Deep Politics Forum

Police remove Occupy activists from Kampa
ÄŒTK | 28 May 2012

Prague, May 27 (CTK) - Activists from the Occupy movement were forced by the police to scrap their improvised camp in the centre of Prague yesterday, police spokeswoman Andrea Zoulova told CTK, adding that no incidents accompanied the police intervention.

The activists had been camping in the Klarov park near the monument to anti-Nazi resistance victims for more than three weeks in connection with their petition campaign.

The event was to end on May 14, but the organisers wanted to extend it until November.

The Prague 1 town hall, which owns the plot concerned, said the activists have misused the petition law.

"After consulting Prague 1 officials, the police scrapped the tent camp yesterday," Zoulova said.

She said only one tent has been left on the site in compliance with the petition law.

The camp was built by activists dissatisfied with the political situation in the Czech Republic. Following the world Occupy movement's example, they said they would be staying in the camp to discuss ways to create a more just society placing more emphasis on direct democracy.

The activists put up almost 20 tents and shelters on the lawn near the Klarov monument, a field kitchen and an information stand.

The town hall said the activists misused the petition law by fixing petition sheets on their tents, thus presenting the tents as official petition stands in which the law permits them to stay.

The activists say hundreds of people have signed their petition so far, but they would not show the petition sheets to journalists.

AMY GOODMAN: With election season heating up here in the United States, the economy remains a crucial focus of the presidential campaign. Earlier this month, the Justice Department opened a criminal probe into a $3 billion trading loss in risky derivatives at financial giant JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank.

Meanwhile, investors have launched a class action lawsuit against Facebook, Morgan Stanley and other banks that underwrote the tech giant's public offering, claiming the companies misstated facts and concealed relevant information about Facebook's financial prospects. Plaintiffs say they have lost more than $2.5 billion as Facebook shares plunged in the days after the company went public. Another lawsuit has reportedly been filed in California. Regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, say they plan to probe issues relating to the offering. Salvatore Graziano, an attorney for a plaintiff, said investors were misled.

SALVATORE GRAZIANO: When you go public, when you raise money in the market, you are required to disclose material information. Here, what apparently happened, what's being discussed, is that there was information put in the prospectus which was vague. And then, separately, people at Facebook, allegedly, were talking to Morgan Stanley and the other underwriters, giving them more information, adverse information. And that's what these cases are about.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, our next guest asks why so little has changed in the banking industry in the nearly four years after the global economic collapse of 2008. Academy-Award winning director Charles Ferguson first examined the network of academic, financial and political players who contributed to the nation's financial crisis in his documentary Inside Job. Charles Ferguson now has a new book out called Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America. It's based on newly released court filings that reveal how major players contributed to the financial crisis.

Charles Ferguson, welcome to Democracy Now! JPMorgan Chase, the missing $3 billion, Facebooktalk about these latest developments in the context of a predator nation.

CHARLES FERGUSON: I think that they're an indication, a symptom, of the fact that the financial sector in the United States remains out of control and is not sufficiently regulated, and also not sufficientlyindeed, almost not at allsubject to criminal prosecution when it violates the law. So, I think that we unfortunately can expect to see a continuation of this kind of behavior.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk aboutwhat is so fascinating in Predator Nation is looking at the academic part of the network that you talk about misleading us, the ivory tower.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Yes, this is a problem that I think many Americans remain unaware of. I was quite struck when my film was released that most people who saw the film and spoke with me afterwards commented that the section on the economics discipline was the most surprising and shocking to them. What has happened is that over the same period of time, roughly the last 30 years, that money has become so much more important in American politics, it has also become more important in American academia. And the same interest groups, companies, industries, that began contributing to political campaigns and building up lobbying organizations and engaging in revolving-door hiring in the political sphere also began doing the same thing in American academia, to the point that now there is actually an industry, an industry that's probably a couple of billion dollars a year, of selling academic expertise for people who have public policy or legal or law enforcement problems.

AMY GOODMAN: Charles, let's go to a clip of Inside Job that deals with this, the links between academics at elite institutions in the U.S. and the financial industry. Here you talk to economics professors at Columbia as well as at Harvard.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Over the last decade, the financial services industries made about $5 billion worth of political contributions in the United States. That's kind of a lot of money. That doesn't bother you?

MARTIN FELDSTEIN: No.

MATT DAMON: Martin Feldstein is a professor at Harvard and one of the world's most prominent economists. As President Reagan's chief economic adviser, he was a major architect of deregulation. And from 1988 until 2009, he was on the board of directors of both AIG and AIG Financial Products, which paid him millions of dollars.

CHARLES FERGUSON: You have any regrets about having been on AIG's board?

MARTIN FELDSTEIN: I have no comments. No, I have no regrets about being on AIG's board.

CHARLES FERGUSON: None?

MARTIN FELDSTEIN: That I can say. Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

CHARLES FERGUSON: OK. You have any regrets about AIG's decisions?

MARTIN FELDSTEIN: I cannot say anything more about AIG.

GLENN HUBBARD: I've taught at Northwestern and Chicago, Harvard and Columbia.

MATT DAMON: Glenn Hubbard is the dean of Columbia Business School and was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Do you think the financial services industry has too much political power in the United States?

GLENN HUBBARD: I don't think so, no. I certainlyyou certainly wouldn't get that impression by the drubbing that they regularly get in Washington.

MATT DAMON: Many prominent academics quietly make fortunes while helping the financial industry shape public debate and government policy. The Analysis Group, Charles River Associates, Compass Lexecon, and the Law and Economics Consulting Group manage a multi-billion-dollar industry that provides academic experts for hire. Two bankers who use these services were Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, Bear Stearns hedge fund managers prosecuted for securities fraud. After hiring the Analysis Group, both were acquitted. Glenn Hubbard was paid $100,000 to testify in their defense.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Do you think that the economics discipline has a conflict of interest problem?

GLENN HUBBARD: I'm not sure I know what you mean.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Do you think that a significant fraction of the economics discipline, number of economists, have financial conflicts of interests that in some way might call into question or color

GLENN HUBBARD: Oh, I see what you're saying. I doubt it. You know, most academic economists, you know, aren't wealthy business people.

MATT DAMON: Hubbard makes $250,000 a year as a board member of MetLife and was formerly on the board of Capmark, a major commercial mortgage lender during the bubble, which went bankrupt in 2009. He has also advised Nomura Securities, KKR Financial Corporation and many other financial firms.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip of the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, narrated by the actor Matt Damon. Our guest is Charles Ferguson, who's followed up this film with Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America. Now, can you talk about how these academics, who also become pundits on television, which is a lot of how people come to understand the issues, missed the financial crisis of 2008, certainly didn't predict it, but they were profiting from it, Charles Ferguson? And bring in Larry Summers when you're talking about all of this, who was formerly the president of Harvard.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Yes. Unfortunately, Larry Summers, who I've known slightly for a very long time, is kind of Exhibit A with regard to this phenomenon. So, there is nowthe revolving door is now a kind of three-way or triangular affair involving academia, politics and policy positions, and major industries, and financial services is probably the most important of them. Slightly behind would be energy and telecommunications.

Larry Summers, first as an academic and then as a senior government officialby this point, he's held almost every senior policy position in economicsargued strongly for and participated in a very serious way in the deregulation of the American financial services industry. After he left the Clinton administration, where he eventually became secretary of the Treasury, he became president of Harvard. And even while serving as president of Harvard, he began making large numbers of speeches to financial organizations for very high rates of pay. And also, he began consulting for hedge funds. After he was forced out as president of Harvard, he increased his consulting activities, earning $5 million a year for one day a week of work at a hedge fund called D.E. Shaw, and making over a million dollars a year giving speeches to financial organizations. And at the same time, he continued to participate in policy debates. And most famously, in 2005, he was president at the Jackson Hole conference, which is the most important annual conference of central bankers in the world. And at that conference, Raghu Rajan, who was thenhe's a very famous economist who was then the chief economist of the IMFdelivered a paper in which he warned about the growth of risk in the financial services industry and the potential for a catastrophic economic meltdown as a result of increased risk taking in finance. And Summers, at the end of Rajan's presentation, stood up and very, very brutally criticized him and dismissed all of his concerns.

So, there have been many other examples of other people who have engaged in similar behavior. Glenn Hubbard is certainly one. Glenn Hubbard is now a senior economic adviser to the Romney campaign. It's unfortunately become a completely bipartisan issue. Economists who support both political parties have very strong financial ties to the financial services industry and have continued to support deregulation.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you make a really critical point when you won the Oscar at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards. You won it for Inside Job. In your acceptance speech, you drew applause after calling for the jailing of financial executives.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Forgive me. I must start by pointing out that three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: What crimes were committed, Charles Ferguson? What should executives be put in jail for?

CHARLES FERGUSON: It's a very long list. Certainly at the top of the list would be securities fraud, accounting fraud and Sarbanes-Oxley violations. Securities fraud is precisely what the name implies. If you sell a security, but you lie about it or you omit material information, that's a crime. And we now know that a very high fraction of the securities that were constructed and sold during the housing bubble and that led to the financial crisis were in fact sold fraudulently, that the mortgage lenders and the investment banks that created, structured and sold them did not tell the truth when they were doing so. And those were very, very significant lies and misrepresentations. And late in the bubble, a number of banks and investment banks began not only selling fraudulent securities, but creating and selling securities for the purpose of betting against them, by profiting on their failure. And that also involved a great deal of dishonesty. And there has not been a single criminal prosecution with regard to that conduct.

And following that would be accounting fraud. We now know that many of the lenders and investment banks were dishonest about their own financial positions, concealed the potential size of their losses. The housing bubble was, in effect, a Ponzi scheme, and like all Ponzi schemes, it eventually had to end. And when it ended, of course, we saw the result in the 2008 crisis. And many people, it's now clear, knew that it was going to end that way and knew that their own financialtheir own firms', their own companies' financial positions were going to be catastrophically affected and lied about it to the public.

And then, third, the Sarbanes-Oxley law requires the CEOs and chief financial officers of banks, all public companies, to certify their financial reports and also the adequacy of their own internal financial controls. And we now have extensive evidence that the senior managements of a number of the banks and investment banks were extremely, explicitly warned that their financial controls were inadequate and that their accounting was fraudulent, and yet they continued to certify their financial reports. And there has, again, not been a single criminal prosecution for such violations.

AMY GOODMAN: Charles Ferguson, the Obama administration has rationalized its failure to prosecute any senior financial executives by saying their behavior wasn't actually illegal. This is a clip of President Obama speaking at a White House news conference in October.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, first on the issue ofon the issue of prosecutions on Wall Street, one of the biggest problems about the collapse of Lehman's and the subsequent financial crisis and the whole subprime lending fiasco is that a lot of that stuff wasn't necessarily illegal, it was just immoral or inappropriate or reckless. That's exactly why we needed to pass Dodd-Frank, to prohibit some of these practices. You know, the financial sector is very creative, and they are always looking for ways to make money. That's their job. And if there are loopholes and rules that can be bent and arbitrage to be had, they will take advantage of it. So, you know, without commenting on particular prosecutionsobviously, that's not my job, that's the attorney general's jobyou know, I think part of people's frustrations, part of my frustration, was a lot of practices that should not have been allowed weren't necessarily against the law, but they had a huge destructive impact.

AMY GOODMAN: Charles Ferguson, your response to President Obama?

CHARLES FERGUSON: President Obama is wrong. And at this point, it's very difficult for me to to believe that he doesn't know that he's wrong. We now have publicly available evidence, through a combination of lawsuits, government investigations and whistleblowers, that there was extensive and highly illegal conduct in the housing bubble and the financial crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain further.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Well, as I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, you know, we now know that there was extensive securities fraud. We know that there was extensive accounting fraud. We know that there were extensive Sarbanes-Oxley violations.

To give just one example among many, in May of 2008, a man by the name of Matthew Lee, who was a senior vice president at Lehman Brothers, hand-delivered to four senior Lehman executives, including the chief financial officer, a memo, which I quote in my book, which is available on the webif you Google "Matthew Lee Lehman," you will find itin which he says, "I feel that it is my ethical and legal responsibility to point out to you that there are billions of dollars of unjustified assets on our balance sheet." And he goes on to say, in some detail, in this memo that his concerns are very serious and that he feels that he absolutely must bring them to the attention of senior Lehman executives. He also says that he had been a loyal Lehman employees since 1994, which he had been. And that's justthat's one example. The CFO and CEO of Lehman continued to certify Lehman's financial statements and the adequacy of its internal financial controls up until a few days before Lehman went bankrupt. They have not been prosecuted. Neither has anybody else. And there's a great deal of now publicly available information, from depositions in lawsuits, subpoenas, etc., that makes it extremely clear that there is overwhelming evidence of massive criminal behavior. And there has not been a single criminal prosecution.

AMY GOODMAN: Charles, you write that a predator elite has taken over this country. How have they done it?

CHARLES FERGUSON: Well, luckily, I think it's too strong to say that they've taken over the country, but they certainly have taken over significant portions of economic policy and of the political system, and also, unfortunately, major portions of the economics discipline. And I think that this has its roots in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, when America first began to encounter economic difficulties and when deregulation first started in earnest in the Reagan administration. And since that time, we've seen a steady and dramatic growth in the use of money to influence politics and also academia. The cost of running for president now, and also the cost of running for the Senate or the House, has gone up by a factor of 20 since the late 1970s. This is now many billions of dollars every election cycle. And when you combine that with other similar trends over the last 30 yearsthe growing divergence between public sector and government salaries, the growing use of revolving-door hiring, the growth of the lobbying sector, all of which have exploded over the same periodyou get to a situation in which the public sector and the public interest are outspent by very specific private interests, especially in the financial sector, by literally probably 50 or a hundred to one.

AMY GOODMAN: You write not only about the corruption, the law breaking, a predator elite, but you also talk about how to take the country back. And interestingly, you say that the rogue financial sector is seriously dangerous to the economy of America right now. How do you challenge this? How do you take the country back?

CHARLES FERGUSON: Well, a lot of hard work. And I think that at this point it's going to have to come from below, from the American people. I think that it's going to have to resemble a movement somewhat like, say, the environmental movement or the civil rights movement, the women's movement, in the sense that it's not going to come from the highest levels of the policy system, and it's not going to come from the highest levels of electoral politics, because, to a great extent, they have been captured and neutralized by the financial sector and other narrow, financially powerful interest groups.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of Occupy arising under President Obama?

CHARLES FERGUSON: Well, I hope that it's the first step in what will have to be probably a long and difficult process of forcing our leaders to pay attention and to change.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Charles Ferguson, you write, "The United States, so long [the] beacon of opportunity for," as you say, "the ambitious poor, has become one of the world's most unequal [...] societies." We have 15 seconds.

CHARLES FERGUSON: Unfortunately, true. The American Dream is dying as we watch it. And now you're better off being born poor in Asia or Europe than in the United States.

21 April 2012 Last updated at 17:51 GMT

Czechs stage huge anti-government rally in Prague
Protesters with stickers "Stop the government" blow whistles in Prague Protesters demanded the immediate resignation of the coalition government

Anti-government demonstrators in the Czech Republic have staged what they describe as the biggest rally since the fall of communism in 1989.

They say 120,000 people packed the capital Prague, protesting against austerity measures and corruption. Police put the numbers at 90,000.

Echoing 1989, people jangled their keys - a signal to the centre-right coalition cabinet to lock up and leave.

The government has recently been rocked by splits and defections.

It is no longer clear if the coalition of Prime Minister Petr Necas commands a majority in parliament, the BBC's Rob Cameron in Prague reports.
'Anorexic'

On Saturday, the protesters - including many pensioners and students - marched through Prague, gathering in Wenceslas Square - the heart of the capital.

Chanting and whistling, they carried banners which read "Stop thieves!" and "Away with the government!"

Rene Koncilova, one of the marchers, said she was struggling to survive on her monthly $350 (£217) disability pension.

"Vaclav Klaus (current president) told us in 1989 that we had to tighten our belts, and the country became anorexic," she told the BBC.

"Fortunately, doctors managed to cure it, but now they're asking us to tighten our belts again. I think we'll all be anorexic before long."

The government says there is no alternative to cuts in public spending and tax rises if the country is to avoid the fate of debt-ridden Greece.

From David at Amped Status.

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Occupy Activist on Hunger Strike to Pressure Trinity Church on Charges

An Occupy Wall Street protester says he has gone on hunger strike and has stopped taking his AIDS medications to protest trespassing charges against activists who were arrested at New York's Trinity Church on December 17. Jack Boyle, who is 57, has been on hunger strike and without medication for roughly two weeks. Protesters have asked the church, one of the city's largest landowners, to "forgive us our trespasses," a reference to a phrase in the Lord's Prayer. The arrests occurred when protesters scaled a fence onto church-owned property after Trinity refused to give them sanctuary following their eviction from Zuccotti Park. Many of those arrested are due in court next week.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to an issue that's gained increasing prominence in the last year: increasing inequality in the United States and the divide between the richest 1 percent and the rest of the country. Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that pay for the top CEOs on Wall Street increased by over 20 percent last year. The article is based on analysis of data reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission and finds that the substantial rise comes after a 26 percent jump in CEO salaries in 2010.

Meanwhile, census data shows nearly one in two Americans, or 150 million people, have fallen into poverty or could be classified as low-income. Thirty-eight percent of African-American children and 35 percent of Latino children live in poverty.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, our next guest has helped to popularize the expression "the 1 percent" and brought to light the causes behind increasing inequality in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. During the Clinton administration from '93 to '97, he served on the Council of Economic Advisers. His May 2011 Vanity Fair article, "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%," serves as the basis of his new book, _The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future_. Joseph Stiglitz teaches at Columbia University.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Nice to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, this figure you have on page eight of your book, when you say, "Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Wal-Mart empire command wealth of $69.7 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society."

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: It's a comment both on how well off the top are and how poor the bottom are. And it's really emblematic of the divide that has gotten much worse in our society. One of the points I try to make in the book is, none of this is inevitable. It's not just market forces. United States is the country in the world with the highest level of inequality, and it's getting worse.

AMY GOODMAN: The highest level?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Of the advanced industrial countries.

AMY GOODMAN: The highest level.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Highest level of the advanced industrial countries. And to me, what's even more disturbing is, we've become the country with the least equality of opportunity of all the advanced industrial countries for which there's data. You know, we think of ourselves as a land of opportunity, American Dream. And there are all examples that we know of where people have made ityou know, immigrants, other people who have made it to the top. But what matters really are the numbers, the chances. You know, what are your life chances if you had the misfortune of being born to a poor family or somebody whose parents are not well educated? What are your chances of going from the bottom to the middle or the bottom to the top? And they are lower in the United States than in other advanced industrial countries.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, it's a striking fact, because you talk about it a few times in your book, that now in old Europe there is more class mobility than there is in the U.S. And, of course, we always here think of Europe as being very class rigid.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: That's right. And this is a change, in many respects. And one of the other points I try to emphasize in the book is it has consequences. It has consequences for our sense of identity, of what we are, but it also has even more, you know, you might say, narrow economic consequences, because what it means is that if you have theyou know, make the mistake of choosing the wrong parents, the likelihood is that you're not going to live up to your potential. And we are, in that sense, wasting our most important assets: our human resources.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You also say that, ultimately, the rich will also pay an extraordinary price for this inequality. How?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, we're all in the same boat together. You know, there are a lot of people who are very bright, who work very hard in developing countries, emerging markets, who have very low incomes. The point is that all of us benefit from our education system, our legal system, the way our whole society functions. In those parts of the world where there's a large divide, mainly in, you know, emerging markets, developing countries, where there's a large divide, societies fall apart. There's political, social, economic turmoil. And in that context, not even the 1 percent can do that well.

AMY GOODMAN: I wantedI wanted to ask you about the people we value and the people we don't. You have an amazing set of examples. You say, "Few are inventor" you say, "By looking at those at the top of the wealth distribution, we can get a feel [for] the nature of this aspect of America's inequality. Few are investors who have reshaped technology, or scientists who have reshaped our understandings of the laws of nature. Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of DNA, upon which rests so much of modern [medicine]. None of them, who made such large contributions to our well-being, are among those most rewarded by our economic system." We have very different names that are tied to these so-called inventions, like of the internet.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: That's right. And the point is that the theory that was developed in the 19th century to justify the inequality that was emerging with capitalism was marginal productivity theory. It was the notion that those who contributed the most to society will get bigger rewards. It was a sense, you might say, of moral justification, but also an argument for economic efficiency. And what we now realize is the individuals who have made the most important contributions are not those that are at the top. The peoplemany of the people who are at the top, for instance, are those financiers who brought the world to the brink of ruin. And the moment of Great Recession, I think, was a really telling moment in our rethinking of what was going on. You know, we all sort of understood that there was something wrong. But in that crisis where you saw so many bankers who had brought the world to the brink of ruin, who actually brought their companies to the brink of ruin, walk off with pay in the millions of dollars, it was very clear there was a disconnect between private rewards and social returns, really undermining the theory that was the basis of the justification of inequality in our society.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So when did financiers, though, come to have this kind of power?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, it's been an evolution. But I think, in my mind, a really telling change was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, where we told the banks, you know, "Don't focus on what you're supposed to be doing, which is providing credit to new businesses to expand businesses." We brought together the commercial banks, which were the basis of the kind of prudent lending, and investment banks, who took rich people's money and gambled. And we put it together. We created these financial institutions that were too big to fail. And the result of that was they grew larger and larger, and the risk taking, gambling, speculation dominated, rather than the lending, which is the basis of a growing, productive economy.

But in a way, the evolution of our economy, more generally, began about 1980. That'sif I would say, where's there a dividing pointwhere the CEOs began to realize that they could take a larger and larger share of the corporate income. They understood that we have deficient corporate governance laws. And so, we didn't require a say in pay. We didn't requireyou know, shareholders are supposed to own the firms, but the shareholders had no say in the pay of the companiesof the managers of the companies that they were supposed to own. A very strange situation. I mean, if you have somebody working for you, you would say you ought to have some say in their pay. And the result of that is they took a larger and larger share. And if you look at those at the topas I say, they're not the Watson and Cricks, the people who made these big changesthey're corporate CEOs.

AMY GOODMAN: Who is Berners-Lee?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, these are people who, you know, made the internet, the people who

AMY GOODMAN: But we think Mark Zuckerberg. We think Gates. We think Jobs.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: You know, all of these played an important role. You know, we shouldn't underestimate the importance of that. But all these rest on a foundation, and that foundation was largely publicly provided, publicly funded. You couldn't have a program if you didn't have a computer. And you don't have a computer unless you do the mathematical research that isprovided the foundation. That was theTuring.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Turing.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: That was Alan Turing. You don't have internet programs unless you have the internet. And that was something that the U.S. government helped to develop, and these other people that helped develop the World Wide Web. So, you know, the irony is that the people who provided the foundation on which our entire modern economy is based are not the people who have done well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask you about the presidential race and about Republican candidate Mitt Romney's record. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a supporter of President Obama, generated controversy last month when he defended Romney's former company, Bain Capital. Booker spoke on Meet the Press.

MAYOR CORY BOOKER: I have to just say, from a very personal level, I'm not about to sit here and indict private equity. It'sto me, it's just thiswe're getting to a ridiculous point in America, and especially that I know. I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are investing in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital's record, it ain'tthey've done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to meI'm very uncomfortable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Joseph Stiglitz, your comments on the role of private equity, and on Bain Capital, in particular?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, let me first say, the financial sector is very important. A financialyou know, no economy can work well without a well-functioning financial sector. The problem with the United States is that our financial sector hasn't been doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's supposed to provide finance to create jobs, not to destroy jobs. It's supposed to allocate capital, manage risk.

The concern about Bain Capital are twofold. One is that much of what they were doing was financial restructuring, which meant not creating jobs, taking money out of companies, putting them in a very fragile situation in which, a few years later, they go over the cliff, and jobs get destroyed. So, it is important to restructure firms to make them sustainable, efficient. But that wasn't what a lot of the enterprises that they were engaged in doing.

The second problem, and I think most people find very disturbing, is that we have a tax law that says that those who are engaged working for this kind of restructuringan important activity if it's done well and done in a way that creates more productivity, more jobswhy should those people pay so little taxes? And thatyou know, going back to the upper 1 percent, their average tax rate is about 15 percent. We tax speculators at a lower rate than we tax people who work for a living. It makes no sense.

AMY GOODMAN: Mayor Booker got a lot of flak for saying, sort of, "Back off Bain." But a number of Democrats have been saying that, and there's a war in the Obama administration now. Do you attack Romney on Bain, the company that he is running on, more than being governor of Massachusetts? And a lot of the Democrats are involved with Bain or have support from people at Bain or other similar companies. Your president, President Clintonyou served as the chief of economic advisershe said, "Back off Bain." And you can see this tug-of-war going on, not only about Bain, though, and now you see them not really talking about Bain and talking about what you were just mentioning, Joe Stiglitz, but also about his offshore investments, offshore bank accounts, himself and his company. Can you talk about this and the fact that Clinton is one of the champions of saying, "Don't raise this. He's a good businessman"?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah. Well, first, we should understand, you know, that Romney is running on the platform: it's good to have a businessman running the White House; we do a better job. You know, the last MBA president we had was George Bush, and I don't think anybody would say that the economy was well run in those eight years. Deficits soared, and the economy finally went over the brink and into the Great Recession. So that qualification that he's touting, if I looked at that, you know, a Harvard MBA, I'm not sure I would say that that is a kind of certification that I would want for running the country. You have to understand public policy, not just how to make money for yourself, which they do a good job of doing, but that's not what's entailed in running the country.

I have some sympathy and say, let's not make this personal. Let's try to keep this at the basic level of principles. And, you know, the basic level of principles are relatively simple: people should be paying their share of the taxes. And paying share of taxes mean you don't pay half the rate of other people who are working for a living. It means you don't use offshore centers to escape taxes. You know, why is so much banking going on in the Cayman Islands? It's not that the weather there is really particularly suited for moving electrons and running banks. You know, it's there for one reason only: to escape regulation, to escape taxation, to undermine the basic principles of our economy. And it's wrong for somebody who is trying to run for the president, who should be symbolizing, you know, making their fair share, to be using offshore accounts to avoid taxes and to avoid regulation.

The other point is, businesses are supposed to be creating value, creating jobs in America, and new American business. Now, this is where we have a tax system that's distorted. But when you're running for the president, you should be out there and saying we don't want a distorted tax system that encourages jobs to move abroad, that encourages speculation over real wealth creation. If he had come out and said, like Warren Buffett, that it's wrong for himthat Warren Buffett to have a lower tax rate than his secretaryif he came out and said it's wrong to have a tax structure that encourages jobs to move abroad, you know, then I might have a little bit more sympathy. But so far, I haven't heard that.

AMY GOODMAN: Ed Conard, the former managing director at Bain Capital, who has contributed to Romney, advises Romney, and argues explicitly for doubling income inequality?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah. I find that astounding. I debated him yesterday, actually. The point is, he believes in trickle-down economics, a notion you throw a lot of money at the top and everybody does a lot better because of their innovation. Given the level of inequality in the United States, I wish it were true, because if it were true, we'd all be doing very well. But the evidence is, you know, overwhelmingly against that. We've had a growth at the top, but what's been happening to the average American? He's not doing very well. Most Americans today are worse off than they were a decade-and-a-half ago. And the people at the bottom have done even worse. If you started looking at, say, male workers, a full-time male worker, people who work for a living, for a male worker today, the average, typicalhalf above, half belowhis income today is lower than it was in 1968, almost a half-century ago. So the American economy has been delivering for the people at the very top, but it's not been delivering for most Americans. And you can see it in another way in the data. In the periods like the period after World War II, we grew together, inequality was shrinking, and we grew much more rapidly than we have since 1980, where we've been growing apart. So the notion that more inequality leads to more growth, to put it quite frankly, is nonsense.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Joseph Stiglitz, you have spoken about the austerity measures that have been imposed across Europe or that are being considered across Europe, and you've said that they're, quote, "a suicide pact." Can you say what you mean by that?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, in Europe, these measures of austerity are going to make the countries weaker and weaker. I predicted that when Europe began that back in 2010 in Greece, when the Greek crisis first emerged. What's happened is, Greece has become successively weaker and weaker, to the point where the youth unemployment now is 50 percent, political turmoil is breaking out. I said the same thing when Spain began that process. And now in Spain the youth unemployment rate is again 50 percent, and the unemployment overall has gone well over 20 percent. And just yesterday, you know, Spain's conservative government has said, "We can't deal with it," even though they had run on a platform of, "Oh, you've messed up with the economic policy."

So, the point is that we've done this experiment in austerity over and over again. The first example, you might say, in modern history was Herbert Hoover when he responded to the stock market crash by austerity, under the influence of his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, and we had the Great Depression. The IMF forced it in East Asia, in Korea and Thailand, in Indonesia, and we alland we saw the consequences: the economies went down. Why Europe is repeating this experiment, where we know almost for certain what the outcome isand it's turning out to be exactly as I predicted.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, is it only Europe? Let's turn to the federal budget here. Republicans, who control the House, have been calling for cuts to food aid, healthcare, other social services, while protecting funds for the Pentagon. This is House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan speaking last month.

REP. PAUL RYAN: What we're saying is, let's get on growth and prevent austerity. The whole premise of our budget is to preempt austerity by getting our borrowing under control, having tax reform for economic growth, and preventing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid from going bankrupt. That preempts austerity. The president, his budget, the fact the Senate hasn't done a budget in three years, puts us on a path toward European-like austerity. That's what we're trying to prevent from happening in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: That's House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan, a Wisconsinite like Governor Scott Walker. Your response, Joe Stiglitz?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, the good thing about what he said is austerity is finally getting a bad name. Then the question is, what are the policies? And what he is proposing is weakening our basic economic fiber. If you don't invest in education, technology, infrastructure

AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the money?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: the economy gets weaker. Well, the good news is that right now the markets are willing to lend to the U.S. at essentially zero interest rate, long-term interest rates of one-and-a-half percent. You know, if you were a business and you could borrow at one-and-a-half percent or zero for investments with very high returns, you would be foolish not to do it. The right keeps focusing on just one side of the country's balance sheet or the government's balance sheet: what they owe. They don't look at the other side: the assets. And it's the assets that are really important if we're going to have long-term economic growth. So, it's like a company that says, "Let's cut out our R&D budget. Let's cut out all our investment." And you know where that company's going to go? It's going to go into the tubes. And that's his recommendation for America. I think that's wrong. It's not the way you're going to get growth.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yeah, you've also said that if Romney, if the Republicans win the elections in November, that that would significantly raise the likelihood of a recession.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, the Republicans have been consistently focused on cutbacks. You know, Americans don't realize that we already have begun austerity. There are about one million fewer public sector employees than there were before the crisis. The standard recommendation of macroeconomics, of economic, is that when the private sector gets weak, government is supposed to step in, fill the breach and stimulate the economy so that the economy is stabilized, because the private sector is very volatile. But we've been doing just the opposite. As the private sector has gotten weaker, we've cut out a million jobs. What the Republicans would do is make those cutbacks even bigger. And the resultand Wisconsin is an exampleyou know, more cutbacks, more cutbacks of public employees. And the result of that is our economy is going to go down further into the hole. In the context of Europe very likely going into turmoil, there is going to be a risk of a significant downturn. And those policies then increase the probability of our weak economy tipping over into recession.

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz, yesterday every single Republican in the Senate voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act, so it cannot move forward. Explain what this act is, the significance of this for working women.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, this is one of the issues that I take up in my book, not the particular bill, butwhat is distinctive about American inequality is that too much goes to the very topthat's the 1 percentthe middle has been hollowed out, and the bottom is notis doing very badly. The number in poverty are increasing. Well, when you look at what's happening at the middle and the bottom, one of the factors that contributes to weaknesses in the middle or the bottom is discrimination. Women get paid on average less than 80 percent of men of the same qualifications doing the same kind of work. You know, that's discrimination. And that weakens the economic fiber of our country, and it creates more inequality. And this bill was an attempt to circumscribe that kind of discrimination. You know, things are better than they were 30 years ago. We've made progress. But what is clear, that in spite of our awareness of this kind of discrimination, we haven't closed the gap. We have a lot more to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Particularly among African-American and Latino women.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Very much so. And, you know, one of the aspects of the crisis, we now realize that the banks targeted Afro-American and Latinos for these predatory lending, bad loans, high transaction costs. And one of the consequences of that discriminationand the banks have paid very large fines and settlements of claims against that kind of discriminationthe consequence is the wealth of those at the bottom who are Afro-American, who are Hispanics, Latinos, have been wiped out. And so, we had a bigger gap in wealth than the bigthan the gap in income. You know, I mentioned that the top 1 percent gets 20 percent of all the income. They have about 40 percent of the wealth. You look at the wealth gaps in Latinos and Afro-Americans, it's so much larger, and really unconscionable.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And your comments on Occupy Wall Street? You write about that in your book, as well.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Well, Occupy Wall Street was a reflection of a lot of Americans' perspective that our economic system is unfair. You know, the protest movement that began in Tunisia was partly about lack of jobs, but it was partlyI went to Tunisiait was unfairness in our system. There was a hope, after the crisis, that government would fix things. It didn't, or it didn't do enough. And that combination of economic unfairness and a political system that doesn't seem capable of correcting these injustices, I think, is what motivated a lot of the Occupy Wall Street.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip of Bloomberg talking about Occupy Wall Street, saying Wall Street is a critical tax base for New York City. This is during his weekly radio address last October.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: The protests that are trying to destroy the jobs of working people in the city aren't productive. And some of the labor unions, the municipal unions, that are participating, their salaries come from the taxes paid by the people that they're trying to vilify.

AMY GOODMAN: What say you, Joe Stiglitz?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: I think he's 100 percent wrong. I mean, basically, the fundamentals of a democracy are that you want people to express their views. They had hoped that the politicians would hear their voice. They had hoped that the politicians would address the inequalities in our society, the lack ofthe deficiencies in ourthe deficiencies in our financial system. And what became increasingly clear was that money was driving politics, which is an important point that I raise in the book. Money shapes markets. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The way markets work is based on rules and regulation that come out of Congress. And when politics shapes those rules and regulations to help the 1 percent rather than to help the rest of our society, something is wrong. And whatthe protest movement was out of frustration, a sense that the democratic politics didn't reflect the view of the majority of Americansyou might say, of the 99 percent. And

AMY GOODMAN: Do you want to see it grow bigger? You were down there at Occupy.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: I think it's very important that somehow we get a politics that reflects the interest of the majority of Americans. When we have a bankruptcy law, for instance, that says that first priority goes to derivatives, that encourages speculation in the financial markets. And when we have a bankruptcy law that says students cannot discharge their debt, no mattereven in bankruptcy, no matter how bad an education the for-profit schools give them, there's something wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to talk to you for a few minutes in post-show, put it online at democracynow.org, about what are the most important things to do right now. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, professor at Columbia University. The new book is The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.

The silent march against stop-and-frisk turned violent and chaotic shortly after 5:00 pm after being confronted by New York police.
It appears that the trouble began as the tail end of the march, which has been estimated as at least 50,000 people, reached the destination point of Fifth Avenue and 78th Street. OccupiedStories tweeted at 5:15, "End of ‪#SilentMarchNYC‬ rowdy and loud. Seems like people are continuing to march down 5th Ave. Intensity level just shot through the roof."
According to the "Newyorkist" Twitter account, it appears that police then began to move in and the crowd started chanting "No justice, no peace" and then "Whose streets, our streets."
Police tried to kettle the march with netting and then split the crowd, pushing some down Fifth Avenue and others onto a side street. They then began wielding batons and Newyorkist tweeted, "Crowd control meaures turning super agressive and dangerous. Crowd tremendously agitated."
Alternet's Kristen Gwynne described/a> a violent scuffle with the police, followed by multiple arrests.
According to journalist Ryan Devereaux, one young woman who was arrested "was dragged away with her breast exposed, people were outraged."
By just before 6:00 pm, however, things seemed to be calming down, and Gwynne tweeted, "Dispersal order from nypd the march is over'"
[URL="https://twitter.com/kristengwynne/status/214475891835813888"] At that point, the march does appear to have dispersed peacefully.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/06/17/br...the-crowd/

[/URL]

Last week, I received a letter from the New York Police Department (NYPD) in response to a wide-ranging request for documents I filed in January related to the department's brutal crackdown on the Occupy Wall Street protest. The NYPD refused to turn over a single document to me pertaining to OWS, claiming that if the records were disclosed it "would interfere with law enforcement investigations or judicial proceedings."

This denial doesn't mean I'm stopping my investigation. Over the years, I've received similar responses from other law enforcement and government agencies, including the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense, whenever I attempt to pry loose documents that would shine a light on government activities. NYPD may have denied Truthout access to records - but the case isn't closed. We'll appeal the NYPD's decision, and if our appeal is denied then we'll litigate, with pro bono legal help.

Jason Leopold, Lead Investigator Truthout

Occupy Will Return
Monday, 18 June 2012 09:33
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

Activists gather at First Churches during a stop on a bus tour by members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in Northampton, Massachusetts, January 2, 2012. (Photo: Nicole Bengiveno / The New York Times)
In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protestand there will be onewill be labeled as "unexpected," a "shock" and a "surprise." The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City's Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial.

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the "left" or the "right" while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don't waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.

The engine of all protest movements rests, finally, not in the hands of the protesters but the ruling class. If the ruling class responds rationally to the grievances and injustices that drive people into the streets, as it did during the New Deal, if it institutes jobs programs for the poor and the young, a prolongation of unemployment benefits (which hundreds of thousands of Americans have just lost), improved Medicare for all, infrastructure projects, a moratorium on foreclosures and bank repossessions, and a forgiveness of student debt, then a mass movement can be diluted. Under a rational ruling class, one that responds to the demands of the citizenry, the energy in the street can be channeled back into the mainstream. But once the system calcifies as a servant of the interests of the corporate elites, as has happened in the United States, formal political power thwarts justice rather than advances it.

Our dying corporate class, corrupt, engorged on obscene profits and indifferent to human suffering, is the guarantee that the mass movement will expand and flourish. No one knows when. No one knows how. The future movement may not resemble Occupy. It may not even bear the name Occupy. But it will come. I have seen this before. And we should use this time to prepare, to educate ourselves about the best ways to fight back, to learn from our mistakes, as many Occupiers are doing in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and other cities. There are dark and turbulent days ahead. There are powerful and frightening forces of hate, backed by corporate money, that will seek to hijack public rage and frustration to create a culture of fear. It is not certain we will win. But it is certain this is not over.

"We had a very powerful first six months," Kevin Zeese, one of the original organizers of the Occupy encampment in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., said when I reached him by phone. "We impacted the debate. We impacted policy. We showed people they are not alone. We exposed the unfair economy and our dysfunctional government. We showed people they could have an impact. We showed people they could have power. We let the genie out of the bottle. No one will put it back in."

The physical eradication of the encampments and efforts by the corporate state to disrupt the movement through surveillance, entrapment, intimidation and infiltration have knocked many off balance. That was the intent. But there continue to be important pockets of resistance. These enclaves will provide fertile ground and direction once mass protests return. It is imperative that, no matter how dispirited we may become, we resist being lured into the dead game of electoral politics."The recent election in Wisconsin shows why Occupy should stay out of the elections," Zeese said. "Many of the people who organized the Wisconsin occupation of the Capitol building became involved in the recall. First, they spent a lot of time and money collecting more than 1 million signatures. Second, they got involved in the primary where the Democrats picked someone who was not very supportive of union rights and who lost to [Gov. Scott] Walker just a couple of years ago. Third, the general election effort was corrupted by billionaire dollars. They lost. Occupy got involved in politics. What did they get? What would they have gotten if they won? They would have gotten a weak, corporate Democrat who in a couple of years would be hated. That would have undermined their credibility and demobilized their movement. Now, they have to restart their resistance movement."

"Would it not have been better if those who organized the occupation of the Capitol continued to organize an independent, mass resistance movement?" Zeese asked. "They already had strong organization in Madison, and in Dane County as well as nearby counties. They could have developed a Montreal-like movement of mass protest that stopped the function of government and built people power. Every time Walker pushed something extreme they could have been out in the streets and in the Legislature disrupting it. They could have organized general and targeted strikes. They would have built their strength. And by the time Walker faced re-election he would have been easily defeated."

"Elections are something that Occupy needs to continue to avoid," Zeese said. "The Obama-Romney debate is not a discussion of the concerns of the American people. Obama sometimes uses Occupy language, but he puts forth virtually no job creation, nothing to end the wealth divide and no real tax reform. On tax reform, the Buffett rulethat the secretary should pay the same tax rate as the bossis totally insufficient. We should be debating whether to go back to the Eisenhower tax rates of 91 percent, the Nixon tax rate of 70 percent or the Reagan tax rate of 50 percent for the top income earnersnot whether secretaries and CEOs should be taxed at the same rate!"

The Occupy movement is not finally about occupying. It is, as Zeese points out, about shifting power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. It is a tactic. And tactics evolve and change. The freedom rides, the sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the marches in Birmingham and the Montgomery bus boycott were tactics used in the civil rights movement. And just as the civil rights movement often borrowed tactics used by the old Communist Party, which long fought segregation in the South, the Occupy movement, as Zeese points out, draws on earlier protests against global trade agreements and the worldwide protests over the invasion of Iraq. Each was, like the Occupy movement, a global response. And this is a global movement.

We live in a period of history the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul calls an interregnum, a period when we are enveloped in what he calls "a vacuum of economic thought," a period when the reigning ideology, although it no longer corresponds to reality, has yet to be replaced with ideas that respond to the crisis engendered by the collapse of globalization. And the formulation of ideas, which are always at first the purview of a small, marginalized minority, is one of the fundamental tasks of the movement. It is as important to think about how we will live and to begin to reconfigure our lives as it is to resist.

Occupy has organized some significant actions, including the May Day protests, the NATO protest in Chicago, an Occupy G8 summit and G8 protests in Thurmont and Frederick, Md. There are a number of ongoing actionsOccupy Our Homes, Occupy Faith, Occupy the Criminal Justice System, Occupy University, the Occupy Caravanthat protect the embers of revolt. Last week when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, testified before a U.S. Senate committee, he was confronted by Occupy protesters, including Deborah Harris, who lost her home in a JPMorgan foreclosure. But you will hear little if anything about these actions on cable television or in The Washington Post. Such acts of resistance get covered almost entirely in the alternative media, such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal and the Occupy Page of The Real News.

"Our job is to build pockets of resistance so that when the flash point arrives, people will have a place to go," Zeese said. "Our job is to stand for transformation, shifting power from concentrated wealth to the people. As long as we keep annunciating and fighting for this, whether we are talking about health care, finance, empire, housing, we will succeed."

"We will only accomplish this by becoming a mass movement," he said. "It will not work if we become a fringe movement. Mass movements have to be diverse. If you build a movement around one ethnic group, or one class group, it is easier for the power structure and the police to figure out what we will do next. With diversity you get creativity of tactics. And creativity of tactics is critical to our success. With diversity you bring to the movement different histories, different ideas, different identities, different experiences and different forms of nonviolent tactics."

"The object is to shift people from the power structure to our side, whether it is media, business, youth, labor or police," he went on. "We must break the enforcement structure. In the book Why Civil Resistance Works,' a review of resistance efforts over the last 100 years, breaking the enforcement structure, which almost always comes through nonviolent civil disobedience, increases your chances of success by 60 percent. We need to divide the police. This is critical. And only a mass movement that is nonviolent and diverse, that draws on all segments of society, has any hope of achieving this. If we can build that, we can win."

This week in Occupy, Egypt and Greece held watershed elections, Jamie Dimon was mic-checked at a Senate hearing, thousands marched in New York against stop and frisk, some key occupations had no choice but to close up shop and the Occupy National Gathering responded to Bill Maher.

#On the eve of Jamie Dimon's testimony before the Senate Banking Committee regarding JPMorgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss, Occupy the SEC and the OWS Alternative Banking Group sent a letter to Tim Johnson and Richard C. Shelby of the Committee posing serious questions that needed answering. Unfortunately the Senators lobbed softballs at Dimon. He was, however, mic-checked by five members of Occupy Homes DC, including a disabled former paramedic who lost her home due to J.P. Morgan's unethical business practices and is now facing eviction. They chanted "Stop foreclosures now!" and were led away in handcuffs.


Photo: Think Progress

#Parties supporting a bailout saving Greece from bankruptcy won a slim parliamentary majority on June 17, beating radical leftists who rejected austerity.

#In a slow, somber procession, several thousand demonstrators conducted a silent march down Fifth Avenue to protest the NYPD's discriminatory and illegal stop-and-frisk policies, which single out minority groups and create an atmosphere of martial law for the city's black and Latino residents. The policy also leaves serious scars.

#Earlier this week, a panel of judges appointed by deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak dissolved the popularly elected Parliament and allowed Ahmed Shafik, the toppled government's last prime minister, to run for president. On June 18, Shafik was defeated by the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate, Mohammed Morsi, in the country's first free presidential election.

#Occupy Wall Street, Occupy LA and Occupy NL staged casserole marches in solidarity with the Quebec student movement, which has passed the 100-day mark. New York's Infinite Strike Marches are staged every Wednesday at 8 p.m. In Vancouver, it's casseroles gone wild. Ontario students dropped a banner at the University of Western Ontario's convocation. Meanwhile, Quebec government lawyers defended Bill 78, an anti- protest law, in court, arguing that it's "in the public interest."

#The Anarchopanda has taken to the streets in open protest of Bill 78. Yes, panda.


Protesting BP at the Body Autonomy Ride on June 9. Photo: Barbara Ross.

#Last week, Bill Maher issued some advice to the Occupy Movement, believing it to be the last hope for the country. The Occupy National Gathering issued a swift response.

#Police and private security forces have raided a protest encampment of anti-fracking activists in Pennsylvania. For two weeks, neighbors and concerned citizens had been helping to stave off the eviction of more than 30 families in the Riverdale Mobile Home Park in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania, after residents were told they had to vacate the property because the land had been sold to the giant private water corporation Aqua America.

#Daily Kos ventures that recently staged occupations by undocumented activists at Obama campaign offices in Colorado, Michigan and California are likely responsible for the timing of Obama's executive order to halt deportations of Dream-eligible youth. Sure, why not?

#NY1 froze Occupy Congressional candidate George Martinez out of a scheduled televised debate, which was eventually cancelled due to a death in his opponent's family.

#Austin Guest and Marisa Holmes, veterans of Liberty Square, have brought the principles of the park to their Crown Heights apartment, including sustainable living and codes of conduct designed to prevent one person from dominating a conversation.

#A band of Occupy Wall Street protesters who call themselves "Occu-pirates" are facing off with the Parks Department over the right to keep a sailboat-turned-protest vehicle docked in the 79th Street Boat Basin and stage drum-filled demonstrations down the Hudson River.

#Mayor Michael Bloomberg has cut funding that may result in 8,000 evictions, while homelessness is at a record high. Meanwhile, he's privatizing New York, piece by piece. Today it's parking meters.

#The Guardian thinks it knows why Bloomberg vetoed a living wage bill.

#An NYPD officer has been indicted on manslaughter charges in the shooting death of Ramarley Graham, an unarmed 18-year-old, in his Bronx home in February.

#Here's a history of the antagonism between Trinity Church and Occupy Wall Street penned by OWSJ editor Allison Burtch for Animal NY.

#More than 450 people gathered outside a JP Morgan Chase in Houston's Skyline District for a peaceful demonstration calling for the end of poverty-wage jobs in Houston. Many of them were janitors who make just $9,000 a year. One person was arrested after attempting to help a protester trampled by a police horse. Exactly 22 years earlier, the situation for Los Angeles janitors wasn't so different.

#Occupy Our Homes MN surprised dozens of Freddie Mac employees at a corporate luncheon in Bloomington by "foreclosing" on them. The group also successfully pressured Citibank to cancel a scheduled sheriff's sale and approve a loan modification for the home of Occupy Homes MN activist Nick Espinosa and his mother, Colleen McKee Espinosa.


A casserole demonstration by a member of Occupy Seattle. Photo: Alex Garland

#Orlando police jailed Timothy Osmar in December for 18 days for writing revolutionary slogans on the sidewalk in chalk in front of city hall, only to drop the charges. Osmar turned around and filed suit, alleging that his First Amendment rights had been violated, and won big proving that it really is cheaper to respect a person's constitutional rights.

#The week of June 11 was Resolutions Week, during which local organizers held events to increase public awareness and put pressure on local, city and state governments to pass resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

#The remaining two members of Occupy the Farm will not be charged, meaning that there will be no charges filed against any of the Gill Tract Occupiers. So their occupation was illegal how…?

#A report found that the Oakland Police Department mishandled the October 25 Occupy Oakland protest. But there's plenty of blame to go around according to the report, the problem started at the top, with Mayor Jean Quan.

#Occupy Oakland is protesting against a recent ban on the use of shields by rallying outside the home of the council person who proposed it.

#The last of the Occupy DC tents at McPherson Square have been dismantled, effectively ending one of the oldest remaining encampments of the Occupy Movement.

#Protesters #occupied the Chicago Department of Public Health and refused to leave until they had a letter of resignation from Health Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair and a promise that six closed clinics would be reopened. Six were arrested.

#The Seattle Noise Brigade swarmed Capitol Hill to protest student debt.


Adam Surface

#Carmen Pittman of Occupy Atlanta is fighting to save the home that's been in her family for generations.

#Occupy Portland got a note from the city telling them that they are no longer allowed to hold meetings in the park without a permit. Apparently they haven't read the Bill of Rights. This, after a fence-mending baseball game occupiers played on June 11 against city employees.

#Twelve members of Occupy Philly were found guilty of "defiant trespassing" and conspiracy stemming from a November sit-in at a Center City Wells Fargo Bank.

#An indictment has been returned against three NATO Summit activists accused of plotting to fire bomb Mayor Rahm Emanuel's home and President Barack Obama's campaign headquarters.

#The Oakland Unified School District will close five schools that predominantly serve minority children. Parents and teachers have pleaded with the Board, and even filed lawsuits, to no effect.

#David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, #occupied a 64-square-foot cage to draw attention to the federal prohibition on growing industrial hemp until police cut him down with a chainsaw. Yes, a chainsaw.

#Molly Gambardella, class president at North Haven High School in Connecticut, won't be addressing her class from the dais at graduation because of her involvement with Occupy North Haven, for which she briefly lived on the New Haven Green.


Waving the Occupy flag in Russia.

#Occupy Fresno has a hater website, so they must be doing something right.

#Occupy the Hamptons is kicking off the summer with some direct action in Sag Harbor.

#The Occupy Caravan reached Reno and Salt Lake.

#Palestinian footballer and hunger striker Mahmoud Al Sarsak is near death in Israeli detention. He's fasting in protest at being held for almost three years without being convicted of a crime.

#Over the weekend, members of Occupy Moscow staged an unsanctioned protest outside the offices of the Investigative Committee to support an anti-corruption blogger who was there being questioned. Ten were arrested. On June 12, 60,000 poured into the streets of Moscow chanting "Russia will be free!" Demonstrators there will soon have to face a mammoth badminton-based weapon, as Russian law enforcement is ready to test a shuttlecock machine-gun. Here's a little more about the brave Russians facing off against Putin, and here's a profile of Occupy Abai.

#Police have evicted the last Occupy London campaigners from Finsbury Square. "Thanks to all those who support Occupy, and Finsbury Square," the Occupy LSX website read. "We tried to make a difference, at least we tried."


Indigenous activists spell out "Stop Belo Monte" with their bodies.

#Three hundred indigenous Amazonians, including small farmers, fisherfolk and local residents, #occupied the massive $18 billion Belo Monte Dam project, a temporary earthen dam recently built to impede the flow of the Xingu River. Residents gathered in formation spelling out the words "Pare Belo Monte," or "Stop Belo Monte," to send a powerful message to the world prior to this week's Rio + 20 gathering.

#Activists in Bulgaria have joined up to form Occupy Eagles Bridge in response to controversial amendments to the Forestry Act that benefit their "shady" oligarch.

#As soon as the Spanish government requested a bailout plan from the European Union, Democracia Real Ya! filed a motion with the Spanish National Court against those responsible for the crisis.

#Workers at China's notorious Foxconn factory, which manufactures Apple products, were greeted with police after attempting to redress their grievances regarding work conditions. Dozens were arrested.

#A leaked draft agreement revealed that the Obama administration is pushing a secretive trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, which could vastly expand corporate power, allowing foreign corporations operating in the U.S. to appeal key regulations to an international tribunal which would have the power to override U.S. law. "Go local" campaigns could be threatened by the agreement. The TPP is being called "NAFTA on steroids."


A 100-year-old woman arrested at the California Capitol building for standing up to save home care.

#The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging the president to oppose any policy toward Iran "that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat." In other words., the drumbeat for war has been sounded.

#The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott over his contentious push to remove thousands of potentially ineligible voters from Florida's voting rolls.

#Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders released Government Accountability Office records revealing that more than $4 trillion in near zero-interest Federal Reserve loans went to the banks and businesses of at least 18 current and former Federal Reserve regional bank directors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse.

#The Supreme Court will not revisit the Julian Assange case.

#Thanks to Canada, Occupy is not dead, wrote the Los Angeles Times. We're just in a transitional period. Here's another article questioning whether or not Occupy is actually going somewhere, but this one has quotes from an actual Occupier.

#The average American family's net worth dropped almost 40 percent between 2007 and 2010, according to a study by the Federal Reserve.

#Seven in 10 teens will be jobless this summer.


Photo: Primavera Mexicana

#Executive compensation continued to rise last year.

#Rhode Island has passed the country's first ever homeless bill of rights.

#The New York Attorney General's office recently won an important decision in Albany County State Supreme Court when a lawsuit by a Koch Brothers'-backed political organization, which attempted to stop New York's involvement in a multi-state campaign to cut climate changing emissions, was dismissed.

#Gay rights organizations and civil rights organizations, which once viewed each other warily, are making surprising alliances.

#Shareholders, once reticent, are now revolting for some of the same reasons we are.

#Insurance giant Aetna inadvertently disclosed more than $7 million in donations to conservative political groups in a regulatory filing made earlier this year.

#Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) called for a "digital bill of rights" to protect Internet users from intrusive legislation.

#In a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, with a straight face, that "government-compelled disclosure of contributions…is nothing less than an effort by the government itself to expose its critics to harassment and intimidation."

#Newt Gingrich, also with a straight face, said that elections are rigged in favor of the wealthy. And he should know.

#President Obama comes down hard on whistleblowers yet he himself leaks.

#Some of those who've been arrested for shoplifting at Wal-mart over the last several years have died while in custody of the megastore's Asset Protection staff.

#A major biotech company known as Syngenta has been criminally charged for denying knowledge that its genetically modified Bt corn actually kills livestock.


Occupier Ben P. arrested at the Cruz home in South Minneapolis while disguised as a bush.

#With virtually no debate, the North Carolina state Senate nixed global warming restrictions on the state's coast.

#Here are six government surveillance programs designed to monitor what you do online.

#The Nation reveals how the FBI is using informants to stir up fake terror plots, destroying lives in the process.

#The Atlantic explains how the Maple Spring fits in with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street sort of.

#The Village Voice ran a series of articles that accurately presented U.S. immigration policy as "apartheid."

#Dan Rather explained to Bill Maher how corporations own the media.

#Workers at the Davis Wire Co. in Kent, Washington, have been on strike for four weeks over forced 12-hour days and inadequate breaks.

#A USA Today investigation found that dozens of men have gone to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun and many of them don't even know they're innocent.


DREAMers line an on-ramp to the 101 Freeway near the Los Angeles Federal Building. Photo: Pocho-one Fotography

#Swoon: Robert Pattinson discussed Occupy.

#Citizen journalists are the future of news. Duh.

#Oregon's expansion of Medicaid not only provided healthcare to 10,000 who previously did not have it but also provided scientist definitive proof that Medicaid helps people, NPR reported.

#The Guardian asked whether the Republicans deliberately crashed the U.S. economy.

#Journalist Josh Stearns has been keeping track of the journalists arrested during Occupy actions. Here is a detailed list.

#God love The Onion.

#On June 21 there will be a national action against PNC Bank.

#The Paul Robeson Freedom School, an innovative 8-week educational program for Brooklyn youth most affected by the destructive policies enacted in the public school system, needs funding.


Occupy London

#Occupy the CITI Long Island City, that is.

#March to the California State Capitol on June 25 and demand a statewide moratorium on foreclosures.

#The Student Power Convergence 2012 will take place August 10 to 14 in Columbus, Ohio.

#According to The People's Record, the month of June has so far proved the busiest month for global protest-movement news.

Want to report news about your occupation or meetup? Email me at JenSacks77@gmail.com.

This week's roundup was brought to you in conjunction with Occupy ALL the Updates,