As hundreds of protesters slowly marched to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Ravenswood neighborhood in Chicago, news trickled in over Twitter that three young NATO protesters recently arrested had their bail set at $1.5 million and were being charged with terrorism-related offences.

The marching protesters were angry and disappointed. Some feared the media’s attention would focus solely on the act of three young men instead of the acts of hundreds who were marching to oppose the closings of six mental health facilities all across the city.

Hosting NATO will likely cost the city an estimated $55 million, and health advocates claim only a fraction of that bill, around $2-3 million, is needed to keep these facilities open.

Basically, priorities are skewed, or as Occupy puts it: “Shit is f-d up and bullshit”.

Full Story Here: Hundreds of Protesters Head to Chicago Mayor’s House to Oppose Health Clinic Closures.

Members of the Class of 2012,

As a former secretary of labor and current professor, I feel I owe it to you to tell you the truth about the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.

You’re f*cked.

Well, not exactly. But you won’t have it easy.

First, you’re going to have a hell of a hard time finding a job. The job market you’re heading into is still bad. Fewer than half of the graduates from last year’s class have as yet found full-time jobs. Most are still looking.

That’s been the pattern over the last three graduating classes: It’s been taking them more than a year to land the first job. And those who still haven’t found a job will be competing with you, making your job search even harder.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich (The Commencement Address That Won’t Be Given).

The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives.

The Conservative War On Education continues apace, with charters blooming everywhere, high-stakes testing cementing its grip on classrooms, and legislators and pundits wondering what we need those stupid liberal arts colleges for anyway. (Isn’t college about job prep? Who needs to know anything about art history, anthropology or ancient Greek?)

Amid the din, there’s a worrisome trend: liberals keep affirming right-wing talking points, usually without realizing that they’re even right wing. Or saying things like, “The education of our children is a non-partisan issue that should exist outside of any ideological debate.”

The hell it is. People who say stuff like this have no idea what they’re talking about. The education of our children is a core cultural and political choice that reflects the deepest differences between liberals and conservatives — because every educational conversation must start with the fundamental philosophical question: What is an education for?

Our answers to that question could not be more diametrically opposed.

Full Story Here: How the Conservative Worldview Quashes Critical Thinking — and What That Means For Our Kids’ Future | Education | AlterNet.

“The Social Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.” – President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977.

“[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.” – President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983

So said Presidents Carter and Reagan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies to offset portions of Social Security payments to collect debts owed to those agencies. (31 U.S.C. §3716). Now we read of horror stories like this:

Full Story Here: Indentured Servitude for Seniors: Social Security Garnished for Student Debts | Common Dreams.

The phrase “brain drain” used to mean, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the flight of professionally-trained people from dictatorships to find opportunity in the U.S. and other Western countries. Now “brain drain” is used in American media to mean an active U.S. government policy to attract foreign entrepreneurs, scientists, physicians, nurses and other skilled laborers in short supply to the U.S.

Behind this push for a “great sucking sound” are companies like Intel, Google, Microsoft, and Pfizer, with their media cheerleaders like Tom Friedman of the New York Times, and members of Congress like Kansas Republican Congressman Jerry Moran and Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner.

The arguments for a deliberate “magnet brain drain,” are porcine. Our companies need these skills. The foreigners have these skills and we want them here where they can flourish, and create profits and jobs. Never mind that our country has plenty of people waiting to have the same opportunity. By reducing tuition barriers, overcoming historic discrimination (e.g. lack of women engineers), reducing the 40 percent dropout rate from colleges, and working with youngsters on a one-on-one basis so that they are not left behind or skewered by misguided multiple-choice standardized test regimens, are all great ways to reach out to Americans.

Full Story Here: The Greediness of Brain Drain | Common Dreams.

Declaring Tuesday, International Workers’ Day, “a holiday for the 99%,” Occupy is calling for a general strike – no work, no school, no shopping – to “unite against a system which does not work for us (and) begin to build the world we want to see.” Many activities here, here and here; Pete Seeger sings L’Internationale to fire you up.

Full Story Here: May Day For the 99%: Resistance Is Fertile | Common Dreams.

The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.

Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.

Full Story Here: How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars | Common Dreams.

A ginormous number of brands are controlled by just 10 multinationals, according to this amazing infographic from French blog Convergence Alimentaire. Now we can see just how many products are owned by Kraft, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, P&G and Nestlé.

(Disclaimer: We are not sure how up-to-date the graphic is. For example, it has not been updated to reflect P&G’s sale of Pringles to Kellogg’s in February.)

Full Story Here: These 10 Companies Control Enormous Number Of Consumer Brands [GRAPHIC].

The corporate money coup over America’s electoral democracy has rampaged through the Republican presidential primaries, and is now surging with even greater fierceness into this fall’s general election.

A handful of millionaires and billionaires, pooling their corporate cash into secretive political arsenals called SuperPACs, which technically are independent from the candidates’ campaigns. They dominated the GOP race. The one backing Mitt Romney, called Restore Our Future, was by far the richest, and it has made him the nominee. In this Brave New World of millionaire-and-up politics, size matters – not the size of the candidate’s heart or ideas, but the size of the SuperPAC, which is now far richer than the candidates themselves. Against president Obama, not only will Restore Our Future be flush with special-interest cash, but the super-rich are also rolling out an even bigger, supersized-SuperPAC to back Romney. Created by political attack-miester Karl Rove and called American Crossroads, it intends to pound Obama relentlessly with a staggering $200 million in bloody-ugly negative campaign ads.

Full Story Here: Jim Hightower | To the barricades, people!.

free audio Listen to this Commentary at link

House Republicans recently proposed cuts to nutrition assistance that will kick 280,000 low-income children off automatic enrollment in the Free School Lunch and Breakfast Program. Those same kids and 1.5 million other people will also lose their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamp benefits) that help them afford food at home.

Ten years’ worth of these nutrition cuts could be prevented for the price of one year of tax cuts on 3,340 multimillion dollar estates that House Republicans are protecting in their budget.

On April 18 the House Agriculture Committee passed a bill cutting over $33 billion from SNAP over the next decade. About one-third of these cuts ($11.5 billion) comes from putting restrictions on “categorical eligibility,” a provision that enables states to better coordinate between programs and improves access to assistance for low-income families.

Full Story Here: House GOP Would Kick 280,000 Children Off School Lunch Program To Protect Tax Cut For Millionaires | ThinkProgress.

by Scientific America :-:

As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline

Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.

Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. In one study, Piff and his colleagues discreetly observed the behavior of drivers at a busy four-way intersection. They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian.

Full Story Here: How Wealth Reduces Compassion | Common Dreams.

Citizens were outraged when Chicago struck a deal to lease its parking meters to a private corporation in 2009, but that was not the first time the city had sold off public assets for a quick cash injection. In 2006 the city leased its parking garages to the same conglomerate that later won the rights to the city’s parking meters. These sales have caused parking prices to skyrocket, and citizens have felt the pinch. Now the City of Chicago itself may join the ranks of those hurt by this deal. The conglomerate who leased the parking garages has brought a massive lawsuit against the city for allowing new private parking garages to be built downtown in violation of the lease agreement. This is further evidence that selling off public assets is a short-sighted fix for budget problems.

Chicago Loop Parking LLC signed a $563 million, 99 year deal for the city’s four downtown parking garages six years ago. An important provision of the deal stated that the city would not allow any competing garages to be built nearby. In the time since, a new private garage has gone up just one block from one of the leased garages. This has angered the investor group, and they have filed a $200 million lawsuit against the city for damages. While the deal may have seemed profitable for the city at first, a $200 million settlement would change the dynamic considerably.

Full Story Here: More Proof that Selling Public Assets Creates Big Problems | Economy In Crisis.

When I was younger, my Dad used to tell me: “Boys don’t want to be your friend.” He then left the rest to my imagination.

At the time, I didn’t agree. I thought: I can crack a good joke, I know how to shoot a hoop, and I’m a cheerful person (but not in an annoying way). What kind of boy wouldn’t want to be around that kind of girl?

Turns out, my Dad was right. Not to be all “Samantha Brick” about it, but in my experience, single, heterosexual men aren’t actively looking for an exclusively platonic relationship with a woman they find sexually attractive. This of course is not a revolutionary concept. In fact, it seems pretty natural to me.

Full Story Here: Natasha Scripture: Friends or ‘Menemies?’.

One of the biggest con games going on at the moment is the sustained attack on the U.S. public school system. It’s being perpetrated by predatory entrepreneurs (disguised as “concerned citizens” and “education reformers”) hoping to persuade the parents of school-age children that the only way their kids are going to get a decent education is by paying for something that they can already get for free. You might say it’s the same marketing campaign that launched bottled water.

The profit impulse fueling this drive is understandable.  All it takes is a cursory look at the economic landscape to see why these speculators are drooling at the prospect of privatizing education.  Millions of students pulling up stakes, bailing out of the public school system, and enrolling in private or charter schools?  Are you kidding?  Just think of the money that would generate.

Mind you, these “education reformers” are the same people who want to privatize the world—the same people who want more toll roads, who want hikers to pay trail fees, who want city parks and public beaches to charge admission. Indeed, they’re the same tribe who convinced a thirsty nation to voluntarily pay for drinking water that it could otherwise get for free.

Full Story Here: The Campaign to Privatize the World | Common Dreams.

George Lakey :-;

We have a moral right to defend ourselves against violation; there’s no doubt in my mind about that. Persons and groups have boundaries for a reason, and integrity generally requires that we defend them. Gandhi said that this is an obligation that trumped his call to experiment with nonviolent action; if you can’t think of a way to defend yourself nonviolently, he said, use violence. I believe Gandhi would have sympathized with the Deacons for Defense, for instance, an armed civil rights group in Southern U.S.

Of course Gandhi also believed that, with sufficient creativity, there is always a way to devise a nonviolent defense. He also recognized that either violent or nonviolent defense might fail in an immediate sense; there is such a thing as overwhelming force.

I think it’s no accident that the question of self-defense has been coming up in some circles in the Occupy movement at this time. Having the discussion reflects how many people are realizing that moving the 1 percent out of the driver’s seat is a revolutionary mission. The person who doesn’t feel fear at the prospect of revolution is out of touch with their feelings. It’s only natural at such a moment to wonder if there is some way to act boldly — and at the same time stay safe.

Full Story Here: The right to self-defense / Waging Nonviolence – People-Powered News and Analysis.

So, can we talk about the Paul Ryan phenomenon?

And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.

No, what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.

The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”

Full Story Here: The Gullible Center – NYTimes.com.

Perhaps no law in the past generation has drawn more praise than the drive to “end welfare as we know it,” which joined the late-’90s economic boom to send caseloads plunging, employment rates rising and officials of both parties hailing the virtues of tough love.

But the distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript: much as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.

Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

Full Story Here: Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit – NYTimes.com.

Many of you have expressed an interest in the current controversy surrounding Dow Chemical Sponsorship of the 2012 Olympics. Len Aldis has received substantial worldwide support for his campaign to stop Dow from wrapping the Olympic Stadium with 336 panels of corporate advertising.

Dow Chemical was a major responsible party involved in the American Agent Orange campaign against the people of Vietnam. The front page of Len’s website contains the correspondence Len has written in support of the millions of Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange. I urge you to forward this material to colleagues and the media.

Full Story Here: ‘Len Aldis vs. Dow Chemical’ – Salem-News.Com.

The Republican Party has a sense of humor, however inadvertently. It’s ardent advocates regularly accuse the Obama Administration of heavy handed regulation of business.

Tell that to the hundred federal poultry inspectors who just picketed the Department of Agriculture in opposition to a proposal that would allow those crammed, bacterial poultry slaughterhouses to do their own inspections. The picketers fear that with this license, the poultry bosses will speed up the slaughter rate to 175 birds per minute from the present 70.

Tell that to the Securities Exchange Commission that will have to allow the return of the notorious boiler room practices where “start-ups” with up to $1 billion in annual revenues can sell stock to investors like the old Wild West days with little discourse or regulation. After the recent devastating Wall Street crash and bailout, here they go again—just throw the federal cop off the corporate crime beat.

Full Story Here: The Regulation Killers » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.

Matt Taibbi :-:

Wall Street is buzzing about the annual report just put out by the Dallas Federal Reserve. In the paper, Harvey Rosenblum, the head of the Dallas Fed’s research department, bluntly calls for the breakup of Too-Big-To-Fail banks like Bank of America, Chase, and Citigroup.

The government’s bottomless sponsorship of these TBTF institutions, Rosenblum writes, has created a “residue of distrust for government, the banking system, the Fed and capitalism itself.”

The report (PDF), entitled, “Choosing the Road to Prosperity: Why We Must End Too-Big-To-Fail Now,” is written in a surprisingly readable style and is illustrated with reader-friendly cartoons and pictographs. It uses rhetoric that, for the Fed, is extremely candid and colorful, going beyond an arcane analysis of monetary policy to focus on the cultural damage of Too-Big-To-Fail.

Full Story Here: Push to End Too-Big-To-Fail Goes Mainstream | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.

Bacevich is the noted author of the best-seller The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Host Bill Moyers opened the episode reminding viewers what the Iraq War has cost us, adding “…here we are, nine years later, and once again the drumbeat sounds for war in the Middle East. This time the bull’s eye is Iran, and many of the bloodthirsty cries come from the same lusty throats that agitated a decade ago for invading Iraq. Now the neo-con armchair warriors call for hitting Iran before it builds a nuclear bomb to drop on Israel – a scenario that remains in doubt.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers and Andrew Bacevich discuss ‘neo-con armchair warriors’ and the futility of ‘endless’ war | The Raw Story.

You need to know this. He did what he needed to do – but it was a not-so-Super Tuesday for Mitt Romney last night. While taking six of the 11 state primaries – including the most coveted state of Ohio – and nabbing the lion’s share of delegates in Tuesday night’s primaries – Romney was still unable to take control of the Republican race in a way that the establishment had hoped for. Santorum stayed in the game by winning four contests last night – and even Newt Gingrich was able to put a victory under his belt in his home state of Georgia – the biggest primary state up for grabs. In every state – Mitt Romney underperformed, based on polls numbers heading into Tuesday night – and, in Ohio, he just barely avoided a catastrophic loss by beating Santorum by a mere 1%. So while Romney appears in better shape to win the nomination after Super Tuesday – this primary season isn’t going to end anytime soon. That means Republicans will have to continue telling the truth to the America people about their plans to profitize Medicare and Social Security, promote endless war with Iran, and give the super rich more of our money by further cutting their taxes. The American people have spoken – and Mitt Romney really isn’t their guy – but Wall Street will spend a few hundred million dollars in the next several months to keep their guy going.

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: A New Study Shows That Extreme Poverty in America Has Doubled in the Last 15 Years, and More | Truthout.

Losing ground to constitutional competition

Among Americans there remains strong pride about the US Constitution, even though there is widespread support for creating reform amendments to it.  Globally, however, what should surprise Americans is a significant loss of respect for it.  Other nations, especially those creating new democracies, see better constitutions elsewhere.  This is not opinion.  It is fact.  And it is important to understand this historic shift.

A new university study sends a disturbing message to all Americans that want to hang on to the fiction that the US constitution is not only the world’s best one, but does not need to be improved.  Do not mentally block this finding: “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to the study by David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia.

What exists today is far different than what was proudly proclaimed in 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, by Time magazine  which calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160 have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S. version.”

Why has the US Constitution lost standing abroad even though Americans cling to their belief that it is sacred and the world’s best constitution?

Full Story Here: The Declining Influence of the US Constitution | Common Dreams.

Some businesses take a long-range growth perspective, and honor all their stakeholders. A country run that way would be OK.

However, other businesses believe their markets are “unattractive,” to use the business school expression. If your business is in an unattractive market, your smart business move is to defer investment in new plant and equipment, cut back on worker training, freeze or terminate pensions, reduce R&D, extract as much value from the business as possible, return the cash to shareholders, and dump whatever remains. I wouldn’t run a country that way.

For decades, industrialists have looked at America and concluded that our domestic economy was unattractive compared to low-wage alternatives. We don’t invest in industrial capacity, we treat our schools as a cost to be minimized rather than a social investment in our children, we terminate pensions, we reduce our investment in infrastructure to a fraction of other countries’, and what R&D we fund seems to create jobs in “more attractive” places, outside the United States.

Full Story Here: Harvest America or Invest in America | Common Dreams.

An alliance of Occupy groups, environmental and food justice organizations have called for a global day of action on February 27 to resist corporate control of our food system and to work towards a healthy food supply for all.

Occupy Our Food Supply is a call facilitated by Rainforest Action Network and is supported by over 60 Occupy groups and over 30 organizations including Family Farm Defenders, National Family Farms Coalition and Pesticide Action Network.

Ashley Schaeffer, Rainforest Agribusiness campaigner with Rainforest Action Network says of the day of action:

Full Story Here: Global Day of Action: Occupy Our Food Supply | Common Dreams.

The international private prison corporation, GEO Group, Inc., was targeted today by the hacktivist group Anonymous.

Anonymous used the takeover of GEO’s website to post a statement saying its hack was part of the group’s “ongoing efforts to dismantle the prison industrial complex.” 

The Associated Press reports:

Earlier Friday, Anonymous claimed credit for defacing the website of a Dayton, Ohio-based chapter of Infragard, a public-private partnership for critical infrastructure protection sponsored by the FBI. The group’s site was replaced by a video of Coolio’s 1995 rap hit, “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

The FBI declined to comment on that attack.

Anonymous, an amorphous collection of activists and Internet mischief-makers, has increasingly focused its energy on military, police and security companies in recent months. Among its most spectacular coups: The interception of a conference call between FBI and Scotland Yard cyber-investigators working to track them down.

Full Story Here: ‘Anonymous’ Targets Private Prison System in Latest Hack | Common Dreams.

Occupy Wall Street is similar to many movements in contending that its opponent—for Occupy, the 1 percent—is maintaining a system whose structural, systematic violence far exceeds any violence exhibited by the movement itself. For example, movements will say that class oppression or sexism or racism hurt people in the daily course of life, pointing to statistics like each percentage point of unemployment resulting in increased suicide, homicide and domestic abuse. However, especially when the movement is still young and only beginning to get its message out, the powers that be in politics and the media will often succeed in dismissing such charges and in blaming every appearance of violence on the campaigners. Reversing this narrative in the public perception is one of a growing movement’s most important challenges.

Full Story Here: Who’s really violent? Tips for controlling the narrative / Waging Nonviolence – People-Powered News and Analysis.

This is the second in a two-part series by Chomsky on the US empire and its decline. Part one, Hegemony and Its Dilemmas, appeared yesterday.

In the years of conscious, self-inflicted decline at home, “losses” continued to mount elsewhere. In the past decade, for the first time in 500 years, South America has taken successful steps to free itself from western domination, another serious loss. The region has moved towards integration, and has begun to address some of the terrible internal problems of societies ruled by mostly Europeanized elites, tiny islands of extreme wealth in a sea of misery. They have also rid themselves of all U.S. military bases and of IMF controls. A newly formed organization, CELAC, includes all countries of the hemisphere apart from the U.S. and Canada. If it actually functions, that would be another step in American decline, in this case in what has always been regarded as “the backyard.”

Even more serious would be the loss of the MENA countries — Middle East/North Africa — which have been regarded by planners since the 1940s as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.” Control of MENA energy reserves would yield “substantial control of the world,” in the words of the influential Roosevelt advisor A.A. Berle.

Full Story Here: The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective | Common Dreams.

The 99% Spring

DATE: February 15, 2012
TO: America
RE: The 99% Spring

Things should never have reached this point.

Every day, the American Dream seems a little farther away. More of our grandparents are being thrown from their homes. Our mothers and fathers can’t retire because their pension funds tanked. Our brothers and sisters are burdened by student loan debt. For our children, budget cuts have resulted in crumbling schools, skyrocketing class sizes, and teachers being denied the supports they need to do their best. Our friends and family are being denied collective bargaining rights in their workplaces and are falling further and further behind. Our neighbors are being poisoned by pollution in our air and water.

The numbers are staggering: in recent years, millions of jobs have been destroyed, homes foreclosed, and an unconscionable number of children live in poverty.

Full Story Here: April 9-15, 2012 — 100,000 Americans Will Train for Non-Violent Direct Action | Common Dreams.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact.

At the moment, we are failing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s decision to launch the most destructive and murderous act of aggression of the post-World War II period: the invasion of South Vietnam, later all of Indochina, leaving millions dead and four countries devastated, with casualties still mounting from the long-term effects of drenching South Vietnam with some of the most lethal carcinogens known, undertaken to destroy ground cover and food crops.

The prime target was South Vietnam. The aggression later spread to the North, then to the remote peasant society of northern Laos, and finally to rural Cambodia, which was bombed at the stunning level of all allied air operations in the Pacific region during World War II, including the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this, Henry Kissinger’s orders were being carried out — “anything that flies on anything that moves” — a call for genocide that is rare in the historical record. Little of this is remembered. Most was scarcely known beyond narrow circles of activists.

Full Story Here: “Losing” the World: American Decline in Perspective | Truthout.

Watching what’s happening to our democracy is like watching the cruise ship Costa Concordia founder and sink slowly into the sea off the coast of Italy, as the passengers, shorn of life vests, scramble for safety as best they can, while the captain trips and falls conveniently into a waiting life boat.

We are drowning here, with gaping holes torn into the hull of the ship of state from charges detonated by the owners and manipulators of capital. Their wealth has become a demonic force in politics. Nothing can stop them. Not the law, which has been written to accommodate them. Not scrutiny — they have no shame. Not a decent respect for the welfare of others — the people without means, their safety net shredded, left helpless before events beyond their control.

The obstacles facing the millennial generation didn’t just happen. Take an economy skewed to the top, low wages and missing jobs, predatory interest rates on college loans: these are politically engineered consequences of government of, by, and for the one percent. So, too, is our tax code the product of money and politics, influence and favoritism, lobbyists and the laws they draft for rented politicians to enact.

Full Story Here: Money Throws Democracy Overboard | Common Dreams.

Today we take the idea of a minimum wage for granted. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Social decency, most Americans today would agree, demands a minimum wage, a floor that keeps working people out of dire privation. Does social decency also demand a “maximum wage,” an income ceiling that discourages wealth from dangerously concentrating?

Philosopher Felix Adler certainly thought so. We remember Adler today as the tireless reformer who led the national effort to end child labor in the early 1900s. Adler also founded the Ethical Culture movement and introduced the kindergarten concept into American education. Much less well known: Adler advanced America’s first serious maximum wage proposal.

The exploitation of workers young and old, Adler believed, generated grand private fortunes that exerted a “corrupting influence” on American politics. To curb that corruption, he proposed a steeply graduated income tax — with a 100 percent top rate at the point “when a certain high and abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the comforts and true refinements of life.”

Full Story Here: Runaway Greed Is Destroying America: Should There Be a Lid on How Much Someone Can Make? | Economy | AlterNet.

Homeless kids have the right to an education. That’s the basic rationale behind the McKinney-Vento Act of 1987, a law meant to ensure that homeless kids receive the same quality of schooling as everyone else.

But with more families losing their homes as a result of the lingering effects of the recession, many homeless advocates say the law doesn’t go far enough to help them. Yet attempts by these advocates to change things have led to a bitter debate within the field of homelessness advocacy itself.

At the center of the debate is the question of who qualifies for government-subsidized housing. As it stands, anyone defined as homeless by the Department of Housing and Urban Development can apply for housing aid from the government. The problem is that HUD’s definition leaves out thousands who lack permanent homes — people who sleep on the couches of friends and relatives, or many who live in cramped motel rooms. Before approving aid in these cases, HUD requires proof that their arrangements are very tentative: either documentation of a lack of funds to afford a hotel room for more two weeks, or confirmation from the friend offering the couch that this setup can not be permanent. Providing such documentation is often a difficult hurdle for people living under these circumstances.

Full Story Here: Homeless Advocates Divided Over Bill Aimed At Helping Kids.

Late last month, President Obama issued a new rule requiring health insurance companies to cover contraception with no co-pay. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said he will do everything and anything to overturn this decision. Almost all women — including 89% of Catholics — want to make their own decisions regarding contraception. Nevertheless, you can count on the fact that your member of Congress will be hearing from a vocal minority. This is just too important to sit on the sidelines.

Full Story Here: TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress not to block affordable access to contraception for all women | ThinkProgress.

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Full Story Here: Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power | Common Dreams.

Two summers ago, at the U.S. Social Forum, I attended a panel discussion about ways to expand the use of credit unions as alternatives to the “too big to fail” banks whose risky investments had helped tank the economy. Each of the speakers—people involved in credit union leadership or advocacy—expressed confusion and frustration that they hadn’t already seen a post-crisis shift away from corporate banks and toward credit unions (which have the advantages of being not-for-profit, owned and governed by their depositors, far more likely than big banks to lend to small businesses, and not responsible for any global economic meltdowns).

It seemed that even as Americans were angry with Big Finance, they didn’t make the connection to their personal accounts

Full Story Here: Big News on Bank Transfers by Brooke Jarvis — YES! Magazine.

While many of us are working to ensure that the Occupy movement will have a lasting impact, it’s worthwhile to consider other countries where masses of people succeeded in nonviolently bringing about a high degree of democracy and economic justice. Sweden and Norway, for example, both experienced a major power shift in the 1930s after prolonged nonviolent struggle. They “fired” the top 1 percent of people who set the direction for society and created the basis for something different.

Both countries had a history of horrendous poverty. When the 1 percent was in charge, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated to avoid starvation. Under the leadership of the working class, however, both countries built robust and successful economies that nearly eliminated poverty, expanded free university education, abolished slums, provided excellent health care available to all as a matter of right and created a system of full employment. Unlike the Norwegians, the Swedes didn’t find oil, but that didn’t stop them from building what the latest CIA World Factbook calls “an enviable standard of living.”

Neither country is a utopia, as readers of the crime novels by Stieg Larsson, Kurt Wallender and Jo Nesbro will know. Critical left-wing authors such as these try to push Sweden and Norway to continue on the path toward more fully just societies. However, as an American activist who first encountered Norway as a student in 1959 and learned some of its language and culture, the achievements I found amazed me. I remember, for example, bicycling for hours through a small

Full Story Here: How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’ / Waging Nonviolence – People-Powered News and Analysis.

Recent comments by Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for President all but guarantee the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year.

When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by “jealousy or fairness” Romney insisted, “I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.” And in this election year he advised that if we do discuss inequality we do so “in quiet rooms” not in public debates.

A public debate, of course, is inevitable. And welcome. To help that debate along I’ll address the five major statements that comprise the Republican argument on inequality.

1. Income is Not All That Unequal

Full Story Here: Challenging the Republican’s Five Myths on Inequality | On the Commons.

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.” –Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

One. Human rights must be taken absolutely seriously. Every single person is entitled to dignity and human rights. No application needed. No exclusions at all. This is our highest priority.

Two. We must radically reinvent contemporary democracy. Current systems are deeply corrupt and not responsive to the needs of people. Representatives chosen by money and influence govern by money and influence. This is unacceptable. Direct democracy by the people is now technologically possible and should be the rule. Communities must be protected whenever they advocate for self-determination, self-development and human rights. Dissent is essential to democracy; we pledge to help it flourish.

Full Story Here: Ten Steps for Radical Revolution in the US | Common Dreams.

Horgan is a writer for “Scientific American,” and approaches the question of whether war can be ended as a scientist. It’s all about research. He concludes that war can be ended, has in various times and places been ended, and is in the process (an entirely reversible process) of being ended on the earth right now.

The war abolitionists of the 1920s Outlawry movement would have loved this book, would have seen it as a proper extension of the ongoing campaign to rid the world of war. But it is a different book from theirs. It does not preach the immorality of war. That idea, although proved truer than ever by the two world wars, failed to prevent the two world wars. When an idea’s time has come and also gone, it becomes necessary to prove to people that the idea wasn’t rendered impossible or naïve by “human nature” or grand forces of history or any other specter. Horgan, in exactly the approach required, preaches the scientific observation of the success (albeit incomplete as yet) of preaching the immorality of war.

The evidence, Horgan argues, shows that war is a cultural contagion, a meme that serves its own ends, not ours (except for certain profiteers perhaps). Wars happen because of their cultural acceptance and are avoided by their cultural rejection. Wars are not created by genes or avoided by eugenics or oxytocin, driven by an ever-present minority of sociopaths or avoided by controlling them, made inevitable by resource scarcity or inequality or prevented by prosperity and shared wealth, or determined by the weaponry available. All such factors, Horgan finds, can play parts in wars, but the decisive factor is a militaristic culture, a culture that glorifies war or even just accepts it, a culture that fails to renounce war as something as barbaric as cannibalism. War spreads as other memes spread, culturally. The abolition of war does the same.

Full Story Here: War and Being and Nothingness.

You may remember that there was a time when apartheid in South Africa seemed unstoppable.

Sure, there were international boycotts of South African businesses, banks, and tourist attractions. There were heroic activists in South Africa, who were going to prison and even dying for freedom. But the conventional wisdom remained that these were principled gestures with little chance of upending the entrenched system of white rule.

“Be patient,” activists were told. “Don’t expect too much against powerful interests with a lot of money invested in the status quo.”

With hindsight, though, apartheid’s fall appears inevitable: the legitimacy of the system had already crumbled. It was harming too many for the benefit of too few. South Africa’s freedom fighters would not be silenced, and the global movement supporting them was likewise tenacious and principled.

Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable.

The 5-4 Citizens United decision struck down bipartisan clean election laws and declared that Congress could not limit so-called “independent” spending by corporations or others. In the two years since that decision, the 1% have been playing an increasingly outsized role in our elections, holding even greater sway than they had before 2010. Deep-pocketed CEOs and corporations have filtered many millions of dollars through Super PACs like American Action Network and secretly-funded non-profit groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, spending made possible by Citizens United and the district court decision SpeechNow.org v. F.E.C.

Exceptionally Costly, and Exceptionally Unpopular

The first elections after Citizens United were the most expensive in U.S. history, with more spending coming from outside groups than from the candidates themselves. In modern elections, 9 out of 10 races are decided by who raises more campaign cash. Given this reality, it stretches the imagination to believe elected officials won’t be indebted to those deep-pocketed donors who help them get the edge over their opponent.

Full Story Here: Two Years After “Citizens United,” Amending the Constitution is Essential | Center for Media and Democracy.

Although the recession has officially been over for two years, the worst may be to come for many people.

Job losses rose during the last few years. So did wages — barely. Foreclosures went up, as did the number of poor people for whom rent eats up at least half the paycheck. And a federal program believed to have made a major difference in keeping homeowners off the streets is due to expire in a few months.

All in all, the conditions are right for national homeless rates to start rising soon, according to a new report that examines many of the large-scale economic factors that force people out of their homes. The report, published Tuesday by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, suggests that a delayed wave of pain may be coming for low-earning renters and homeowners.

“It takes a while for people to become homeless,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. “They don’t enter the shelter right away.”

Full Story Here: Homeless Rate Ready To Rise As Stimulus Cash Runs Out: Study.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulnerable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Full Story Here: Michigan Democrats Unveil Plan To Finance Free College Tuition By Eliminating Corporate Tax Credits | ThinkProgress.

Ringing in the New Year, the annual Tournament of Roses Parade, viewed by 47 million Americans across the country, ended with roughly 5000 peaceful Occupy Wall Street movement demonstrators. It was a move negotiated between the City of Pasadena and Occupy the Rose Parade organizers which allowed participants to march in the parade with anti-corporate, anti-wall street banners, countering a parade known for its traditional corporate ties. Occupy protesters from Los Angeles camped along the parade route, hoping cameras would catch a glimpse of their signs while others arrived early for bleacher seats to support Occupy the Rose Parade marchers.

The month of January continues to shape up with hundreds of Occupy protesters from across the country descending on Washington DC forOccupy Congress on January 17, when the House is scheduled to be in session. Some of the movement’s best bloggers, livestreamers and social media geniuses will document this historic gathering. Members of the 112th Congress have shown mixed emotions towards Occupy Wall Street. Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor, R-VA., expressed concern of the “growing mobs that occupy wall street” whereas House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA., said she supports the growing nationwide Occupy Wall Street movement. Whether the Congressional reception to the Occupy Wall Street movement is warm or cold, Occupy protesters have chosen to rally its political voice on Capitol Hill to draw attention that corporate money has corrupted our elected officials.

Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street Movement Kicks Off 2012 With Demos | Common Dreams.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:-:

If you’re part of the one percent, even getting fired comes with a cushion made of eiderdown. GMI, a research company that gets paid to keep an eye on such things, just issued a study headlined, “Twenty-One U.S. CEOs with Golden Parachutes of More than $100 Million.” That’s each

Full Story Here: America Wakes Up to the Reality: Inequality Matters | Common Dreams.

District of Columbia Mayor Vincent Gray may have turned up the pressure on the federal government to remove the Occupy DC encampment from McPherson Square, but Occupy DC says their protest isn’t going anywhere.

The protesters issued a media release on Friday with a to-the-point headline: “Occupy DC Is Not Leaving McPherson Square, Will Not Cave to Mayor Gray’s Political Posturing.”

In the release itself, the protesters claim a move to evict them from McPherson Square, where they have been camped since Oct. 1, would be unconstitutional and would cause more problems than it would solve:

Washington, D.C. — Mayor Gray’s call for the National Park Service

Full Story Here: Occupy DC: We’re Not Leaving McPherson Square.

What’s the common cause behind Occupy protesters?

The Moyers & Company team visited the Occupy Wall Street site several times between October and December in 2011 — visits that reveal real faces, real people, and a true common cause. In this premiere Bill Moyers Essay, Bill talks about their anger — not at the concept of wealth itself, but at the crony capitalists who resort to tricks, loopholes, and hard, cold cash for politicians to make sure insiders prosper… and then pull up the ladder behind them.

BILL MOYERS: By coincidence I first met with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson on the very day Occupy Wall Street had sprung up in lower Manhattan. And I wondered, as so many others did, were we seeing the advance guard of a movement by organized people to challenge the power of organized money? Well, it’s still too soon to know. But in the weeks that followed, every time we went down to the encampment, there was no mistaking the message.

LINNEA PALMER PATON: I don’t have thousands of dollars to go buy myself a lobbyist to lobby for my views, but corporations do.

BILL MOYERS: Linnea Palmer Paton is 23 and an Occupy Wall Street Volunteer.

Full Story Here: Bill Moyers: Occupy a Cause | Truthout.

Honoring Martin Luther King Jr. while perpetuating the racial divide

Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality is far from reality.

Census Bureau figures show the U.S. on track to be a majority minority nation by 2042. But if the trends of the last 30 years continue, according to a new report, the economic racial divide is set to increase.

The non-partisan group United for a Fair Economy’s (UFE) ninth annual MLK Day report, State of the Dream 2012: The Emerging Majority finds that racial economic divide will remain “disastrously large and will threaten the stability of the entire economy.”

While the numbers of people of color in the nation surge, this fact alone is not enough to change the economic reality. From the report:

In the age of mass media and Citizens United, money buys influence, and the national income and wealth will remain over-whelmingly in the hands of Whites – a small group of Whites at that.

Full Story Here: Report: Massive Movement Needed to Fix ‘Perverse Concentration of Wealth’ | Common Dreams.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship:-:

Welcome to BillMoyers.com. Over the next few weeks, on the air and on this website, we’ll be talking a lot about “winner-take-all” politics and how economic inequality – the vast gap between the rich and everyone else– isn’t the result of market forces and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It has been deliberately, politically engineered.

But first, as they used to say on radio, a musical interlude. The traveling medicine show known as the race for the Republican presidential nomination has moved on from Iowa and New Hampshire, and all eyes are now on South Carolina. Well, not exactly all. At the moment, our eyes are fixed on some big news from the great state of Oklahoma, home of the legendary American folk singer Woody Guthrie, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated later this year.

Woody saw the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand; his own family came unraveled in the worst hard times. And he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich. What professional success he had during his own lifetime, singing in concerts and on the radio, was often undone by politics and the restless urge to keep moving on. “So long, it’s been good to know you,” he sang, and off he would go.

Full Story Here: Is This Land Made for You and Me? | On Democracy | BillMoyers.com.

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet. Try as hard as you can, you’re never going to be as cynical as the corporations and the harem of politicians they pay for.  It’s like trying to outchant a Buddhist monastery.

Here’s my case in point, one of a thousand stories people working for social change could tell: All last fall, most of the environmental movement, including350.org, the group I helped found, waged a fight against the planned Keystone XL pipeline that would bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Canada through the U.S. to the Gulf Coast. We waged our struggle against building it out in the open, presenting scientific argument, holding demonstrations, and attending hearings.  We sent 1,253 people to jail in the largest civil disobedience action in a generation.  Meanwhile, more than half a million Americans offered public comments against the pipeline, the most on any energy project in the nation’s history.

Full Story Here: Cynicism Is for Suckers: How We Can Fight the Greedy Elites That Run Our Lives | Activism & Vision | AlterNet.

According to the Huffington Post, Algemeen Burgerlijk Pensioenfonds declared earlier this week that it was blacklisting Walmart for its non-compliance with the United Nations’ Global Compact, which “presents a set of core values relating to human rights, labor standards, the environment and anti-corruption efforts.”

ABP has been trying for years to convince the retail giant to change its policies. The firm first came to ABP’s attention in 2007, when the fund established a “socially responsible investing” policy and was “struck by the staggering number of lawsuits and National Labor Relations Board complaints” against Walmart.

Full Story Here: Pension fund divests from Walmart for violating global labor standards | The Raw Story.

The following is an excerpt from Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism, recently released in paperback updated with a new forward by James Gustave Speth. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the author.

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. By the end of the twenty-first century it will have the technological capacity to increase the income of all its citizens many times over or to radically reduce work-time and thereby allow a new flowering of democracy, liberty, and personal and community creativity. The new century could be—should be—one of innovation, hope, even excitement.

Few Americans approach the century this way. The future is clouded by problems rather than opportunities; it appears as an era of great political difficulty and danger. At the most obvious level is the threat posed by terrorism and war—and the many challenges to liberty that overly zealous approaches to both have produced. At another level are the growing social, economic, racial, and other difficulties catalogued in the preceding pages. Critically, confidence that the great traditional values at the very heart of the American experience can be sustained has been declining rapidly.

Full Story Here:  Breaking Ground for an America Beyond Capitalism | Common Dreams.

One of the more delusional aspects of capitalism is the idea that if one pursues the acquisition of private wealth with abandon, that this is somehow automatically “good” for human society.

The laissez-faire advocate and novelist Ayn Rand wrote that if one does not support this notion that greed is good and pursuing “enlightened self-interest,” (as Adam Smith characterized it), is the highest virtue, then one defaults to supporting a centralized oppressive regime that allows no personal freedom and no private wealth whatsoever. One supports living in darkness and despair or, in a word, Hell. This Manichean thinking is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition dating back to the Indus Valley divide between the Vedic traditions and the Zoroastrian belief system of ancient Persia. The notion that the world is characterized by an ongoing “war” between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is at the base of much of so-called western thought.

In The Three Metamorphoses, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that humans are saddled with a heavy burden as children. Using the metaphor of a camel, he describes how we then venture into the wilderness with this burden, whereupon we are attacked by a great dragon. The dragon is covered with hundreds of scales, each scale bearing the words “Thou Shalt.” The human is then transformed into a lion in order to do battle with the dragon. If the lion is victorious in the battle – slaying the dragon “Thou Shalt” – the metaphor then turns to that of a child. The human then becomes what he or she was born to be – “a wheel rolling out of its own center.” One of the scales on the dragon for most of us growing up in the “developed world” is that “thou shalt believe in the war between light and darkness.” And, the societal assumption is that one aspect of this war is the capitalist notion of “enlightened self-interest” versus the evil “socialist” notions of public ownership and oppressive altruism that punishes the productive and rewards the unproductive. This has become conflated with the Judeo-Christian religious structure of “good versus evil” to the point where in some quarters there is no distinction between the secular and religious versions of the myth. To complete the Nietzschean metaphor in this context, most people do not slay the dragon. The result is a societal discourse that is largely delusional and controlled by mythic thinking, catch-phrases, and unquestioned assumptions.

Full Story Here: The Delusional Assumptions of Capitalism | Common Dreams.

“All week! All year! We’ll still be here!”

“Whose park? Our park!”

The chants went up 10, 20, maybe 100 deep shortly before midnight at Zuccotti Park as Occupy Wall Street activists surprised the New York Police Department and retook the space that was once the homebase for their movement. The barricades surrounding the park went down. They have since been removed. Protesters were allowed to come and go through the park.

(CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST OCCUPY UPDATES)

Earlier, activists danced on the piles of barricades. Some climbed the lattice of metal and hoisted American flags. Others waved signs and banners. The Zuccotti Park Christmas tree was wrapped in an Occupy Wall Street banner. Of course, there were the drums.

Full Story Here: Before Midnight, Occupy Wall Street Activists Retake Zuccotti Park.

Who would have thought that some young people camped out in lower Manhattan with cardboard signs, a few sharpies, some donated pizza, and a bunch of smart phones could change so much?

The viral spread of the Occupy Movement took everyone by surprise. Last summer, politicians and the media were fixated on the debt ceiling, and everyone seemed to forget that we were in the midst of an economic meltdown—everyone except the 99 percent who were experiencing it.

Today, people ranging from Ben Bernake, chair of the
Federal Reserve, to filmmaker Michael Moore are expressing sympathy for the Occupy Movement and concern for those losing homes, retirement savings, access to health care, and hope of ever finding a job.

This uprising is the biggest reason for hope in 2012. The following are 12 ways the Occupy Movement and other major trends of 2011 offer a foundation for a transformative 2012.

Full Story Here: The 12 Most Hopeful Trends to Build On in 2012 by Sarah van Gelder — YES! Magazine.

In a 2009 Internet survey of about 2,500 Americans, four Hamilton College economists found that weather events like heat waves and drought tended to have the greatest impact on people who aren’t otherwise well-informed about global warming.

“[O]ur results are consistent with the idea that experiencing extreme weather causes individuals to become more aware of the issue of global warming, and increases their perception of the risk of global warming,” authors of the study wrote.

Full Story Here: Study: Bad weather makes voters more liberal | The Raw Story.

“We fail to understand why we should have to pay the costs of the crisis, while its instigators continue to post record profits. We’re sick and tired of one injustice after another. We want human dignity back again.

This isn’t the kind of world we want to live in, and it’s we who have to decide what world we do want. We know we can change it, and we’re having a great time going about it.”

Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.

Inspired by the Arab Spring and uprisings in Europe, sparked by a challenge from Adbusters magazine to show up at Wall Street on September 17 and “bring a tent,” and encouraged by veteran New York activists, a few thousand people gathered in the financial district of New York City. At the end of the day, some of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park and started what became a national—and now international—movement.

Full Story Here: Excerpt From the Book This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement by Sarah van Gelder and the staff of YES! Magazine.

Responding to common conservative talking points without losing your mind

There comes a time at most large family gatherings when a heated political argument breaks out. And by “heated political argument” what I mean is “someone just repeats something they heard on Hannity’s radio show that you know to be completely untrue.” You may be the lone liberal in a conservative family, or you may have one right-wing uncle in your left-wing family, but this will happen. What to do?

If you have a “smart phone,” just bookmark Snopes now. That’ll take care of the really weird stuff. (Well, not this level of weird, but “I read that airlines don’t pair Christian pilots and co-pilots in case The Rapture happens” weird.)

But a right-wing myth generally lives on forever, no matter how many times it is debunked. You are powerless to prevent its spread. All you can do is perhaps convince one person that one talk radio meme is completely bogus. But you will probably have better luck simply changing the subject. (Suggestions: Whether or not Peyton Manning will be a Colt next season, “American Horror Story,” Jay-Z and Beyonce’s baby.)

Full Story Here: How to argue with right-wing relatives – Fighting – Salon.com.

I don’t mean worthless as a pejorative. (My father would have used a more colorful term to characterize my scholarly pursuits.) But worthless as a commodity. Us kids at Montrose Elementary School weren’t making anyone rich. Not like today’s pupils, particularly those in Florida, who’ve become valuable cogs in a burgeoning industry.

Such precious little dummies, these wayward students. Their benighted ways in the classroom have given rise to a recession-proof enterprise. To a no-lose sort of capitalism. Educational entrepreneurs (some backed by Wall Street hedge funds who know a sure thing when they see it) have figured out how to make millions without the usual risks of the marketplace, drilling for profits in the ever lucrative field of school reform.

No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s 2001 education reform package, since embraced by President Obama, may have forced needed attention onto failing schools, but the law also created an extraordinary new industry funded exclusively with public money.

Full Story Here: Law turns kids into commodities – Fred Grimm – MiamiHerald.com.

As her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown Miami, talking about her economic struggles and loss of faith in the U.S. political system, 3-year-old Aeisha Touray blurted out what sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.

“How dare you!” the girl said abruptly as she nudged a toy car across a conference room table at the Chapman Partnership shelter in Miami’s tough and predominantly black Overtown neighborhood.

There was no telling what Aeisha was thinking as her 32-year-old mother, Nairkahe Touray, spoke of how she burned through her savings and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier this year.

Full Story Here: Another Face of the US Recession: Homeless Children | Common Dreams.

The British public want business to put “people before profits” and to see politicians close the gap between rich and poor, according to a new survey.

The findings suggest growingsupport for “responsible capitalism” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and bankers’ excessive bonuses – and public sympathy with the anti-globalisation protests such as the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’sCathedral.

YouGov, which polled 1,723 people for the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and the TUC, found that 80 per cent believe the private sector should forgo some profits to meet a wider responsibility to their employees, customers and communities and invest more for the long-term. Only 12 per cent think that maximising profits for shareholders is a company’s top priority.

Full Story Here: It’s time that we valued people over profits, poll results show – UK Politics – UK – The Independent.

“We have every intention to keep this place closed down until we are satisfied,” said Frank Cordaro, an activist and founder of the Catholic Worker group in Des Moines.

A handful of activists went to Obama’s nondescript office in a downtown strip mall after larger rallies to mark the three-month anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. They had hoped to read a statement demanding Obama cut military spending by half and “dismantle our U.S. military empire … so we can create jobs, balance the budget, meet our peoples’ needs here and help the human community to heal our dying planet.”

When they arrived, they found the doors locked.

“You wouldn’t even have known this was a campaign office,” said Julie Brown, an activist who recently moved to Des Moines.

Full Story Here: Occupy Des Moines Vows To Shut Down Obama Offices.

Dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested Saturday after they scaled a chain-link fence or crawled under it to get to an Episcopal church-owned lot they want to use for a new camp site.

Protesters used a wooden ladder to scale the fence or lifted it from below while others cheered them on. A man wearing a Santa suit stood on the ladder among others, as they ignored red “Private Property” signs.

As officers made arrests, protesters shouted obscenities and hollered: “Make them catch you!” The group was inside the lot for a short time before being led out by police in single file through a space in the fence. About 50 people were arrested, police said.

Full Story Here: New York Occupy Wall Street Protestors March On After Day of Arrests At Vacant Lot Near Duarte Square.

Occupy Wall Street has taken in more than $665,000 in donations since it launched Sept. 17. Here’s the bad news for Occupy: Donations have fallen off a cliff, from a high of around $20,000 per day to a current low of just $98 on Dec. 13. The good news: The movement still has hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank, an impressive sum for an entity that has existed for a mere three months.

That’s according to my analysis of newly available data on the finances of the movement’s New York arm.

The spending data offers a glimpse into what Occupy has been up to and the direction it’s going, even as the mainstream news media turns its attention elsewhere.

Full Story Here: Donations to Occupy Wall Street plummet – Salon.com.

For someone who came of age in the seventies, that’s a big statement. I’ve been thinking about why (other than his irresistable mojo) so many people are jumping in the sack with Eric.

More magazine would attribute it to the knows-what-she-wants/doesn’t-care-what-you-think attitude women acquire as they take control of their lives, usually in the second half. There’s a lot of truth to this. Just as I no longer worry about female friends stealing my man–having long ago weeded out anyone toxic enough to consider it–I’ve got a better handle on my own needs, and have learned to allow them to carry weight in the decision-making process.

Full Story Here: Deborah Gaines: One-Night Stands in Midlife: Just Desserts.

Forget politics. The 99%, the Occupy Wall Street movement, is not about politics. But politicians don’t get it yet. The Dems sure don’t. And while Bill O’Reilly says the movement is already dead, insider Frank Luntz thinks OWS is not only very alive, but getting dangerously bigger. In fact, he’s very “scared” for his clients.

Warning: Will somebody please tell Luntz Occupy Wall Street is not about politics? This is class warfare, a revolution about economic inequality, not about political parties, political policies and political solutions … and it’s not going away any time soon.

Luntz is a conservative pollster so he’s making it all about politics. But he’s missing the point, and misleading his clients. Luntz is author of some great books like “Words That Matter” and “What Americans Really Want…Really.” And in my opinion, he’s one of the America’s best behavioral economists.

But his pitch at last week’s Republican Governors Association meeting in Florida suggests he not only doesn’t understand the 99%, he’s misleading 29 state governors with Words That Will Backfire when the occupiers in the encampments see through Luntz’s attempted manipulations.

Full Story Here: Super Rich vs. 99%: Class war will explode – Paul B. Farrell – MarketWatch.

• Occupy Portland camp shut down Saturday night, adding it to the list of major camps to be busted by police
• Occupy LA, Philadelphia shut down earlier this week
• Dead body found at Occupy Denton site in Texas

Some Occupy Wall street protests throughout the country are taking desperate measures to keep the movement alive as only a few camps across the country remain open.

In New York, which was the original birthplace of the movement, protesters have started a hunger strike and hope to move to a different plot of land since they have been barred from Zuccotti Park.

Protesters were planning on taking this extreme stand starting Saturday, the same day when the Occupy Portland camp was broken up by police.

Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street hunger strikes begin as one of the few remaining camps shut down by police | Mail Online.

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

Full Story Here: Robert Reich.

Up to two million public sector workers are staging a strike over pensions in what is set to be the biggest walkout for a generation.

Schools, hospitals, airports, ports and government offices will be among sites disrupted, as more than 1,000 demonstrations are due across the UK.

It would “achieve nothing”, Downing Street said, calling for more talks.

Unions object to government plans to make their members pay more and work longer to earn their pensions.

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Mr Maude branded the action “indefensible and wrong”.

Full Story Here: BBC News – Public sector strike set to be largest for a generation.

17.2 million: The number of households that were food insecure in 2010, the highest number on record. They make up 14.5 percent of households, or approximately one in seven.

48.8 million: People who lived in food insecure households last year.

Full Story Here: Hunger In America, By The Numbers | ThinkProgress.

He talks about the 99 percent movement from which the Occupy Wall Street sprung out and comments on its aims and implications.

Full Story Here: The 99 percent movement & Wall Street-On the Edge with Max Keiser-11-25-2011 – YouTube.

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.\

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.

Full Story Here: We Are the 99.9% – NYTimes.com.

A volunteer with the demonstrators’ public relations group says they will have meals and music for 5,000 people.

The food is being donated by restaurants and individual supporters.

They also say they will be abiding by Department of Health code by wrapping all the plates of food individually.

The music will be acoustic, because protesters do not have a permit for loudspeakers.

There will also be a canned food drive, with donations going to local food banks and pantries.

Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street Protesters Plan Feast In Zuccotti Park – NY1.com.

Who’s screwed? American workers. A new report out of the Commerce Department shows that over the last decade – U.S.-based transnational corporations laid off 864,000 American workers – while hiring more than 1.5 million new Asian workers and hiring nearly 500,000 new workers in Latin America. Also during the last decade – these transnational giants reduced how much money they were investing in the U.S. economy – but increased their investment in foreign economies by 4%. Currently – American corporations pay the second lowest amount in taxes of all the developed nations in the world – and many like General Electric pay absolutely no taxes at all. Yet – they have no interest in keeping all their extra profits right here in America. There used to be a business ethic in our nation that a corporation not only focuses on making a profit – but also serves the community it belongs to. Unfortunately – thanks to thirty years of Reaganomics, Clintonomics, and Bushonomics – and all the tax cuts, deregulation, and so-called Free Trade deals – it’s all about getting as rich as you can – as fast as you can – and to hell with the nation you call home. Can you hear the giant sucking sound that Ross Perot warned us about?

Full Story Here: On the News With Thom Hartmann: Occupy Wall Street is Bringing Down the Big Banks, and More | Truthout.

[CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST OCCUPY WALL STREET UPDATES]

The memo, first reported by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, host of the show “Up with Chris Hayes,” was written by the firm Clark, Lytle, Geduldig, Cranford and addressed to one of its Wall Street clients. It runs four pages long and is set to be sent on Thanksgiving.

The first two graphs of the memo, provided by MSNBC to The Huffington Post, express angst over the idea that the movement could mean “more than just short-term discomfort for Wall Street firms” and has “the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”

Full Story Here: Lobbying Firm Memo To Advise Wall Street Clients On Occupy Movement (VIDEO).

Former Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis joined Occupy Wall Street protesters on Tuesday.

He was seen holding a sign reading “NYPD Don’t Be Wall Street Mercenaries.”

In a video interview with Livestreamers, he railed against the excessive power of corporate America and the wrongful eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park. He said if the occupations “continue to grow, you’re going to see a lot more of the FBI.”

Full Story Here: Former Philadelphia Police Captain Joins Occupy Protesters, Gets Arrested | Common Dreams.

animated video at link below:

Full Story Here: 99% v 1%: The Data Behind the Occupy Movement – Animation | Common Dreams.

Series of events planned to support evicted Zuccotti Park activists by highlighting growing inequality and need for jobs

Supporters of the Occupy movement are gearing up for a national day of protest and direct action across America, taking in dozens of events from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Thursday has been declared a day of “solidarity” with the Occupy Wall Street activists in New York after their camp in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park was raided and dismantled by police. But it is also aimed at highlighting several of the movement’s broader aims in terms of income inequality and a desperate need for job creation in America’s floundering economy.

The Occupy movement, which began two months ago with the occupation of Zuccotti Park, has since spread to scores of cities and towns across the country, with varying success. It has often rejuvenated left-leaning political activists but also brought down a heavy police response, frequently at the behest of city mayors.

Full Story Here: Occupy protesters prepare for day of ‘solidarity’ across US | World news | guardian.co.uk.

In the aftermath of a city-by-city crackdown featuring hundreds of arrests and evictions of Occupy encampments, plenty of questions demand answers.

Occurring without provocation, the Occupy crackdown gives the appearance of an orchestrated effort to thwart an emerging protest movement. Early morning Tuesday, in New York City, hundreds of police officers, many in riot gear, swept down on Zuccotti Park, throwing away private property, restricting press and using aggressive tactics to remove protesters and supporters. Here are some things we’d really like to know.

1. Who convened the mayors call? In an interview with the BBC, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan alluded to her participation in a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities just prior to the raids on encampments across the country. Mayors’ associations do exist, but they do not typically organize police interventions or local decision-making in such detail. Given the abuses of the past, such as the notorious COINTELPRO and other intervention programs that the U.S. government organized during the Vietnam protests, the public has a right to know the details of who organized that call.

Full Story Here: 6 Burning Questions About the Violent Crackdowns on Occupations Around the Country | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Who knew, or could even imagine, that in such a short time, the Occupy Wall Street movement would inspire a striking transformation of public consciousness, capturing the imagination of the country and the globe, and fundamentally changing the public discourse? And it’s just the beginning.

Zuccotti Park/Liberty Plaza was recoccupied last night by hundreds of protestors, after a brutal display by the NYPD the night before. Police snuck in under the cover of darkness in the early morning hours Tuesday, and violently cleared the park, destroying everything that had been creatively built over the past two months. It was a sad and infuriating moment; an action that spoke volumes about the fears and pettiness of a mayor and a city that can’t seem to help but be immature and brutal, arbitrary and capricious, and totally lacking in any of the imagination the protestors have in bundles.

This is an opportunity for a transcendent moment. But the billionaire mayor and his advisers and minders have responded in petty ways, cowed perhaps by the ridiculous crap spewed by the idiots who edit the New York Post and the Daily News.

Full Story Here: Message to Occupiers: Stay Strong — They Can’t Beat Down Hopes, Dreams and the Fight for a More Humane World | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Berkeley Activist Hit By Police Explains How Several UC Regents Profit From Higher Levels Of Student Debt

Earlier today, OccupyCal protesters at the University of California Berkeley staged a mass “teach-in” and protest to stand in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and to rebuke police brutality. Last week, a video captured police viciously beating peaceful students as they locked arms to protect their encampment on campus.

One of the students hit by the police in the now infamous YouTube video, Honest Chung, addressed a crowd of well over a thousand people around 2:30pm PST. Chung explained the movement’s grievances, and said that the UC Regents, the governing body for the university system, had ordered the crack down. He also noted that several of the UC Regents retain positions at major banks, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The arrangement, Chung said, not only symbolized the larger problems of economic inequality and bank power over society, but places the UC Regents in a position to profit from student debt

Full Story Here: 99 Percent Movement | ThinkProgress.

Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee asked the department for relief from some No Child provisions, including the requirement that all students be proficient in English and math by 2014. In their applications, the states outlined plans to develop their own locally designed school accountability systems, create new educator-evaluation systems and overhaul their lowest-performing schools, the department said.

President Obama said in announcing the waiver program in September that it was necessary because many states had already adopted new common academic standards and were taking other steps that were in conflict with the requirements of the 2002 No Child law. Since Congress had made little progress in rewriting the law, Mr. Obama said, his administration felt obligated to offer states relief.

Full Story Here: 11 States Seek Relief From ‘No Child’ Provisions, in Return for Raising Standards – NYTimes.com.

How can the rest of the 99 percent demonstrate our outrage? Here are five things we can do, without parking a tent in the street.

Let’s take a look at where we are right now. There is battle royale underway between inhabitants of two entirely different universes over what’s wrong with our nation and what should be fixed.

On the one hand, the entire political establishment, blessed by Wall Street, wants the conversation to be all about debt and “entitlements.” We are told 24/7 that we’re living over our heads, that our social safety net is too expensive, and that we need to cut, cut, cut trillions of dollars from public budgets so we don’t become the next Greece.

In that framework the only question is how much to cut and how much we should sacrifice. The so-called liberal position is that the rich should pay a bit more while the rest of us suffer cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Please note that taxes on Wall Street are not on the table.) The “grand bargain” is all about how much we will have to pay for the economic collapse caused by Wall Street. It’s also a loser because the more we cut, the longer unemployment will last, and the more fiscal distress we’ll face as tax revenues stall.

Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street Is Not a Spectator Sport: 5 Ways the 99 Percent Can Contribute to the Movement Right Now | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

Full Story Here: The New Progressive Movement – NYTimes.com.

Anti-Wall Street protesters and their supporters flooded a city park area in Portland early Sunday in defiance of an eviction order, and authorities elsewhere stepped up pressure against the demonstrators, arresting nearly two dozen.

Crowds converged on two adjacent downtown Portland parks where protesters are camped after city officials set a midnight Saturday deadline to disperse.

But hours later, the protesters were still there, backed by many supporters who spilled out into the streets next to camp, tying up traffic. They obeyed police orders to clear the street early Sunday.

At one point the numbers swelled to thousands but then started to thin in the early morning hours.

Organizers said they hope enough people will join them to make it difficult if not impossible for police to carry through on any eviction.

Full Story Here: Occupy Portland Protesters Face Showdown With Police Over Eviction Order.

The 99 Percent Movement has attracted students, labor unions, unemployed workers, teachers, artists, singers, writers, former real estate brokers, political activists, people who have given up on the traditional political system, and thousands more. But a growing contingent seen at Occupy Wall Street solidarity protests all across the country are veterans.

The signs of a veterans movement are everywhere, from new groups dedicated to supporting veterans in the occupy movement, to thousands of veterans showing up at street actions. And despite condescending rhetoric from the right-wing media, veterans have every reason to be there:

Full Story Here: Five Reasons Why Veterans Are Part Of The 99 Percent | ThinkProgress.

The American people are fed up with watching passively as their homes are foreclosed; their jobs outsourced; and wars are waged for billions of dollars that could have been used to build our infrastructure at home, create new jobs, and improve our educational system. Many are beginning to see the hypocrisy of politicians who embrace a “culture of life” while supporting pointless, bloody wars; and of politicians who claim to be for human rights while at the same time abridging our rights to privacy, equal protection, due process, and other basic human rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Many Americans are fed up with a government that lies to them; and they are distrustful of the mainstream media to expose those lies.

As a result, thousands are taking to the streets of cities throughout the nation and the world in peaceful protest. At last, the 99 percent is standing up to the 1 percent; and it is reasonable to expect that the latter will eventually have little choice but to take seriously the concerns of the former, if only because politicians need votes and big business needs customers.

Full Story Here: Why Are 99 Percent of Americans Fed Up? A Video Tells All | Psychology Today.

In Portland, police said they had received reports that protesters were digging a reinforced hole and fashioning make-shift weapons out of wood and nails after Mayor Sam Adams gave them until midnight on Saturday to clear out of two downtown parks.

Police said they believed Occupy Portland organizers had also put out a call for reinforcements from Oakland, Seattle and San Francisco as they prepared for a confrontation.

Full Story Here: Anti-Wall Street protesters dig in against police | Reuters.

The police request came one day after a man was shot to death near their protest site. But Occupy Oakland demonstrators said the shooting, which took place at a public transit station at the edge of Frank Ogawa Plaza on Thursday, had nothing to do with their movement.

The Oakland Police Officers Association, in an open letter to the protesters, said that police sympathized with their movement but that the city was in a “state of emergency.”

“You have sent the world a strong message; now it is time to go home. Your leaving today, peacefully, of your own free will, on the 30th day, will send a message to Oakland that you care about our citizens and respect our city,” the union said.

Full Story Here: Oakland police union calls for end to Occupy camp | Reuters.

Full Story Here: We are Radicals – YouTube.

Joseph E. Stiglitz :-:

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: a sense that the “system” has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right – at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain’s indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: “We are the 99%.”

That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled “Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%,” describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1% of the population controls more than 40% of the wealth and receives more than 20% of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society – bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality – but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

Full Story Here: The Globalization of Protest – Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.

Amid chants demanding that the cuts be forestalled — with suggestions for alternatives, including tax hikes — 43 demonstrators were escorted from the intersection (see video, above) by police and issued citations for pedestrian failure to “exercise due care,” or for blocking traffic. Those cited included four protesters using assisted mobility devices and at least one centenarian.

Judy Moses said she was glad to receive the citation–her second in her quest to maintain funding for programs that benefit seniors, following an arrest for blocking traffic in December at a similar protest.

“When I was younger, I never did protests,” she said. “I was a silent majority. Now, I’m ready to make noise.”

Full Story Here: Seniors Join Occupy Chicago, Protest Cuts To Medicare, Social Security (VIDEO, PHOTOS).

Full Story Here: Roger Waters – Occupy – YouTube.

Absolutely enormous crowd hit the street in Oakland in support of Oakland. They took over a highway; there’s got to be a good 100,000 people there.

Full Story Here: RAW VIDEO: Chopper footage of 100,000+ Occupy Oakland Takes back Highway – YouTube.

If the big  banks aren’t scared yet at the power of social-media grass-roots activism, they’re not paying attention

On Oct. 9, Kristen Christian, a 27-year-old art gallery owner in Los Angeles, created a Facebook page urging her friends to move their money out of the big banks on Nov. 5. The suggestion hit a nerve. By Nov. 4, 77,015 “friends” had declared their intention to “attend” Bank Transfer Day.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that 77,015 people will be pulling all their money out of the likes of Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America all at once. Saturday is hardly an ideal day to get banking business done, and the process of switching over one’s account to a new bank or credit union is not something that can be accomplished — yet — with a flip of a switch. (Detailed advice on how to change your banking account can be found here.) And of course, clicking your intent to do something on Facebook is a far cry from actually, well, doing it.

It’s also not clear that the big banks will take a big hit from Bank Transfer Day. The usually sensible economics commentator Felix Salmon goes so far as to assert that “the big banks are blithely unconcerned about people withdrawing their funds on Saturday … I’m not kidding myself that doing so is going to harm the big banks at all.”

Full Story Here: Why Bank Transfer Day is only the beginning – Salon.com.

Full Story Here: 11-03-11 1b – Occupy The Banks, with Matt Taibbi – Countdown with Keith Olbermann – YouTube.

In an interview with BBC News, the Microsoft co-founder, said that while the plight of impoverished people in developed nations may seem like it has little to with the economies of rich countries, it affects everyone.

“Not caring about the instability of these countries really would hurt our economic future quite dramatically, whether it’s unrest, whether it’s disease,” Gates told BBC News. “On the other hand, if you bring these people into the world economy then you get this very positive, virtuous cycle.”

Gates, who made a presentation highlighting the importance of foreign aid at the G20 conference in Cannes Thursday, has outlined several ways to better integrate the globe’s poor into the world economy, the Guardian reports. One of his most popular proposals seems to be the institution of a tax on trades on stocks, bonds and derivatives, also known as the Robin Hood tax.

Full Story Here: Bill Gates: Ignoring World’s Poor ‘Would Hurt Our Economic Future’.

As many as 15,000 people participated in actions across Oakland yesterday, with small marches peeling off to protest in front of banks or “occupy” foreclosed homes. There were probably eight to ten times the number of people in the streets of Oakland today as I’d seen during past OWS actions. Police maintained a minimal presence throughout the day. There were a few scattered acts of vandalism — windows were broken at two banks but there was no violence, and the protests were remarkably up-beat throughout the day. But that changed when night fell as the streets of Oakland once again resonated with the sharp cracks of tear gas canisters and “less lethal” projectiles being fired, and flash-bang grenades scattering the crowd.

But first: did a small group of activists manage in just 5 short days of organizing to bring about the first general strike in the United States in generations?

Full Story Here: OWS Oakland Takes Over City, Shutting Down One of the Biggest Ports in the Country…But Nightfall Brings More Chaos and Teargas | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.

Now is such a time.

Millions are demanding clear explanations for the economic turmoil surrounding their lives and rejecting en masse standard platitudes from an increasingly discredited political establishment.

Fox-News pundits, Heritage Foundation business scholars, glib right-wing loud mouths and two-faced politicians from both major parties have been exposed as stand-in ventriloquists for the wealthy – shockingly, all in a few short weeks.

It all began with only a few hundred protestors camped out on Wall Street challenging conceited notions of the one percent.

Full Story Here: Is Capitalism Losing the Debate? | Common Dreams.