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The Occupied Wall Street Journal, issue 2, 8 Oct 2011
[Google Doc]
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Daily Kos: #occupywallstreet: a primer on consensus and the General Assembly
What is a People’s Assembly?
It is a participatory decision-making body which works towards consensus.The Assembly looks for the best arguments to take a decision that reflects every opinion – not positions at odds with each other as what happens when votes are taken.
An Assembly should not be centred around an ideological discourse; instead it should deal with practical questions:
What do we need?
How can we get it? -
Panic of the Plutocrats – NYTimes.com – Paul Krugman – 9 Oct 2011
…Eric Cantor…has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” …Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them. …
…wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
…Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe… [are] not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
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The ever-rising `uncertainty’ bar – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
Dems agreed to the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which conservatives claimed would help the economy. Dems agreed to deep cuts in spending… while embracing the conservative argument that signaling this set of priorities would restore the confidence and certainty necessary to create jobs. And we’re still where we are.
No, conservatives haven’t gotten everything they want. …Obama and Dems are still talking about tax hikes on corporations and the rich. That continuing talk, conservatives insist, along with “Obamacare” and remaining government regulations, continue to strangle the recovery by creating lingering uncertainty.
And herein lies the beauty of the “uncertainty” argument.
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#OccupyWallStreet is a lesson on listening | AMERICAblog News • by Matt Browner Hamlin
The objections people have [to the status quo] are not radical, they’re pure and heartfelt. … The requests are basic, but stem from a similar, brutal experience of life in America in the twenty-first century. When Brown is writing about us becoming the systems we need, she is tapping into this sentiment and the ways in which the community that is #OccupyWallStreet is already seeking to be the answer to its own question.
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#OccupyWallStreet is not the London riots | AMERICAblog News • by Gilbert Moon
The second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal makes for exhilarating reading. But sitting here in England, one passage caused me to spit the fine tea I wasn’t drinking over the English muffin that I wasn’t eating. The paragraph appears in a graphic that seems to be intended to demonstrate that the Occupy Movement is part of a continuum of international protest: …
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MSNBC Mixes Tea Party Video In With Occupy Wall Street Clips
On MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports today,New York Times columnist Charles Blow was talking about Occupy Wall Street, as some video of a Washington, DC tea party protest played over his remarks.
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Netflix Cancels Qwikster DVD Service, Goes Back To All-In-One Site | The Consumerist • by MB Quirk
Less than a month after Netflix announced it’d be splitting into two sites — Netflix for streaming movies and Qwikster for DVDs — it’s decided that that maybe isn’t the best idea. For those of you who were outraged, your roars have been heard.
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Getting the economic policy right | The Plum Line • by Jonathan Bernstein
The biggest political problem for the Barack Obama White House is failure of results, not failure of spin.The Obama Administration made real mistakes in economic policy, but also got a lot of stuff right – and most importantly, the things it got wrong were the sorts of things that policy makers generally get wrong in responding to similar economic challenges.
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Amazing Video: Killer Whale Imitates Motor Boat Noise
[Warning! Sad ending.]
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Mobile Phone: Weapon Against Global Poverty – Milwaukee News Story – WISN Milwaukee
The advent of the mobile society may have brought convenience and a cultural sea change to the U.S. and Europe, but in the poorest regions of the world, affordable mobile phone access has caused a quantum leap in services — like calling for medical help, sending a quick letter to loved ones or starting a savings account — that Americans and Europeans have taken for granted for generations, analysts say.
“The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development,” …
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Tenzing Norgay – An Inspirational Story | About.com Asian History
Not many people in this world rise from indentured servitude to international fame. Only two people had the honor of first conquering Mt. Everest, the world’s tallest mountain. And Tenzing Norgay did both!
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A recently opened solar power plant near Seville in southern Spain, is the first of its kind to be able to generate electricity from sunlight during the day and still retain enough heat to continue generating energy all the way through the night. …The plant is of the heliostatic variety, meaning that it doesn’t derive its power from photovoltaics, but rather from the raw heat energy of sunlight. A series of concentric mirrors, 2,650 in this case, direct the sunlight at centrally located salt tanks. The heat melts the salt, which boils water around it, and the steam generated turns the turbines. The salt tanks’ ability to retain heat is what affords the plant up to 15 hours of sunless energy generation.
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EXCLUSIVE: Woman of Peace—Leymah Gbowee – Women’s Media Center blog
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We Need a Black Economic Renaissance | The Root
The reality is that the good manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that were once a ticket to the middle class for many people had been drying up for years…
The fact is that over the last three decades, new startups by innovators and entrepreneurs — companies less than five years old — have accounted for nearly all newly created jobs in the private sector.
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VIDEO: At UniverSoul Circus, Old-School R&B vs New-School R&B
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At Critical Time, Budget Ax Falls on Parole Courts – The Bay Citizen
As counties statewide confront a shortage of jail space and programs to handle the influx of offenders, the decision to close the two courts, which are financed almost entirely by federal grants, has baffled some observers.
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In Oakland Classrooms, Getting Fed is First Lesson of the Day – The Bay Citizen
As hunger and poverty rise in Alameda County, schools step in to provide meals; 70 percent of students now qualify…
“How many of you have ever given food to a hungry student at school?” she asked the teachers and nurses, as they ate breakfast.
Almost everyone raised a hand.
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The evidence doesn’t seem to show that Howley incited protesters to do anything they weren’t already primed to do, but his stated intention to “undermine” the 99 Percent Movement and associated demonstrations — and his position leading the charge of protesters at the museum entrance — indicate a little more activism than simply an attempt to get a close look at protests, as Howley says, “for journalistic purposes.”
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