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

[Peter Lemkin]

[Keith Millea]

The city government and police department has closed down Washington-Jefferson park and our camping Occupy community is asked to vacate today . We are continuing to work cooperatively with the police to functionally remove tents, break down structures, and foremost, keep our park clean during this displacement. Our goal is to continue to keep this a peaceful action, working with the police to deconstruct on our terms, and in turn making sure that personal belongings remain intact and in our possession, unlike many of the evicted Occupiers across the country.
Unfortunately, the social services that were promised to be on site to help with the transition as homeless folks left the park did not arrive until 3:30pm, and many people who needed these services had already left.

This is a great opportunity to show Eugene and the world how resilient and passionate our community isbecause it is built on love. To demonstrate this love, we want to initiate the Adopt an Occupier' campaign. This call goes out to members and supporters of the movement with houses or spare living situations. Please, open up your spare rooms, extra sofas, driveways, backyards or even a corner of a room. Please take the time to come down to the site and get in contact with a houseless Occupier to take home for the holiday season. Or call the Occupy Eugene hotline at 541-525-0130.
Solidarity starts at home. Adopt an Occupier.

AND THIS:

Police Say They Will Make No Arrests Tonight, Come Celebrate the Solstice With Us!

[Peter Lemkin]

Albany was also wiped off the map a few nights ago.
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Occupy Wall Street Protesters Sue Over Free Speech, Use Of Force
Occupy Wall Street Lawsuits

First Posted: 12/22/11 06:37 PM ET Updated: 12/23/11 10:11 AM ET

By ERIKA NIEDOWSKI, Associated Press

Most major Occupy encampments have been dispersed, but they live on in a flurry of lawsuits in which protesters are asserting their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly and challenging authorities' mass arrests and use of force to break up tent cities.

Lawyers representing protesters have filed lawsuits or are planning them in state and federal courts from coast to coast, challenging eviction orders and what they call heavy-handed police tactics and the banning of demonstrators from public properties.

Some say the fundamental right of protest has been criminalized in places, with protesters facing arrest and charges while doing nothing more than exercising protected rights to demonstrate.

"When I think about the tents as an expression of the First Amendment here, I compare it to Tahrir Square in Egypt," said Carol Sobel, co-chairwoman of the National Lawyers Guild's Mass Defense Committee.

"Our government is outraged when military forces and those governments come down on the demonstrators. But they won't extend the same rights in this country," she said. "They praise that as a fight for democracy, the values we treasure. It comes here and these people are riffraff."

A handful of protesters began camping out in September in a lower Manhattan plaza, demanding an end to corporate excess and income inequality, and were soon joined by scores of others who set up tents and remained around the clock. Similar camps sprang up in dozens of cities nationwide and around the world, but patience wore thin, and many camps including the flagship at Zuccotti Park and in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore. were forcibly cleared.

Public officials and police unions have generally defended moves to break up the camps, citing health and safety concerns. They also said that responding to problems at Occupy encampments was draining crime-fighting resources.

Protester lawsuits are now beginning to wend their way through the legal system, and attorneys say more are likely on the way.

The National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California sued the Oakland Police Department in federal court in November, saying police and other agencies violated demonstrators' Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force including "flash-bang" grenades against demonstrators who posed no safety threat. The suit says officials also violated their First Amendment rights to assemble and demonstrate.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan on Wednesday announced an independent investigation into the police response.

In Austin, Texas, this week, a federal judge has been hearing the case of two Occupy protesters who were arrested and later barred from City Hall under a policy their attorneys call overly broad and say amounts to a ban on speech. The Texas Civil Rights Project says around 106 people have been banned since the protests began, in some cases for up to a year. The policy says a criminal trespass notice may be issued for "unreasonably disruptive" conduct.

Yvette Felarca is among those suing campus police and administration officials at the University of California, Berkeley, after officers forcefully dispersed a group of Occupy protesters and others rallying for public education last month.

Felarca, a middle school teacher and organizer with the civil rights organization By Any Means Necessary, which filed the suit, says she was standing, arms linked with other demonstrators', before a line of police officers who moved in after some tents were set up on a lawn. She said she was chanting and yelling when a police officer hit her in the throat with his baton. She said she was also hit in her ribs, abdomen and back and watched others bear repeated blows.

"The brutality was absolutely designed to chill the speech of students in the movement and literally try to beat and terrorize our right to criticize, to think critically and to act on that criticism," Felarca said.

The university has called it "disconcerting" that the suit contains "so many inaccuracies."

Sobel, of the National Lawyers Guild, said a lawsuit is also planned in the case of the pepper-spraying by campus police of peaceful protesters at the University of California, Davis, video footage of which went viral.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the lawsuits an important check on police power. She noted that authorities haven't been uniformly excessive around the country, but pointed in New York City to mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge which are under litigation as well as the pepper-spraying of several women and the dark-of-night breakup of Zuccotti Park.

She said that her group has been concerned for years about police tactics, but that the response to the Occupy movement shines a light on them in a way that "engages and offends a new sector of the public."

She predicted there will be other lawsuits about excessive force, civil rights violations and mostly likely people's rights to get back into Zuccotti, which she said police have blocked from public usage with their pens.

"I think what's been happening with Occupy is so reminiscent of what happened during the Republican National Convention" in 2008, she said. "When people get together to engage in that most American of pastimes protest it almost always generates a defensive and repressive response from law enforcement. Occupy is no exception."

Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn., said police overreacted to the Occupy movement in some cities, which probably earned protesters some new support. Still, he noted, protesters' First Amendment rights are not without limitation.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Best with sound turned off...I must be getting old or today's taste in 'music' discordanent.'

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Published on Saturday, December 24, 2011 by Rolling Stone

A Christmas Message From America's Rich

by Matt Taibbi

It seems America's bankers are tired of all the abuse. They've decided to speak out.

True, they're doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don't have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn't have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven't yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
"Who gives a crap about some imbecile?" Marcus said. "Are you kidding me?"

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:
"If I hear a politician use the term paying your fair share' one more time, I'm going to vomit," said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there's Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs's money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street's increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you'll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can't walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
"You'll get more out of me," the billionaire said, "if you treat me with respect."

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.
"You have to have skin in the game," said Schwarzman, 64. "I'm not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system."

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson's collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman's line about lower-income folks lacking "skin in the game." This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no "skin in the game," ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.
It's not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax as a private equity chief, he doesn't pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman's quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).
So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America's problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enoughin our society's future. Apparently, we'd all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you're broke enough that you're not paying any income tax, you've got nothing butskin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can't afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can't afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you're not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can't hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today's Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don't need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo's Leon Black, and Carlyle's David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus's doorstep, and they get it killed.
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon the man the New York Times once called "Obama's favorite banker" had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system's doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who's complaining now about the unfair criticism. "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it," he recently said, at an investor's conference.
Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he's rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon's bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county's debt burden.
Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents' children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone's sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren't really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.
Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase "helped" Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.
Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase hell, it's a no-lose play, like cutting a car's brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.
But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We're talking about banks that not only didn't warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.
People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the "imbeciles" on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don't get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn't even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don't do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn't take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life's savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you'd at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don't have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:
Capitalists "are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be" and the wealthy aren't "a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot," Cooperman wrote. They make products that "fill store shelves at Christmas…"
Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupy is a word which has taken on new meaning this year as, from the streets of New York to the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, protesters have forced their case by the simple act of pitching tents.
On Thursday there was a stark reminder of their cause. New census data showed a record number of Americans, nearly half, are living in poverty or are classified as low income.
The BBC's Katty Kay was joined by Princeton professor, Cornel West, to discuss the distribution of wealth in America and the Occupy movement.


Interview on BBC with Prof. West here

[Peter Lemkin]

It's time that we valued people over profits, poll results show

The British public want business to put "people before profits" and to see politicians close the gap between rich and poor, according to a new survey.
The findings suggest growingsupport for "responsible capitalism" in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and bankers' excessive bonuses and public sympathy with the anti-globalisation protests such as the Occupy London camp outside St Paul'sCathedral.
YouGov, which polled 1,723 people for the Labour-affiliated Fabian Society and the TUC, found that 80 per cent believe the private sector should forgo some profits to meet a wider responsibility to their employees, customers and communities and invest more for the long-term. Only 12 per cent think that maximising profits for shareholders is a company's top priority.
To see the graphic click here.
Seven out of 10 people believe the gap between those at the top and everyone else is too wide and bad for ordinary people, while 20 per cent think we should not worry about the gap too much or reduce rewards for successful people.
The figures suggest politicians have been right to try to appeal to a changing public mood in recent months. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, sparked a debate over capitalism in September by saying the Government should punish "predators" and reward "producers."
However, YouGov found that people remain wary about too much state intervention. Some 44 per cent believe that past government intervention has usually ended in tears and that the state should keep out of the way.
About one in three people (31 per cent) thinks the economy would benefit if the Government intervened more.
The poll uncovered markedly different attitudes among supporters of the two Coalition parties. Liberal Democrat voters are significantly more progressive than the average person and on some issues are more progressive than Labour voters.
Conservative supporters are almost evenly split on whether the rich-poor gap is bad for ordinary people, while 78 per cent of Lib Dem voters believe it is bad and only 14 per cent do not.
The Coalition parties' supporters are also divided over workplace rights. Almost half of Tory voters say employee rights lead to fewer jobs and a weaker economy but only 19 per cent of Liberal Democrat supporters agree. While 46 per cent of Tory supporters think businesses would be more successful if they involved their workforce, that view is held by 74 per cent of Lib Dem voters.
According to YouGov, Britons are pessimistic about the economic outlook. Only 18 per cent expect people to be better off in 10 years' time and only 11 per cent believe future generations will have better living standards than today.
Andrew Harrop, the Fabian Society's general secretary, said: "The Westminster village is misjudging the British public's views on economic issues.
"Our polling shows overwhelming support for what are regarded as left-leaning views among not only Liberal Democrat and Labour supporters but also from millions of Conservative voters. On economics, the Conservative leadership is totally out of touch with the mainstream."

[Peter Lemkin]