to China currency legislation.

As Ryan Grim and Michael McAuliff at Huffington Post point out, Harry Reid Busts Up Senate Precedent

McConnell moved to suspend the rules and shift debate over to the American Jobs Act. Reid argued that doing so amounted to another filibuster, because it required 60 votes to move back to the original bill, and so therefore was out of order. Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), who happened to be the presiding officer at the time, asked the Senate parliamentarian what he thought. The parliamentarian advised Begich that McConnell’s motion was in order.

Reid then appealed the ruling, following a script that advocates of ending the filibuster wrote long ago. What some senators call the “constitutional option,” and what others call the “nuclear option,” involves as a first step appealing a ruling that a filibuster is in order. The second step is to defeat a motion to table that appeal, which is exactly what happened next, with all but one Democrat sticking with Reid.

{}

With the chair overruled, McConnell’s motion was declared out of order, setting a narrow precedent that motions to suspend the rules are out of order during a post-cloture period.

But it also set a more important precedent. The advice of the parliamentarian is considered sacrosanct in the Senate. Reid’s decision to overrule him opens a gate to similar efforts that could also be done by majority vote.

{}

Reid’s move Thursday, in that context, is less abusive of Senate precedent than it first appears. The current rules create a situation in which two 60-vote thresholds must be met before a bill can pass, the first to end debate and the second to move to final passage. McConnell’s move to suspend the rules could have created additional 60-vote hurdles, clearly in violation of the spirit of the post-cloture period, which is intended to be a short stretch until moving to final passage.

David Waldman st Daily Kos came to this conclusion:

(T)he discussion on the floor has in fact wandered into rules reform territory, which is not altogether unfitting. If this really were the nuclear option, that would of course mean that the infamous “Gentleman’s agreement” was now inoperative, since part of that deal was that neither party would use the “constitutional option” (which would under most definitions encompass the slightly different “nuclear option” as well) in this Congress or the next. Do Republicans really want that door open? We can do that, I guess. But we might as well go all the way, then.

We’ll just have to see how much more frustrated Reid gets with the Republicans blocking everything. This may have some two years too late.

Up Date: The jobs bill failed to get enough votes to pass cloture. Looks like Harry still hasn’t found his last nerve with Republican obstruction.  

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Like his predecessor, George W. Bush, President Barack Obama went to his Office of Legal Council on how to circumvent an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war to “legally” order and successfully carry out the assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki last month in Yemen. According to an article by reporter Charles Savage in the New York Times, the 50 page memorandum was completed in June of last year. It was written specifically in regard to only al-Awlaki and did not examine the evidence against him:

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

[]

It was principally drafted by David Barron and Martin Lederman, who were both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time, and was signed by Mr. Barron. The office may have given oral approval for an attack on Mr. Awlaki before completing its detailed memorandum. Several news reports before June 2010 quoted anonymous counterterrorism officials as saying that Mr. Awlaki had been placed on a kill-or-capture list around the time of the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25, 2009. Mr. Awlaki was accused of helping to recruit the attacker for that operation.

[]

Other assertions about Mr. Awlaki included that he was a leader of the group, which had become a “cobelligerent” with Al Qaeda, and he was pushing it to focus on trying to attack the United States again. The lawyers were also told that capturing him alive among hostile armed allies might not be feasible if and when he were located.

Based on those premises, the Justice Department concluded that Mr. Awlaki was covered by the authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda that Congress enacted shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – meaning that he was a lawful target in the armed conflict unless some other legal prohibition trumped that authority.

Mr. Savage goes on to detail how each legal obstacle was  considered and rejected:

The executive order the lawyers concluded only pertained to the assassination of political leaders outside of war;

The statute that makes it illegal to murder of US nationals on foreign soil did apply “because it is not “murder” to kill a wartime enemy in compliance with the laws of war.”;

It concluded that if the operator of the drone was a civilian of the CIA it wold not be a war crime and although it would violate the laws of Yemen, ti would be unlikely that Yemen would seek to prosecute;

Last to be considered and dispensed with were those pesky amendments in the Bill of Rights that guarantee “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” and the right to due process:

The memo concluded that what was reasonable, and the process that was due, was different for Mr. Awlaki than for an ordinary criminal. It cited court cases allowing American citizens who had joined an enemy’s forces to be detained or prosecuted in a military court just like noncitizen enemies.

It also cited several other Supreme Court precedents, like a 2007 case involving a high-speed chase and a 1985 case involving the shooting of a fleeing suspect, finding that it was constitutional for the police to take actions that put a suspect in serious risk of death in order to curtail an imminent risk to innocent people.

The document’s authors argued that “imminent” risks could include those by an enemy leader who is in the business of attacking the United States whenever possible, even if he is not in the midst of launching an attack at the precise moment he is located.

Despite the argument that will be made by the right wing Obama supporters that the memorandum is specific to al-Awlaki, all the arguments that were made to justify his assassination could easily be made against any US citizen anywhwere and may already have been:

   American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions . . . . There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council . . . . Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate. . . . The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. . . .

Glenn Greenwald at Salon in his excellent article considers that al-Awlaki won’t be the last victim:

Officials in the Obama White House and then the President decreed in secret that Awlaki should die.  So the U.S. Government killed him.  Republicans who always cheer acts of violence against Muslims are joined by Democrats who reflexively cheer what this Democratic President does, and now this death panel for U.S. citizens – operating with no known rules, transparency, or oversight – is entrenched as bipartisan consensus and a permanent fixture of American political life.  I’m sure this will never be abused: unrestrained power exercised in secret has a very noble history in the U.S. (Reuters says that the only American they could confirm on the hit list is Awlaki, though Dana Priest reported last year that either three or four Americans were on a  hit list).

Anyway, look over there: wasn’t it outrageous how George Bush imprisoned people without any due process and tried to seize unrestrained power, and isn’t it horrifying what a barbaric death cult Republicans are for favoring executions even when there’s doubt about guilt?  Even for those deeply cynical about American political culture: wouldn’t you have thought a few years ago that having the President create a White House panel to place Americans on a CIA hit list – in secret, without a shred of due process – would be a bridge too far?

The tales of through the looking glass continue.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

If you can’t beat them then try to hijack their cause.

When I first wrote in defense of the Occupy Wall Street protests a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that much of the scorn then being expressed by many progressives was “grounded in the belief that the only valid form of political activism is support for Democratic Party candidates.” Since then, even the most establishment Democrats have fundamentally changed how they talk about the protests – from condescension and hostility to respect and even support – and The New York Times today makes clear one significant factor accounting for this change:

Leading Democratic figures, including party fund-raisers and a top ally of President Obama, are embracing the spread of the anti-Wall Street protests in a clear sign that members of the Democratic establishment see the movement as a way to align disenchanted Americans with their party.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party’s powerful House fund-raising arm, is circulating a petition seeking 100,000 party supporters to declare that “I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests.”

The Center for American Progress, a liberal organization run by John D. Podesta, who helped lead Mr. Obama’s 2008 transition, credits the protests with tapping into pent-up anger over a political system that it says rewards the rich over the working class – a populist theme now being emphasized by the White House and the party. The center has encouraged and sought to help coordinate protests in different cities.

[]

Can that scheme work? Can the Occupy Wall Street protests be transformed into a get-out-the-vote organ of Obama 2012 and the Democratic Party? To determine if this is likely, let’s review a few relevant facts.

The last and best part of Glenn’s article is the up date:

UPDATE: Here are the top recipients of campaign donations from the “securities and investment” industry from 1989 through 2010 (h/t muddy thinking):

Click on image to enlarge

Would it not be a bit odd for a protest movement to “Occupy Wall Street” while simultaneously devoting itself to keeping Wall Street’s most lavishly funded politician in power?

Former Sen. Russ Feingold, founder of Progressives United, tells Keith he both supports and is excited about the Occupy protests. Feingold is calling on Democrats to not play “cautious politics” and to join the movement, saying conservatives are attempting to mock the protests because “they’re very nervous that this might work.” Feingold adds, “My sense is that there is great fear that this sweet deal that a lot of these people have in both Washington and New York … is finally being threatened and challenged.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Former Congressman and now congressional candidate from his old Florida district, Alan Grayson was a guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time on HBO along with former humorist PJ O’Rourke. When the subject turned to Occupy Wall Street Grayson gave O’Rourke a priceless lesson in basic economics.

Thanks to Crooks & Liars for both the video and the transcript.

O’Rourke: Get your shoes off, get a bongo drum, forget where to go to the bathroom and it’s yours.

Grayson: If I am the spokesman for all the people who think we should not have twenty four million people in this country who can’t find a full time job. That we should not have fifty million people who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick. That we shouldn’t have forty seven million people of this country who need government help to feed themselves. And we shouldn’t have fifteen million families who owe more on their mortgage than the value of home, OK, I’ll be that spokesman..

What Yves Smith said

One of the intriguing things about the commentary by the media and political operatives on OccupyWallStreet is how often they try to denigrate it, usually via ridicule and attacks on the appearance or presumed demographics of the participants. The underlying message is that the protestors are slovenly unproductive losers and hence have nothing in common with respectable middle class people. That flies in the face of the evidence on the ground, where the crowd in Zuccotti Park has gotten to be both older and more mixed ethnically than it was at its inception, and many of the Occupy demonstrations in other cities have solid representation of the middle aged and retirees.

Alan Grayson spooke with Rachel Maddow about the litany of economic grievances that are behind the Occupy Wall Street movement sweeping across America.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

How magnanimous of NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to “allow the Wall Street protesters to stay indefinitely. Making the statement at the Columbus Day parade, Bloomberg also proclaimed that:

“This is the place where you can protest,” Bloomberg said last week, calling New York the “most tolerant, open city in the world.”

Is that so. Mike? How about your out of control police white shirts that indiscriminately pepper spray lawful protesters and lead them on to the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge only to set them up for arrest? Are you going to pay back the tax payers of NYC for the cost of defending the lawsuits that will generate? Not to mention the pay out when the city is found libel for police brutality and entrapment.

As for “letting the protesters stay”, reality is that the mayor has no power to make them leave. The Zucotti park is what is known as a privately owned public space and there are over five hundred such spaces in NYC, including Tompkins Square Park, that are part of a program to encourage private developers to provide indoor and outdoor public spaces. Under the agreement these spaces are open to the public 24/7 and neither the police or the owners have the right or remove anyone so long as they abide by the law and the reasonable rules established by the private owners.

Tough, ain’t it, Mike, you aren’t a dictator.

The ice cream brand has issued a statement supporting the Wall Street protests. So what flavour should that solidarity come in?

The board of directors of well-known ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s has issued a statement, “We stand with you”, in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

   “As a board and as a company we have actively been involved with these issues for years but your efforts have put them out front in a way we have not been able to do. We have provided support to citizens’ efforts to rein in corporate money in politics, we pay a livable wage to our employees, we directly support family farms and we are working to source fairly traded ingredients for all our products. But we realize that Occupy Wall Street is calling for systemic change. We support this call to action and are honored to join you in this call to take back our nation and democracy.”

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Occupy Wall Street is on the move … uptown.

Why uptown? Because that’s where the rich folks live!

Organizers are planning a march on Tuesday that will visit the homes of JP Morgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) CEO Jamie Dimon, billionaire David Koch, hedge fund honcho John Paulson, Howard Milstein, and News Corp (NWSA, Fortune 500) CEO Rupert Murdoch.

The millionaires and billionaires are being targeted for what event organizers called a “willingness to hoard wealth at the expense of the 99%.”

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Fellow blogger and one of the long term under-/unemployed, Jesse LaGrega, participated in ABC’s “This Week with Christiane Amanpour”. He not only held his own with the Village pundits, he left George Will speechless and shreds out of touch elitist Peggy Noonan.

From Scarecrow at FDL: