Elected Dems to protesters — we’re with you, sort of

Posted on October 17, 2011 by oddmanout215

Chris Hedges, plainly stating why “liberal” has become a dirty word not only to right-wingers but to many thinkers and activists on the left:

Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests…

… The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back…

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Freedom of assembly? Not in MY public space

Posted on October 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

From Michael Kimmelman’s thoughtful piece about… well, about America’s rediscovery that movements to effect social change are often sparked by large, sustained public gatherings of protesters:

THE ever expanding Occupy Wall Street movement, with encampments now not only in Lower Manhattan but also in Washington, London and other cities, proves among other things that no matter how instrumental new media have become in spreading protest these days, nothing replaces people taking to the streets.

Maybe I’m wrong, but the movement also seems to point to a conflict between our First Amendment rights of assembly and petition, and contemporary laws and notions regarding public space. As Kimmelman notes, public spaces in American cities — usually, small parks — often amount to “token gestures by developers in return for erecting bigger, taller buildings.” Most public parks in New York are closed to the public at night.

Zuccotti Park is “quasi-public.” Its owner, Brookfield Office Properties, must abide by a zoning variance that allows it to remain open the the public 24 hours a day, and that’s the only reason protesters were able to establish a camp there. Without the variance, no Occupy Wall Street and, probably, no similar movements in cities around the world.

However, the quasi-public Zuccotti Park is fundamentally no different from most so-called public spaces in cities, in that most of them ultimately are “controlled by landlords.” Zuccotti Park is still occupied, thanks to the zoning variance, but the occupiers are violating Brookfield’s prohibition of tarps and other personal effects and therefore are subject to legal eviction if and when the Brookfield decides to have them kicked out. Kimmelman writes:

The whole situation illustrates just how far we have allowed the ancient civic ideal of public space to drift from an arena of public expression and public assembly (Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, say) to a commercial sop (the foyer of the Time Warner Center).

It also illustrates how precarious the rights to assemble peaceably and petition for redress of grievances are in a country where police can chase people from public spaces because the sun is going down, or because users of the park are carrying bedrolls or other belongings. (BTW, this describes what happened to Occupy Denver this week when cops simply moved in and removed the protesters. So much for their right to assemble.)

I hope Kimmelman or someone else in the corporate media directly addresses this apparent danger to the OWS movement, and to our First Amendment rights. Where’s Nat Hentoff when you need him?

Posted in economic collapse, Great Recession, livable cities, mainstream media, New York Times, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t judge me by my shoes…

Posted on October 16, 2011 by oddmanout215

The Band was peaking as a creative force when “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” appeared on their second album. The song’s subject is a rural victim of the Great Depression who joins a labor union to avoid starvation. His plight seemed awfully remote to most young listeners in 1969, but the economy has changed in a big way since then. What goes around, comes around…

Richard Manuel sings like an impassioned modern-day Job — My horse Jethro, well he went mad/And I can’t remember things bein’ so bad — and Robbie Robertson is at his tasteful and funky best as a guitarist and a writer of songs that, as Greil Marcus noted in Mystery Train, “were made to bring to life the fragments of experience, legend and artifact every American has inherited as the memory of a mythical past.”

Posted in arts, economic collapse, Great Depression, pop music, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Toomey puppet paraded at Occupy Philly

Posted on October 15, 2011 by oddmanout215

“Follow the puppet!”

The oversize papier-mache likeness of right-wing Sen. Pat Toomey stood tall among hundreds of Occupy Philly sympathizers marching from City Hall to Toomey’s Philly office with a petition for job creation. Coordinators shouted again when some marchers veered to the north, away from the destination.

“Follow the puppet!”

This sounded to me like a description of what many working people do when they vote for guys like Toomey, one of the Congresspeople on the so-called Super Committee that will decide how to cut the federal budget. Toomey used to work for Club For Growth, the job-killing pro-corporate advocacy group.

I shared my thought about the puppet chant with Jacob Russell, 70, a South Philly poet and Occupy Philly volunteer, who replied, “The irony is not lost on me.”

Russell explained that each Occupy group — there are roughly a thousand now in the U.S. and abroad — isn’t a protest group at its core, but rather a decision-making body constantly incorporating new ideas proposed by individuals and committees within the group. He said the goal is to organize communications so that the Occupy movement can build a structure beyond the local groups that is still democratic and inclusive.

“We’re going to have to do that to survive,” Russell said in noting the powers-that-be and their political puppets never concede anything without an organized fight by those seeking fundamental change — in income disparity, in regulations regarding lobbying and corporate bailouts, and so on.

As we talked, the crowd swung back around and started the long march to Independence Hall, to be part of what is being called the OccupyWallStreet Global Day of Action, involving marches in hundreds of cities. The marchers waved signs and chanted, “We are the 99 percent.”

Watched from all sides were cops in squad cars, traffic cops, plainclothes cops with walkie-talkies and armbands, husky bike cops wearing shirts bearing the ominous message “Police Strike Force.”

A middle-aged man from Wynnewood, PA, who didn’t want his name used said, “I’m here because the country is headed in the wrong direction. There are too many of us who want to have jobs but don’t, and too many of us who don’t have health care but should. And there are too many people making too much money, and it’s becoming more and more disparate as we go along.”

Posted in City Hall, Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Philadelphia, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, unemployment | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

As sure as the sun will shine…

Posted on October 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

This was ripped right from the movie, I think. It simmers. Great rhythm section. The whole band is the rhythm section.

Check out the sinister bosses sizing up Cliff’s commercial potential.

Posted in arts, movies, pop music | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Bloomberg backs off plan to sweep away OWS

Posted on October 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

Weary looking Russell Simmons, answering a reporter’s question about Occupy Wall Street after the movement survived a threat by NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg to “clean up” its camp in Zuccotti Park:

The message is coming out. It’s pretty simple. We are at Wall Street, and Wall Street controls our government, and we would like the people to control it. Simple.

I hear Russell, but it’s not that simple, and he knows it. First you have to find a way to separate government from the corporations and big investment banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, which Matt Taibbi famously described as

…a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

This won’t happen while Obama and politicians like him continue to be elected. However, the fact that people like Simmons are on the streets protesting the unchecked power of the vampires and attracting long-overdue media attention is a big step in the right direction.

Update: According to Mediaite.com:

Hip Hop mogul and progressive activist Russell Simmons told CNN that Occupy Wall Street protestors will remain at Zuccotti Park possibly until Congress passes a constitutional amendment that says “money is going to leave Washington.”

Hmm… You want to run that by me again?

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Talking with voters, walking with CEOs

Posted on October 14, 2011 by oddmanout215

What will it mean to American voters that Barack Obama has signed into law three trade deals that will destroy up to 159,000 American jobs, and that he did this at approximately the same time he promised to get serious about job creation at home? As Firedoglake notes, this latest betrayal

… tells you something important about President Obama and many members of Congress. The problem isn’t that most of our elected officials actually want to destroy Americans who have jobs, all things being equal they do want Americans to have jobs. The problem is protecting American jobs is a much lower priority for Obama and most members of Congress than is giving the large corporate lobbyists what they are willing to donate millions to see advanced.

It is always good to be reminded where you stand.

In other words, it will mean that voters, including all of us who voted for Obama, can move forward with fresh confirmation that the primary goal of this president is not to serve the people, but to be re-elected. (I know, what else is new?) Further, that all sitting presidents, Democrat or Republican, listen to lobbyists, not workers, because the big money for re-election bids comes from the corporations, not “grassroots” contributors.

It means that Obama is an unrepentant windbag who will talk jobs from now until November 2012 but will continue to walk with CEOs and banksters at critical moments. This also goes for most members of Congress, of course, who figure the jobs lost to South Korea, Panama and Colombia, a viciously anti-trade unionist country, will be forgotten by voters at election time.

Finally, it means the Occupy movement is likely to keep spreading. People are tired of living in a corporatocracy.

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, world-wide economy | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Instead of New Deal, No Deal

Posted on October 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

Robert Scheer’s reminder that we need a president whose policies help the 99 percent of Americans who are hurting, not the one percent who are extremely wealthy:

… To accomplish that, we need a moratorium on bank-ordered evictions, along with a government-funded program to aid the underemployed that is as robust as the trillions spent to save the Wall Street swindlers who caused all of this trouble.

Instead we are left with a Democratic president who soothes our rage with promises of decent-paying jobs that in actuality are being vigorously exported from our shores by the president’s top corporate backers. That absurdity was marked by Barack Obama’s choice of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric—a company that has shifted to foreign countries two-thirds of its workforce and 82 percent of its profits—to head the president’s job creation council.

Obama has failed not because he is a progressive in the mold of Franklin Delano Roosevelt but because he is not. He has blindly followed the lead of George W. Bush in bankrupting the nation by throwing money at Wall Street while continuing to fund wildly expensive and unneeded wars…

Scheer’s observations lead him to conclude that voting for Obama makes sense because he will be the lesser of two evils, but he notes that such a choice is “akin to a form of slow torture.” He adds, “Better to support the Occupy Wall Street protests as an inspiring alternative.”

Right, but you can’t just dismiss electoral politics and expect any changes to be made, not without a revolution. Scheer doesn’t mention it, but a third-party candidacy for the Democratic nomination might help make Obama behave more like a Dem. Or is this mere wishful thinking on my part?

Posted in Congress, economic collapse, globalization, Great Recession, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, unemployment, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Uh-oh, ‘the help’ is marching in NYC

Posted on October 13, 2011 by oddmanout215

How would you like to make pennies cleaning up after the royalists who helped create one of the biggest financial messes of all time, or after people just like them? Workers in NYC don’t like it at all:

Hundreds of office cleaners and guards marched near Wall Street on Wednesday demanding good jobs and protesting economic inequality, while a smaller group of demonstrators rallied at JPMorgan Chase’s skyscraper. The marches were part of a growing Occupy Wall Street movement, the month-long protests that have inspired solidarity rallies planned for Thursday at some 90 U.S. college campuses. Demonstrations have occurred in more than 1,400 cities around the world.

The movement began on Sept. 17, when protesters set up camp in a park near Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, upset that the billions of dollars in bank bailouts doled out during the recession allowed banks to resume earning huge profits while average Americans have had no relief from high unemployment and job insecurity. Participants also complain the richest 1 percent of Americans do not pay their fair share of taxes…

Protesters appeared to be directing frustration at JP Morgan Chase’s high-profile chief executive, Jamie Dimon. About 500 protesters on Tuesday met on Manhattan’s upscale Upper East Side, marching past the homes of Dimon, hedge fund manager John Paulson, media mogul Rupert Murdoch and David Koch, co-founder of energy firm Koch Industries…

Posted in economic collapse, Goldman Sachs, mainstream media, Politics, taxes, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Warren way too honest for Obama’s inner circle

Posted on October 12, 2011 by oddmanout215

I hope she runs Scott Brown’s pickup truck off the road, I’ll root for her all the way, BUT… I won’t forget how Barack Obama turned his back on Elizabeth Warren for her loyalty, not to mention her effectiveness at fighting for the interests of the poor and middle-class:

As she crisscrossed the country, spreading the word about the [Consumer Finance Protection Bureau], Warren became a familiar face… She had gained millions of supporters… She had become like a modern-day Mr. Smith, giving voice to regular citizens astonished at the failure of Washington to protect Main Street – and what increasingly appeared to be its abandonment of middle-class America. By July, the AFL-CIO – speaking for its 12 million members – had called on Obama to name Warren to head the agency. So had scores of consumer groups. Eighty-nine Democrats in the House of Representatives had signed a letter, publicly urging him to choose Warren… By July 18, when Obama announced that he was passing Warren over, he did so after receiving petitions signed by several hundred thousand people and organizations urging him to appoint Warren as the country’s top consumer watchdog.

At the end of his remarks, Obama turned to Warren and kissed her on the cheek. She smiled gamely, though if there are kisses a woman can do without, this was one of them. A Judas kiss, some would say.

At the time of the betrayal, the Daily Kos crowd and other Obama-bots insisted that she didn’t really want the job, that the president had stood up for her, that it was her decision not to go through the arduous process of trying to get Congressional approval. Even Mother Jones suggested that Warren might be too much of a “lightning rod” for GOP opposition; that Richard Cordray, the person Obama picked for the position, would do a good job and would have a better shot at being confirmed.

This was all bullshit. It was Obama caving on a key commitment to the best person for the job and ignoring the wishes of the people who’d elected him. It was Wall Street demonstrating the extent of their influence over him. It was timid Democrats giving Obama his 99th benefit of the doubt.

I’m sure Warren will make a good senator, if such a thing is still possible. But she would have been much more directly effective and valuable as the country’s foremost official consumer advocate.

Too bad she’s not running for president, there would be someone to vote for.

Posted in CFPB, Congress, economic collapse, Great Recession, mainstream media, Obama, Politics, The New Depression, Wall Street | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment