Occupy LA has gained the official support of the Los Angeles City Council after it unanimously approved a resolution Wednesday afternoon. It now heads to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for his approval or veto.
via L.A. City Council Votes to Support Occupy LA | Communities | 1st and Spring | KCET.
“We Are the 99 Percent” encourages us to demand of those in power, “Are you with the 99 percent or not? And what are you doing about it?” And the “99 percent” slogan is not only all-embracing but nearly correct: the system is working for far more than one percent of us, of course, but how much more? We are the most class-divided of all the world’s “developed” nations, though in my current travels through five European countries I’ve seen and heard about life-altering cuts everywhere.
Find a group new year. There are almost 1500 of them.
About Occupy Together Meetups Everywhere
* 9,846 Occupiers
* 1,491 cities
This is OCCUPY TOGETHER’s hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. See what’s going on in your community or get something started!
The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history—at the end of the 1920s. Unemployment has also reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression.
Unemployment is way up.
And that’s just people who meet the strict criteria for “unemployed.” Include people working part-time who want to work full-time, plus some people who haven’t looked for a job in a while, and unemployment’s at 17%
Meanwhile, corporate profits are at an all-time high And CEO’s make 350 times what workers make. It was only 50 times in 1960-1985.
In fact, income inequality has gotten so extreme here that the US now ranks 93rd in the world in “income equality.” China’s ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.
Click through to see a great set of charts on why people are angry.
When you can borrow money for nothing, and lend it back to the government risk-free for a few percentage points, you can COIN MONEY. And the banks are doing that. According to IRA, the “net interest margin” made by US banks in the first six months of this year is $211 Billion. Nice!
via CHARTS: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About….
Local is the way to go! More resilient, more reliable.
That’s why a growing number of people who work in the industry are now questioning whether massive, centralized clean-energy projects really are the future. What good are huge solar farms in the desert if you can’t get them wired? Perhaps smaller, distributed sources of clean energy — rooftop solar panels, say, or small turbines — that don’t need fancy new transmission lines are a more promising option.
“It’s long been conventional wisdom that it’s much easier and cheaper to build those big plants,” Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development at IBM’s energy and utilities group, told me. “But, when we interviewed customers, we found a strong appetite for individuals having control over their own energy future.” As an alternate model, Schurr points to Germany, where well-crafted incentives for rooftop panels have transformed the cloudy nation into a solar leader. And there’s a lot of untapped potential here: the National Renewable Energy Lab has estimated that we have 661,000 megawatts of rooftop-solar resources here in the United States.
via Are transmission lines holding America back? – The Washington Post.
This post is rather technical, but it indicates the corporations routinely cook their books and that the practice is very widespread.
While these time series don’t prove anything decisively, deviations from Benford’s law are compellingly correlated with known financial crises, bubbles, and fraud waves. And overall, the picture looks grim. Accounting data seem to be less and less related to the natural data-generating process that governs everything from rivers to molecules to cities. Since these data form the basis of most of our research in finance, Benford’s law casts serious doubt on the reliability of our results. And it’s just one more reason for investors to beware.
H/t Tyler Cowan, Marginal Revolution.
“We don’t want people to think that we are being co-opted by other movements,” Mr. Philbrook said. “Occupy Chicago, like all the Occupy movements, stands apart from any political parties, stands apart from any existing movement.”
A sometimes tentative police response is adding its own element to the mix. In Atlanta, protesters were warned by the police on Tuesday that if, at 11 p.m., they were still in Woodruff Park, a small oasis in the heart of downtown, they would be arrested. Anyone who does not want to be arrested can simply leave the park, the police said. But protesters said they were told the same thing on Monday. Instead, dozens of police officers showed up but made no arrests.
The protesters also seem to have significant numbers of uncounted allies, silent or on the sidelines, at least for now.
Daniel Eavenson, an engineer in Chicago, said he had only been “witnessing.”
“There are millions of us watching online and sending out our hope,” he said.
via Response of the Police Is Expanding With Protests – NYTimes.com.
“It is immoral to give a tax cut to John Paulson when we are giving budget cuts to school kids in the south Bronx,” Kink shouted in front of Paulson’s home on 86th Street. “It is immoral to give a tax cut to John Paulson when we are cutting for poor seniors in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Our communities need the money!”
The march of roughly 500 was organized by a new coalition of groups, “99 New York,” whose name is a reference to the unofficial slogan of Occupy Wall Street, “We are the 99 percent,” and which formed in the last few weeks. It is made up of Strong Economy for All, United NY, the Working Families Party, New York Communities for Change, and MoveOn. Activists from Occupy Wall Street were also involved in the planning of the march, said 99 New York spokesman Douglas Forand.
via Protesters march on billionaires’ homes – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs says the wealth gap got started with globalization, which allowed a small group of highly skilled people to sell their skills in a world market while forcing less skilled people to compete for foreign labor for every lower wages. Then Reagan decided to dismantle government and the federal government’s been unraveling since then.
You, in fact, call for a renewed emphasis on compassion and social responsibility.
What are our deeper economic objectives? Among these is a sense of well-being, of life satisfaction. Income can play a role in that, but so do things like social trust and honest government – and compassion for other people. This kind of discussion is considered odd and I think that is part of our problem right now. We don’t have effective ways to discuss these things in our society.
Instead, we have people who represent a cult of selfishness, what I would consider Ayn Rand libertarianism. They are political figures who say that the goal of America is to leave [people] alone, and that ideas like compassion and so on are dangerous. What the Republicans have on offer – which is based on this 30-year misdiagnosis – is cruel and deeply wrong, because they express disdain for the idea that people are suffering and they need help.
We’ve arrived at a crossroads about the real meaning of our civilization. I think that we will need to reflect on how to achieve a higher level of happiness in this country — [and think about] issues of social trust, social connectedness, decency, compassion.
via What caused the wealth gap? – Occupy Wall Street – Salon.com.
Spruce Street and One World Trade Center I took part in last Wednesday’s Community/Labor March To Wall St. in New York City. I met some musician buddies at Washington Square Park and we marched to Foley Square with the New York University group, though none of us are affiliated with NYU. From Foley Square, a bit Northeast of City Hall. There we joined up with the main crowd, and a passel of musicians, and headed on to Liberty Plaza, flanked and guided by police all the way.
Not long after we left Washington Square Park, say a five or six blocks out, I noticed this building ahead, and I kept tracking it all the way down:
Photo of 8 Spruce Street by Wally Gobetz
That’s a new luxury apartment building at 8 Spruce Street, just south of City Hall. It was designed by starchitect Frank Gehry.
Does anyone who lives there care about us marchers? I thought. It’s a pricy building, with studio apartments starting at $3770 a month, which is over $42,000 per year, and two bedrooms at $6045 per month, almost $61,000 per year. I’m thinking that, no, the folks who live there are more likely in the 1% who’re living high off of banker’s bonuses than in the 99% who can’t afford health insurance and who won’t have pensions when they retire.
More likely than not, they think things are pretty much OK as they are. Maybe the bonuses are a little slim, but the rabble down here marching to Liberty Plaza, we don’t figure in their view of the world. They have no empathy with us.
But then how could they?
My father was an engineer. He worked in an office. But his work took him into coal mines to collect samples and to inspect the coal face. He knew that mining was dirty and dangerous work and believed that no one should have authority over coal miners unless they’d worked in the mines themselves. Continue reading
Truth and Traditions 