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FIRST ‘OFFICIAL’ STATEMENT FROM THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT | infonews.co.nz – 2 October 2011
…We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; …and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. …
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. …
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
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Fifteen Definitions of Freedom from #OccupyWallStreet | Rortybomb – 2 October 2011
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Daily Kos: A necessary but insufficient condition | 3 October 2011
The reality is that putting Democrats in power is a necessary but insufficient condition to creating real change in this country.
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David Graeber is an anthropologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of ‘Direct Action: An Ethnography.’ He was also one of the initial organizers of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests. And he thinks the people asking for a list of demands are missing the point of the movement quite dramatically. We spoke this morning by phone.
Ezra Klein: So when did your involvement with these protests begin?
David Graeber: July 2nd. That was the first actual meeting. What happened was AdBusters put out this call for these protests. We had heard there was supposed to be a general assembly on July 2nd. So I just showed up. But it was a rally, not an assembly. Some Marxist groups had set up stages and megaphones and was making speeches and were planning a march. So we said we don’t need to do this. We pulled a small group together and decided to have a real assembly. …
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Sep 30, 2011
This morning, while on local radio host John Gambling’s show, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked about the demonstrations on Wall Street. Bloomberg condemned the protests, claiming that the protesters are targeting people who making “$40-50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet.” He then went on to say people are focusing too much on the causes of the financial crisis and that we need to be nicer to the banking industry so that it starts lending again.
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Sep 30, 2011
House Republicans yesterday released their draft budget proposal for labor, health, and human service, which in one fell swoop revives the assault on all their favorite bugaboos, including Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio, the National Labor Relations Board, and President Obama’s health care reform law. The GOP also targeted heat subsidies that prevent low-income families from freezing in the winter, and slashed education funding by $2.4 billion. The bill also eliminates the Administration’s “Race to the Top” education reform program and reduces eligibility for Pell Grants for low-income college students.
Perhaps most surprisingly for a party that claims to be focused on job creation, the GOP budget reduces funding for job training programs that give the unemployed the skills they need to find work in an ailing economy:…
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Oct 3, 2011
However, if calling for an end to millionaires having lower tax rates than their secretaries is class warfare, Obama is only the latest class warrior to occupy the Oval Office. In a June 6, 1985 speech at Northside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, then President Ronald Reagan explained that tax loopholes allowing a millionaire to pay lower taxes that a bus driver were “crazy,” because they allowed the “truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share”: …
Watch Obama and Reagan’s remarks, side by side: …
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Daily Kos: Rick Perry’s hunting grounds name provokes outrage … at Herman Cain – 3 Oct 2011
Taking offense at the n-word really shouldn’t be a controversial position: …
there’s really no way you can argue with Cain’s statement that the name of Rick Perry’s family’s hunting grounds was “insulting” and “insensitive.”
Well, unless you’re a Republican. In which case, the real villain of this story isn’t Perry. It’s Cain.
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Daily Kos: If Rick Perry is liberal, Chris Christie is the next Karl Marx | 3 Oct 2011
Now that Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a liberal, the GOP establishment is back to looking for that mythical magical creature that can both appeal to the teabagging crowd as well as DC and Wall Street Republicans. Sure, they’d love Mitt Romney, but know he is damaged goods in the Republican primary.The name they’ve settled on, however, isn’t exactly an improvement on Perry. Sure, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie yelled at that union member that one time, but his list of transgressions is longer than Perry’s. …
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Daily Kos: Colorado secretary of state bars overseas soldiers from voting | 3 Oct 2011
What a shock that Gessler would target Democratic-voting counties for voter “fraud.” He is suing the clerk of Denver county to try to stop the mailing of ballots to all registered voters. And, for now, he has succeeded in disenfranchising Colorado soldiers. Apparently, the era of Republicans supporting the troops is over.
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Protest and parade in downtown Los Angeles – latimes.com – 3 Oct 2011
#OccupyLA
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Daily Kos: Six NEW Reasons To Support #OccupyWallStreet | 3 Oct 2011
1.) You might not know it yet, but the U.S. has just entered into another recession…
2.) Our government has committed close to $450 billion more U.S. taxpayer dollars to Wall Street bailouts in 2011, alone. …
5.) Speaking of “misrepresenting their financial condition to the public,” the Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) was in Boston on Friday, and he announced that most/many of Europe’s sovereign funds and banks (these are funds and banks with substantial U.S. investments in them, both directly and indirectly) are cooking their books. …
[Scroll down for many, many links. -L]
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Daily Kos: Witnessing #occupywallstreet: my 2nd day | 28 Sep 2011
I was able to sit through an entire General Assembly in the afternoon and get a better feel for this process. Catching the beginning of the Assembly, I got the introduction where they explain how the meeting is structured and the use of hand signals. It sounds like the hand signal vocabulary is growing or refining based on experience.
The meeting is combination of report backs and need requests from working groups, agenda items which have been requested previously and affirmed by the community and then a sort of open mic, where anyone can ask to speak.
There is some sensitivity to having marginalized voices heard, so they use something called “progressive stack” when asserting who will speak in what order. The “stack” is the list of people who will speak. …The stack managers have the discretion to call people to speak in a different order than the requests were made if they feel that a particular demographic group has had too much representation and other groups need to be heard from. At one point, for instance, 5 males in a row stood up to speak. Someone in the audience signaled a “point of process” and facilitators were reminded of the progressive stack. The next speaker was, therefore, female regardless of what order people had been put on the list.
I could go on and on about the details of the General Assembly. I highly recommend that you watch on on the live feed sometime. It is a powerful example of direct democracy. …
One thing which feels foreign to our cultural norms is the reality that there really are no heirarchical leaders. There are working groups which take on tasks and anyone can join them. The community may defer to that working group, but their decision may also be subject to consensus at the General Assembly. Moreover, there is no Head of a working group.
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NYPD receives $4.6 Million “Gift” From J.P. Morgan Chase – OCT 02, 2011 – Daily Kos
Nothing to see here move along.
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Daily Kos: “So you don’t want a raise?” | 28 Sep 2011
I had the following conversation with an associate in my law firm. He’s a reasonably bright kid, but always looking to start a debate with the wacky liberal partner. This time, his bait of choice was taxes. “If you raise taxes,” he said, “people will lose their incentive to work.” “If you take more of what people earn, they won’t work as hard, they won’t innovate, they won’t create the new jobs that keep the economy going.”
I answered, “so you don’t want a raise? Great. I’ll make sure you don’t get one this year.”
He suddenly looked very confused.
[Followed by an explanation of tax brackets. -L]
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Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer, not willing to wait for the Affordable Care Act to kick in in two or three years, is challenging the federal government to start having a dialogue about real health care reform now by allowing Montana to set up a system modeled on “SaskCare,” the Saskatchewan health system, the first universal health care system among the Canadian provinces.In an interview with Daily Kos Friday, Schweitzer talked about his rationale for the plan. It builds on a request he made last year for a Medicaid waiver for his state to set up a “Medicaid Part D” program, as he called it, a prescription benefit plan for all Montanans. That proposal, intended to hit at the heart of a long-time Schweitzer foe—the pharmaceutical industry—would have allowed the state to offer a prescription drug program to all Montana citizens that would provide the drugs at Medicaid prices.
That waiver request was denied.
Building on that, and taking Saskatchewan as his model, Schweitzer will request a waiver from HHS for not just Medicaid, but Medicare, Veterans Administration and Indian Health Services funds that are provided to the state. He wants a block grant of those moneys to set up a single payer system. …
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Rick Perry: Warren Buffett hasn’t got a clue about the private sector | Daily Kos – 30 Sep 2011
This really isn’t that big of a deal, but with Republicans claiming that Warren Buffett opposes the Buffett Rule, I just can’t help myself from pointing out this hilarious pronouncement from none other than Rick Perry: …
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Humorless morons cracking rape “jokes” | pandagon.net – Amanda Marcotte
This was inevitable. Elizabeth Warren is an outspoken woman who doesn’t pull her punches.
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The Tax Foundation – Some Historical Tax Stats
The top marginal tax rate in 1960 was 91%, which applied to income over $200,000 (for single filers) or $400,000 (for married filers) – thresholds which correspond to approximately $1.5 million and $3 million, respectively, in today’s dollars. Approximately 0.00235% of households had income taxed at the top rate.
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…it’s the classic good news/bad news situation for Twitter. The good news: It’s looking less likely that the company is going to face accusations that its platform is being used by activists such as the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters to organize, and therefore face legal action as a result. The bad news: It’s because activists seem to be moving onto an entirely new messaging system altogether.
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The Real Zack Morris | The State of the Art is Terrible
When I read about the elegant computer science of the 50s and 60s, when great minds like Alan Turing and Peter Landin laid down the foundations of computation, I have to admit that I’m jealous. It’s so quaint to write lisp on a whiteboard. …
Most computers today, for all of their potential speed, are largely a mistake, based on the provenly unscalable Von Neumann architecture, controlled with one of the most shortsighted languages of all time, x86 assembly. They are almost unfathomably inefficient. …
Sure, your computer can perform 10 billion floating point operations per second. But most of the time it’s not doing anything at all. Just like you.
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Why would-be engineers end up as English majors – CNN.com
Undergraduates across the country are choosing to leave science, technology, engineering and math programs before they graduate with those degrees. Many students in those STEM fields struggle to complete their degrees in four years, or drop out, according to a 2010 University of California, Los Angeles, study.
The study, conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, found students in science, math and engineering take longer to complete their degrees than students who start out majoring in other fields. The study tracked thousands of students who entered college for the first time in 2004. …
Low graduation rates among science and math undergraduates affect how the United States competes globally. Fewer biology and math majors means fewer doctors and engineers later. …
High school graduates aren’t prepared for first-year science classes in college, Hurtado said.But there’s another problem, too: Higher education, itself. Science and math programs are designed and taught to winnow down the number of students. University tenure systems often reward professors who conduct research and publish their work, but not those who teach well.
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Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas
The studies’ findings include:
* Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
* People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.
* Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
* Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea. -
It’s the end of the web as we know it « Adrian Short
When you use a free web service you’re the underclass. At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliche but it’s worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it you’re the product not the customer. …
The conclusion here should be obvious: if you really care about your site you need to run it on your own domain. You need to own your URLs. …
But it’s no longer that simple.
..Facebook and Twitter now wield enormous power over the web by giving their members ways to find and share information using tools that work in a social context. There’s no obvious way to replicate this power out on the open web of independent websites …
You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve.
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Intimacy and Performance on Facebook by Joe Moon
Both intimacy and performance are important parts of what makes social networks like Facebook compelling. Initially, the performance part was the profile, where you listed your biographical information, your likes and dislikes, your expressions of identity (in the narrow ways that Facebook allowed). The performance part was important for discovering new people and expanding your network, for actually forming the connections. The intimacy part was pretty much everything else: your status updates, messages, comments, photos, and videos. It consisted of the kind of stuff in the two videos above. It was what injected meaning into those connections that you’d made.
At every turn, Facebook seems to have subverted the intimacy of social experiences by turning them into public performances.
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Jeanne Mansfield: Why I Was Maced at the Wall Street Protests | Boston Review
Just for the record, I love cops. I do, my mother worked in the justice system for 30 years, and I’ve known a lot of really good cops, really good honorable people just doing their jobs. I’ve never agreed with the sentiment, “Fuck the Po-lice,” and I still don’t. But these guys are fucked up. There was an anger in those white-shirt’s eyes that said, “You don’t matter.” And whether they were just scared or irrational or looking for a target for their rage, there was no excuse for their abuse of authority. I had always thought that people who complained about police brutality must have done something to provoke it, that surely cops wouldn’t hurt people without a really good reason. But they do. We were on the curb, we were contained, we were unarmed. Pepper spray hurts like hell, and the experience only makes me wish I’d done something more to deserve it.
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