Occupy Everywhere - Sept 17th - Day of Rage Against Wall Street and what it stands for!

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

The youth of OWS Say "It's the system stupid!"
Posted by Denver Progressive in General Discussion
Fri Dec 09th 2011, 08:53 PM
As the ruling class of this country continue to scratch their heads in public about the Occupy Wall Street movement, most of us regular folks had seen this movement coming for sometime now. Young Americans have joined OWS, not just because there is a high unemployment rate in this country, and not just because they go from one job interview to the next, practically losing the ability to feel the disappointment of yet another rejection. No, they joined the OWS movement because they are losing hope that the American system can still successfully work for them and their futures.

At a time in these young peoples lives when society should be encouraging them to dream big and work hard while leaving a crack open in the door of opportunity, they are being told in subtle and not so subtle ways that they should seriously lower their expectations. They are basically being asked to embrace a new downsized version of the American dream where the mantra is to settle for less. Young Americans are hearing messages like "Don't bother owning a home when you can rent" and "you must settle for a lesser job with less pay, because your labor is a dime a dozen in the new global economy." This is a far cry from the "own your own home" and "through hard work, the sky's the limit" messages that their parents received just a generation ago.

And although the prospects of attaining the American dream is dwindling, what is expected of young men and women today has not changed whatsoever. They are still expected to take care of themselves and their families while paying off an enormous amount of debt, including student loans which serve as an anchor, impeding their ability to compete with those who do not have these burdens. And they are expected to do all of this without a decent job to do it with. It reminds me a bit of a modern-day version of indentured servitude, but unlike the indentured servants of the past, the youth of today don't even have a way to work themselves out of their debt.

Many young Americans who support the OWS movement don't trust corporations, and eye them with suspicion for colluding with their government and corrupting the political process. Young people are even less trusting of America's corporate capitalistic system, and really, who can blame them? These kids see all around them the evidence of a system that far too often values profits over the well-being of people. In fact, many at OWS have shared the feeling that American capitalism has altogether failed them by making profits off of their parents and grandparents, whose labor and consumerism built this country, and then turning around and abandoning them for cheaper labor found elsewhere.

Young Americans who are lucky enough to have jobs, often experience a reduction in their hours and benefits, while having to take on more work for the same or even less pay. They have seen coworkers who were experienced and loyal employees get dropped and replaced by new workers who are paid much less for the same position. Young Americans have watched corporations use ugly tactics in the past, like forcing their parents and grandparents into early retirement. And more recently,these young people have witnessed the little bit of wealth that their parents and grandparents had acquired over their lifetime get drained away when they lost their homes and life savings, all while the corporations reported record earnings and the big banks got rescued.

The youth of this country has realized that American capitalism doesn't work for them, they work for it. They can see that American corporations know no loyalty to the American workers who built them up. They know now that these corporations will move on to the next desperate population that's willing to work for next to nothing. When you consider this, you can understand why these young adults question why they should be forced to work in, and remain loyal to a system where all but the minority come out on the losing end. Yet this is something that is rarely ever talked about in the main stream media. It's almost as if there are no other possible alternative systems but our own to speak of.

The youth, along with the rest of America, are locked into a dysfunctional system that allows the privileged few to control and distribute all of the resources and rewards that this country produces, while keeping a disproportionate amount for themselves. When you consider that Young people are generally at the bottom of this system, it's not really not difficult to understand why you hear them throwing that socialism word so often. Trust the American system after what they have seen? They'd be blind fools to do so. But thankfully, America's youth are far from fools, and education, along with social networking and the internet in general have opened them up to the other ways that people work and live in the world. Unlike some older generations, who often associated the word socialism with Soviet Russia and fear, today's youth views socialism with less negatively and they are less afraid it then they are for their own uncertain futures in the system they are stuck in now.

Many young Americans see the economic injustices and moral failures of American capitalism, and no longer believe that the system we have in place can allow them to achieve a better life than their parents had. This is one of the reasons why young American's have looked elsewhere for answers, and in doing so, they experimented in creating their own micro societies at Occupy Wall Streets all across the country. The OWS system, is composed of direct democracy and values equality over all. It is a system that much more closely resembles socialism then it does capitalism, and it is also one of OWS's greatest successes. Through these micro societies, OWS showed themselves and America that the system they created can be truly representative of the will of the people, while also being morally responsible. A claim that American capitalism can't yet make.

Politicians beware, the young people of this country, many of whom make up a good percentage the OWS movement, want more than your typical political talk and band-aid solutions. These patriotic Americans want to change the whole system to more closely resemble the one that they have created. Some within the OWS movement, some say that if implemented in America, a system like theirs could allow for capitalism in some form if it were properly regulated and non predatory. Others say they would prefer not to have capitalism, because the powerful always find a way to strip away regulations. Either way, the one thing everyone can agree on is that the energy that the OWS movement has produced, the same energy that young people are tapping into, is so powerful that it not only leaves the ruling class shaking in their boots, but it also makes them extremely dangerous as they are willing to use any means necessary to make sure that change doesn't happen.

As they did with movements of the late 1960's, the ruling class is beginning to show its disdain for the OWS movement, because it challenges their and their supremacy. And if we have learned anything from the struggles of the 60's, it's that when the ruling class gets agitated, two things tend to happen: 1)the words "dirty hippie" reemerge, and 2) There is an intensification of aggression toward the young people who are trying to change the system. Once the powers that be come to realize that no matter how much money and force they throw at trying to counter the OWS movement, they simply cannot not stop it, we will see that increased aggression occur.

In the end, the reason that OWS is so revolutionary is simply because those who have created it, lived it and support it, believe that they have created a fluid and admittedly imperfect, but altogether better system of living than the one they were born into. And once you see and experience something better than what you had before, you never want go back to the old. So, the OWS movement will continue to evolve in a fight for its survival, and young Americans will rightly go on occupying and practicing civil disobedience until they see a system in place that will allow them and their fellow citizens to live a decent life, while giving them a renewed sense of hope for their futures. And to that I say solidarity forever!

[Peter Lemkin]

The Epic Failure of Republican Trickle Down Economics
By Jon Perr
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/epic-...-economics [lots of charts and diagrams]
When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic.

But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

Job Creation and Economic Growth
The Stock Market
Income Inequality
National Debt
The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

That dismal performance prompted David Leonhardt of the New York Times to ask last fall, "Why should we believe that extending the Bush tax cuts will provide a big lift to growth?" His answer was unambiguous:

Those tax cuts passed in 2001 amid big promises about what they would do for the economy. What followed? The decade with the slowest average annual growth since World War II. Amazingly, that statement is true even if you forget about the Great Recession and simply look at 2001-7...

Is there good evidence the tax cuts persuaded more people to join the work force (because they would be able to keep more of their income)? Not really. The labor-force participation rate fell in the years after 2001 and has never again approached its record in the year 2000.

Is there evidence that the tax cuts led to a lot of entrepreneurship and innovation? Again, no. The rate at which start-up businesses created jobs fell during the past decade.

The data are clear: lower taxes for America's so called job-creators don't mean either faster economic growth or more jobs for Americans.

It's no wonder Leonhardt followed his first question with another. "I mean this as a serious question, not a rhetorical one," he asked, "Given this history, why should we believe that the Bush tax cuts were pro-growth?" Or as Mark Shields asked and answered in April:

"Do tax cuts help 'job creators' or 'robber barons'?"

But as the Washington Post and the New York Times suggested, Bush's dismal performance was hardly the exception to the rule. In general, the American economy simply does better when a Democrat sits in the White House. Apparently, America's job creators can create a lot more jobs when their taxes are higher - even much higher - than they are today.

As Harry Truman famously said:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

The Stock Market

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans' superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor's 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush's time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon's abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover's cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

As it turns out, as the New York Times also showed in October 2008, the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole." To make its case, the New York Times asked readers to imagine having put their money where its mouth is. Contrary to Republican mythology, Americans fare better - much, much better - under Democratic administrations:

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover's presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(For the eye-popping chart of the S&P's performance under each of the presidents from Hoover through Bush 43, visit here.)

As the broader record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

(There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. As Slate in 2002 and the New York Times in 2003 found, "It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats." Barack Obama has been no exception.)

Income Inequality

While the GOP's "job creators" didn't create any jobs after the top rate was trimmed to 35 percent and capital gains and dividends taxes were slashed under President Bush, they did enjoy an unprecedented windfall courtesy of the United States Treasury.

For Republicans, this predictable result of the Bush tax cuts was a feature, not a bug.

As the Center for American Progress noted in 2004, "for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little," adding, "By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration's latest tax cuts."

But that's just the beginning of the story. As the CAP also reported, the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. And to be sure, their payday was staggering. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that millionaires on average pocketed almost $129,000 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. As a result, millionaires saw their after-tax incomes rise by 6.2%, while the gain for those earning between $40,000 and $50,000 was paltry 2.2%.

And as the New York Times uncovered in 2006, the 2003 Bush dividend and capital gains tax cuts offered almost nothing to taxpayers earning below $100,000 a year. Instead, those windfalls reduced taxes "on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000." As the Times explained in a shocking chart: "The top 2 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $200,000, received more than 70% of the increased tax savings from those cuts in investment income."

And as the Washington Post recently explained, for the very richest Americans the successive capital gains tax cuts from Presidents Clinton (to 20 percent) and Bush (to 15 percent) have been "better than any Christmas gift":

While it's true that many middle-class Americans own stocks or bonds, they tend to stash them in tax-sheltered retirement accounts, where the capital gains rate does not apply. By contrast, the richest Americans reap huge benefits. Over the past 20 years, more than 80 percent of the capital gains income realized in the United States has gone to 5 percent of the people; about half of all the capital gains have gone to the wealthiest 0.1 percent.

This convenient chart tells the tale:

It's no wonder that between 2001 and 2007- a period during which poverty was rising and average household income had fallen - the 400 richest taxpayers saw their incomes double to an average of $345 million even as their effective tax rate was virtually halved. As the Washington Post noted, "The 400 richest taxpayers in 2008 counted 60 percent of their income in the form of capital gains and 8 percent from salary and wages. The rest of the country reported 5 percent in capital gains and 72 percent in salary."

(It's worth noting that the changing landscape of loopholes, deductions and credits, especially after the 1986 tax reform signed by President Reagan, makes apples-to-apples comparisons of marginal tax rates over time very difficult. For more background, see the CBO data on effective tax rates by income quintile.)

If you had any lingering doubts about Warren Buffett's admission that "it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning," this pair of charts from the New York Times should put them to rest. As the upper-income tax burden fell, income inequality in the U.S. exploded.

As the Washington Post demonstrated in its jaw-dropping series "Breaking Away," plummeting tax rates overall and on capital gains in particular have been widening the chasm between the rich and everyone else in America:

National Debt

The Republican tax cut windfall for the wealthy didn't merely produce the lowest total federal burden in 60 years and the highest income inequality in 80. GOP trickle down policies also drained the United States Treasury.

In case Americans had forgotten that Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush doubled it, the New York Times presented this helpful reminder:

Leave aside for the moment that small government icon Ronald Reagan signed 17 debt ceiling increases into law. (That might explain why the Gipper repeatedly demanded Congress boost his borrowing authority and called the oceans of red ink he bequeathed to America his greatest regret.) As it turns out, Republican majorities voted seven times to raise the debt ceiling under President Bush and the current GOP leadership team voted a combined 19 times to bump the debt limit $4 trillion during his tenure. (That vote tally included a "clean" debt ceiling increase in 2004, backed by 98 current House Republicans and 31 sitting GOP Senators.)

Of course, they had to. After all, the two unfunded wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 (the first war-time tax cut in modern U.S. history) and the Medicare prescription drug program drained the U.S. Treasury. Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor voted for all of it.

Again, in words and pictures, the New York Times tells the tale:

As the Washington Post summed up the CBO's conclusions regarding the causes of the nation's mounting debt earlier this year, "The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts." The analysis by the Times echoed that finding:

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here -- from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

But as Ezra Klein explained in the Washington Post, the revealing Times chart doesn't tell the full story of the impact of Bush-era policies on future debt facing Barack Obama:

What's also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama's major expenses were temporary -- the stimulus is over now -- while Bush's were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn't just lower revenue for 10 years. It's clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them.

These two graphs from the Washington Post and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities make that point crystal clear. Analyses by CBPP showed that the Bush tax cuts accounted for half of the deficits during his tenure, and if made permanent, over the next decade would cost the U.S. Treasury more than Iraq, Afghanistan, the recession, TARP and the stimulus - combined.

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch was telling the truth when he described Republican fiscal mismanagement during the Bush years by acknowledging, "It was standard practice not to pay for things."

As Paul Krugman documented, the jump in federal spending as a percentage of GDP under President Obama is almost completely explained by the contraction of the economy and the stimulus programs now ending. (Republicans always take great to care to avoid mentioning that the total federal tax burden as a percentage of the U.S. economy is at its lowest level in 60 years even as income inequality is at its highest in 80.) As Krugman summed it up:

Now, pointing out the Obama spending binge is a myth generally produces rage: people know that it happened, because Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal say so. But that doesn't make it true.

Put another way, when it comes to the American balance sheet, Republicans broke it. Now, they claim, Democrats own it.

The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Despite Republican mythmaking that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) "created zero jobs," the CBO reported last month that the stimulus added up to 2.4 million jobs and boosted GDP by as much as 1.9 points in the past quarter. As it turns out, that conclusion confirms the consensus of most economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust- that President Obama's recovery program is continuing to deliver benefits for the American people.

From the beginning, the CBO has testified to the success of the largely concluded 2009 stimulus package in driving employment and economic growth. (That's one reason why Republicans like GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich want to abolish the agency.) Now, as The Hill reported Tuesday, the CBO has found that "President Obama's 2009 stimulus package continues to benefit the struggling economy":

The agency said the measure raised gross domestic product by between 0.3 and 1.9 percent in the third quarter of 2011, which ended Sept. 30. The Commerce Department said Tuesday that GDP in that quarter was only 2 percent total.

CBO said that the stimulus also lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 and 1.3 percentage points and increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million...

By CBO's numbers, the $800 billion stimulus added up to 0.9 million jobs in 2009, 3.3 million jobs in 2010 and 2.6 million jobs in 2011.

But to really gauge the success of the stimulus, it's worth taking a second look at just how dire the U.S. economic situation was when the Obama administration made its fateful prediction that unemployment would peak at 8 percent. As The Economist and the Washington Post's Ezra Klein detailed, in early 2009 the American economy was not only in much worse shape than anyone imagined; it was literally on the brink of collapse. As The Economist explained the run-up to the passage of the $787 billion recovery program:

The White House looked at the economic situation, sized up Congress, and took its shot. Unfortunately, the situation was far more dire than anyone in the administration or in Congress supposed.

Output in the third and fourth quarters fell by 3.7% and 8.9%, respectively, not at 0.5% and 3.8% as believed at the time. Employment was also falling much faster than estimated. Some 820,000 jobs were lost in January, rather than the 598,000 then reported. In the three months prior to the passage of stimulus, the economy cut loose 2.2m workers, not 1.8m. In January, total employment was already 1m workers below the level shown in the official data.

Klein points out that "wasn't until this year that the actual number was revealed" for Q4 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As The Economist lamented, the Obama administration was "flying blind."

Whether the White House should have known the unemployment picture was going to be much, much worse (as Joseph Stiglitz and Jared Bernstein argued) or that the stimulus package itself was too small and too laden with tax breaks (as Paul Krugman warned at the time), there is little question that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act worked largely as designed. And you don't have to take the CBO's word for it. You can just ask some of John McCain's advisers.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO and chief economic adviser to John McCain during the 2008 election, acknowledged the impact of the stimulus. Certainly no fan of either Barack Obama or the design of the ARRA, Holtz-Eakin told Ezra Klein that:

"The argument that the stimulus had zero impact and we shouldn't have done it is intellectually dishonest or wrong. If you throw a trillion dollars at the economy it has an impact, and we needed to do something."

Mark Zandi, another adviser to McCain, was much more adamant. Federal intervention, he and Princeton economist Alan Blinder argued in August 2010, literally saved the United States from a second Great Depression. In "How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End," Blinder and Zandi's models confirmed the impact of the Obama recovery program and concluded that "laissez faire was not an option":

The effects of the fiscal stimulus alone appear very substantial, raising 2010 real GDP by about 3.4%, holding the unemployment rate about 1½ percentage points lower, and adding almost 2.7 million jobs to U.S. payrolls. These estimates of the fiscal impact are broadly consistent with those made by the CBO and the Obama administration.

But their modeling also suggests that the totality of federal efforts to rescue the banking system dating back to the fall of 2008 prevented a catastrophic collapse:

We find that its effects on real GDP, jobs, and inflation are huge, and probably averted what could have been called Great Depression 2.0. For example, we estimate that, without the government's response, GDP in 2010 would be about 11.5% lower, payroll employment would be less by some 8½ million jobs, and the nation would now be experiencing deflation.

While the U.S. economy is now experiencing slow but steady growth and job gains, the effects of the stimulus are winding down. (Worse still, the draconian budget-cutting by state and local governments which have already cost 600,000 workers their jobs could rightly be deemed the "anti-stimulus.") As Paul Krugman described the new report from the Congressional Budget Office:

What it tells us is that the US federal government has been practicing destructive fiscal austerity since the middle of 2010 (and that's not even talking about what's happening at the state and local level). Here's the average of CBO's high and low estimates of the impact of the ARRA on the level (not the rate of growth) of GDP by quarter:

And you wonder why the economy isn't recovering strongly?

Which is why the American people and economists alike want more action - and not less- from Washington. Polling shows that jobs and the economy are now consistently rated as a higher priority than deficit reduction, even among Republicans. While Zandi of Moody's Economics aggressively forecast that President Obama's $447 billion American Jobs Act could add 1.9 million jobs and lift GDP by two points next year, a Bloomberg survey of economists concluded the AJA at a minimum would keep the U.S. from falling back into a recession. And as the Washington Post explained in November:

Estimates vary on the extent that growth in the gross domestic product could suffer. Goldman Sachs economic forecaster Alec Phillips estimated that allowing the payroll tax cut to expire would reduce growth by as much as two-thirds of a percentage point in early 2012. Macroeconomic Advisers estimates that it would reduce GDP growth by 0.5 percent and cost the economy 400,000 jobs by the fourth quarter. Allowing unemployment benefits to lapse would result in the economy being slower by an additional quarter of a percent and cost 200,000 jobs.


Addressing his audience in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama summed up the performance of the Republican trickle down economic theory in practice. As he explained and as the images above attest, the picture of GOP economic orthodoxy is not a pretty one:

Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory.

Truer words were never spoken. Even if Republicans and their right-wing water carriers don't want to hear them.

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupied Media: Foreclose on the Corporate Fourth Estate
by Michael Nigro

Beneath the ever-expanding Occupy umbrella, one of the broad messages is this: people are fed up going through the regular political channels.

Politicians have intentionally or otherwise immersed themselves into the corporate toilet for the wholly unacceptable reason of retaining their political position and their life of privilege.

Metaphorically, our two-party political system is a giant decomposing carcass, where elected officials are imprisoned within its ribcage, expecting further sustenance from us. But they've had their feast. If the Occupy Movement becomes it's own living and breathing entity, the inevitable will be accelerated: these politicians will devour each other. Let them.

There is, however, another industry verging on this sort of cannibalism, the corporate media. A body politic now eschews The Fourth Estate, dismissing part (if not all) of what it's become.

This is materializing in more of an opaque and organic way than the 99's denunciation of our political system and, to some degree, the Fourth Estate is now Occupied, being reconstructed and utilized to reestablish the public's trust. The mainstream media may not quite be a decomposing carcass, as there are still quality sectors and true professionals, but the distrust has placed the profession on life-support

Citizens are not simply searching for alternative news sources, they're creating their own media prism for an issue, story or an event to pass through.

For sometime now the Internet and the utilization of social networking has been facilitating a citizen's ability to devise useful ways on how information is gathered and disseminated. It was not until the inchoate days of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, however, that we have seen it taken to such a level in the United States (a nod to the Arab Spring, here). The mainstream media, seemingly, cannot keep up.

At an award's ceremony this past November 22, former CBS news anchor Dan Rather accepted his award from the Committee to Protect Journalists and challenged his colleagues to do a better job:

"But now, we see our fellow citizens taking to the streets. And, that my friends, is our cue to get back to work. As the People of our nation begin rising up, they expect the business of news to be about inquiry and accountability."

During many of the recent Occupy marches, the 24/7 media colossus has been outmaneuvered by this amorphous trend; Unpaid people reporting, co-producers, becoming credible sources of information. Often armed with whatever recording device available, consumers are becoming the courageous ones, the ones who are putting the public's interest first and constructing information ecosystems throughout social media portals.

Some call it Citizen Journalism or Collaborative Journalism others would rather not use the word "journalism" because, like the word "reality," we've surrendered the actual meaning of it. At best, the word "journalist" has lost it's real substance, cheapened by those who present opinion as fact, create the news rather than report it, frame hate propaganda behind a gauze of faux reportage.

Dan Rather, in that same acceptance speech:

"Today, how we look and how we "present" information has become far more important than how we gather it. It's upside down and backwards. And, the worst part is ... we have gotten used to it."

Mr. Rather may be overdue in revealing his inner thoughts on his former industry (and, as it was pointed out to me, made a substantial living, thus making it easy for him to rage against the same machine where he was once a huge cog). But Dan Rather is right: for the sake of ratings facts are often beside the point. And many journalist and media professionals know it, loath it, turn a blind eye and cash their paychecks to it. Begs the question: shouldn't we call the corporate media exactly what it is, a paid advertisement?

When the news is owned and driven by corporations, packaged for the sole purpose to grab eyeballs for profit, the result isn't so much fact but entertainment. Many of the TV news programs have devolved into a carnival, complete with fancy graphics, dramatic music stings, pseudo-punditry and the exaggerated energy of an infomercial.

So is it too late "to get back to work," as Dan Rather suggested to his colleagues? Of course not. And it's unfair to indict the entire profession; some "real" journalists haven't stopped working and are stellar. But the shift is clear, beyond the tsunami of cyber-garbage on the web, new and unlikely sources are presenting credible and honest alternative forms of news. From the hors d'oeuvres tapped out on Twitter to the live feeds of Ustream and Livestream, so the whole world can watch.

The danger, here, is that these feeds and social networks (and the entire Internet) become corporatized and then censored (some argue that that is already happening).

In mid-November, CNN laid off 50 of its staff members, citing the growth of "citizen journalism" as the reason. Stephen Colbert subsequently lampooned this alternative brand of news on his November 28, 2011 show, an utterly hilarious bit, generating hundreds of Facebook re-postings and comments praising Colbert for supporting "real" journalists, for telling it like it is.

In watching the Colbert piece, however, the presumption is that we have "real" journalist delivering reliable and accurate news. That's hard to reconcile, especially since an astonishing number of people claim to actually gettheir news from "The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It's Shakespearean: The court jester and the fool are the tellers of truth, the wisest of us all.

This is not a pejorative dig to Colbert and Stewart. It's a message actually: in the public's eyes the media profession is loosing its credibility, creeping toward irrelevant.

Just as the Occupy movement is not about a particular electorate constituency (it's about redesigning our dead system), the citizens feel that the media is not being held accountable for intentionally or otherwise screwing up the Public's narrative.

As Liberty Square was being eviscerated in the wee hours of November 15, 2011, the mainstream media, due in part to a coordinated censoring by the NYPD, missed a great deal of it which, frankly, is not a mortal sin; not every story can be captured. It's impossible.

But what happened later that day, at 11:30 a.m., is a one small example of why a negative perception lingers about "real" journalist.

After the park had been power-cleaned and barricaded, a court order deemed the eviction unlawful and therefore the protesters were attempting, as the law allowed, to re-enter, the threat of rain notwithstanding. The NYPD were blatantly ignoring the court order, prompting police and protesters to engage like inexperience rugby players.

One such scrum was directly between the cordoned-off park and the police approved press area, where all the press vans and their crew had returned from their eviction and set up just like they had been the weeks prior. None of the "real" journalist captured this particular confrontation: a 54-year-old woman and mother of 4 getting punched in the head by a police officer.

It is, however, documented in this video (shaky footage and all): Police Brutality Explained and Specific. And it was shot by three strangers (Casey Neistat, Dennis Trainor Jr., and myself) whereby, a couple of days after the incident, we sought each other out on the Internet and created the piece.

Police Brutality Explained and Specific from Nigrotime on Vimeo.

The mainstream media didn't catch this small skirmish. Again, it's impossible to capture every moment. CNN, however, jumped on the story after the fact, wrangled the mother of four for an interview. And though many proffered and pointed out the offending officer, the other side of the story, the "real" news crew neglected to investigate further.

The reporter went back to a production crate, sat down and began reapplying her makeup. If only at that moment the sky opened up. Their umbrellas, resting against their media bulk, looked so small.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

#Occupy Calgary recently lost their battles to maintain their encampment. Protesters packed up their belongings, cleaned the site, and turned the moment into something magnificent, instead of a struggle...they and a local artist left a new sculpture at the site...from an #OccupyCalgary member: 'the placque reads: 'Presented to the people of Calgary, as a lasting monument to the suffering of all humankind, and our unceasing desire to overcome'".

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[Peter Lemkin]

http://zulfahmed.wordpress.com/2011/12/0...o-america/

Israel tests police state techniques on Palestinians and exports them to America

December 4, 2011 by zulfahmed

Speaking about the Israeli occupation of Palestinians and the boycott movement against Israel, Shir Hever, an Israeli economist working in Jerusalem had said the following extremely insightful comments:

Israel is a kind of factory for repression and mechanisms of repression that are being sold to other countries in the world. And mechanisms that are used against Palestinians are often replicated and used against citizens of other countries by their governments because they've already been tested on Palestinians as kind of guinea pigs, if you want. And so the boycott movement is also a way for people to voice their dissatisfaction with their governments. Why are their governments enabling Israel, allowing Israel to continue to violate international law, to develop and create weapons of mass destruction illegally, to deny Palestinians citizenship and democracy, and to incarcerate 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip in conditions of utter poverty, where their only means of sustenance is aid from the international community?

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal has taken the trouble to trace more precisely this phenomenon, although I do not suggest that Hever influenced Blumenthal directly. In two articles, Blumenthal shows us precisely how the Israeli police state mechanism tested on Palestinians have been used against the Occupy Wall Street movement in America.

First is the use of the the LRAD Sound Cannon in New York. Second is the joint training of Israeli Border Police with California police around the University of California Davis Occupy protests. These two incidents underline the point raised by Hever which is significant for us today because the Occupy protests are a worldwide phenomena and it is important for the western public to have a clear understanding in the direct role played by the police state infrastructure in their lives from that of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The usual link between external war-internal police state had amply been shown after the 9/11 false flag, which we know now were preceded by the plans of an Israel-centric neoconservative cabal who had radical plans for regime changes throughout the Muslim world.

Those who feel that these police state measures that have been rammed through since the Israel-centric neocons planned and executed the 9/11 false flag which was followed by police state measures in America and Europe will make them safer' will realise, as the Occupy movement gains strength, that these are not your friends but your wardens, and you will risk living in a prison planet more and more like occupied Palestine.