Archive | November, 2011

Police Oust Occupy Wall Street Protesters at Zuccotti Park – NYTimes.com

15 Nov

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of the beginning of the encampment, which has spurred similar demonstrations across the country.

The move also came hours after a small demonstration at City Hall on Monday by opponents of the protest, including local residents and merchants, some of whom urged the mayor to clear out the park.

Before the police moved in, they set up a battery of klieg lights and aimed them into the park. A police captain, wearing a helmet, walked down Liberty Street and announced: “The city has determined that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park poses an increasing health and fire safety hazard.”

The captain ordered the protesters to “to immediately remove all private property” and said that if they interfered with the police operation, they would be arrested. Property that was not removed would be taken to a sanitation garage, the police said.

via Police Oust Occupy Wall Street Protesters at Zuccotti Park – NYTimes.com.

Black Preaching, the Church, and Civic Life

14 Nov

I can’t say that I’ve even thought of that topic until a two or three weeks ago. Now it’s been much on my mind. What got me thinking about black preaching in the first place, of course, is my recent church visit. But how I got from that visit to this more general issue, black preaching and civic life, that takes a bit of explaining. Where I’m going is that, if we’re going to make substantial changes in how this country, these United States of America, goes about its business, if we’re going to forge a more just and more sustainable union, we’ve got to be grounded in something, something that doesn’t quite exist. Perhaps black preaching has a role to play in that something.

Civics 101: Legitimizing the State

Let’s start with the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Forms, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As I’ve observed in another post:

In Jefferson’s formulation the government gains its power by grant from the people. The people, in turn, gain their power, their unalienable rights, from their Creator. This reverses the logic of legitimization prevailing in traditional European monarchies. In those governments the rulers got their legitimacy from God and their subjects, in turn, got their rights and obligations through their relationship to the ruler. In that scheme democracy is implausible. Jefferson, and the new nation, emphatically rejected that scheme in favor of a different one.

In this new system the separation of church and state secures two ends, religious freedom and, even more fundamentally, the state itself. The first is obvious, and has occasioned much discussion. The second seems obvious as well, but is somehow more subtle. How can the people legitimize the state unless their authority is itself independent of that state? The only way to guarantee that independence is to guarantee the separation of church and state.

And that, I suggest, may be why religion has been so important in American society. For a large fraction of the population, though not for all, it has been the ground of capital “B” Being on which their sense of themselves-in-the-world depends.

The rest of that post elaborates on that last paragraph and its implications. I assume that argument for the rest of THIS post, but I have something different in mind.

What has happened in this country is that, while we the people retain the nominal power of legitimizing the national government through our votes, both for the President and for congressmen, that power has become only nominal. Whoever we vote for we get a government that’s run by the corporations, for the corporations, and over we the people. Continue reading →

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Sisters of St. Francis, the Quiet Shareholder Activists – NYTimes.com

14 Nov

Wonderful!

In 1980, Sister Nora and her community formed a corporate responsibility committee to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses in which they invested their retirement fund. A year later, in coordination with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment, they mounted their offensive. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.

Eventually, they developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual shareholder meeting….That gave them a nuclear option, in the event the company’s executives refused to meet with them….

“You’re not going to get any sympathy for cutting off a nun at your annual meeting,” says Robert McCormick, chief policy officer of Glass, Lewis & Company, a firm that specializes in shareholder proxy votes. With their moral authority, he said, the Sisters of St. Francis “can really bring attention to issues.”

via Sisters of St. Francis, the Quiet Shareholder Activists – NYTimes.com.

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The Gulf of Morality – NYTimes.com

14 Nov

The intensification of disagreements over moral values not only makes compromise difficult to achieve, but sharpens competition for scarce goods at a time when austerity dominates the agenda. If, as is increasingly the case, left and right see their opposites as morally corrupt, the decision to cut the benefits or raise the taxes of the other side become easy – too easy — to justify.

via The Gulf of Morality – NYTimes.com.

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Fort of the 1%

13 Nov

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I’ve had a vision, and in that vision the last of the 1% end up in this little fort nestled in the swamp grass in Liberty State Park. And then an itty bitty asteroid crashes into the harbor and they’re swamped. Which suits the ducks and herons just fine.

A Town in New York Creates Its Own Department Store – NYTimes.com

13 Nov

When the local department store people in Saranac Lake had to drive 50 miles to buy bed linens and underware. Then Wal-Mart came knocking and people decided they didn’t want this giant camped out in the little town.

…when Wal-Mart Stores came knocking, some here welcomed it. Others felt that the company’s plan to build a 120,000-square-foot supercenter would overwhelm their village, with its year-round population of 5,000, and put local merchants out of business.

It’s a situation familiar to many communities these days. But rather than accept their fate, residents of Saranac Lake did something unusual: they decided to raise capital to open their own department store. Shares in the store, priced at $100 each, were marketed to local residents as a way to “take control of our future and help our community,” said Melinda Little, a Saranac Lake resident who has been involved in the effort from the start. “The idea was, this is an investment in the community as well as the store.”

via A Town in New York Creates Its Own Department Store – NYTimes.com.

The New Progressive Movement – NYTimes.com

13 Nov

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

via The New Progressive Movement – NYTimes.com.

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Penn State, my final loss of faith – Guest Voices – The Washington Post

13 Nov

Has Tom Brokaw’s “greatest generation” failed its leadership responsibilities? This man thinks so. He’s a veteran of Iraq and went through  Sandusky’s Second Mile Foundation, successfully and happily. But too many of his elders have failed to lead.

One thing I know for certain: A leader must emerge from Happy Valley to tie our community together again, and it won’t come from our parents’ generation.

They have failed us, over and over and over again.

I speak not specifically of our parents — I have two loving ones — but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

Think of the world our parents’ generation inherited. They inherited a country of boundless economic prosperity and the highest admiration overseas, produced by the hands of their mothers and fathers. They were safe. For most, they were endowed opportunities to succeed, to prosper, and build on their parents’ work.

For those of us in our 20s and early 30s, this is not the world we are inheriting.

via Penn State, my final loss of faith – Guest Voices – The Washington Post.

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News | Rolling Stone

13 Nov

We’re a nation that was built on a thousand different utopian ideas, from the Shakers to the Mormons to New Harmony, Indiana. It was possible, once, for communities to experiment with everything from free love to an end to private property. But nowadays even the palest federalism is swiftly crushed. If your state tries to place tariffs on companies doing business with some notorious human-rights-violator state – like Massachusetts did, when it sought to bar state contracts to firms doing business with Myanmar – the decision will be overturned by some distant global bureaucracy like the WTO.

via How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

How to solve the corporate tax problem – Taxes – Salon.com

11 Nov

This tendency of MNCs to find complementary loopholes among countries harkens back to the pre-globalization era, when multistate companies would shift operations to the lowest-tax states. The race to the bottom of tax revenues was relieved when states pooled their collective bargaining power to create more consistent tax rules.

To end the race to the bottom, states adopted a new approach to taxation. Known as formulary apportionment (FA), companies divide their total tax burden among host states based on the percentage of sales (and sometimes payroll and property) located in each state, rather than on the elusive headquarters’ location. The apportionment approach increases simplicity (which businesses love) and increases tax revenue (which governments love.) That’s what we call a win-win.

Of course, firms would not be happy with the change if it increased their tax burden. A shift to FA could be paired with lower tax rates to be revenue neutral, so America would no longer have the highest corporate tax rate. Policies designed to be revenue neutral, however, should err on the side of the Treasury, especially if we truly want to reduce the deficit.

The best global scenario is for all countries to adopt apportionment, so that MNCs would have one general tax rule to follow, rather than the current system where MNCs have different rules for every country in which they operate.

In the short term a truly global policy is unlikely. But the EU is now considering moving to apportionment, creating an opportunity for the U.S. to collaborate with Europe.

via How to solve the corporate tax problem – Taxes – Salon.com.

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