Indoor/outdoor Occupy strategies

Posted on November 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

Uh-oh, writes Henry Banta, it’s getting cold out there…

Since the police have turned nasty and winter is coming it might be worth considering adding some indoor activities. Like going to public town hall meetings – the kind that the Tea Party got so much press for misbehaving at… The trick is to confront the political leadership with the real questions they’d rather avoid. It may also be a good idea to keep the confrontation focused on facts and avoid ideological conflict. Getting to the facts is hard enough without trying to bring the other guys to some kind of spiritual epiphany.

Banta recommends slamming elected officials with questions that focus on the key issues: income inequality, the financial crisis, financial reform, tax reform, government spending regarding the recession, and labor legislation.

Meanwhile, Abigail Caplovitz Field thinks it would be a bad idea for Occupy to simply shut down encampments for the winter. She recommends shift work and is asking you who live near an encampment to invite a protester to “occupy” your home during those hours when he/she isn’t outdoors, holding down the fort:

If sleeping and all the biological needs of the occupiers–can be handled in your space, the Occupiers can stand vigil in our space. Can’t you see it? The afternoon shift giving way to the graveyard shift, sunrise greeting the morning shift as it arrives for its duty. Or maybe there’s just two shifts, day and night. Either way, shift work is very 99%, a tactic that’s on message.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Nature’s way of telling you

Posted on November 19, 2011 by oddmanout215

This won’t faze the current crop of Republicans, because they don’t believe in science. But it might be of interest to thinking people:

Top international climate scientists and disaster experts meeting in Africa had a sharp message Friday for the world’s political leaders: Get ready for more dangerous and “unprecedented extreme weather” caused by global warming. Making preparations, they say, will save lives and money.

These experts fear that without preparedness, crazy weather extremes may overwhelm some locations, making some places unlivable.

The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new special report on global warming and extreme weather after meeting in Kampala, Uganda. This is the first time the group of scientists has focused on the dangers of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. Those are more dangerous than gradual increases in the world’s average temperature.

“We need to be worried,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands. “And our response needs to anticipate disasters and reduce risk before they happen rather than wait until after they happen and clean up afterward. … Risk has already increased dramatically.”

Posted in arts, climate change, environmentalism, pop music | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

From dystopia to reality, via NYPD

Posted on November 18, 2011 by oddmanout215

At what point does the near-future depicted in a novel stop seeming dystopian and become more-or-less realistic? This is from Super Sad True Love Story, the bestseller by Gary Shteyngart, who read Wednesday at Rutgers-Camden:

An armored personnel carrier bearing the insignia of the New York Army National Guard was parked astride a man-sized pothole at the busy intersection of Essex and Delancey, a roof-mounted .50-calibre Browning machine gun rotating 180 degrees, back and forth, like a retarded metronome along the busy but peaceable Lower East Side streetscape. Traffic was frozen all along Delancey Street. Silent traffic, for no one dared to use a horn against the military vehicle. The street corner emptied around me until I stood alone, staring down the barrel of a gun like an idiot. I lifted up my hands in panic and directed my feet to scram.

And here’s Amy Goodman on Tuesday, shortly after the NYPD trashed everything in Zuccotti Park, two days before the “day of action” involving Occupy groups all over the country:

Deeper in the park, I spotted a single book on the ground. It was marked “OWSL,” for Occupy Wall Street Library, also known as the People’s Library, one of the key institutions that had sprung up in the organic democracy of the movement. By the latest count, it had accumulated 5,000 donated books. The one I found, amidst the debris of democracy that was being hauled off to the dump, was “Brave New World Revisited,” by Aldous Huxley.

As the night progressed, the irony of finding Huxley’s book grew. He wrote it in 1958, almost 30 years after his famous dystopian novel, “Brave New World.” The original work described society in the future where people had been stratified into haves and have-nots…

“Brave New World Revisited” was Huxley’s nonfiction response to the speed with which he saw modern society careening to that bleak future. It seemed relevant, as the encampment, motivated in large part by the opposition to the supremacy of commerce and globalization, was being destroyed.

You could argue we’ve been living in Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited and are transitioning to Shteyngart’s version of dystopia, in which cops are everywhere and armed to the teeth, and people are monitored by devices that read their credit rankings and are detained in a “secure screening facility” if they attempt to keep any secrets from the government.

But who really would have thought a few years ago that paramilitary cops, in a nationally coordinated assault, might suppress the First Amendment rights of non-violent protesters tired of being used by the one percent of the population that holds all the money and power?

Shteyngart did. He lived until age 7 in what used to be the Soviet Union. He has a wild sense of humor and writes with a lot more flair and empathy than Huxley, which make his depiction of the near-future all the more disturbing.

Here’s Shteyngart at a pre-Occupy Wall Street reading, when fewer readers were focusing on the darker themes in Super Sad True Love Story:

Posted in arts, Camden, economic collapse, fiction, globalization, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, humor, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Why Republicans love privatization…

Posted on November 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

… and high incarceration rates:

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds, and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison’s phones to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates’ need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

John Kyl, Paul Ryan and other world-class liars often rhapsodize about privatization — of the postal service, transportation systems, prisons and all other entities that aren’t exclusively in the hands of the wealthy. They say the goal is to save us money, not to line their own pockets and enrich their wealthy patrons.

They also insist they’re for job creation. Unfortunately, most of the job openings they seem to have in mind are for prison guards.

Footnote: Yes, some Democrats are just as bad.

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Anarchy in Occupy Philly!

Posted on November 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Daniel Denvir in The Naked City, regarding a rumor Philadelphia Daily News helped spread yesterday with its cover story (sub-head: “How the homeless hijacked Occupy Philly”):

I received a call nearly two weeks ago touting the same conspiracy theory: anarchists are being bused into the city. (And, a top city official has also repeated this narrative to CP as fact within the past few days.) In fact, Philadelphia (in particular, West Philly) has one of the largest anarchist populations of any city that I know. If anything, it would make more sense if our anarchists were being bused to invade other cities! And all of my sources at Occupy Philly, including two lead activists who very much want to relocate from Dilworth, reject the accusation as absurd.

Posted in City Hall, City Paper, economic collapse, humor, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Camping without tents or tarps

Posted on November 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Cold ground was my bed last night,
And rock was my pillow, too.

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Occupy Wall Street, pop music, The New Depression | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Occupy without encampments? I don’t think so.

Posted on November 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

I share Robert Reich’s opinion of the corporate kingpins who are working to drive a stake through the ailing heart of our democracy:

A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted…

The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats…

If there’s a core message to the Occupier movement it’s that the increasing concentration of income and wealth poses a grave danger to our democracy. Yet when Occupiers seek to make their voices heard – in one of the few ways average people can still be heard – they’re told their First Amendment rights are limited…

However, Reich’s suggestion for undoing the harm done by Michael Bloomberg, the Koch brothers and other corporatists needs to be more specific:

… If Occupiers are expelled from specific geographic locations the Occupier movement can shift to broad-based organizing around the simple idea at the core of the movement: It’s time to occupy our democracy.

Reich presumably means “Occupiers” should focus their energies on installing genuine campaign finance reform, on pressuring the government to create jobs, stop further foreclosures, bring charges against Wall Street frauds, and other worthy goals. All good, but I think it would be a big mistake to completely quit the encampments around the country that have made the Occupy movement a genuine force for change.

The Bloombergs of the world, and their friends in the federal government, figure the mainstream media will go back to sleep and the backlash against them will fade if they make the encampments disappear. They know it’s the physical presence of large groups of defiant citizens that has focused attention on how badly we are being used by the wealthy and powerful.

Posted in campaign finance reform, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

A glass-half-full take on OWS clearout

Posted on November 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

Tuesday was a career-defining day for Mike Bloomberg. First he ordered Zuccotti Park cleared by paramilitary cops who roughed up and/or arrested many protesters and a few reporters in the process. Then he ignored a court order to allow the protesters to return to the park, stalling until he found a judge who would make a ruling more to his liking:

Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman on Tuesday denied a motion by the demonstrators seeking to be allowed back into the park with their tents and sleeping bags. Police cleared out the protesters in a nighttime sweep early Tuesday. The judge upheld the city’s effective eviction of the protesters after an emergency appeal by the National Lawyers Guild… After the ruling came down, protesters were allowed to reenter the park, albeit without any bulky items or large backpacks.

Many observers have assumed a glass-half-full attitude regarding Bloomberg’s attack on protesters and their First Amendment rights. Ezra Klein thinks the mayor did the movement a favor because the resolve of the the Zuccotti Park occupiers would have weakened significantly as weather worsened:

In aggressively clearing them from the park, Bloomberg spared them that fate. Zuccotti Park wasn’t emptied by weather, or the insufficient commitment of protesters. It was cleared by pepper spray and tear gas. It was cleared by police and authority. It was cleared by a billionaire mayor from Wall Street and a request by one of America’s largest commercial real estate developers. It was cleared, in other words, in a way that will temporarily reinvigorate the protesters and give Occupy Wall Street the best possible chance to become whatever it will become next.

I don’t know about that, but I’ll bet the police-state tactics Bloomberg used woke up a lot of liberals who’ve been sitting on the fence regarding the Occupy movement. If it didn’t, then this country is in even worse shape than it seems.

Posted in Great Recession, mainstream media, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Obama’s silence on OWS speaks volumes

Posted on November 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, weighed in today on the OWS mess, lest we forget the abandonment of the poor and middle-class by Barack Obama, the anti-FDR:

“One of the appalling things here is that there are so many Democratic mayors involved in these crackdowns or in Bloomberg’s case, someone who is seen as a liberal,” Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. “And where in all this was Obama? Why couldn’t he have picked up the phone at some point a couple of weeks ago and called the mayors of Portland and Oakland and said: ‘go easy on these people. They represent the anger and aspirations of the majority.’ Would that have been so difficult…?”

… For years, [Ehrenreich] said, she had maintained the importance of going out to vote. Now, she suggested she was becoming sympathetic to the argument of some of the protesters that the political system was so corrupted that elections were irrelevant.

“I am a responsible citizen. I always tend to drag myself out to vote but I am having trouble making arguments for that. I find myself having a lot of trouble,” she said. “We do not seem to be heard or represented.”

She added: “I just feel so disgusted at this point.”

For all her anger, though, Ehrenreich said she remained confident that the evictions were not the last for the movement.

Posted in economic collapse, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Bloomberg’s doubletalk on park evictions

Posted on November 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

Here, from Raw Story, is all you have to know about the integrity of the billionaire mayor from Wall Street:

After ordering the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday explained that the park would temporarily remain closed due to a court order that restrained the city from closing the park.

A ruling issued by [Manhattan Supreme Court Justice] Lucy Billings… said that the city is “prohibited from: “(a) Evicting protesters from Zuccotti Park and/or (b) Enforcing the “rules” published after the occupation began or otherwise preventing protesters from re-entering the park with tents and other property previously utilized,” the ruling said.

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Bloomberg said that protesters had only been “temporarily” asked to leave the park “to reduce the risk of confrontation and to minimize destruction in the surrounding neighborhood…”

… He went on to insist that “no right is absolute, and every right comes with responsibility,” suggesting that the First Amendment “does not allow tents and sleeping bags to take over public space.”

So Bloomberg has evicted protesters and is preventing them from returning, and he’s blaming his refusal to allow them to return on the judge who ruled the evictions illegal. This makes him not only a double-talker, but also something close to a dictator.

Posted in liar, Occupy Wall Street, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street, weasel | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment