A philosophy for the protesters Barcelona, Spain - A few weeks ago, after participating at a conference at Stony Brook University in New York, I went to Zuccotti Park to see and support the protesters there. A few months earlier, I had done the same thing, but in Placa de Catalunya in Barcelona; in both parks, where similar dissatisfaction with our world order was being expressed, the only thing I could think of was the actuality of Karl Marx's words of 1845: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it". How can these words still be valid today? Is there a philosophy for these protesters? Regardless of all the great work that philosophers have done since Marx, this change has still not come about. The reason does not rest in philosophers' inability to interpret correctly, but rather in their desire to interpret correctly. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.
The Regency « zunguzungu Most of the Regents of the University of California — whose very name gives you a good idea of the kind of power they wield over the direction and functioning of the University of California – are unelected, appointed to 12 year terms by the governor of California, and almost without exception, they have no real background or apparent interest in education. They are corporate moguls, the 1%, whatever you want to call them. On Monday, they defied California’s open meeting laws by sort-of teleconferencing from four different campuses, voting to raise various administrative salaries by about $3.5 million, including the UC Davis chief campus counsel. Perhaps they suspected he would be busy in the near future? But as many are pointing out, at a time of across-the-board-cutbacks in the work of teaching and being a university, to find raising executive salaries to be “essential” — as UC president Mark Yudof put it, “We consider these retention efforts to be essential. The students still came.
OWS and Inequality: How “expenditure cascades” are squeezing the American middle class Photograph by Spencer Platt/Getty Images. This essay is adapted from Robert H. Frank’s recently published book, The Darwin Economy. Robert H. Frank is an economics professor at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management, an economics columnist for the New York Times, and a distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Republicans have never wanted to talk about inequality, and many Democrats now seem afraid to. The remarkable achievement of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been to make continuing silence about inequality politically unacceptable. Because many continue to deny that income inequality has been growing, it’s useful to start with a brief review of how income growth patterns have changed since World War II. It’s a striking fractal pattern. Is this new pattern something to worry about? It’s done that through a process that I’ve elsewhere called “expenditure cascades.” Many social critics wag their fingers at what they perceive to be frivolous luxury spending.
Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue. Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse. ‘Change Their Votes’ The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S.
ger of the Week: Laurie Penny - Truthdigger of the Week Truthdigger of the Week: Laurie Penny Posted on Nov 25, 2011 Every social movement needs to guard against the inevitable attempts of mainstream media sources to warp its message, defend its targets and recast its members as lazy, crazy or fringy malcontents. Luckily for the Occupy movement, British journalist Laurie Penny is more than capable of taking on, and taking down, the opposition—and that’s why she’s our Truthdigger of the Week. Credentials aside, it was her total ownership of the situation that unfolded over the course of the BBC Newsnight showdown with anchor Emily Maitlis and former Goldman Sachs partner Richard Sharp that launched her to the top of this week’s list of Truthdigger nominees—which, we should mention, included the Egyptian protesters and UC Davis English professor Nathan Brown. Here’s that clip again if you haven’t seen the BBC Newsnight exchange. BBC Newsnight via YouTube: Get truth delivered to your inbox every week. Previous item: When We Fight Back
Occupy Wall Street: Why Baby Boomers Don't Understand the Protests American spies have spotted all the signs of an all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why won’t they tell the Ukrainians about the forces on their border? U.S. intelligence agencies now have detailed information that Russia has amassed the kind of forces needed for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But the Obama administration hasn’t shared with Ukraine the imagery, intercepts, and analysis that pinpont the location of the Russian troops ready to seize more Ukrainian land, The Daily Beast has learned. President Obama has repeatedly and publicly expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people—and warned Russian leader Vladimir Putin that there will be consequences if he takes over any more Ukrainian territory. Yet Obama’s administration has so far been reluctant to hand over the kind of intelligence the Ukrainians could use to defend themselves. “I am not confident we are sharing any of that kind of information,” said Rep. Others disagreed.
The shocking truth about the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park. But just when Americans thought we had the picture – was this crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities? – the picture darkened. To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. Why this massive mobilisation against these not-yet-fully-articulated, unarmed, inchoate people?
Think Occupy Wall St. is a phase? You don't get it A protester holds a sign at the Occupy Wall Street protest last weekend Douglas Rushkoff says traditional media condescends to Occupy Wall Street movementHe says that's because its 21st-century, net-driven narrative doesn't fit old media modelHe says protest not about end-point, it's about a new discourse on variety of complaintsRushkoff: Protest may be unwieldy, but aims to correct disconnects in U.S. Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist and the author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age" and "Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How We Can Take it Back." (CNN) -- Like the spokesmen for Arab dictators feigning bewilderment over protesters' demands, mainstream television news reporters finally training their attention on the growing Occupy Wall Street protest movement seem determined to cast it as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. Occupy protests spread across U.S. Unions join 'Occupy Wall Street'
The Left-Behinds - Michael Hirsh BRADDOCK, Pa.—Movie director George Romero, the master of zombie kitsch, made his first films in the pitted and rusting landscape around this fabled steel town back in the 1960s and ’70s. It was fantasy then. But today, Braddock truly is the land of the living dead. U.S. This area used to be legendary for hard work; its progeny includes iron-tough football heroes such as Johnny Unitas, Joe Namath, and Joe Montana. Today, Braddock is a black hole of apathy where the gravitational pull of despair is often too powerful to resist. “We have manufacturing companies who say to us, ‘I don’t want to look at those people. It’s easy to write off the Mon Valley left-behinds as an old story limited to the specific woes of the steel industry. In Stockton, Calif., a community of left-behinds has materialized in the wreckage of the mortgage meltdown. When Lee Farkas’s mortgage company collapsed and he went to prison, Ocala, Fla., lost 1,200 jobs. Larger version Until now, anyway.