'Occupy': A catalyst for change? - Inside Story The 'Occupy' movement is holding gatherings around the world as protesters meet in the financial centres of several cities. The movement's central site, United for Global Change, says 951 cities in 82 countries will participate in rallies. Dozens of protesters were arrested in New York as thousands marched through the city's financial district before moving on to Times Square. Protests were also held elsewhere in the US and Canada, notably in Washington DC, the US capital. And several cities across the world - from Tokyo to Alaska via London, Frankfurt and Washington - held demonstrations in a show of solidarity with the rallies that began last month in New York. But does the movement have a defined agenda?
Europe's Zero-Sum Dilemma EUROPE’S DEBT crisis is threatening a political order that has been built up over the course of more than a half century. It is still entirely possible—indeed likely—that the European single currency will not survive the crisis. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has predicted that if the euro collapses, the European Union will crumble with it. The destruction of the EU would, in turn, remove the organization around which postwar European politics has been constructed. Even if both the EU and the single currency survive, the current crisis is likely to extract an economic and political price that makes a mockery of many of the original hopes invested in the European Union.
Occupy Wall Street to a global intifada? On Wednesday, October 5, I joined thousands of others and marched down lower Manhattan to 'occupy Wall Street'. Seeing thousands of people marching peacefully together under the banner of occupying struck me in profound and contradictory ways. The marches and occupation were orderly and disciplined. There was neither a mob mentality, nor a sense of anarchy, nor any violence. No one crushed anyone else, in fact people apologised if they so much as tread over each other's toes. Everyone obeyed the flow determined by the New York Police Department (NYPD): Walking on sidewalks behind barricades, congregating in open spaces of parks, and for the most part not standing on streetlights, signs or scaffolding to get a bird's eye view. The feeling was certainly one of dispossession - targeted at Wall Street, at corporate America, at rising unemployment, at taxation inequalities, at rising student loans, at seemingly out-of-control military spending. What kind of occupation? Defining occupation
6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying All of a sudden, it's like you can't make huge amounts of money without people getting all pissed off about it. And it's only going to get worse -- with the election coming up and the weather getting warmer, this whole "Occupy" movement is probably going to come back strong. The 1 percent will feel even more besieged than before. "What the hell?" #6. "The amount that I have to reinvest in my business and feed my family is more like $600,000 ... and so by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over ..." -- Congressman John Fleming Pictured here with his poverty. "It is hard to ask more of households making $250,000 or $300,000 a year. -- Senator Chuck Schumer What They Think They're Saying: "Come on, we're all in this together! What We Hear: "When my family's Aruba vacation went over budget, that was exactly like you being unable to afford medication for your child's excruciating chronic illness!" Getty"Look at how tiny my yacht is!" Getty"This stuff? #5. -- Wayne Allyn Root #4.
The 'Last Place Aversion' Paradox If ever Americans were up for a bit of class warfare, now would seem to be the time. The current financial downturn has led to a $700 billion tax-payer-financed bank bailout and an unemployment rate stuck stubbornly above nine percent. Onto this scene has stepped the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which seeks to bring together a disparate group of protesters united in their belief that the current income distribution is unfair. “The one thing we all have in common is that We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” says their website. Or, maybe not. Support for redistribution, surprisingly enough, has plummeted during the recession. What might explain this trend? Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest.
Not What the Doctor Ordered: 20 Million Could Lose Employer Coverage In all the hand-wringing over the last two months for Obamacare by “liberal” apologists, little has actually been said about the actual effects of the law. True, whether or not Obamacare is beneficial has little if anything to do with its constitutionality. (And the actual Constitutional issues involved, however valid, have little to do with the cynical politics behind the Supreme Court’s right-wing block in the case.) Hence one story that caught my eye in March: “20 million could lose employer coverage under Obama health care overhaul.” As many as 20 million Americans could lose their employer-sponsored coverage in 2019 under the health care legislation signed into law by President Obama in March 2010… The CBO’s most optimistic estimate, which the federal agency says is subject to a “tremendous amount of uncertainty,” is that 3 million to 5 million could lose their employer health coverage each year from 2019 through 2022.
A Movement Too Big to Fail - Chris Hedges' Columns A Movement Too Big to Fail Posted on Oct 16, 2011 By Chris Hedges There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to “clean” the premises. Tinkering with the corporate state will not work. The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. Martin Luther King was repeatedly betrayed by liberal supporters, especially when he began to challenge economic forms of discrimination, which demanded that liberals, rather than simply white Southern racists, begin to make sacrifices. New and Improved Comments
Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide | Economy May 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact. We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24. LF: Let’s start with the big picture. NC: There is either a crisis or a return to the norm of stagnation. The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. LF: And politically…? NC: Again there are differences. In the US, first of all, the electoral system has been almost totally shredded. The Republican Party has pretty much abandoned any pretense of being a traditional political party.
#occupywallstreet vs Avaaz « halfiranian.com I wonder how many people at Avaaz saw the irony of their email calling on people to sign a petition in solidarity with protesters on Wall Street. Adbusters, who put out the original call for #occupywallstreet back in July, are vocal critics of ‘clicktivism‘, the derogatory term for the growing industry of organisations (like Avaaz and 38 degrees) who try to mobilise people around clicking petition links. Don’t get me wrong, I sign many of Avaaz’s emails, but there are significant issues with their model. Micah White – Senior Editor at Adbusters – has written a series of scathing but brilliant articles attacking clicktivism for sapping the energy out of grassroots activism and fuelling the illusion that change can come from the click of a mouse. He’s right. Everything out there is telling you to focus on the colour of your action buttons, the alignment of your forms or the optimal number of emails to send per month. That’s why #occupywallstreet is a refreshing burst of genius.
Robert Barro: Stimulus Spending Keeps Failing The Fantastic Success of Occupy Wall Street | Immanuel Wallerstein The Occupy Wall Street movement – for now it is a movement – is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is. Why it started in the United States when it did – and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later – we’ll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the “middle class”); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population (“Wall Street”); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the “Arab spring,” the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn’t really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. That brought us to Stage two – publicity. This brought us to Stage three – legitimacy.
Mainstream Economics is a Cult Neoclassical Economics Is Based on Myth Neoclassical economics is a cult which ignores reality in favor of shared myths. Economics professor Michael Hudson writes: [One Nobel prize winning economist stated,] “In pointing out the consequences of a set of abstract assumptions, one need not be committed unduly as to the relation between reality and these assumptions.”This attitude did not deter him from drawing policy conclusions affecting the material world in which real people live….Typical of this now widespread attitude is the textbook Microeconomics by William Vickery, winner of the 1997 Nobel Economics Prize: “Economic theory proper, indeed, is nothing more than a system of logical relations between certain sets of assumptions and the conclusions derived from them… The validity of a theory proper does not depend on the correspondence or lack of it between the assumptions of the theory or its conclusions and observations in the real world. “Our models show there is no chance of water”