Multiple cities across the nation have begun their offensive against the people standing up for the right to fair representation and a just economic system instead of the corporatist system which we are currently subjugated by.
Some of these have been brutal and vicious attacks on Americans, including what now appears to be an intentional attack on Scott Olsen — a former Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq before leaving the military in 2010.
In Oakland Olsen was struck in the head by a police projectile, causing a skull fracture which put him in critical condition. Thankfully, Olsen is now conscious, although he is reportedly having trouble speaking and his brain swelling is still a risk according to doctors. The most disturbing part of this incident is not that the police who are supposed to protect and serve are brutally assaulting demonstrators but that the officer apparently meant to hit Olsen in the head.
As you will see in the following video, Scott Olsen was just feet away from the police barricade when he was hit in the head. The officer responsible clearly did not lob a tear gas canister as they are supposed to do, but instead aimed at Olsen’s head.
You will then see activists rush to Olsen’s aid as he is lying on the ground, unmoving and bleeding from the head.
Notice the police officer move back behind two other officers then lob what appears to be a flash bang right next to Olsen’s body.
What appears to be a flash bang grenade goes off and the crowd disperses for a moment.
Keep in mind that the Oakland Police Department claims that they did not use flash bang grenades against the protesters, although they will not account for the other police agencies involved in the assault.
The Daily Bail posted a picture of some of the ammunition used by police in the attack which clearly includes a rubber bullet, which the Oakland Police also claim they did not use:
In an article published on Business Insider, a Marine is quoted saying that the tactics utilized by police in Oakland are not even allowed in a war zone.
Is there not something seriously wrong when our public servants are utilizing tactics on American civilians that American soldiers are not supposed to use in combat on foreign soil?
Oakland’s Mayor Jean Quan said in a written statement that the city has opened an investigation into the use of force, including the use of tear gas on Tuesday.
However, the statement also said, “We are asking you not to camp overnight. Frank Ogawa Plaza is open for free speech activities between 6 am and 10 pm.”
This is the kind of ludicrously un-American thinking that has plagued the response to the Occupy Wall Street movement.
This is a nation with free speech which means that you cannot tell us when and where to speak freely.
You might not like it, but we have every right to occupy a public space all hours of the day. We have every right to freely assemble whenever and wherever we want.
If it really is problematic for you, you might want to explore moving to a nation which was not founded upon the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Oakland is just one of the many places in which police arelaunching an all-out offensive on peaceful demonstrators who are sick and tired of the elite ruling class robbing America blind while our politicians encourage it.
Indeed California now seems to be a hotspot for these anti-Occupation moves, contrary to what one might assume based on California’s history as a blue state.
However, this is just more proof that the bi-partisan system in Washington is nothing other than a two-party dictatorship in which both parties work towards the exact same goals and push an identical agenda of control and oppression.
San Diego saw police actions against their Occupation at around 2 am in the morning.
OB Rag, an independent news organization out of Ocean Beach, California reports that at least 44 people were arrested in the sweep which began at 1:45 am in Children’s Park without any forewarning.
Police and the Sheriff’s department arrived outfitted in riot gear with batons and at least two men were reportedly beaten in the process of being arrested.
Several of the demonstrators who were arrested were veterans and one man was apparently a legal observer although more specific details are not yet available.
All of the donated food and medical supplies at both occupation sites were confiscated by the police.
Previously Assistant Police Chief Boyd Long told demonstrators that they could remain in Children’s Park so long as they did not set up tents.
Despite this assurance, Long told the OB Rag that they were clearing both sites and people had been ordered to clear the areas before this.
Later, barricades were set up at the Civic Center Plaza and activists were told they could return after the area was power washed, but without any belongings.
A similar incident occurred at Occupy Nashville when, despite false assurances that arrests would not occur until the next day, police rounded up activists in accordance with a new 10 pm to 6 am curfew on the state Capitol grounds.
State troopers arrested some 29 demonstrators at 3 am and kept them in detention until 9 am at which point they marched right back onto the Legislative Plaza.
Thankfully, in this case a tiny bit of justice has already been seen when the magistrate of the court refused to even hear the charges in saying that the state didn’t give the activists adequate prior notice of the curfew since it was only announced yesterday in the afternoon.
The Highway Patrol was advised by the judge to release the protesters immediately but instead they continued to hold them and issued criminal trespass citations.
This was a clear example of the state deceiving activists and the media in order to illegally crackdown on the protests.
Yesterday Lola Potter, the Tennessee state spokeswoman told reporters that demonstrators wouldn’t be arrested until they had an opportunity today to apply for one of the new state permits required to hold demonstrations at the State’s Capitol.
Despite the claim that they were “not going to enforce it today” they indeed did just that.
The Occupy Nashville movement is having none of it, calling the state’s policy “a direct violation of our constitutional rights” which indeed it is.
Undeterred, the activists held another meeting on the Plaza steps at 7 pm in defiance of the state’s unjust actions.
Then in New York, where the Occupy Wall Street movement first began, the police is utilizing more indirect methods to push the activists out of Zuccotti Park.
This comes as the cold encroaches and a forecast includes more wet cold weather in the near future. Tomorrow has a 100% chance of precipitation and tomorrow night has a forecast of snow and 90% chance of precipitation.
The city claims that they are worried about the Occupy camp becoming a “fire trap” due to gasoline powered generators.
However, no open flames are used in the camp and dishwater is brought in pre-heated, and the movement is even planning on setting up a volunteer fire brigade with fire extinguishers.
It appears that this is nothing more than a tricky tactic to pressure the activists to leave and stop exercising their right to free speech and assembly.
The president of the Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, also made a somewhat absurd statement to The New York Post, saying that the NYPD will sue “obnoxious” activists for physical confrontations with police.
Mullins said, “I am deeply concerned that protesters will be emboldened by the recent rash of violent acts against police officers in other cities. New York’s police officers are working around the clock as the already overburdened economy in New York is being drained by ‘occupiers’ who intentionally and maliciously instigate needless and violent confrontations with the police.”
They will reportedly seek the “harshest possible civil sanctions – including monetary damages – against any individual protester who causes injury to [police].”
Unfortunately most protesters don’t have the attorneys on retainer to harass the police who brutally assaulted them for no reason.
These are just a few examples of how crackdowns are occurring across the nation as those in power attempt to shut down the Occupy Wall Street movement which shows no signs of slowing down or giving up.
It appears that politicians, even ostensibly “liberal” ones like Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein, are becoming fed up with the Occupation movement.
Immediately following the disturbingly vicious attack on Occupy Oakland, Feinstein made a painfully ignorant statement that exposed her for what she truly is: yet another elitist, corrupt, freedom-hating politician.
Feinstein said she did not think that the “protesters have the right to occupy forever.”
Sorry, Dianne, they have every right to occupy forever despite what you might hope.
“I don’t think people, for example, can sleep in a square for weeks on end. You have to have some order to it,” she said.
Again, sorry Dianne but you don’t get to decide when and where people can assemble and speak freely or for how long they do it, or in what manner.
Feinstein parroted the typical ignorant objection to the Occupy Wall Street movement in saying, “There are all kinds of different agendas going on [and it is] hard to figure out what people want,” as if that is some kind of indictment of the movement.
Feinstein doesn’t understand what people want because she is part of the 1% that is unconcerned with the economic situation in our country and the implications it has for average Americans.
You can view Feinstein’s financial statements here which include a purchase of over $1,000,000 in JP Morgan Chase just last year.
Obviously, despite her purported leftist leanings, she is just another Washington elite that seeks to profit at the expense of the American people.
In 2009 Feinstein’s net worth was between $46,055,250 and $108,109,018. Can anyone expect someone of such massive wealth to understand the plight of most Americans?
These include Darrell Issa with a maximum net worth of over $451 million, Jane Harman with a maximum net worth of over $435 million, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi with a maximum net worth of over $108 million and Gary Miller with a maximum net worth of over $84 million.
Could this overrepresentation of multi-millionaires be related to the mistreatment of anti-corporatist demonstrators in California? While it is pure speculation, it seems to be a somewhat valid conclusion.
Regardless, there is an irrefutable trend sweeping the nation encouraging the oppression and crackdown on peaceful protesters seeking a new direction for the hijacked American economy and government.
Hopefully people will see this and it will encourage them to take action and fight back against the un-American restriction of free speech in any and every way possible.
The last thing we need is to allow the Occupy Wall Street movement to either be co-opted by the Democratic party, unions, or any other group with an ulterior motive, or to be shut down through police force.
Through bringing these issues to the forefront we can help keep the movement alive and kicking despite the many attempts to marginalize it and/or co-opt it for questionable ends.
It’s time that We the People take back our power and show these global corporate operatives who’s really in charge. It’s time to raise our collective voices, our flags, and our concerns in an all out effort to end the encroaching disease of global corporatism that is now infecting governments throughout the world.
(It’s time that We the People do much more than hold signs of discontent, or voice our particular opinions by shouting slogans through Bullhorns…)
Nothing has ever been achieved by sitting on the sidelines, waiting for history to unfold. Changes and revolutions are born from a people, like you and me: willing to occupy Wall Street or willing to extend themselves, or spill the necessary blood needed to administer those specific rights and justices that have been far too long in coming.
In Centuries past, during the signing of the Declaration of Independence, such was a Patriots duty: defending the homeland and protecting her sovereignty. Today it is our duty, We the People, both yours and mine, whether we like it or not. We have been conscripted by our very nature and by the times that we live in, to carry out those freedoms that our respective Forefathers once laid bare by their very own trust and blood.
We the People should speak up and act out against these corporate megalomaniacs infecting our lives, if only to show our disgust and discontent for their ultimate design.
“For what we do now will reflect what our world will become, and what our grandchildren will ultimatelyinherit…”
Veterans for Peace member Scott Olsen was wounded by a less-lethal round fired by either San Francisco Sheriffs deputies or Palo Alto Police on October 25, 2011 at 14th Street and Broadway in Downtown Oakland.
#OccupyOakland – Flashbangs USED on protesters OPD LIES:
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
The company behind a Department of Homeland Security-funded project to install street lights that double as sophisticated surveillance devices pulled its promo video for ‘Intellistreets’ from You Tube hours after our article drawing attention to the issue was linked on the popular Drudge Report website.
Having initially disabled comments on the You Tube clip, Illuminating Concepts yanked the video entirely this afternoon, presumably nervous about the negative publicity that could be generated from concerns about new high-tech street lights being used for “Homeland Security” purposes – their words, not ours.
If ‘Intellistreets’ is such a cutting edge concept that presents an array of wonderful benefits, as the promo video claims, then why remove it from You Tube? It’s almost like a kid getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Now that the company has tried to hide the video, it will only generate more suspicion about the true purpose behind ‘Intellistreets’ and the level of involvement on behalf of Homeland Security.
Using street lights as Minority Report-style broadcasting platforms for advertising and government propaganda also dovetails with the Obama administration’s agenda to have complete control over communications by means of the Emergency Alert System and the program to have all new cell phones display mandatory “emergency” messages from the federal government by next year.
You can still watch a duplicate of the video for ‘Intellistreets’ below (until that too is pulled). The video is also still available on the company’s website.
Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul has won the latest Republican presidential straw poll.
The Texas Republican, who continues to trail former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in national polls, captured the support of 53 percent of Ohio Republicans. Former businessman Herman Cain won the support of 26 percent of Republicans voting in the poll. Mr. Romney captured 8 percent in the poll, while the rest of the Republican field captured less than 5 percent.
The event requires participants to pay $25 to participate giving Ohio Republicans a chance to have their voices heard in the early stage of the presidential primary nominating process.
Mr. Paul’s victory in Ohio comes as his campaign announced they would launch a series of ads aimed at criticizing his Republican opponents. The campaign will also run radio versions of these spots, and complement the broadcast push with substantial voter outreach on the same topics.
Today, millions of smart, hard working Americans are flipping burgers, waiting tables or working dead end retail jobs not because they want to, but because they have no other options. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 14 million Americans are currently unemployed and another 9.3 million Americans are currently “underemployed”. During this economic downturn, a lot of Americans have been forced to take part-time jobs because they have been unable to find full-time jobs. For many, this can be a soul-crushing experience. It can be easy to become very bitter when you have worked very hard all your life and yet you find yourself having to take a job that only pays you a fraction of what you used to make. A lot of young college graduates end up hating life because the only jobs that they can seem to find do not even require a college degree and don’t even come close to enabling them to keep up with their crippling student loan debt payments. Sadly, the underemployment problem continues to grow even worse. In September alone, the number of underemployed Americans rose by close to half a million.
There are other measurements that indicate that unemployment in America is even worse that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is indicating.
For example, a recent Gallup poll found that approximately one out of every five Americans that currently have a job consider themselves to be underemployed.
In addition, according to author Paul Osterman about 20 percent of all U.S. adults are currently working jobs that pay poverty-level wages.
When you try as hard as you can and you still can’t pay the bills, it is easy to end up hating life.
What some Americans are going through is absolutely heart breaking. Just consider the following story from a recent article on Fox News….
Damian Birkel, of Winston-Salem N.C., found himself in similar circumstances. He was a marketing manager at Sarah Lee in the early 1990s when he was downsized. Since then, he has been laid off from three other jobs, including one at a recruiting firm.
“I felt like I had ‘loser’ tattooed to my forehead, and ‘will work for food’ tattooed to my chest,” he says.
The hardest part was telling his young daughter that there might not be enough money to pay the bills — among them, sending her to summer camp. “She brings her piggy bank and says, ‘Daddy, why don’t you break into the piggy bank so that you can pay some of the bills.’”
How would you feel if your little daughter said that to you?
Unfortunately, the number of good jobs just continues to decrease.
There are fewer payroll jobs in the United States today than there were back in 2000 even though we have added 30 million extra people to the population since then.
And the mix of jobs that our economy is producing continues to change.
Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.
A lot of young people are coming out of college right now and are having their dreams absolutely crushed. Large numbers of them are entering the “real world” with nightmarish student loan debt burdens and only a limited number of them can find decent jobs.
Kate Wolfe chased a dream when she moved to New York after college, looking to break into acting while working as a maître d’.
Her $50,000 worth of student loans were a distraction she could handle. Then the uninsured 25-year-old was mugged last year, and the final indignity was the $30,000 emergency room bill.
We are pumping out tons of college graduates, but we are not pumping out nearly enough jobs for all of them.
If you can believe it, in the United States today there are 317,000 waiters and waitresses that actually have college degrees.
That is an absolutely horrifying statistic.
But the truth is that the lack of good jobs is hitting every age level really hard.
For example, the average American family is under a tremendous amount of financial stress in this economy. Once you adjust it for inflation, median household income in the United States has declined approximately 10 percent since December 2007.
Meanwhile, the cost of food, gas, health insurance and just about everything else a family needs has gone up significantly.
Our politicians keep talking about “jobs, jobs, jobs” but the number of decent jobs continues on a very clear downward trend.
Back in 1980, 52 percent of all jobs in the United States were middle income jobs. Today, only 42 percent of all jobs in the United States are middle income jobs.
Sadly, it now looks like even the low income jobs are starting to dry up.
Well, unfortunately they continue to fumble the football very badly.
According to a recent ABC News report, the U.S. government actually gave a $529 million loan guarantee to an electric car company that decided to make its cars in Finland….
Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department’s $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job of assembling the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car has been outsourced to Finland.
If we don’t figure out how to stop millions of jobs from leaving this country we are going to be in a world of hurt.
The trade policies of the federal government are neither “free” nor “fair” and they are causing the standard of living of American workers to rapidly sink toward the level of the rest of the world.
We are told that it is “inevitable” that we are going to be deindustrialized and that we are going to become a service economy.
But guess what?
Service jobs generally pay a lot less than manufacturing jobs do.
A “one world economy” where our labor force is merged with the labor forces of the rest of the globe is not a good thing for the average American worker and it is not a good thing for America.
But of course trade is not the only reason why we are losing good jobs. There are a whole bunch of reasons why this is happening. For many more reasons, just check out this article.
A lot of you that are reading this article are unemployed or underemployed right now.
Unfortunately, there is not much hope that the U.S. economy is going to experience a significant turnaround any time soon.
In fact, it is likely that things are going to be getting even worse.
Our economic system is dying. Now is the time to try to get as independent of it as you can.
Don’t count on a job (“just over broke”) as your only source of income. In this economy, no job is safe.
There are millions upon millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans that never dreamed that their lives would go so horribly wrong.
But they did.
Our nation is experiencing the consequences of decades of very bad decisions.
There is no help on the horizon and the calvary is not on the way to rescue us.
A new independent analysis of 2012 presidential candidates’ campaign contributions confirms that Mitt Romney is the banksters’ choice for the GOP nominee, and indeed for President.
Records of campaign contributions based on Federal Election Commission data released electronically this past weekend, reveal that Romney’s top 20 donors are made up almost exclusively of the biggest private banks on the planet.
Among Romney’s top twenty donors are Credit Suisse Group, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo and Citigroup Inc.
By far and away Romney’s largest campaign contributions have emanated from employees and officials at Goldman Sachs, with a total of $354,700 donated.
The donations are tallied from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families.
In stark contrast to Romney, and every other candidate for that matter, the top three organizations that employ Congressman Ron Paul’s supporters are the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy.
Indeed, the latest figures once again show that the Ron Paul 2012 Campaign has raised more donations from active military than all other presidential candidates—Republican or Democrat.
Paul tallied more than $75,000 from servicemen and women in the third quarter.
Paul also raised more from active military than all other GOP competitors combined, and more than incumbent President Barack Obama.
Unlike the majority of the rest of the field, Ron Paul’s donations have come solely from individuals and not from the use of PACs, bundling, subsidiaries and the like – indicating that the Congressman is the only candidate with purely grassroots support.
“This fundraising analysis confirms Americans’ beliefs about Ron Paul and their suspicions about Mitt Romney.” said Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton in a statement.
“It is that Dr. Paul is extraordinarily popular and accepted by the everyman and by everyday heroes, while Romney relies almost exclusively on his big-business ties,” Benton added.
Paul’s modest foreign policy, his continued support and tireless work with and on behalf of veterans and his truly authentic anti-war credentials are all factors behind his large pool of active military support.
“Ron Paul is the only candidate with a plan to end the growing number of unconstitutional undeclared wars, having an unclear connection to U.S. national security, end costly overseas nation-building that pays no friendship dividends, and stop subsidizing global security.” said Jesse Benton.
“Instead Dr. Paul will bring our troops home, secure our borders and lead the nation in practicing a traditional Republican noninterventionist foreign policy.” Benton added.
Paul is placed fourth in the fundraising stakes, behind Obama, Romney and Perry, so far in the three quarters of the year that have passed.
Last night’s debate in Las Vegas saw every candidate bickering and viciously attacking one and other over each of their flip flopping principles and big government voting records.
Only one candidate remains immune from such shameful displays – because his consistent and untainted record speaks for itself.
Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will ALWAYS remember the 5th of November!! If the 99% removes our funds from the major banking institutions to non-profit credit unions on or by this date, we will send a clear message to the 1% that conscious consumers won’t support companies with unethical business practices.
• Open an account with a Credit Union or small, local bank
• Transfer your funds to the new account on or before 11/05
• Follow your bank’s procedures to close your account
Publicly, bankers say they understand the anger at Wall Street — but believe they are misunderstood by the protesters camped on their doorstep. But when they speak privately, it is often a different story.
“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager.
“It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”
As the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have grown and spread to other cities, an open question is: Do the bankers get it? Their different worldview speaks volumes about the wide chasms that have opened over who is to blame for the continuing economic malaise and what is best for the country.
Some on Wall Street viewed the protesters with disdain, and a degree of caution, as hundreds marched through the financial district on Friday. Others say they feel their pain, but are befuddled about what they are supposed to do to ease it. A few even feel personally attacked, and say the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have been in Zuccotti Park for weeks are just bitter about their own economic fate and looking for an easy target. If anything, they say, people should show some gratitude.
“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”
He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.
Generally, bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps. “Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull’s-eye on their back,” the hedge fund manager said.
John Paulson, the hedge fund titan who made billions in the financial crisis by betting against the subprime mortgage market, has been the exception. His Upper East Side home was picketed by demonstrators earlier this week, but Mr. Paulson offered a full-throated defense of the Street, even going so far as to defend the tiny sliver of top earners attacked by the Occupy Wall Street protesters — whose signs refer to themselves as “the other 99 percent.”
“The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state,” he said in a statement. “Paulson & Company and its employees have paid hundreds of millions in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high-paying jobs in New York City since its formation.”
The messages coming from the protesters are by no means in accord. They have myriad grievances, though many see Wall Street as the most powerful symbol of the income inequality and “economic injustice” they are railing against. There is ample indignation over banks being bailed out while their customers are being foreclosed upon, and over banks handing out hefty bonus checks and severance packages so soon after the crisis erupted.
Similarly, executives keep getting generous payouts when they leave. Just last week, Bank of America disclosed it was paying a total of $11 million in severance to two executives forced out in a management reshuffle, Sallie Krawcheck and Joe Price, even as the company said it would begin laying off roughly 30,000 employees over the next few years.
“Wall Street continues to underestimate the degree of anger among citizens and voters,” said Douglas J. Elliott, a former investment banker who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution. For the most part, bankers say that they see the protests as a reaction to the high unemployment and slow growth that has plagued the American economy since the recession and the financial crisis of 2008. Despite all the placards and chants plainly indicating otherwise, some bankers suggest that deep down, the protesters are not really all that mad at them.
“I don’t think we see ourselves as the target,” said Steve Bartlett, president of the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the nation’s biggest banks and insurers in Washington. “I think they’re protesting about the economy. What’s lost is that the financial services sector has to be well capitalized and well financed for the economy to recover.”
“Anybody who dismisses them publicly is putting a bull's-eye on their back,” said one hedge fund manager of the protesters.
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Company, typifies the conflicting messages coming from Wall Street. In a conference call with reporters after third-quarter earnings were announced Thursday, he struck a sympathetic note. “I do vaguely remember the First Amendment that it is legal to demonstrate and it is completely fine,” he said. “You should listen and not just have a knee-jerk reaction.”
But in a later conference call with analysts, Mr. Dimon’s remarks were more offhand when asked about the protests and the negative perception of his industry. “Most of our clients like us,” he said. Besides, changing the industry’s image now is a tall order, he told the analysts, before adding, “If you have any great ideas on the phone you guys can write them up and send them to me. We’ll take them into consideration.” Without a coherent message, the crowds will ultimately thin out, Wall Street types insist — especially when the weather turns colder. They see the protesters as an entertaining sideshow, little more than flash mobs of slackers, seeking to lock arms with Kanye West or get a whiff of the antiestablishment politics that defined their parents’ generation.
“There is a view that it will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing,” said one financial industry official.
Most bankers were far more concerned this week about the business impact of the new Volcker Rule restrictions on speculative trading than they were about the demonstrations, this official added.
A smaller group of bank executives are taking the protests more seriously. They see them as a sign of the growing economic divide in this country — and are even monitoring the latest developments on Twitter. While peaceful so far, the demonstrations at Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo branches from San Francisco to Peoria are eerily similar to those routinely seen at Citibank outposts in Athens, Hong Kong, and in other overseas markets. Some believe it could be years before the swarms of protesters end their marches on bank branches.
A few outspoken members of the financial industry have broken ranks with their more skeptical brethren to say they understand a bit of the outrage of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
“When I tell people I went down to research the protests, they’re shocked, they literally laugh,” said Michael Mayo, a veteran bank analyst at Crédit Agricole Securities. “It’s just not a location they frequent.”
Citigroup’s chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, even said he would be happy to talk with the protesters any time they wanted to drop by. Mr. Pandit, onstage Wednesday at a Fortune magazine conference, said that the protesters’ “sentiments were completely understandable.”
“I would also corroborate that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S., and that it’s Wall Street’s job to reach out to Main Street and rebuild that trust,” Mr. Pandit said. The protesters should hold Citi and others “accountable for practicing responsible finance,” he said, “and keep asking us about how we’re doing.”
Last night at Occupy Wall Street in Times Square, Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas boldly defended the occupiers. Sergeant Thomas calmly asked the NYPD why they aren’t protecting the peaceful protestors. The NYPD ignored his questions and continued telling protestors to leave the sidewalk otherwise “they’d get hurt.”
Then, in an epic scene, Thomas approached the line of NYPD officers who held their batons.
While many Occupy Wall Street demonstrators had been arrested for merely crossing the street, he exclaimed, “These are U.S. citizens peacefully protesting! These are the people you are supposed to protect!” The 10-15 NYPD officers he addressed dared not to touch him.
Sergeant Thomas continued denouncing the NYPD’s actions shouting, “This isn’t a war zone! I’ve served overseas, that’s a war zone! Get rid of your batons and helmets!”
After five minutes of severely and loudly criticizing the NYPD, the Sergeant walked away leaving the scorned officers behind. The few people who were there applauded and cheered.
Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas delivered a scathing sermon to the NYPD, backing them off and furiously reminding them that the police should be there to protect the people (see photo via Joshua Paul below):
Sgt Shamar Thomas represents a major problem for those who would love nothing more than to conveniently dismiss the protesters as “stoners, losers and fringe elements.”
The video shows a woman arrested by police for trying to close her account at a Citibank branch in New York City. Citibank claim the people were being disruptive.
David DeGraw – one of the primary Wall Street protest organizers – just sent me the following email:
Top MoveOn leaders / executives are all over national television speaking for the movement. fully appreciate the help and support of MoveOn, but the MSM is clearly using them as the spokespeople for OWS. This is an blatant attempt to fracture the 99% into a Democratic Party organization. The leadership of MoveON are Democratic Party operatives. they are divide and conquer pawns. For years they ignored Wall Street protests to keep complete focus on the Republicans, in favor of Goldman’s Obama and Wall Street’s Democratic leadership.
If anyone at Move On or Daily Kos would like to have a public debate about these comments, we invite it.
Please help us stop this divide and conquer attempt.
DeGraw – who is wholly non-partisan [like the writers at Washington's Blog] – tells me that about half of the protesters are liberals, but the other half are libertarians (and see this.)
This mirrors what one of the original organizers of the “Occupy Trenton” protest told me: MoveOn attempted to set the agenda and pretend it was their event.
Everyone’s trying to cash in on the courage and conviction of the Wall Street protesters.
People are trying to associate Occupy Wall Street with their pet projects, in the same way that advertisers try to associate the goodwill of the Super Bowl, NBA playoffs, World Series or Olympics with their product.
But I hear from OWS organizers that the protesters come from totally diverse political affiliations. Many protesters support Ron Paul, many like Obama, others are for other parties or candidates or don’t vote at all.
The protesters themselves are having none of it, tweeting today:
We don’t want to be the democratic tea party or liberal tea party. We want to be our own movement separate of any political affiliation.
The two main challenges [facing the protesters are]: (1) An attempt by both the Democratic and Republican parties to co-opt it (see this, this and this); and (2) agents provocateur (see this, this and this) [and here].
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, October 14, 2011
Republican Congressman Peter King told CNBC’s Larry Kudlow that he regarded the dubious Iranian terror plot as an “act of war” and that President Obama should put the military on standby in response.
“They’ve not just crossed the red line, they’ve jumped over the red line, and this to me is an act of war,” said the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, adding that a military response should be kept on the table as an option “to let Iran know how seriously we take this,” as well as other “bad state actors”.
King called for new sanctions to be applied as well as advocating economic warfare by causing the Iranian central bank to collapse. Ludicrously, he also called on Obama to slap sanctions on the sale of Iranian crude oil, a move that would send gas prices soaring for American citizens, fruther cripple the global economy, while also possibly laying the foundation for world war three.
King nonchalantely implied that other middle eastern nations, including Saudi Arabia, could be threatened to fill the gap, “because they realize their survival is on the line here.”
Starting a new global energy crisis and potentially a massive global conflict in response to a fabricated terror plot that many would consider too far-fetched for a Hollywood movie script are not enough for King however, he also called for all Iranian diplomats to be expelled from the UN, claiming most of them were spies and suggesting Iran wanted to blow up the New York subway system.
King also agreed with Kudlow that the U.S. military should set in process a series of aggressive military manouvers to strike fear into Iran.
Of course, neo-con King’s belligerant call for Obama to set in motion world war three is made to look all the more ridiculous by the fact that the already dubious Iranian terror plot is now starting to look less credible than a children’s fairytale story.
As we reported earlier, the legal documents from the case clearly indicate how the alleged plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador was wholly the creation of the DEA informant working to entrap accused patsy Mansour J. Arbabsiar on behalf of the FBI.
Today will be the 28th day of demonstrations in the name of #OccupyWallStreet and while New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has advised the protesters that sanitation will be entering Liberty Plaza to clean up, the occupiers have plans of their own.
Protesters organized a massive clean-up last night, after General Assembly, according to their Facebook page.
Today, protesters will link arms in a human chain around the park and refuse to let NYPD enter the park, then at 9 a.m., protesters will march to Wall Street with brooms and mops.
On Wednesday/Thursday, all campers/supporters should reach out to friends/family/anyone to donate or purchase brooms, mops, squeegees, dust pans, garbage bags, power washers and any other cleaning supplies to be collected at sanitation.
The sanitation committee should move full-speed ahead on purchase of bins allocated by consensus at GA.
After General Assembly on Thursday, we’ll have a full-camp cleanup session.
Sanitation can coordinate, and anyone who is available will help with the massive community effort!
Then, Friday morning, we’ll awake and position ourselves with our brooms and mops in a human chain around the park, linked at the arms.
If NYPD attempts to enter, we’ll peacefully/non-violently stand our ground and those who are willing will get arrested.
Afterwards, at 9am, we’ll march with brooms and mops to Wall Street to do a massive #wallstcleanup march, where the real mess is!
Perry, Romney and Cain will all fade away, says Burkman
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, October 13, 2011
Republican Strategist Jack Burkman told Fox Business host Judge Andrew Napolitano that “Ron Paul could win the GOP nomination,” given the fact that Perry and Romney’s campaigns have started to crumble whereas Herman Cain has no real political experience.
“I can see Ron Paul catching on….if you look at the whole range of issues and if you look at who else is out there, there aren’t a lot of choices,” said Burkman.
Adding that Ron Paul tied together a lot of concerns shared by social conservatives, Burkman stated, “I’m going to make a bold prediction – Ron Paul could win the GOP nomination. A lot of people are going to think that’s fanciful, let’s take a look at it, Perry is starting to stumble, Bachmann and Gingrich probably already out, Romney the frontrunner….it’s impossible for him to win, he can’t get through the South on Super Tuesday, question becomes who’s left.”
Burkman added that Herman Cain, although surging in polls at present, had “no real political experience” and that his campaign would eventually go nowhere. “I could easily see Paul surging,” concluded Burkman.
Burkman can hardly be dismissed as a Paulite cheerleader, indeed he is one of the few mainstream media talking heads who dares to admit that Ron Paul has a chance of success.
Burkman is a Washington DC-based political consultant and regularly appears on mainstream networks, including Fox News, ABC News, MSNBC and CNN.
As we have documented, the establishment is petrified that Ron Paul could build the kind of momentum that would catapult him to the head of a line in a field dominated by compromised candidates who all have skeletons in their closet, from Herman Cain’s Fed connections to Mitt Romney’s Obamacare identikit past.
That’s why they’ve deliberately crafted a policy to ignore, dismiss and ridicule his campaign, despite the fact that Paul has repeatedly performed well in both straw polls and national polls of likely Republican voters.
It’s also why Ron Paul is routinely given significantly less time in televised debates than the likes of Romney, Cain and Rick Perry.
As we reported earlier this week, Tony Perkins, the principal organizer of the Values Voters Summit derided his own group’s straw poll as irrelevant after Ron Paul won, dismissing the results as not being “truly reflective of where values voters stand.”
Speaking before the results were announced, Congressman Paul stated, “If I win, it wouldn’t be as important to the media than if I lose.”
Indeed, Perkins’ dismissal of the importance of the poll result continues the trend where straw polls are only deemed important if they are won by establishment Republicans.
When Michele Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll, the mainstream media gushed with enthusiasm and immediately classified Bachmann as a frontrunner, while completely ignoring Ron Paul’s strong second place showing less than 200 votes behind the Minnesota Republican.
However, when Ron Paul won a big victory in the California straw poll just weeks later, the corporate press all but blacklisted the story.
This process of downplaying Paul’s victories while trumpeting those of his rivals is how the establishment attempts to dictate reality – this is how “frontrunners” are manufactured from the top down.
The Occupy Wall Street protests and the rise of the Tea Party movement have both changed America, but you haven’t seen anything yet. You better buckle up, because America is getting very angry and as the economy continues to decline the economic protests are going to become much more frightening in the years ahead. Americans have become very accustomed to prosperity. Now that our prosperity is vanishing, people are starting to become very angry. The scary thing is that the vast majority of our population now lives in tightly congested urban areas. That makes the potential for mass rioting and civil unrest much greater. Back in 1910, 72 percent of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, only 16 percent of Americans live in rural areas. So what happens when you have millions of incredibly angry people crammed into tightly congested metropolitan areas? Well, we are about to find out.
Over the past 4 years, we have seen some unprecedented things happen in America. First we witnessed the rise of the Tea Party movement. Initially it pretty much was a true grassroots movement but now it has been mostly taken over by establishment Republicans. Now we are witnessing the rise of Occupy Wall Street. While there are some grassroots elements to it, the reality is that Occupy Wall Street seems to be pretty much controlled by the Democrats. In fact, one individual was recently told that “Ron Paul signs are not welcome here” at a recent protest.
So we have the left and the right fighting with each other like cats and dogs. The Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street both pretty much hate each other.
Meanwhile, those that control both political parties are enjoying the view.
But the people that are expressing their anger through protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street are not going to be content with the status quo for long.
The truth is that there is a lot of anger in the United States today, and that anger is rapidly growing. Millions upon millions of Americans are deeply upset about the economy and about our financial system.
Right now, protests by both the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street have been mostly peaceful.
But that will not last indefinitely.
In fact, there are already signs that Occupy Wall Street protesters are not content with simply sitting in the park and banging on drums.
Also, more than 50 protesters from the Occupy Boston movement were arrested today when they would not do what police were ordering them to do.
But most notable of all was the march to the homes of certain millionaires up in New York. Earlier today, Occupy Wall Street protesters marched to the homes of Jamie Dimon, David Koch, John Paulson, Howard Milstein, and Rupert Murdoch.
Needless to say, that is going to seriously upset some people.
The home protests were not spontaneous. The truth is that they were highly organized. Organizers such as SEIU board member Stephen Lerner have been talking about them for quite some time. In fact, you can hear him discussing plans for the upcoming protests at the homes of these millionaires back on October 3rdright here.
There is a lot about Occupy Wall Street that can be criticized (just check out this article), but one thing that Occupy Wall Street is actually doing right is that it is focusing on the role of money in politics.
The big financial powers spend hundreds of millions of dollars on political campaigns. Just check out this infographic. All of that money buys a lot of influence over the political process. If it didn’t, the big financial powers would not be spending that kind of money.
But the big financial powers are not just spending money on political campaigns. It has now come out that the big Wall Street banks can order New York City police officers just like they would order pizzas. In fact, over a million dollars is going to be spent this way just this year alone.
A recent article that was posted on counterpunch.org detailed how this works….
One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
So expect the big Wall Street banks to be sending in orders for huge numbers of New York City cops to protect them from the half-crazed Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Sadly, if recent poll numbers are any indication, the anger of the American people is not going to abate any time soon….
*According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans that lack confidence in U.S. banks is now at an all-time high of 36%.
*According to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 90 percent of Americans believe that the economy is performing poorly and approximately 80 percent of Americans believe that it is “difficult” to find a job right now.
*According to a recent Rasmussen survey, 48 percent of all Americans believe that reductions in government spending are “at least somewhat likely” to result in civil unrest inside the United States.
*Another recent survey found that 73 percent of all Americans believe that the nation is “on the wrong track”.
*According to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, Congress has a disapproval rating of 82%.
*A recent Rasmussen survey found that 85 percent of Americans believe that members of Congress “are more interested in helping their own careers than in helping other people”, and that same survey found that 46 percent of the American people believe that most members of Congress are corrupt.
*According to a different Rasmussen survey, only 17 percent of all Americans now believe that the U.S. government has the consent of the governed.
*A recent Washington Post poll found that 78 percent of Americans are dissatisfied “with the way this country’s political system is working” and that only26 percent of Americans now believe that the federal government can solve the economic problems that we are facing.
So what does all of that add up to?
It adds up to a U.S. population that is very frustrated and that is looking for outlets for that frustration.
As the U.S. economy continues to fall apart, that frustration is going to continue to rise.
What we are seeing all across America is only the beginning. We are going to see protest movements and explosions of anger that we can’t even imagine right now.
There are 27 members on Barack Obama’s job creation panel, and most of them are corporate executives. The formal name of the panel is the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which is kind of ironic considering the fact that many of the CEOs on the panel have been rapidly shipping jobs out of the United States. So what hope is there that things are going to turn around if many of the folks that are supposed to be helping Barack Obama create U.S. jobs are actively destroying them instead? And how is the American middle class ever supposed to recover if corporate executives keep taking their jobs away and sending them to the other side of the world where it is legal to pay slave labor wages? These issues go to the very heart of America’s economic problems, and yet very few of our leaders are talking about them. But they should be talking about these things, because the economy is the number one issue for most American voters right now.
During most of the decades since World War II, the U.S. economy was a job creation machine.
But this past decade was different.
So how many total jobs do you think were created during the decade that just ended?
“If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.”
But aren’t we the greatest economy on earth?
Don’t we have great success stories such as Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook?
How could we have created zero jobs over an entire decade?
Well, the truth is that globalism has fundamentally altered the relationship between the big corporations and the American people.
You see, they don’t actually need most of us anymore. They can just set up facilities on the other side of the world and hire workers for 10 to 20 times less money.
Over the last couple of decades, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of jobs have been shipped out of the United States.
Even many of the corporate executives on Obama’s job creation panel are guilty of doing this.
*Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox, eliminated 4,500 U.S. jobs during the first six months of 2011.
*Kenneth I. Chenault, the CEO of American Express, got rid of 550 U.S. jobs earlier this year. But it wasn’t because American Express was not making enough money. According to the Los Angeles Times, “American Express announced it had made $1.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, up 48% from the same period the previous year.”
*Antonio M. Perez, the CEO of Eastman Kodak, got rid of 9,200 U.S. employees between 2004 and 2011.
*Jim McNerney, the CEO of Boeing, announced in January that 1,100 U.S. jobs would be eliminated. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that “Boeing reported that profits rose 20%, to $941 billion in the second quarter of 2011.”
*Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, has eliminated 22,000 U.S. jobs over the last four years.
And as I noted in a recent article on The Economic Collapse Blog, if you go back even farther the job losses at GE get even larger. The truth is that it is standard operating procedure at GE to look for ways to aggressively cut jobs in the United States and GE has been adding thousands upon thousands of new jobs overseas.
As the administration struggles to prod businesses to create jobs at home, GE has been busy sending them abroad. Since Immelt took over in 2001, GE has shed 34,000 jobs in the U.S., according to its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But it’s added 25,000 jobs overseas.
At the end of 2009, GE employed 36,000 more people abroad than it did in the U.S. In 2000, it was nearly the opposite.
So should we be disgusted by this?
Of course we should be.
About the only thing that the “experts” on Obama’s jobs panel will be able to teach him is about how to ship U.S. jobs out of the country.
So it should be no great mystery as to why we have so many unemployed workers in the United States today.
And since we are now competing for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe, there is also substantial downward pressure on our wages and on the standard of living that we all enjoy.
The statistics tell us that incomes for middle class Americans just keep declining and declining and declining.
For example, the following comes from a recent article in the New York Times….
Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent.
So are you alarmed that the number of unemployed Americans continues to go up and our incomes continue to go down?
You should be.
Rampant unemployment and declining incomes are also two of the biggest reasons for the current housing crisis. Without good jobs that pay well, Americans simply cannot afford to buy homes.
During the recent economic downturn, the homeownership rate in the United States experienced the largest drop that we have seen since the Great Depression.
When we buy stuff that is made in the United States, the money stays here and it goes to support U.S. businesses and U.S. workers.
When we buy stuff that is made overseas, the money that we spend does not support U.S. workers. If U.S. workers cannot find jobs, the tax base is diminished and the number of people receiving government assistance goes up.
The United States has had a negative trade balance every single year since 1976, and since that time the United States has run a total trade deficit of more than 7.5 trillion dollars with the rest of the world.
That represents a whole lot of money that could have gone to U.S. workers. It also represents a whole lot of money that taxes could have been paid on.
But instead, Americans have become highly addicted to cheap stuff from overseas. Today, our stores are absolutely packed with stuff that was made in China.
Unfortunately, that also means that we are sending massive amounts of our money to the Chinese government. 7 of the 10 largest corporations in China are owned by the government. Many other key corporations in China are deeply subsidized by the government.
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars that should go to support U.S. workers goes to China instead.
This is helping China to rise dramatically even as the United States falls apart.
The signs of this are everywhere.
For example, did you know that China has surpassed the United States and is nowthe largest PC market in the entire world?
But most of our lawmakers continue to insist that trade with China is a wonderful thing for us.
Even the construction of many of our roads and bridges is being outsourced to China. Just check out the following quote from a recent ABC News article….
In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.
In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.
In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.
These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.
“When we subsidize jobs in China, we’re not creating any wealth in the United States,” said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
If only our founding fathers could see us now, eh?
As China rises, big U.S. corporations are flocking to invest in that nation.
In a recent article, I noted some of the significant new investments that U.S. corporations are now making in China….
*Caterpillar has built 16 factories in China and now employs more than 8,000 workers there.
*Ford is currently “building three factories in Chongqing as part of $1.6 billion investment that also includes another plant in Nanchang”.
But as China rises, the U.S. continues to rot. We do not have nearly enough jobs for all of our workers and our state and local governments are going broke because there are not nearly enough tax dollars coming in.
Unfortunately, things are going to get even worse if something is not done quickly.
According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades.
Our economy is being radically transformed by globalization. The emerging “one world economy” is ripping the middle class to shreds and it is making us poorer as a nation.
Something has got to be done about the millions of jobs that are being shipped out of the United States, but unfortunately many of the corporate executives on Obama’s job creation panel that are supposed to be helping create jobs are actively involved in booting our jobs out of the country instead.
We are in a whole lot of trouble.
The entire system is falling apart all around us and there seems to be no help on the horizon.
This author spent roughly 30 minutes in the Occupy Wall Street Chat Room before I was summarily booted off for my opinions regarding the affects of the Federal Reserve, the manipulation of our government by corporate lobbyists, and their respective influences upon the American people. (Actually, I didn’t think my statements were that incendiary, but nevertheless.) How unfortunate…
I thought that Occupy Wall Street was all about the views and opinions of every person in America, and not just those among the populist mainstream. I guess was wrong. How unfortunate…
Hundreds of millions of Americans are eagerly perched and waiting for instruction as to what they can do, or how they can act, in order to cure this disease; this deadly epidemic now infecting their country. (Even those people of “conservative persuasion” are on board and determined to jump into the fray; if only to divest large corporations of their power and influence over our American system of governance.) Yet there is, as of this moment, no cognitive or particular direction for this protest. How unfortunate…
As it stands now, Occupy Wall Street is not yet the cause that we’ve all been waiting for. It is currently nothing more than a clearinghouse of thoughts and ideas; a mere conglomeration of the abstract by the disillusioned and disenfranchised: an endless cacophony of disconcerting concertos, seeking to be all heard at once through a series of tweeted epitaphs that scroll endlessly up and out of sight in the blink of an eye; and all founded upon the declaration of absolutely nothing more than the mere imaginings of what could be the, “American Dream”.
Perhaps their protests will one day realize their true worth, years later, by finally working to liberalize the American people from their bondage to corporatism and their corrupt government. But not before so much latent blood has already been spilled in the process.
WWII and Other Military Vets Support Wall Street Protest
A reader posted the following comment regarding the Occupy Wall Street protests:
I am so proud of all you people who are showing your back bones, to stand up and put a stop to the Banking cartel, who is defining History, by insisting that We The People, use their Fiat Money system. Our Constitution states, that Only Gold and Silver shall be used as lawful Money. The So Called Federal Government, is really only to have Ten Square Miles, in which to conduct their so called wisdom to Protect the Sovereign States. But look at how much territory they call, Federal lands etc. We Have a rouge Government, which is completely out of control. Your movements of collective peaceful protests, are the beginning of the end for the crooked Fiat Money people. I am a WWII Vet, South Pacific Campaign. 94 years young, handy capped, from War Injuries. I want you to know from my Heart, I am so proud of each and every one of you. So Hang in there, your movement is just what this Country needs.
I’m not certain whether the reader is one of these gentlemen attending the Occupy Wall Street protests:
Marines and other military men are also supporting the protests:
A week after the BBC exploded Alessio Rastani to the stage, it has just done it all over again. In an interview with IMF advisor Robert Shapiro, the bailout expert has pretty much said what,once again, is on everyone’s mind: “If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system.
We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected.
All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world. This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serrious than the crisis in 2008…. What we don’t know the state of credit default swaps held by banks against sovereign debt and against European banks, nor do we know the state of CDS held by British banks, nor are we certain of how certain the exposure of British banks is to the Ireland sovereign debt problems.”
But no, Morgan Stanley does, or so they swear an unlimited number of times each day. And they say not to worry about anything because, you see, it is not like they have any upside in telling anyone the truth. Which is why for everyone hung up on the latest rumor of a plan about a plan about a plan spread by a newspaper whose very viability is tied in with that of the banks that pay for its advertising revenue, we have one thing to ask: “show us the actual plan please.” Because it is easy to say “recapitalize” this, and “bad bank” that. In practice, it is next to impossible. So yes, ladies and gentlemen, enjoy this brief relief rally driven by the fact that China is offline for the week and that the persistent source of overnight selling on Chinese “hard/crash landing” concerns has been gone simply due to an extended national holiday. Well, that holiday is coming to an end.
By the way, Reuters, Shapiro is not a Yes Man -we’ll spare you the ruminations.
This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System… and that the severity of each of the major contractions — 1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities…
Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank…
To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.
Given this dismal monetary and banking situation, given a 39:1 pyramiding of checkable deposits and currency on top of gold, given a Fed unchecked and out of control, given a world of fiat moneys, how can we possibly return to a sound noninflationary market money? The objectives, after the discussion in this work, should be clear: (a) to return to a gold standard, a commodity standard unhampered by government intervention; (b) to abolish the Federal Reserve System and return to a system of free and competitive banking; (c) to separate the government from money; and (d) either to enforce 100 percent reserve banking on the commercial banks, or at least to arrive at a system where any bank, at the slightest hint of nonpayment of its demand liabilities, is forced quickly into bankruptcy and liquidation. While the outlawing of fractional reserve as fraud would be preferable if it could be enforced, the problems of enforcement, especially where banks can continually innovate in forms of credit, make free banking an attractive alternative.
A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s independent central bank, saying the U.S. Federal Reserve should either be brought under tighter political control or abolished outright, a poll shows.
***
Americans across the political spectrum say the Fed shouldn’t retain its current structure of independence. Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.
As I have extensively documented, the Fed is largely responsible for the economic crisis, and has failed to meet a single one of its stated mandates (let alone its implied ones).
Media personality Alex Jones believes that protesting the Fed is the most important and high-leverage way to change our economic system for the better. Steve Watson – frequent contributor to Jones’ websites – writes today:
In spite of a large number of protesters who are clearly aware of the fact that the greatest threat to the global financial system comes not directly from Wall Street but from the privately owned Federal Reserve cartel, the official “list of specific demands” of the Occupy Wall Street movement makes absolutely no mention of the Fed whatsoever.
The Occupy Wall Street crowd has become predictably focused on issues like taxing the middle class and moderately “rich,” ending capitalism and even re-electing Obama to ‘fight’ the very elites who pushed him into power. Focus should instead be on the real source of power for the out-of-control bankster class- the private, unaccountable Federal Reserve bank that creates money out of thin air, issues secret loans to insiders and foreign governments and systematically institutes debt on the American people through their undue powers.
With this in mind, Alex Jones is calling on patriots to “occupy” branches of the Federal Reserve, with plans to appear at three locations in Texas this weekend in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The times and locations appear below. Further, people everywhere should converge upon Fed locations in their area to raise awareness about the real culprit behind the economic crisis.
Well meaning protesters who have joined the Occupy Wall Street effort, including solidarity activities in cities everywhere, need to be educated about the power held by this insidious institution, as well as the false solutions that have been proposed by leading figures on the left and right that only further expand the scope of big government, all while avoiding the elephant in the room.
Given that Alex Jones has millions of TV viewers and readers, his announcement might result in a dramatic new front in the nationwide protests currently occurring.
The worldwide riots are not mysterious or unforeseeable. They’ve been predicted for years, and are a direct result of the bad policy choices made by most nations worldwide.
***
Nations around the world decided to bail out their big banks instead of taking the necessary steps to stabilize their economies …. As such, they all transferred massive debts (from fraudulent and stupid gambling activities) from the balance sheets of the banks to the balance sheets of the country.
The nations have then run their printing presses nonstop in an effort to inflate their way out of their debt crises, even though that effort is doomed to failure from the get-go.
But the fact is that every country in the world that can print money … has been printing massive quantities of money.
***
Moreover, the austerity measures which governments worldwide are imposing to try to plug their gaping deficits (created by throwing trillions at their banks) are causing people world-wide to push back.
As I warned in February 2009 and again in December of that year:
Numerous high-level officials and experts warn that the economic crisis could lead to unrest world-wide – even in developed countries ….
And the sense of outrage at the injustice of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer is also a growing global trend.
Countries worldwide told their people that bailout out the giant banks was necessary to save the economy. But they haven’t delivered, and the “Main Streets” of the world have suffered.
As former American senator (and consummate insider) Chris Dodd said in 2008:
If it turns out that [the banks] are hoarding, you’ll have a revolution on your hands. People will be so livid and furious that their tax money is going to line their pockets instead of doing the right thing. There will be hell to pay.
Of course, the big banks are hoarding, and refusing to lend to Main Street. In fact, they admitted back in 2008 that they would. And the same is playing out globally.
In March, Council of Foreign Relations research associate Matthew Klein noted the parallels between soaring youth unemployment in corrupt Arab countries and the U.S.:
We all enjoy speculating about which Arab regime will be toppled next, but maybe we should be looking closer to home. High unemployment? Check. Out-of-touch elites? Check. Frustrated young people? As a 24-year-old American, I can testify that this rich democracy has plenty of those too.
About one-fourth of Egyptian workers under 25 are unemployed, a statistic that is often cited as a reason for the revolution there. In the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in January an official unemployment rate of 21 percent for workers ages 16 to 24.
***
The true unemployment rate for young graduates is most likely even higher because it fails to account for those who went to graduate school in an attempt to ride out the economic storm or fled the country to teach English overseas. It would be higher still if it accounted for all of those young graduates who have given up looking for full-time work, and are working part time for lack of any alternative.
***
The uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa are a warning for the developed world. Even if an Egyptian-style revolution breaking out in a rich democracy is unthinkable, it is easy to recognize the frustration of a generation that lacks opportunity. Indeed, the “desperate generation” in Portugal got tens of thousands of people to participate in nationwide protests on March 12. How much longer until the rest of the rich world follows their lead?
The number of young Americans without a job has exploded to 53.4 percent — a post-World War II high, according to the Labor Dept. — meaning millions of Americans are staring at the likelihood that their lifetime earning potential will be diminished and, combined with the predicted slow economic recovery, their transition into productive members of society could be put on hold for an extended period of time.
The number represents the flip-side to the Labor Dept.’s report that the employment rate of 16-to-24 year olds has eroded to 46.6 percent — the lowest ratio of working young Americans in that age group, including all but those in the military, since WWII.
34.5% of young African American men were unemployed in October 2009.
As the Center for Immigration Studies noted last December:
Unemployment rates for less-educated and younger workers:
As of the third quarter of 2009, the overall unemployment rate for native-born Americans is 9.5 percent; the U-6 measure shows it as 15.9 percent.
The unemployment rate for natives with a high school degree or less is 13.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 21.9 percent.
The unemployment rate for natives with less than a high school education is 20.5 percent. Their U-6 measure is 32.4 percent.
The unemployment rate for young native-born Americans (18-29) who have only a high school education is 19 percent. Their U-6 measure is 31.2 percent.
The unemployment rate for native-born blacks with less than a high school education is 28.8 percent. Their U-6 measure is 42.2 percent.
The unemployment rate for young native-born blacks (18-29) with only a high school education is 27.1 percent. Their U-6 measure is 39.8 percent.
The unemployment rate for native-born Hispanics with less than a high school education is 23.2 percent. Their U-6 measure is 35.6 percent.
The unemployment rate for young native-born Hispanics (18-29) with only a high school degree is 20.9 percent. Their U-6 measure is 33.9 percent.
No wonder Chris Tilly – director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA – says that African-Americans and high school dropouts are experiencing depression-level unemployment.
And as I have previously noted, unemployment for those who earn $150,000 or more is only 3%, while unemployment for the poor is 31%.
And food prices are soaring in the U.S. As CNN noted last month:
According to the latest government figures, the consumer price index for food at home increased by 60 basis points year-over-year to 6% versus the 10 basis point gain in food away from home CPI inflation to 2.7%.
Food inflation is now the most important household expense, according to Wal-Mart’s (WMT) commentary during its earnings call last month. Food prices, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, continue to accelerate higher.
As MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson points out today, the official White House position is that:
(1) The government created the mega-giants, and they are not the product of free market competition
(2) The White House needs to “regulate and oversee them”, even though it is clear that the government has no real plans to regulate or oversee the banking behemoths
Without government-created moral hazard emboldening casino-style speculation, corruption of government officials, creation of a system of government-sponsored rating agencies which had at its core a model of bribery, and other government-induced distortions of the free market, things wouldn’t have gotten nearly so bad.
And while co-option of government by the big banks is a huge problem, it is also true that corruption in government leads to corruption in the private sector. See this and this. The U.S. has truly become a banana republic, just like the worst Latin American countries.
So anyone who thinks that government would solve all of our problems if it were only freed from obstructionists is only seeing half the problem, and is falling for the oldest trick in the book … the ole’ divide and conquer strategy.
Hundreds held by NYPD – including New York Times journalist – after attempted march across bridge ends in chaos:
More than 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday evening during a march by anti-Wall Street protesters who have been occupying a downtown Manhattan square for two weeks.
The group, called Occupy Wall Street, has been protesting against the finance industry and other perceived social ills by camping out in Zuccotti park in New York.
During the afternoon a long line of protesters numbering several thousand snaked through the streets towards the landmark bridge across the East River with the aim of ending at a Brooklyn park.
However, during the march across the bridge groups of protesters sat down or strayed into the road from the pedestrian pathway. They were then arrested in large numbers by officers who were part of a heavy police presence shepherding the march along its path.
At one stage 500 protesters were blocked off by police on the bridge. At least one journalist, freelancer Natasha Lennard for the New York Times, was among those arrested. “About half way across the group of people who wanted to occupy the bridge launched their action and stepped into the road. They wanted to get arrested. It was sort of the idea,” said Yaier Heber, one of the marchers.
New Yorkers need “to help the banks” was Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s message to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in his weekly radio appearance on the John Gambling show.
“The protesters are protesting against people who make $40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet. That’s the bottom line,” Bloomberg said, presumably meaning service workers on Wall Street, adding that “we all” share blame for taking on too much risk, not just the financial industry.
“And people in this day and age need support for their employers. If the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economic problems, we will not have jobs so anything we can do that’s responsible to help the banks do that is what we need.”
Asked if there’s an “end-game” for the protesters and if they will be allowed to stay in Zuccotti Park, which is privately owned but open to the public, Bloomberg said, “We’ll see.
“You know people have a right to protest but we also have to make sure that people who don’t want to protest can go down the streets unmolested. We have to make sure that while you can say what you want to say, people who want to say something very different have a right to say that as well. That’s what’s great about this country.”
Warning of “other societal concerns,” offering sanitation as his example without elaborating, he then skipped down memory lane and away from the question to recall protests on Wall St. during the Vietnam War. His conclusion: “when the Vietnam vets came back we didn’t treat them the way they deserve to be treated.”
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