Occupy Wall Street: A movement beyond fear - The Economic Times. Rajni Bakshi Nov 5, 2011, 03.20am IST By Rajni Bakshi, Author Occupy Wall Street protests across the world have revived interest in sifting 'good capitalism' from 'bad capitalism'. Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, proponents of market capitalism have sought ways to re-legitimise their creed. Now they fear that a wave of global discontent might overwhelm the only economic system that really works.
Even those who concede that Wall Street's operations need to be reformed tend to consider any challenge to 'the market' as blasphemous. Besides, they add, it is easy enough to grumble about the failings of markets, but where is the alternative? This view is both ill-informed and desperately lacking in imagination. That is why the mere idea of occupying Wall Street evokes a visceral response in a wide range of people in far-flung corners of the world.
Capitalism is currently the dominant mode of market economy but it is not final. Everything You Know About Occupy Wall Street is Wrong. Well, perhaps not quite everything, but enough that were you to personally experience the demonstration and look around with your own eyes, you’d likely come to regard the mainstream media reports about Occupy Wall Street (especially the lamebrain stuff printed in The New York Post or heard on Fox News) more like loose gossip, bullshit or random fiction, than actual journalism or considered opinion. I had the extreme privilege of visiting Zuccotti Park on three of the five days I recently spent in NYC and I’m here to tell you that I am much more excited about Occupy Wall Street—and prospects for real progressive change in this country—now than I ever could have been admiring it from afar. It was a life-affirming and quite moving thing to personally experience and hopefully I can get some of those good feelings across here.
On Wednesday, I was picked up at JFK by my old friend (and frequent Dangerous Minds Radio Hour DJ) Nate Cimmino. The medical area of Occupy Wall Street. Gay? Believe. Not an Ending, a Beginning: Notes on Occupy Wall Street. By Guest Contributor Manissa McCleave Maharawal, originally published at In Front and Center In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: “What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?” These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, when you are very much in it, it feels impossible sometimes. And so instead of describing what Occupy Wall Street feels like I say: “It is all happening so fast, it changes everyday, it is overwhelming, I am tired but I am also excited again, I’ve made new friends, new lovers and new enemies, I couldn’t have imagined my life would be like this a month ago.”
When I said this to my friend Amy last week she laughed and replied, half-jokingly: “That sounds like the start of the revolution.” “Not yet,” I replied “but we’re trying.” Here is the thing: Occupy Wall Street has changed a lot over the past two weeks. Top Five Reasons Why the Occupy Wall Street Protests Embody Values of the Real Boston Tea Party | Truthout. In recent years, the Boston Tea Party has been associated with a right-wing movement that supports policies favoring powerful corporations and the wealthy. As ThinkProgress has reported, lobbyists and Republican front groups have driven the current manifestation of the Tea Party to push for giveaways to oil companies and big businesses.
However, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations picking up momentum across the country better embody the values of the original Boston Tea Party. In the late 18th century, the British government became deeply entwined with the interests of the East India Trading Company, a massive conglomerate that counted British aristocracy as shareholders. Americans, upset with a government that used the colonies to enrich the East India Trading Company, donned Native American costumes and boarded the ships belonging to the company and destroyed the company’s tea. 1.) The Original Boston Tea Party Was A Civil Disobedience Action Against A Private Corporation. The New Yorker Mocks The 1% With Its Occupy Wall Street Cover. NYC Property Owners Want All Public Plazas Closed at Night.
Property owners are moving to change an old zoning law that has allowed anti-Wall Street protesters to camp out in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan around the clock. A 1960's era zoning rule gave developers zoning concessions in return for building public plazas that would be accessible 24 hours a day. This rule has since changed so that new privately built public spaces may close overnight; however, the plazas built under the earlier rule were not affected and still kept open 24 hours. Real Estate Board President Steve Spinola said his organization, which represents institutions and people involved in NY real estate, will request a zoning change that will allow those plazas built under the 1961 rule to close at 1 a.m.
"I do believe that plazas should have the right to shut down at a certain time because they were not meant for camping out," he said. But changing the rule retroactively for plazas built under the old rule is expected to be a lengthy legal process. The capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011. AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. The Zurich team can. 1. OWS Thinks About Demands, Starting With A Massive Jobs Program Taken Straight From The New Deal. Occupy Wall Street is working on an agenda. Sort of. In a dispatch from the demonstration, John Harkinson of Mother Jones reports on the work of the “Demands” group, first reported in the New York Times. And high on the list of demands is a federally funded jobs program, like the ones that operated during the New Deal: The plan would involve the federal government raising about $1.5 trillion in new revenue and using it to create 25 million new public-sector jobs paying union-level wages. It would put Americans to work building bridges, roads, and affordable housing; providing free public transportation and free university education for all; staffing a single-payer health care system; and pursuing clean-energy research.
It remains to be seen whether the demonstrators will formalize this demand – or any other demand, for that matter. But the the idea itself? Oh, I know: This Congress isn't going to enact a government jobs program. The Demographics Of Occupy Wall Street. Coverage of the technology at Occupy Wall Street focuses on the neat-o, young-people elements such as Twitter, Facebook, live streaming video, and a sleepover atmosphere. But Occupy Wall Street also employs the kind of heavy-duty data crunching and analysis found at marketing firms and universities.
In fact, two of the volunteers, business analyst Harrison Schultz and professor Hector R. Cordero-Guzman from the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, today released a study based on a survey of 1,619 visitors to the occupywallst.org site on October 5. And about a quarter of them have also attended occupation events.
So they aren't all armchair activists. Some of the results are to be expected. Among the findings: They aren’t all kids. It’s not all students and the educated elite. “Get a job!” “Tax the rich!” It may be a party, but not that kind. Not everyone tweets. While interesting, the survey is still a rough cut, with some gaps. How Republicans Convinced Fundamentalists To Support Their Corporatist Agenda. There are many religious people who believe that their god controls every aspect of their lives, and for them, relinquishing control of their existence to a deity makes sense.
The problem is that it also excuses them from any form of self-responsibility as well as giving their religion’s leaders power to manipulate them to behave and choose a particular political ideology based on their faith. It is unfortunate that in America, fundamentalist Christians support conservative economic policies that are against their own self-interests because Republicans portray the government as an overreaching entity that is in competition with the bible and its prohibition on gays, women’s rights, and freedom of religion.
Republicans and their teabagger minions use anti-government rhetoric to convince fundamentalists that corporations and the wealthy are being overtaxed and over-regulated by the godless government and it has fostered support for conservative ideals that are destroying the economy. Ambiguous UpSparkles From the Heart of the Park (Mic Check/Occupy Wall Street) | V-Day: A Global Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls Worldwide. I have been watching and listening to all kinds of views and takes on Occupy Wall Street. Some say it's backed by the Democratic Party. Some say it's the emergence of a third party. Some say the protesters have no goals, no demands, no stated call. Some say it's too broad, taking on too much. I have been spending time down at Zucotti Park and I am here to offer a much more terrifying view. It is a cry against what appears to be scarcity and what Naomi Klein calls a distribution problem and, I would add, a priority problem.
We all know things are terribly wrong in this country. A diverse group of teachers, thinkers, students, techies, workers, nurses, have stopped their daily lives. Occupy Wall Street is a work of art, exploding onto a canvas in search of form, in search of an image, a vision. In a culture obsessed with product, the process of creation is almost unbearable. Melanie Butler Daniel Levine Jordan Dann. My Soapbox Advice to the OWS Movement and then some. I may not know much, but I know a lot of it. So I decided to share my opinions and thoughts on what I would do if the OWS movement either elected me Grand Poobah or asked for my advice: 1. The Great Lie of Wall Street. Every CEO tells the same great white lie. It is at the heart of every communication. Great CEO White Lie = “We are acting in the best interests of shareholders.”
When a CEO utters this lie, everyone automatically forgives whatever they do. The problem is that unless the company is losing money and it is the only way to keep the company alive, in this era of 9.1pct unemployment it NEVER is in the BEST INTEREST OF SHAREHOLDERS. Shareholders , whether they own shares directly or through mutual funds or pensions do not live in a corporate vacuum. If OWS really wants to change corporate structure and impact the economy, talk to shareholders.
You might even consider buying a share of stock. 2. Those personal guarantees would change EVERYTHING in the banking industry. 3. Crazy ? The Mass Media’s Disgraceful Coverage of Occupy Wall Street - The Bloody Cross Roads - The Bloody Cross Roads. Here Are The Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About... Last week, we published a chart-essay that illustrates the extreme inequality that has developed in the US economy over the past 30 years.
The charts explain what the Wall Street protesters are angry about. They also explain why the protesters' message is resonating with the country at large. Here are the four key points: 1. 2. 3. 4. Three charts illustrate this: The top earners are capturing a higher share of the national income than they have anytime since the 1920s: CEO pay and corporate profits have skyrocketed in the past 20 years, "production worker" pay has risen 4%. After adjusting for inflation, average earnings haven't increased in 50 years. It's worth noting that the US has been in a similar situation before: At the end of the "Roaring '20s," just before the start of the Great Depression. It took the country 15-20 years to pull out of that slump and fix the imbalances. SEE ALSO: CHARTS: Here's What The Protesters Are So Angry About... How the Right's Lame Attack on Occupy Wall St. Shows the Poverty of Conservative Ideology.
A new NBC/ poll finds that among those with an opinion, twice as many Americans support the Occupy Wall Street Movement than oppose it. The movement -- with its defining message of standing with the 99 percent of Americans who don't have lobbyists working for them – appears to have tapped into a deep vein of discontent among working people whose economic security has been savaged by decades of upward redistribution of the nation's wealth. The right, in keeping with its habitual knee-jerk defense of the privileged, has tried, with little success so far, to push back on that message. And its response offers us a microcosmic view of everything that's wrong with conservative discourse these days.
Their answer – or one of them – is a Tumblr account called We Are the 53% , an unimaginitive take-off of Occupy Wall Street's We Are the 99% . The site is the brain-child of Erick Erickson, a toxic right-wing idiot hired by CNN in a futile attempt to deflect conservative charges of “liberal bias.”