Occupy 2.0. Prior to the 20th century, military conflicts used to be put on hold during the winters as all parties decided the elements would do more harm than the enemy. It’s no surprise then that Occupy Wall Street has taken a bit of time off the front pages of the news—but rest assured, they have been very, very busy. Citizens connected to this movement have filed a civil rights action in federal court; held press conferences; recruited dozens of speakers such as Professors David Harvey and Angela Davis as OWS educators; cultivated relationships with labor leaders, religious leaders, and forged international connections with those similarly dispossessed around the world.
They have reclaimed fertile but empty land for farming; pressed the Justice Department to fight civil rights violations and end mass incarceration. They have trained 50,000 citizens in non-violent direct action, civil disobedience, and their civil and political rights. They have forced governments to hold elections on time. Less Visible Occupy Movement Looks for Staying Power. “They have fewer people, and it’s not a new story anymore that there were people protesting in the streets or sleeping in parks,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a liberal organization that has strong ties to top Democrats and has encouraged the protests.
“They need to think of new ways to garner attention and connect with people around the country.” Driven off the streets by local law enforcement officials, who have evicted protesters from their encampments and arrested thousands, the movement has seen a steep decline in visibility. That has left Occupy without bases of operations in the heart of many cities and has forced protesters to spend time defending themselves in court, deterring many from taking to the streets again.
With less visibility, the movement has received less attention from the news media, taking away a national platform. “Are we a little scarred? Of course,” he said. Mr. “We are looking to late spring and summer,” he said. Ms. 'Festive, Righteous Anger': Occupy Makes May-Day Comeback With Massive Demonstrations.
Photo Credit: Occupy Wall Street Aerial Shot, NYC May 1, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. All over the world, May 1 is celebrated as International Workers' Day. Yesterday, May Day also marked the reemergence of the Occupy movement, with events in cities all over America. AlterNet's reporters were in the field -- here are their dispatches from New York and the Bay Area. Midtown NYC, morning Midtown is a great place for chanting; your voice echoes off the tall buildings and you can hear it blocks away.
I made it to Bryant Park a few minutes after eight in a haze of rain, and found a crowd of around 100 huddled under their umbrellas or the ones at tables in the park. My first picket stop was at the New York Times building, where the United Auto Workers (UAW) were picketing under a lovely awning in support of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW Local 2320). How Occupy Wall Street Plans to Take Down Bank of America--And How You Can Help.
April 8, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Bank of America: the very name is meant to conjure up comforting, red-white-and-blue fantasies of a bank of the people, by the people, and for the people. But as Matt Taibbi pointed out in his latest feature for Rolling Stone , while there's almost nothing the megabank does that is for the people, it sure as hell is paid for by the people. Unless we do something soon, we might be heading for yet another people's bailout of America's bank. Occupy Wall Street has decided to fight back. Big Bad BAC Bank of America just can't seem to stay ahead of its public relations disasters. But outrage over its CEO's pay is the least of the zombie bank's concerns. What does that actually mean? Then, of course, there's the constant lawsuits, settlements, and battles with various state and federal government officials.
Chicago Activists Stop Forclosure. Occupy Groups Reimagine The Bank. Hide captionOccupy L.A. activists rally outside the Bank of America Plaza in Los Angeles in February. The Occupy protests around the country have inspired two working groups that are attempting to reform the banking system and create an alternative bank. Damian Dovarganes/AP Groups within the Occupy Wall Street movement are trying to overhaul the banking system and even dream of creating a new kind of bank. Occupy isn't in the headlines so much these days, but work continues behind the scenes. "We have almost no consensus opinion, except that the system is not working," says Cathy O'Neil, who often facilitates the group that is working on legislation and regulation to reform the financial system.
She herself was a quant — a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund. This group also wrote an article in the Financial Times about former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman's plan to deal with banks that were "too big to fail. " 'Pretty Radical Stuff' There is always lively discussion. Activists Target Bank of America on International Women's Day. Occupy Movement Regroups, Laying Plans for the Next Phase. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times Members of the Occupy Wall Street movement have started a five-week bus tour to exchange ideas and hold training sessions with other Occupy groups. Here, a workshop at the First Churches of Northampton during a stop in Massachusetts.
More Photos » Far from dissipating, groups around the country say they are preparing for a new phase of larger marches and strikes this spring that they hope will rebuild momentum and cast an even brighter glare on inequality and corporate greed. But this transition is filled with potential pitfalls and uncertainties: without the visible camps or clear goals, can Occupy become a lasting force for change? Though still loosely organized, the movement is putting down roots in many cities. On any night in New York City, which remains a hub of the movement, a dozen working groups on issues like “food justice” and “arts and culture” meet in a Wall Street atrium, and “general assemblies” have formed in 14 neighborhoods. Ms. 'Festive, Righteous Anger': Occupy Makes May-Day Comeback With Massive Demonstrations. Squeezed Dry: Why Americans Work So Hard but Feel So Poor - Derek Thompson - Business.
How is it possible that we're both working harder and finding it more difficult to make a living? Maybe the same thing is making work cheap and life expensive. It's the productivity paradox. Flickr/Marvin L Sped up, slimmed down, squeezed dry, or simply shut out, the American worker faces an unprecedented slump.
Since the recovery began, corporate profits have captured nearly 90 percent of the growth in real income. There's a lot of online ink about the productivity paradox, memorably deemed our "Speed-up Crisis" in a provocative article by Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, coeditors of Mother Jones. HOW WE GOT HERE (or: HOW CONSUMERS FOUGHT WORKERS, AND WON) I want to try to tell this story without using the word corporation. Productivity means work divided by time. Mother Jones Productivity is not evil. This conflict between consumers and workers is an important piece of the productivity puzzle.
Stuff got cheap. IF WORK IS CHEAP, WHY IS LIFE SO EXPENSIVE? Here's a theory. Jeffrey Sachs: Budgetary Deceit and America's Decline. As I shuttle between East Africa, where a severe drought threatens the lives of more than 10 million people, and Athens, where a financial crisis threatens Greece and all of Europe, I am shocked by the U.S. budget negotiations between Congress and President Obama. Every part of the budget debate in the U.S. is built on a tissue of willful deceit. Consider the Republican Party's double-mantra that the deficit results from "runaway spending" and that more tax cuts are the key to economic growth. Republicans claim that the budget deficit, around 10 percent of GDP, has been caused only by a rise in outlays.
This is blatantly untrue. The deficit results roughly equally from a fall of tax revenues as a share of GDP and a rise of spending as a share of GDP. On both sides of the ledger -- spending and taxes -- part of the shift results from the weak economy ("cyclical factors") and part from long-term trends. Taxation is lower also because of short-term factors and long-term factors. A Critique of Pure Gold. GOLD IS back, what with libertarians the country over looking to force the government out of the business of monetary-policy making.
How? Well, by bringing back the gold standard of course. There’s no better place to see just how real this oddball proposal is than in Iowa, with its caucuses just a few months away. In June, prospective voters were entertained not just by the candidates but also by the spectacle of an eighteen-day, multicity bus tour cosponsored by the Iowa Tea Party and American Principles in Action, or APIA. The candidates, for their part, were cautious. Nor did it prevent state legislators from attempting to move ahead on their own. In May, Utah became the first state to actually adopt such a policy. Historically, societies attracted to using gold as legal tender have dealt with this problem by empowering their governments to fix its price in domestic-currency terms (in the U.S. case, in dollars). The three fundamentalisms of the American right - War Room. In contradiction to the hostility to Darwinism shared by many of its constituents, the American right is evolving rapidly before our eyes.
The project of creating an American version of Burkean conservatism has collapsed. What has replaced it is best described as triple fundamentalism — a synthesis of Biblical fundamentalism, constitutional fundamentalism and market fundamentalism. Following World War II, the American right was a miscellany of marginal, embittered subcultures — anti-New Dealers, isolationists, paranoid anticommunists, anti-semites and white supremacists. Russell Kirk and others associated with William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review sought to Americanize a version of high-toned British Burkean conservatism. The religious equivalent of Burkean politics is orthodoxy, not fundamentalism. America’s Burkean conservatives like Kirk tended to favor Catholicism or the Anglo-Catholic school within the Anglican church. “All Protestantism…is a sort of dissent. $230,000 For a Guard Dog: Why the Wealthy Are Afraid Of Violence From Below. July 29, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
“Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.” That was what an unidentified billionaire told Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal a while back. He noted: Of course, Insite has an interest in getting the paranoid rich to beef up their security. John Johnson, the owner of the $230,000 dog featured in the New York Times , is a former debt collector. In addition to security systems, dogs and armed yachts, the security-conscious oligarch can hire a private spy company— Jellyfish, a spinoff of the notorious private security company Blackwater.
So why are the rich getting paranoid? David Sirota has noted that “we're fast becoming a 'let them eat cake' economy,” where ostentatious displays of wealth and arrogance seem to be an everyday occurrence as the rest of the country suffers. “Love it, love it, love it,” Mr. Why the Debt Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think. There is a comforting story about the debt ceiling that goes like this: Back in the 1990s, the U.S. was shrinking its national debt at a rapid pace. Serious people actually worried about dislocations from having too little government debt.
If it hadn’t been for two wars, the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the housing meltdown, and the subsequent financial crisis and recession, the nation’s finances would be in fine condition today. And the only obstacle to getting there again, this narrative goes, is political dysfunction in Washington. If the Republicans and Democrats would just split their differences on spending and taxes and raise the debt ceiling, we could all get back to our real lives.
Problem solved. Except it’s not that way at all. That’s why the posturing about whether and how Congress should increase the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 has been a hollow exercise. The language we use is part of the problem. The national debt itself is one such Einsteinian (that is, squishy) concept. Inequality and its Discontents. As income inequality increased in the past quarter century in most parts of the world, it was strangely absent from mainstream economic discussions and publications. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find many macroeconomic models that incorporated income or wealth inequality. Even in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, when income inequality returned to levels not seen since the Great Depression, it did not elicit much attention. Since then, however, the growing disparity in incomes between the rich and poor has taken a place at the top of the public agenda.
From Tunisia to Egypt, from the United States to Great Britain, inequality is cited as a chief cause of revolution, economic disintegration, and unrest. For the poor, the gap has been palpable. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Register Register now to get three articles each month. As a subscriber, you get unrestricted access to ForeignAffairs.com. Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial. Stop Coddling the Super-Rich. The bleak face of U.S. poverty - U.S. Economy. “Bleak Portrait of Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say,” blared the Friday headline in the New York Times.
The traditional strategy for measuring poverty, we were told, did not include the benefits of federal programs like food stamps and tax credits that were helping to keep Americans above the poverty line. A new, “supplemental measure” from the U.S. Census that took such factors into account would reveal that many Americans thought to be living below the poverty line were actually above it — “as much as half of the reported rise in poverty since 2006 disappears,” declared the Times. I discussed the likely political implications of this rejiggering in my last post. But on Monday the census unveiled its report, and a first look at the numbers suggests that the Times’ preview was a bit off-base. According to the census’s new interpretation of the numbers, the total number of people living in poverty America is higher than the traditional approach indicates.
Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult. Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten! " Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten. " -"Double Indemnity" (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election?
Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma. But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. John P. 1. 2. 3.
Footnotes: The Empire at Dusk - By Stephen Glain. The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf. What George Orwell Can Teach Us About OWS and Police Brutality - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics. Bill McKibben, Keystone XL, and Barack Obama. Kalle Lasn and Micah White, the Creators of Occupy Wall Street. The Fight for 'Real Democracy' at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street. The Instability of Inequality - Nouriel Roubini. Global Imbalances and Domestic Inequality - Kemal Derviş. On fairy tales about inequality.
OWS and Inequality: How “expenditure cascades” are squeezing the American middle class. Occupy Wall Street's lasting effect: rich vs. poor increasingly tense issue. The 'Last Place Aversion' Paradox. Why Inequality Doesn't Matter. How Inequality Damages Economies. The Globalization of Protest - Joseph E. Stiglitz. There's America—and Then There's Washington - Andrew Cohen - Politics. The Left-Behinds - Michael Hirsh. My Soapbox Advice to the OWS Movement and then some.
Rational Irrationality: Charting the Great Inequality Debate. Big Business Is Good for America. Occupy Wall Street and Washington's History of Financial Bailouts. Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest and Income Inequality. The future of Occupy: Four key questions - Occupy Wall Street. Finding Freedom in Handcuffs - Chris Hedges' Columns. An Oral History of Occupy Wall Street | Politics. In Focus - The Montreal Protests, 4 Months In. Noam Chomsky Speaks to Occupy: If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow. Democracy in Distress - Dominique Moisi. Why Activists in the US and Around the World Should be Learning from Montreal Student Strikers. The capitalist network that runs the world - physics-math - 19 October 2011. The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot. We Are the 99.9% The Future of History.
Occupy Wall Street's Eviction Was a Lucky Break—Now What? - Derek Thompson - Business. Turning the Dialogue From Wealth to Values. Has a Harvard Professor Mapped Out the Next Step for Occupy Wall Street? - Alesh Houdek - Politics. A philosophy for the protesters. Leiter Reports. Ger of the Week: Laurie Penny - Truthdigger of the Week. Krugman on "Austerity" and Suffering as Moralistic Purging. Why Americans Won't Do Dirty Jobs. Samplocracy. Beholden. Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1% U.N. Envoy: U.S. Isn't Protecting Occupy Protesters' Rights. The Streets of 2012 - Naomi Wolf. The anti-protest bill signed by Barack Obama is a quiet attack on free speech. Occupy Isn't About Electing Democrats--It's About Exposing a Broken System.
Is Occupy vacant? Why Occupy failed. Occupational hazards. Concerning the Violent Peace-Police. Michael Lewis Interviews Himself: Boycott the Banks! A World Divided - or Coming Together? | Oxford Research Group. The Fight Against Corruption Goes Global. We're All the 1 Percent - Charles Kenny. "The Inequality Trap" by Kemal Derviş. Here Is the Full Inequality Speech and Slideshow That Was Too Hot for TED - National Journal - Business. "The Price of Inequality" by Joseph E. Stiglitz.