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

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Fall of the "Liberal Elite"
Posted by Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich at 9:30am, December 15, 2011.
You might almost think the news was good. The Europeans, so headlines tell us, have at least a "partial solution" to the Euro-zone crisis (until, of course, the next round of panic is upon us); the stock market has sort of rebounded (until the next precipitous plunge); the unemployment rate "dropped sharply" to 8.6% in November, the lowest it's been in more than two years (thanks in part to the strangest category around -- the 315,000 people who grew too discouraged last month to look for work and so were no longer considered unemployed but out of the labor force); and talk of a double-dip recession seems on holiday. So why pay attention to the modest-sized Associated Press story you were likely to find, if at all, deep inside your newspaper (as on page 21 of last Friday's Washington Post)? It was headlined "Household wealth down in 3rd quarter," with the telling subhead, "Corporate cash continues to grow, Fed report says."
Still, if you wanted to sum up the growing gap between the 1% and the 99%, you couldn't ask for better. In fact, household wealth wasn't just "down" 4%, it was the "biggest loss of wealth" for Americans "in more than two years," and those corporate cash stockpiles didn't simply continue to grow, they reached "record levels" at $2.1 trillion. Since American wealth is deeply linked to homeownership, the fact that "most economists expect home prices to keep falling" wasn't exactly good news, nor when it came to pensions and retirement was the July-to-September 12% drop in "the average balance in 401(k) plans managed by Fidelity Investments, the largest workplace savings plan provider." In sum, the average American household managed to lose $21,000 dollars in those three months, a total loss in household wealth of $2.4 trillion.
You might think that would make front pages nationwide, but we're evidently too busy dealing with complex subjects like whether the $10,000 bet offered by Mitt Romney, the $202 million man, during Saturday's Republican debate meant he was "out of touch" with normal Americans. In the meantime, TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich unerringly home in on a fast-changing American reality first brought to national attention by Occupy Wall Street: that, as the middle class goes down the chute, we're left in a world in which 99% "R" Us. This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and will appear in print in the latest issue of that magazine. Tom

The Making of the American 99%
And the Collapse of the Middle Class
By Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich
"Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs."
-- E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
The "other men" (and of course women) in the current American class alignment are those in the top 1% of the wealth distribution -- the bankers, hedge-fund managers, and CEOs targeted by the Occupy Wall Street movement. They have been around for a long time in one form or another, but they only began to emerge as a distinct and visible group, informally called the "super-rich," in recent years.
Extravagant levels of consumption helped draw attention to them: private jets, multiple 50,000 square-foot mansions, $25,000 chocolate desserts embellished with gold dust. But as long as the middle class could still muster the credit for college tuition and occasional home improvements, it seemed churlish to complain. Then came the financial crash of 2007-2008, followed by the Great Recession, and the 1% to whom we had entrusted our pensions, our economy, and our political system stood revealed as a band of feckless, greedy narcissists, and possibly sociopaths.
Still, until a few months ago, the 99% was hardly a group capable of (as Thompson says) articulating "the identity of their interests." It contained, and still contains, most "ordinary" rich people, along with middle-class professionals, factory workers, truck drivers, and miners, as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawns of the affluent.

It was divided not only by these class differences, but most visibly by race and ethnicity -- a division that has actually deepened since 2008. African-Americans and Latinos of all income levels disproportionately lost their homes to foreclosure in 2007 and 2008, and then disproportionately lost their jobs in the wave of layoffs that followed. On the eve of the Occupy movement, the black middle class had been devastated. In fact, the only political movements to have come out of the 99% before Occupy emerged were the Tea Party movement and, on the other side of the political spectrum, the resistance to restrictions on collective bargaining in Wisconsin.
But Occupy could not have happened if large swaths of the 99% had not begun to discover some common interests, or at least to put aside some of the divisions among themselves. For decades, the most stridently promoted division within the 99% was the one between what the right calls the "liberal elite" -- composed of academics, journalists, media figures, etc. -- and pretty much everyone else.
As Harper's Magazine columnist Tom Frank has brilliantly explained, the right earned its spurious claim to populism by targeting that "liberal elite," which supposedly favors reckless government spending that requires oppressive levels of taxes, supports "redistributive" social policies and programs that reduce opportunity for the white middle class, creates ever more regulations (to, for instance, protect the environment) that reduce jobs for the working class, and promotes kinky countercultural innovations like gay marriage. The liberal elite, insisted conservative intellectuals, looked down on "ordinary" middle- and working-class Americans, finding them tasteless and politically incorrect. The "elite" was the enemy, while the super-rich were just like everyone else, only more "focused" and perhaps a bit better connected.
Of course, the "liberal elite" never made any sociological sense. Not all academics or media figures are liberal (Newt Gingrich, George Will, Rupert Murdoch). Many well-educated middle managers and highly trained engineers may favor latte over Red Bull, but they were never targets of the right. And how could trial lawyers be members of the nefarious elite, while their spouses in corporate law firms were not?
A Greased Chute, Not a Safety Net
"Liberal elite" was always a political category masquerading as a sociological one. What gave the idea of a liberal elite some traction, though, at least for a while, was that the great majority of us have never knowingly encountered a member of the actual elite, the 1% who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.
The authority figures most people are likely to encounter in their daily lives are teachers, doctors, social workers, and professors. These groups (along with middle managers and other white-collar corporate employees) occupy a much lower position in the class hierarchy. They made up what we described in a 1976 essay as the "professional managerial class." As we wrote at the time, on the basis of our experience of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there have been real, longstanding resentments between the working-class and middle-class professionals. These resentments, which the populist right cleverly deflected toward "liberals," contributed significantly to that previous era of rebellion's failure to build a lasting progressive movement.
As it happened, the idea of the "liberal elite" could not survive the depredations of the 1% in the late 2000s. For one thing, it was summarily eclipsed by the discovery of the actual Wall Street-based elite and their crimes. Compared to them, professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1% took your house away.
There was, as well, another inescapable problem embedded in the right-wing populist strategy: even by 2000, and certainly by 2010, the class of people who might qualify as part of the "liberal elite" was in increasingly bad repair. Public-sector budget cuts and corporate-inspired reorganizations were decimating the ranks of decently paid academics, who were being replaced by adjunct professors working on bare subsistence incomes. Media firms were shrinking their newsrooms and editorial budgets. Law firms had started outsourcing their more routine tasks to India. Hospitals beamed X-rays to cheap foreign radiologists. Funding had dried up for nonprofit ventures in the arts and public service. Hence the iconic figure of the Occupy movement: the college graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.
These trends were in place even before the financial crash hit, but it took the crash and its grim economic aftermath to awaken the 99% to a widespread awareness of shared danger. In 2008, "Joe the Plumber's" intention to earn a quarter-million dollars a year still had some faint sense of plausibility. A couple of years into the recession, however, sudden downward mobility had become the mainstream American experience, and even some of the most reliably neoliberal media pundits were beginning to announce that something had gone awry with the American dream.
Once-affluent people lost their nest eggs as housing prices dropped off cliffs. Laid-off middle-aged managers and professionals were staggered to find that their age made them repulsive to potential employers. Medical debts plunged middle-class households into bankruptcy. The old conservative dictum -- that it was unwise to criticize (or tax) the rich because you might yourself be one of them someday -- gave way to a new realization that the class you were most likely to migrate into wasn't the rich, but the poor.
And here was another thing many in the middle class were discovering: the downward plunge into poverty could occur with dizzying speed. One reason the concept of an economic 99% first took root in America rather than, say, Ireland or Spain is that Americans are particularly vulnerable to economic dislocation. We have little in the way of a welfare state to stop a family or an individual in free-fall. Unemployment benefits do not last more than six months or a year, though in a recession they are sometimes extended by Congress. At present, even with such an extension, they reach only about half the jobless. Welfare was all but abolished 15 years ago, and health insurance has traditionally been linked to employment.
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60% of American firms now check applicants' credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.
Making Sense of the 99%
The Occupation encampments that enlivened approximately 1,400 cities this fall provided a vivid template for the 99%'s growing sense of unity. Here were thousands of people -- we may never know the exact numbers -- from all walks of life, living outdoors in the streets and parks, very much as the poorest of the poor have always lived: without electricity, heat, water, or toilets. In the process, they managed to create self-governing communities.
General assembly meetings brought together an unprecedented mix of recent college graduates, young professionals, elderly people, laid-off blue-collar workers, and plenty of the chronically homeless for what were, for the most part, constructive and civil exchanges. What started as a diffuse protest against economic injustice became a vast experiment in class building. The 99%, which might have seemed to be a purely aspirational category just a few months ago, began to will itself into existence.
Can the unity cultivated in the encampments survive as the Occupy movement evolves into a more decentralized phase? All sorts of class, racial, and cultural divisions persist within that 99%, including distrust between members of the former "liberal elite" and those less privileged. It would be surprising if they didn't. The life experience of a young lawyer or a social worker is very different from that of a blue-collar worker whose work may rarely allow for biological necessities like meal or bathroom breaks. Drum circles, consensus decision-making, and masks remain exotic to at least the 90%. "Middle class" prejudice against the homeless, fanned by decades of right-wing demonization of the poor, retains much of its grip.
Sometimes these differences led to conflict in Occupy encampments -- for example, over the role of the chronically homeless in Portland or the use of marijuana in Los Angeles -- but amazingly, despite all the official warnings about health and safety threats, there was no "Altamont moment": no major fires and hardly any violence. In fact, the encampments engendered almost unthinkable convergences: people from comfortable backgrounds learning about street survival from the homeless, a distinguished professor of political science discussing horizontal versus vertical decision-making with a postal worker, military men in dress uniforms showing up to defend the occupiers from the police.
Class happens, as Thompson said, but it happens most decisively when people are prepared to nourish and build it. If the "99%" is to become more than a stylish meme, if it's to become a force to change the world, eventually we will undoubtedly have to confront some of the class and racial divisions that lie within it. But we need to do so patiently, respectfully, and always with an eye to the next big action -- the next march, or building occupation, or foreclosure fight, as the situation demands.

[Keith Millea]

http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/12/15-0

Published on Thursday, December 15, 2011 by Ian MacKenzie

Naomi Klein - Interview with Occupy Vancouver

Shot by Ian MacKenzie ianmack.com

On Dec. 1, Naomi Klein joined "Occupy Condos: Take the Pantages!" to show support for affordable housing in the DTES.

After the march, members of Occupy Vancouver media team were able to sit down with Naomi and capture her thoughts on the Occupy Movement, the tar sands pipeline, and how to prepare for the largest economic shock yet.

[video=vimeo;33034678]http://vimeo.com/33034678[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

Thu Dec 15, 2011 at 09:57 AM PST

New poll shows Occupy Wall Street support growing, public discontent with Congress at record levels

by Chris Bowers

[URL="https://twitter.com/share"]
[/URL]

New polling from Pew shows that a plurality of Americans still support the Occupy Wall Street movement. In fact, support has grown since Occupy's mid-October media peak:Pew (PDF). 12/7-11. Adults (10/20-23 results)

Q. From what you've read and heard about the Occupy Wall Street movement involving demonstrations in cities around the country, do you strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose the Occupy Wall Street Movement?Support strongly: 15 (16)
Support somewhat: 29 (23)
Oppose somewhat: 16 (19)
Oppose strongly: 19 (16)

Perhaps the main reason for the continuing, and growing, support of the movement is that Americans overwhelmingly agree with its core concerns. By wide margins, people believe that "there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations," that "the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy," and that Wall Street hurts the economy more than it helps:

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.
The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36% say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts51% say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60%) and independents (54%) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49%).

Meanwhile, the public really doesn't like Congress, especially Republicans:

Public discontent with Congress has reached record levels, and the implications for incumbents in next year's elections could be stark. Two-in-three voters say most members of Congress should be voted out of office in 2012 the highest on record. And the number who say their own member should be replaced matches the all-time high recorded in 2010, when fully 58 members of Congress lost reelection bids the most in any election since 1948.The Republican Party is taking more of the blame than the Democrats for a do-nothing Congress. A record-high 50% say that the current Congress has accomplished less than other recent Congresses, and by nearly two-to-one (40% to 23%) more blame Republican leaders than Democratic leaders for this. By wide margins, the GOP is seen as the party that is more extreme in its positions, less willing to work with the other side to get things done, and less honest and ethical in the way it governs. And for the first time in over two years, the Democratic Party has gained the edge as the party better able to manage the federal government.

[Peter Lemkin]

Thu Dec 15, 2011 at 01:57 AM PST

Tired of police brutality against protesters? Try this...

by Ray PensadorFollow
[TABLE="class: stats"]
[TR]
[TD="class: statcomments"][/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]


By now is beginning to dawn on people that perhaps their understanding of what this country was about may have been a little off base. Constitutional protections? Right to peacefully assemble? The rule of law applied equally to all, regardless of station in life?
As we've seen, in the face of criminality and thievery by the ruling class, and the increasing oppression people are being subjected to as a consequence, when the citizenry has taken to the street in protest, they have been met with the fascist boot of their oppressors (in the form of militarized police-cum-corporate-goons).
Beatings, harassment of journalists, mass arrests, the use of tear gas, and pepper spray, and worst, have all become standard operating procedures for these "officers of the law."
And all this has happened even as the Occupy protest has remained peaceful (by and large). And yet, we are beginning to see the corporate media drumbeat trying to demonize these true patriots, members of the Occupy movement, by labeling them as "terrorists."
Who are the true terrorists? Who stole trillions of dollars by devising massive investment scams that plunged the country into economic despair?
Here's the thing... The beatings and the harassment, and the intimidation, and the arrests, and the increasingly serious charges being filed against protesters, are all part of a concerted strategy of "psychological warfare."
It engenders fear in the population; it intimidates people and makes them think twice before joining a protest march, or even supporting the movement; it helps create a sense of impotence.
The protest movement needs to evolve; it needs to take the task at hand much more seriously. I go to the protests, and interact with people, and at some level it feels like a "love fest." The music, the general assembly meetings addressing all kind of issues. It's all nice. I understand it; people want to come together in camaraderie, and friendship, and brotherhood. It's all good. I don't discourage that...
But what I don't see is "militancy" or discipline, organization, strategic thinking. And it seems to me that, given the challenge before us, those are precisely the things we are going to need if we are going to be able to mount a credible challenge to the fascistic corporatist hegemony.
And I argue that a highly-disciplined faction within the movement could be the greatest guarantee against eventual violence... Not that great unwarranted violence is not already happening. But of course, it's only one side perpetrating the violence: The fascistic militarized police against peaceful protesters.
I call for the formation of a "well-regulated" faction within the Occupy movement in order to engage in a relentless campaign of nationwide high-profile protest actions that are strategic, well-planned, and always peaceful.
Scenario... At Ocar Grant plaza Occupiers are mingling; it's 2:00pm, cold, but sunny. All of the sudden 50 members of this very focused and disciplined subset of protesters show up, all at once. They're all wearing dark-color clothing, and plain dark baseball caps.
Members of this group do not engage in dancing, or playing instruments, or discussions about the Glass-Steagall, or "Move to Amend." Their only focus is on coming up with very carefully-planned protest tactics meant to put a relentless amount of (increase) pressure on the corrupt system, while avoiding violent confrontation with the "authorities." A tall order, of course.
But here's the thing, for the same reasons this idea makes many good people reading this diary very nervous and uncomfortable, it is that the powers-that-be will take notice.
And at this point, we the people need to force the PTB to pay very careful attention at the just and fair grievances we are raising.
As I mentioned, the police brutality against protesters also serves as psychological warfare, meant to discourage others from joining the movement, and meant to defeat us.
This movement can't just be about protesters having their faces smashed in, or put in patty wagons for hours, left to urinate and defecate on themselves; or taken to private rooms for a beating.
Some say that we have accomplished a great deal thus far, and that the trajectory the movement is taking is just fine. But are we really? Has there been any change in policies? Or are more "austerity" measure being planned against the people.
My position is that if we are too timid when it comes to coming up with ideas to project power, there may come a time that people are going to feel pushed to despair, and then they may explode in anger, so you end up going from one extreme to the other.
Folks, this is very serious. We are facing the possibility of ending up in serfdom, under an brutally oppressive regime.
I've heard that there are military veterans joining the movement in different cities; they could be a perfect sub-set for this type of highly-disciplined, focused, and strategic (peaceful) group.
Regarding strategy, a group like this could evaluate the situation, and come up with many ideas to put the maximum amount of pressure on the system, while avoiding direct confrontation with the authorities.
A "propaganda" campaign would go hand in hand with this group's operations. They would project power, discipline, success, inspiration. They would be true "peaceful warriors."

[Peter Lemkin]

Three-Quarters Of Americans Think The 1 Percent Has Too Much Power

By Travis Waldron on Dec 15, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Since the 99 Percent Movement protests began across the country, multiple Republican lawmakers and strategists have announced their fear of what they claim are the movement's attacks on capitalism and America's free market economy. The protests and Democratic policies, some Republicans have claimed, represent a form of class warfare against the rich. And many have predicted that supporting the movement will come back to haunt Democrats.
But a new poll from the Pew Research Center found that when asked directly about the belief that sparked the 99 Percent Movement that the rich have too much power and influence in this country Americans of all political stripes largely agree. Wide majorities of Democrats, independents, and even Republicans, in fact, think the rich are too powerful, and a majority also thinks our economic system unfairly favors the wealthy, as the Washington Post's Greg Sargent highlighted:

Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations in the United States. In a 1941 Gallup poll, six-in-ten (60%) Americans expressed this view. About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight-in-ten (80%) of independents assert that power is too concentrated among the rich and large corporations, but this view is shared by a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans.
Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36% say the system is generally fair to most Americans. About three-quarters (76%) of Democrats and 61% of independents say the economic system is tilted in favor of the wealthy; a majority (58%) of Republicans say that the system is generally fair to most Americans.

In addition, Americans also have a skeptical view of Wall Street. A slim majority 51 percent thinks Wall Street hurts the economy more than it helps, including 60 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of independents. Just 36 percent think Wall Street helps more than it hurts.
Republican lawmakers who have decried the movement may be shocked by these numbers. But given that their policies have increased prosperity for the 1 percent while driving half of Americans into either poverty or low-income status, they probably shouldn't be.

[Peter Lemkin]

[video]http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,1326292364001_2102352,00.html[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

If you watch only one film this year, make it this one......



and the final chapter possible 'answer'.....
[video=vimeo;22305004]http://vimeo.com/22305004[/video]


More info on the film, filmmakers, speakers in the film, etc. HERE