t's always been about the money. Occupy Wall Street chose to set up its 24-hour outpost of political dissent on the doorstep of the finance industry primarily to underscore the simple fact that money has corrupted our political process so completely that the seat of power in the U.S. isn't even in Washington, D.C. any more. That said, the Capitol continues collecting its cut, as evidenced in this week's double-barreled dispatches, in the Washington Post and the New York Times, on the exploding wealth gap between our ever-more affluent representatives in Congress and the financially flat-lined citizens they represent.

From its inception, OWS has focused on the concept of legalized bribery, as the continually rising cost of a political campaign - an average of $1.4 million for a successful House run, up fourfold in real dollars since 1976, and nearly $10 million for a Senate seat - has been largely subsidized by wealthy donors, corporations and special interests, in return for legislation that favors their interests. It's a form of regulatory capture that most first-world democracies outlaw as corruption, but that Americans know as "the way things are," along with "ask your doctor" pharmaceutical ads and campaigns pitching products directly to young children. The result is an almost total lack of confidence in our elected officials, as reflected by Congress' almost impossibly low 9 percent approval rating.

Even insider-trading laws don't apply to our lawmakers, despite their regular access to valuable market information Joe Citizen will never hear, not to mention their power to tilt markets and pick winners and losers by removing a sentence from this piece of legislation, or adding a clause to that one.

The gap between the Beltway and the economic realities of most Americans can be found in the common Washington framing of households with an annual income of $250,000 - a figure achieved by just the top 1.5 percent - as "middle class." It's understandable, since that's not much more than the $174,000 base pay pulled in by rank-and-file members of both houses of Congress. That's how rich our representatives have become.

While that salary actually has dipped slightly in inflation-adjusted dollars over recent decades, our representatives have kept getting richer. That's both a reflection of the high cost of campaigns that effectively dissuade would-be candidates without ready money of their own or access to it from running, and the private profits many of our elected officials can and do claim once in office.

The freshman class of 106 members elected last year, including many new Tea Party-backed Republicans, had a median net worth of $864,000 - an inflation-adjusted increase of 26 percent from the 2004 freshmen. In the wake of a crushing recession, America's politicians actually were richer, in part so they could foot their share of the bill, along with their donors, for the political ads that are expected to be one of the fastest-growing sources of television advertising revenue in 2012, breaking the spending record set in 2008.

A survey this year by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly one in four Americans couldn't come up with even $2,000 in cash within 30 days if he or she had to, while another one in five would have to pawn or sell possessions or take out a payday loan. Compare that with our representatives in Washington' median net worth of $725,000, excluding home equity - up more than 150 percent since 1984 in inflation-adjusted 2009 dollars. Over the same period, the wealth of an American family has declined slightly, with the comparable median figure sliding from $20,600 to $20,500, according to the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

Taxation as a remedy to perpetual wealth is as much a part of the American legacy as a representative government, but the last 30 years have seen both taxes and representation recede. We now have a society with limited social mobility, where the advantages of wealth translate into preferred access to healthcare, education, business, and yes, even the political process.

The fact that Congress is moving away from the rest of the public is exactly why Occupy Wall Street has found such a giant hole in the political conversation to step into, and why our national representatives have kept their distance even when polls showed the public responding powerfully to our complaints and slogans. In a true market of political ideas, we'd have been prime targets for coopting. Instead, President Obama works "99 percent" into his speeches, and business as usual continues.

We now have a society where the advantages of wealth translate into preferred access to healthcare, education, business and yes, even the political process.

Despite such indifference, Occupy Wall Street resonated where previous protests petered out by creating and holding a physical space where it was impossible to avert one's gaze. Members of the general public came to Occupy encampments all over the country to take in the scene and to participate, despite the disinterest shown by politicians and the glib tone of much of the mainstream press coverage. The occupation became an amplifier for those voices - not unlike the people's mic itself - as the encampment in Zuccotti Park meant that a like-minded group in another city was now part of a national story that didn't schedule its own ending like a traditional protest, and couldn't easily be ignored. The 99 percent rediscovered the collective power of our voice, and started using it to make a whole lot of noise.

In 2012, expect to hear more of that noise from Occupy the Caucuses and Occupy Congress. Money talks, but we do too.

Tax Benefits From Options as Windfall for Businesses

James Estrin/The New York Times
Mel Karmazin, the chief executive of SiriusXM, was granted stock options in June 2009. They are now worth $165 million.

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

Published: December 29, 2011

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The stock market's rebound from the financial crisis three years ago has created a potential windfall for hundreds of executives who were granted unusually large packages of stock options shortly after the market collapsed.[url=http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/12/30/business/loading-up-on-stock-options.html?ref=business]

Now, the corporations that gave those generous awards are beginning to benefit, too, in the form of tax savings.

Thanks to a quirk in tax law, companies can claim a tax deduction in future years that is much bigger than the value of the stock options when they were granted to executives. This tax break will deprive the federal government of tens of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade. And it is one of the many obscure provisions buried in the tax code that together enable most American companies to pay far less than the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent in some cases, virtually nothing even in very profitable years.
In Washington, where executive pay and taxes are highly charged issues, some critics in Congress have long sought to eliminate this tax benefit, saying it is bad policy to let companies claim such large deductions for stock options without having to make any cash outlay. Moreover, they say, the policy essentially forces taxpayers to subsidize executive pay, which has soared in recent decades. Those drawbacks have been magnified, they say, now that executives and companies are reaping inordinate benefits by taking advantage of once depressed stock prices.
A stock option entitles its owner to buy a share of company stock at a set price over a specified period. The corporate tax savings stem from the fact that executives typically cash in stock options at a much higher price than the initial value that companies report to shareholders when they are granted.
But companies are then allowed a tax deduction for that higher price.
For example, in the dark days of June 2009, Mel Karmazin, chief executive of Sirius XM Radio, was granted options to buy the company stock at 43 cents a share. At today's price of about $1.80 a share, the value of those options has risen to $165 million from the $35 million reported by the company as a compensation expense on its financial books when they were issued.
If he exercises and sells at that price, Mr. Karmazin would of course owe taxes on the $165 million as ordinary income. The company, meanwhile, would be entitled to deduct the full $165 million as compensation on its tax return, as if it had paid that amount in cash. That could reduce its federal tax bill by an estimated $57 million, at the top corporate tax rate.
SiriusXM did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Dozens of other major corporations doled out unusually large grants of stock options in late 2008 and 2009 including Ford, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Google and Starbucks and soon may be eligible for corresponding tax breaks.
Executive compensation experts say that barring another market collapse, the payouts to executives and tax benefits for the companies will run well into the billions of dollars in the coming years. Indeed, of the billions of shares worth of options issued after the crisis, only about 11 million have thus far been exercised, according to data compiled by InsiderScore, a consulting firm that compiles regulatory filings on insider stock sales.
"These options gave executives a highly leveraged bet that stock prices would rebound from their 2008 and 2009 lows, and are now rewarding them for rising tides rather than performance," said Robert J. Jackson Jr., an associate professor of law at Columbia who worked as an adviser to the office that oversaw compensation of executives at companies receiving federal bailout money. "The tax code does nothing to ensure that these rewards go only to executives who have created sustainable long-term value."
For some companies, awarding stock options can seem like a tempting bargain, since there is no cash outlay and the tax benefits can exceed the original cost. continues HERE.

Occupy Wall Street takes the fight to the Internet with its own Facebook clone
December 29, 2011
By Molly McHugh

A social network that focuses in our the movement is in the works. Is there potential for the idea, or is it dead in the water?

Facebook rivals and detractors have been springing up online for awhile now. It most significantly started with Diaspora, the anti-Facebook, open source social network that launched with the idea of segmenting how you share online. Anybeat (formerly Altly) has also tried to execute these ideas, as has Path and newcomer Unthink.

While these networks were born of a desire to connect without Facebook and to potentially do it better, none of them have had an already established community behind them. Now, the Occupy Wall Street protestors are trying to create their own social media platform, using the anti-corporate movement's members as fuel.

According to Wired, a group of developers associated with OWS are working on their own Facebook. Their motivation is partially to have a focused space for like-minded individuals to communicate and organize. It's also because they don't entirely know what Facebook is doing with their data. "We don't want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists," developer Ed Knutson told the site.

At the moment this platform is being called Federated General Assembly and will work like Facebook and Twitter applications that use the Open ID and OAuth permissions. In order to join, you have to be invited and then vouched for by a member of your movement's local network.

Facebook backlash is nearly as old as Facebook, but there's never been a collective group like the Occupiers who have taken up the cause of creating an alternative. But does mean this idea has legs to stand on? Sites have tried time and time again to accomplish this, without any feasible success.

It deserves to be said that protestors shouldn't be so quick to abandon Facebook (or even Twitter) for a new medium. These social sites were hugely instrumental during revolutions in the Middle East, and we can't imagine their international presence is going to be impeded by the Occupy movement. It stands to reason that many users interested in being a part of the Occupy version represented on Facebook are also interested in worldwide demonstrations, and for that reason a great many would remain on these sites.

But if the bar is set low enough, this thing could serve a purpose. Protestors' social media use has been targeted this year, from threats during the UK riots to Twitter subpoenas regarding user information. Secure messaging and event organization features would be the main purpose of the application, and anything that's willing to build off of Facebook or Twitter rather than go head-to-head with them has a much better shot. But attempting to lure Occupiers over completely is a fool's gamethe project would be dead in the water if that were their mission.

Two things set this idea apart however: using the Facebook or Twitter permission technologies and the OWS movement. While the latter of these two has seen better days, having any pre-existing user base is more than most new social platforms start with.

At last night's General Assembly, Occupy Wall Street passed a proposal to set up a $100,000 fund solely for bailing people out of jail. It's the largest chunk of funds that OWS has allocated for one purpose, and represents nearly a third of the budget. The fund is meant to get protesters out of jail following direct actions, which historically have ended in multiple arrests -- or mass arrests, like on the Brooklyn Bridge back in September.

According to OWS media team member Jeff Smith, "we didn't change any of the stipulations on who gets bail and how much." Three thousand dollars is still the maximum bail allowed, except for under special circumstances (like with Joshua Fellows, whose bail was set at $25,000. The movement agreed to pay it. the bail was apparently paid by a third party, not OWS itself).

The new bail budget is effective immediately. Policies are already in place for who gets bail and who doesn't -- according to Smith, any kind of violent offense would require consensus to bail the person out, while smaller offenses that go along with the territory of direct actions (trespassing, disorderly conduct, etc) can dip into the bail fund automatically.

Last night the protesters also voted to send money to Occupy Oakland, in the neighborhood of $25,000.

"The general consensus among OWS is that we want to get rid of the money because it's more problem than good," Smith said. "In future, when we have specific financial needs for any specific thing we'll probably be able to raise the money rather than have this giant pot of gold that everyone fights over." The pot of gold is about $350,000 at this point.

Update 5:05 p.m.: Just spoke with Accounting working group member Justin Strekal, who clarified some points. According to Strekal, "as of right now the only stipulations on bail are that it's an occupier or OWS supporter who's arrested during an OWS event or connected to an OWS activity who's conducting themselves nonviolently."

Apart from the $100,000 that is being put aside, Strekal said, the general accounts stand at $230,000.

Of the $100K, Strekal said "right now it's a buffer. It's a statement reaffirming our commitment to peaceably assemble."

The Ticket-Fixing Scandal [One of MANY this year, alone!]
Published: October 31, 2011
NYT

The arrest of 16 New York City police officers in the Bronx last week, 11 of them for fixing tickets, was bad enough. What added to the outrage was the thuggish behavior of a crowd of off-duty police officers who went to the courthouse to support their accused colleagues. Some chanted "Down with the D.A.!" in reference to Robert Johnson, the Bronx district attorney whose office is prosecuting these cases. Others mocked welfare recipients who were lined up at a benefits office near the courthouse.

Patrick Lynch, the president of the patrolman's union, tried to excuse illegal ticket-fixing: "A courtesy has now turned into a crime, and that's wrong." He said ticket-fixing was conduct "accepted at all ranks for decades."

If this conduct is part of the police culture, then Commissioner Raymond Kelly needs to do more to end it now. It is a crime to make a ticket summons disappear for friends, relatives and people with connections to other officers. Mr. Johnson said the ticket-fixing had drained between $1 million and $2 million from the city's coffers.

After the investigation began in 2008, Mr. Kelly began a system for tracking officers' appearances in court, and last year the department created a new computer system that is supposed to make it difficult to delete a ticket. That's a start.

Mr. Kelly's challenge is made more daunting by allegations that the ticket-fixing investigation was plagued by leaks to the police union from the department's Internal Affairs Bureau. One person indicted was a lieutenant, who worked at Internal Affairs and was charged with leaking wiretap information. Unless the department's leadership can root out this insidious behavior, the anticorruption bureau can't possibly do its job.

For Mr. Kelly, the past week was an embarrassment. Eight current and former officers were separately charged in federal court with smuggling illegal firearms into the city. The ticket-fixing scandal is another stain on the department's reputation. Not only does it further undermine public trust, but it could jeopardize hundreds of cases in which the accused officers are crucial witnesses.

It is time for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly and the union leaders to make sure the police live by the laws they are supposed to enforce.

Occupy Wall Street Honors 121st Anniversary of Massacre at Wounded Knee

By Mel Fabrikant Thursday, December 29, 2011, 04:49 PM EST

Lively Discussion With Indigenous Americans On Un-settling the Occupation'

Occupy Wall Street will host an open dialogue with indigenous Americans on the 121st Anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee, to raise local and national awareness of ongoing Native struggles. Current conditions of capitalist exploitation are predicated upon the acquisition of territory and the dispossession and dehumanization of indigenous peoples.


WHEN: Thursday, December 29, 5:30pm
WHERE: IRONDALE 85 S. Oxford St. in Brooklyn, NY
FEATURED SPEAKERS INCLUDE: Janice Richards, Oglala Lakota, Activist and Educator; Jake Little, Oglala Lakota, Activist and Educator; Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Cheyenne River Lakota, Activist, Artist, Host of First Voices Indigenous Radio; Firewolf Nelson-Wong, Diné, AIM Member and Activist; Demelza Champagne, Turtle Mountain Chippewa, Activist and Scholar; Members of AMERINDA: American Indian Artists, Inc. *Gloria Miguel, Kuna, will perform excerpts from her one-woman play, "Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue."
This event is hosted with AMERINDA: American Indian Artists Inc., a NYC non-profit organization working to empower Native Americans and foster intercultural understanding and appreciation of Native arts, as well as with members of the Native population of New York.

Conditions of exploitation will be discussed as we connect the historical colonial occupation of Manhattan all the way to today's Occupy Wall Street an occupation of already occupied land. 'Un-settling Occupation' calls us to remain cognizant that our movement unfolds on land seized by force, and compels us to take action in support of indigenous peoplespeoples for whom occupation has not been a choice, but a lived experience of oppression. We will pass the mic, turn up the volume, listen to Native voices, and break down the grammar of domination.

Occupy Wall Street is part of an international people powered movement fighting for economic justice in the face of neoliberal economic practices, the crimes of Wall Street, and a government controlled by monied interests. #OWS is the 99% organizing to end the tyranny of the 1%. For more info http://www.occupywallst.org

Occupy Wall Street Radio WBAI-NYC
Monday - Friday 6:30pm - 7pm [EST] - or via internet at that time - archive for many weeks. Archived Shows: [URL="http://archive.wbai.org/show1.php?showid=owsr"]Click Here
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About the show
Occupy Wall Street Radio premiered on WBAI on October 26, 2011. From the streets to airwaves, the movement that began in September 2011 as a Day Of Rage takes to the airwaves on the only station that broadcasts the voice of the 99%. Its birth was Wall Street, here in New York, but it has now crossed continents to Europe and Asia and is alive in 73 cities all across the United States. The show offers a regular check in for the latest breaking news from the streets. Hear the voices, the heart, the soul of this 99% growing and now global movement.

On the show, a roundtable of hosts and producers will be your path to the action of the Occupy Movement day. Join Victoria Sobel (Finance), Luke Richardson (Media), Daniel Levine (Press), Dan Feidt (Live Video), Sade Adona (Mediation), Michael Premo (Press), Max Hodes (Sanitation) and Amy Hamburger (Kitchen) Faith Laugier (Media & Direct Action) for your daily updates.

Hear about NYPD activity, arrests and releases, celebrities and personalities, the latest corporate greed target, newest additions and organizations to the movement, the "Occupy Everywhere" segment, a series of reports from national and global occupations. The radical voice of the silenced majority will be heard loud and clear.

So, why WBAI? WBAI was the first and only station featuring the voices of this revolution before anyone called it that. Ignored by the mainstream, dismissed as a moment, the rest of the world tuned out. WBAI Program Director, Tony Bates and WBAI producers tuned in, turned an audience on to the beginnings of what is now a movement that cannot be ignored. Located at each end of Wall Street, the Occupy Wall Street movement and WBAI Radio bookend the block.

Occupy-NYC has temporarily taken back Liberty Plaza and torn down most of the police barricades. I've been watching them there for about an hour...but just now the police are about to raid and they don't look like they are going to be very nice about it!.....more later. Happy New Year OWS!

So, few hours later [update]....Actually most, if not almost all left Liberty Park befere the Police chose to do anything [they likely felt they didn't have sufficient numbers to deal with the ~600-800 persons there], and they started a march up Broadway. Now seem to be headed toward Union Park - not sure. Police following them, but so far not able or willing to stop them. Oh, at Liberty Park the 'batsign' was there again with a large 99%, Happy New Year - The Future is Ours and other such light slogans on the buildings.

Occupy 2012 is what it looks like!



Second update at 3:00 EST [GMT+8]. Where the two livestreamers are, the police are trying again to stop and arrest the Occupy protest in the East Villiage of NYC, but most seem to have broken through Police lines and kettling nets - marching again. Destination unsure, think Union Square Park.

Update#3 Police let out some [or they slipped out], but are arresting others and have many contained at moment - telling them to leave - but giving them no means of leaving......typical of the Police, I'm afraid. Will wait until this is all over to update further...seems will be long and confusing. Only two livestreamers and many people in many places; many different things happening. At one point the police were definitely coming at one of the livestreamers to arrest him, but he slipped away with inches to spare....

Hard to know, but I think about 50 arrested in total over the night...maybe less. Here is one of the last videos from on livestreamer, here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19508535#...m=19508535

The Occupy' movement lives

By Gina Glantz, Published: December 31

Gina Glantz was most recently an adjunct lecturer at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School.

The hashtag#occupywallstreet inspired the most basic of organizing strategies: sit-ins. OWS sit-ins became encampments, many of which are now being dismantled by law enforcement and debilitated by weather. As the movement is increasingly out of the sight of pundits and the popular media, and criticized as leaderless and lacking a clear purpose, it has become fashionable to talk about OWS as inevitably failing. This is a mistake. Encampment "occupiers" come and go; hashtag followers live on in cyberspace, where OWS is spawning leaders and developing goals, just not in the way that most people are accustomed to.

●The Occupy Wiki Research Group, of which I am a member, has a robust online dialogue among college professors, organizing practitioners and activists. Weekly phone calls refine their efforts.

●Occupytogether.org was started by two designers who couldn't get to New York so tried to track, on their own, activities around the country. Overwhelmed by the volume, they recently incorporated MeetUp.com into their site.

●Maps depicting FourSquare locations using the Occupy Wall Street hashtag show thousands of check-ins across the country.

●Students at Boulder Digital Works at the University of Colorado built Occupationalist.org, which describes itself as "an impartial and real-time view of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Covering history as it unfolds. No filters. No delays."

●An urban gardening advocate's blog about how Occupy Wall Street can help communities seeking to take over empty lots is circulating on Facebook.

These are just a few examples of the occupy movement taking root. The spring may bring new encampments (and the fall, along with the elections, political action). New communities will continue to be built online. In some places action will move seamlessly between the Internet and local coffee shops and public squares.

Look at Wisconsin, where, after Gov. Scott Walker ® declared an end to collective bargaining and threatened to call the National Guard on protesters, an occupation of the state capitol morphed into an Internet community, UnitedWisconsin.com. It signed up more than 200,000 supporters in an effort to recall Walker over labor and budget issues. In less than two weeks, these "leaderless," Internet-driven recall supporters, in combination with the original "occupiers," collected more than 300,000 signatures on the streets of rural and urban Wisconsin.

In many ways, Occupy Wall Street on the Internet mirrors and expands Occupy Wall Street on the ground. It blurs the lines between online and off-line activism. The anonymity of the Web allows anyone who identifies with the "99 percent" to participate, regardless of their ideology or attitude toward the physical occupiers. A gathering of 25 or 100 people participating in a "mic check" can look, and feel, awkward. But surfing the Internet, one can find mic checks nationwide in the constant retweeting about Occupy Wall Street. Blogs about Occupy Wall Street that generate comments (that frequently generate even more comments) are some of the everyday indications of what is important to Web denizens.

Encampments are easy to find and describe. The 2,000-plus Occupy Wall Street meetups that have been initiated are harder to stumble upon. They may be in Oklahoma City or Denver or St. Petersburg, Fla. They may attract five people or 50 or 150. The point is not how many people are attending them at this moment but how they are proliferating and how many of them will mature into ongoing get-togethers.

Signals about the movement's future will come from spurts of public activity such as the efforts to occupy foreclosed homes and from the spread of ideas and advocacy online. Indeed, OWS is not leaderless. It is "leaderfull." It is not without purpose. It is "purposefull."

The excitement about Occupy Wall Street and its meme, the 99 percent, is unpredictable and expansive. It is spontaneous, organic, simultaneously online and off-line. It has no boundaries. It has and will continue to take many forms, in virtual and physical public squares, as it works its way into the national consciousness. The media and the political class should get to know Occupy Wall Street's blended organizing model, or they will be the only ones surprised about what it achieves.