Occupy Wall St – DocuDharma

Oct 16 2011

‘Paid Detail Unit’ Wall Streets’ Cops

By wilberforce

Counterpunch has an excellent piece up on the New York City police and wall street’s cozy relationship / revolving door.

Especially regarding ‘white shirts’.

And, especially something called the “PDU” – the Paid Detail Unit.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

Read the whole thing here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/20…

It’s an amazing piece. Note also the bio of the author: she worked on wall street for more than 2 decades.

Oct 15 2011

24 Arrested At Citibank: trying to Close Accounts

By wilberforce

Still developing, but basically as part of OWS protesters went to a West Village Citibank (I think I used to bank at that branch, long long ago) and attempted to close account en mass.

Video here of a woman outside being dragged in to be arrested:

http://www.twitvid.com/ZUYXO

(ek hornbeck- Here are some embeds courtesy of lambert @ Corrente)

Bank of America, St. Louis 10/4

Bank of America, Santa Cruz 10/7

Citibank, NYC 10/15

Below, I have details on the legality of the arrest.

Oct 08 2011

The Rise Of The 1%

By wilberforce

Some rich guys new toy:

A 225 foot ~~yacht~~ ship.

Over the past 4 decades, and accelerating since 2008, the top 1% has gained an ever larger share of the wealth.

Saez and French economist Thomas Piketty have been generating steady academic, governmental and public attention after reporting (in 2008) that from 2002 to 2007, the top 1 percent of American households accounted for about two-thirds of all income gains.

In a 2010 paper titled “Striking it Richer: The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States,” Saez provided 2007 to 2008 updates on the above-mentioned figures. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2010, Saez found that the average real income for the top percentile fell 19.7 percent (resulting in a drop in the top percentile income share from 23.5 to 20.9 percent), average real income for the bottom 99 percent also fell sharply, by 6.9 percent. For that 99 percent, the drop was, by far, the greatest year-to-year decline since the Great Depression.

And:

Q: What are the key causes for the substantial income gaps in the United States today? What role does the size of the federal deficit play, if any?

A: New technologies and globalization cannot explain the dramatic increase in the U.S. income gaps because countries in continental Europe (such as France or Germany) and Japan are going through the same technological and globalization forces, yet are not experiencing such a dramatic increase in income gaps.

This implies that institutions, government policies and regulations, and social norms play a central role in shaping income gaps. To put things simply, the U.S. income gaps shrunk significantly after the Great Depression with the New Deal policies of stringent regulations and progressive taxation and widened significantly after the Reagan revolution that undid those regulations and progressive taxation.

http://newscenter.berkeley.edu…

Oct 06 2011