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

[Peter Lemkin]

(Reuters) - A British court ruled on Wednesday that a protest camp denouncing economic inequality should be removed from its site outside London's landmark St Paul's cathedral.

Dozens of activists from Occupy London, part of an international movement inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protest that began last September, have been camping outside St Paul's since October.

They are engaged in a legal battle with the City of London Corporation, which has policing powers in the area and wants to evict the campers.

At a packed High Court hearing, judge Keith Lindblom said the camp should be removed on grounds of safety and hygiene and to allow better access to the cathedral for worshippers.

"(The corporation) gave the defendants ample opportunity to remove the protest camp without the need for time and money to be spent in legal proceedings," said the judge.

Dozens of Occupy London members stood in the courtroom, some wearing hats adorned with symbols of peace and nuclear disarmament, and one shouted "Shame!" as the judge finished reading out his ruling.

John Cooper, a lawyer representing Occupy London, said the campers would appeal against the decision. A lawyer for the corporation said it would allow the protesters seven days to lodge an appeal.

Protester Rosa O'Connor, a 27-year-old student, said she was concerned the authorities would try and use force to remove the campers.

"I think the protest movement is immovable," she told Reuters after the hearing.

"It has affected so many people ... over issues that were previously overlooked or pushed to one side, taboo or even boring. It has made economics trendy."

INJUSTICE

The protesters had originally targeted the nearby London Stock Exchange, but were blocked from the surrounding square and instead set up camp outside St Paul's in a blaze of publicity. The vast domed baroque cathedral is one of central London's main landmarks. Prince Charles married Princess Diana there in 1981.

Helped by the backdrop of a top tourist attraction, protesters succeeded in drawing international attention to grievances such as bankers' bonuses, the gap between rich and poor and the perceived greed of a privileged minority.

The impact of the protest was amplified by the response from the Church of England, which was divided over how to handle the situation. Two senior clerics resigned from posts at the cathedral over the issue, drawing further media attention.

However, the leaderless movement has not articulated a clear set of concrete demands and its aims remain nebulous in the eyes of many of the financial services workers who walk past the camp every day.

In the United States, police have cleared the flagship Occupy encampments in New York, Los Angeles, Oakland and other major cities although a handful of camps remain in place around the country.

The movement has influenced the U.S. political debate, although there too it has been criticized for failing to achieve much beyond highlighting the injustices of the global economy.

(Writing by Estelle Shirbon)

[Peter Lemkin]

What CEOs and Hedge Funds Don't Want the 99% to Understand

Posted: 1/14/12 07:12 PM ET









Zuccotti Park may be emptied and the Wall Street no longer occupied, but the anger of the 99% hasn't abated one iota as they watched CEOs cash in on the recovery and hedge funds make money hand over fist whether the market is going up or down. This shouldn't be a surprise. The fact is, because of the structure of their compensation, CEOs are rewarded for share price volatility not share price performance. And hedge funds make big money on the volatility that CEOs are incented to produce. So while the volatility of the past five years has devastated the lives, savings and pensions of vast numbers of the 99%, it has served CEOs and hedge fund managers very well indeed.
To understand the perverse structures, let's compare the compensation of two hypothetical CEOs, Bill and Sally, appointed on Jan. 1, 2007 and retired five years later on Dec. 31, 2011. The average US large company CEO has a compensation package of approximately $10 million/year made up half of salary/bonuses and half of stock-based compensation, so that is what we awarded Bill and Sally. Typically, the stock compensation is awarded annually on Jan. 1 of each year. If it is in the form of restricted stock, it vests as of retirement. If it is in the form of stock options, they typically must be exercised at the time of retirement. So that is how we structured their stock-based compensation.
It was a wild ride during Bill's and Sally's time. The S&P 500 (which accounts for 75% of US market capitalization) was 1,416 when they took over, shot up to an all-time high of 1,565 on Oct. 9, 2007, then plummeted in the fall of 2008 and bottomed out on March 9, 2009 at 676, then rose to the close of 2011, finishing at 1,258 -- 80% of that all-time high.
CEO Bill managed the company as if it was a proxy for the stock market; its stock followed the S&P500 exactly with the huge ups and downs. On January 1, 2007, his stock price was $100/share, making the share price at the beginning of 2008-2011: $102, $66, $80, and $90, respectively. When he retired, the price was $89. So in five years, he took his shareholders on a wild ride and ended up losing 11% of the investment of the shareholders who stuck with him the whole time.
CEO Sally was able to buck the market trend. She managed carefully and proactively and somehow kept the stock stable at $100/share from 2007 through to the end of 2011. So against the backdrop of five wild years in the market, she avoided giving shareholders scary ups and downs and left them with their investment whole -- 11% better than the market performance and 11% better than Bill.
Who is the more valuable CEO? Whose compensation should be higher? Should it be Bill, whose shareholders experienced massive volatility and a net loss of 11% over the period? Or should it be Sally, who avoided ups and down, protected investors' capital and ended up 11% higher than Bill? The answer, of course, is obvious -- Sally with both better returns and lower volatility. She should have made a hell of a lot more.
But that is not the way it works out in crazy America. Over the period, Bill made $57M in compensation to Sally's $50M if their stock-based compensation was in stock options; $51M versus $50M if it was restricted stock. It seems impossible: how could the valuations end up there when Sally's stock was 11% higher on the day the stock-based compensation was valued? It is primarily because of the huge value of Bill's stock-based compensation given to him on Jan. 1, 2009 when his stock price was languishing at $66.
Therein lays the fundamental problem eating away at the core of American capitalism -- and generating anguish of the 99%. American CEOs are paid to generate volatility -- so they did just great over the last five years while the 99% took it in the teeth. And that wasn't some kind of accident -- it is inherent in the current system.
The 99% would love nothing more than slow and steady growth, but that is not what maximizes incentive compensation for corporate executives. As far as CEO compensation goes, under the current stock-based compensation model, it is unambiguously better to have your stock plummet and then partly recover than to have the stock price stay steady over the same period. In fact, the most bloody-minded and self-interested CEO would be wise to drive its stock down immediately after taking over -- and blaming the prior administration for all the problems found -- and then get the stock back to the initial level. The CEO will make a small fortune doing that -- while shareholders make nothing -- and it is a lot easier than producing stock price increases from the initial level.
Though they wouldn't want to admit it, the crash of 2008 wasn't all that bad for the vast majority of big-company CEOs. With the exception of those few CEOs who were sacked, most had terrific air cover: "Our stock may be down 50% but so is everybody else. Really, I'm doing well, all things considered." Even better, CEOs got tranches of stock grants at super-low prices -- in some cases lots of them to keep the CEOs from being depressed that their existing options were "so far underwater." As the market dragged their stock prices up with everyone else's, these CEOs made out like, well, bandits.
Stock-based compensation has produced a volatility machine and that volatility is wrecking the American economy, while it makes CEOs and hedge fund managers rich. The crash of 2008 wasn't a rogue event and it will happen again as long as our rogue system of executive compensation stays intact.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

Free Enterprise on Trial

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog

17 January 12

itt Romney is casting the 2012 campaign as "free enterprise on trial" - defining free enterprise as achieving success through "hard work and risking-taking." Tea-Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says he's supporting Romney because "we really need someone who understands how risk, taking risk … is the way we create jobs, create choices, expand freedom." Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue, defending Romney, explains "this economy is about risk. If you don't take risk, you can't have success."

Wait a minute. Who do they think are bearing the risks? Their blather about free enterprise risk-taking has it upside down. The higher you go in the economy, the easier it is to make money without taking any personal financial risk at all. The lower you go, the bigger the risks.

Wall Street has become the center of riskless free enterprise. Bankers risk other peoples' money. If deals turn bad, they collect their fees in any event. The entire hedge-fund industry is designed to hedge bets so big investors can make money whether the price of assets they bet on rises or falls. And if the worst happens, the biggest bankers and investors now know they'll be bailed out by taxpayers because they're too big to fail.

But the worst examples of riskless free enterprise are the CEOs who rake in millions after they screw up royally.

Near the end of 2007, Charles Prince resigned as CEO of Citgroup after announcing the bank would need an additional $8 billion to $11 billion in write-downs related to sub-prime mortgages gone bad. Prince left with a princely $30 million in pension, stock awards, and stock options, along with an office, car, and a driver for five years.

Stanley O'Neal's five-year tenure as CEO of Merrill Lynch ended about the same time, when it became clear Merrill would have to take tens of billions in write-downs on bad sub-prime mortgages and be bought up at a fire-sale price by Bank of America. O'Neal got a payout worth $162 million.

Philip Purcell, who left Morgan Stanley in 2005 after a shareholder revolt against him, took away $43.9 million plus $250,000 a year for life.

Pay-for-failure extends far beyond Wall Street. In a study released last week, GMI, a well-regarded research firm that monitors executive pay, analyzed the largest severance packages received by ex-CEOs since 2000.

On the list: Thomas E. Freston, who lasted just nine months as CEO of Viacom before being terminated, and left with a walk-away package of $101 million.

Also William D. McGuire, who in 2006 was forced to resign as CEO of UnitedHealth over a stock-options scandal, and for his troubles got a pay package worth $286 million.

And Hank A. McKinnell Jr.'s, whose five-year tenure as CEO of Pfizer was marked by a $140 billion drop in Pfizer's stock market value. Notwithstanding, McKinnell walked away with a payout of nearly $200 million, free lifetime medical coverage, and an annual pension of $6.5 million. (At Pfizer's 2006 annual meeting a plane flew overhead towing a banner reading "Give it back, Hank!")

Not to forget Douglas Ivester of Coca Cola, who stepped down as CEO in 2000 after a period of stagnant growth and declining earnings, with an exit package worth $120 million.

If anything, pay-for-failure is on the rise. Last September, Leo Apotheker was shown the door at Hewlett-Packard, with an exit package worth $13 million. Stephen Hilbert left Conseco with an estimated $72 million, even though the value of Conseco's stock during his tenure sank from $57 to $5 a share on its way to bankruptcy.

But as economic risk-taking has declined at the top, it's been increasing at the middle and below. More than 20 percent of the American workforce is now "contingent" - temporary workers, contractors, independent consultants - with no security at all.

Even full-time workers who have put in decades with a company can now find themselves without a job overnight - with no parachute, no help finding another job, and no health insurance.

Meanwhile the proportion of large and medium-sized companies (200 or more workers) offering full healthcare coverage continues to drop - from 74 percent in 1980 to under 10 percent today. Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of large and medium-sized employers also provided health insurance to their retirees. Now, fewer than 15 percent do.

The risk of getting old with no pension is also rising. In 1980, more than 80 percent of large and medium-sized firms gave their workers "defined-benefit" pensions that guaranteed a fixed amount of money every month after they retired. Now it's down to under 10 percent. Instead, they offer "defined-contribution" plans where the risk is on the workers. When the stock market tanks, as it did in 2008, the 401(k) plan tanks along with it. Today, a third of all workers with defined-benefit plans contribute nothing, which means their employers don't either.

And the risk of losing earnings continues to grow. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch about half of all families experienced some decline in income. And the downturns were becoming progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average.

What Romney and the cheerleaders of risk-taking free enterprise don't want you to know is the risks of the economy have been shifting steadily away from CEOs and Wall Street - and on to average working people. It's not just income and wealth that are surging to the top. Economic security is moving there as well, leaving the rest of us stranded.

To the extent free enterprise is on trial, the real question is whether the system is rigged in favor of those at the top who get rewarded no matter how badly they screw up, while the rest of us get screwed no matter how hard we work.

The jury will report back Election Day. In the meantime, Obama and the Democrats shouldn't allow Romney and the Republicans to act as defenders of risk-taking free enterprise. Americans need to know the truth. The only way the economy can thrive is if we have more risk-taking at the top, and more economic security below.

Robert Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupy London protesters to appeal against eviction ruling

City of London Corporation wins high court case to remove protest camp from St Paul's churchyard


City of London Corporation wins its court case to remove the Occupy LSX protest camp from St Paul's churchyard. Link to this video

Occupy London protesters camped outside St Paul's have vowed to carry on their legal fight as the City of London Corporation won its high court case to evict them from the cathedral churchyard.

Leave to appeal the ruling will be sought at the court of appeal on Thursday. Tammy Samede, as the principal named defendant, said outside the court: "This is not the end. Onwards and upwards for Occupy."

Her QC, John Cooper, said an appeal would be sought on whether the actions taken by the corporation were proportionate.

"This is an important judgment. It marks the start of a legal analysis as to the extent of protest in this country. What Occupy have done is push the boundaries of public law on protest," said Cooper.

The judge, Mr Justice Lindblom, said he ruled in favour of the corporation because of the extent and duration of the tented protest at St Paul's, the public nuisance it caused, and the effect on worshippers and visitors.

Granting orders for possession and injunctions against Occupy London Stock Exchange (LSX), he said the proposed action was "entirely lawful and justified" as well as necessary and proportionate. But he praised OccupyLSX protesters, who set up camp on 16 October to highlight global economic injustice, for the way they had conducted their legal case. "No one has doubted, or could, the significance of the causes the defendants promote, or the sincerity and passion with which they are doing this." He refused permission to appeal, although the protesters have seven working days to seek leave to challenge the decision. The corporation has said it will not enforce eviction until leave to appeal has been sought.

The ruling was greeted with dismay by Dr Giles Fraser, who resigned as canon chancellor of St Paul's rather than see the protesters evicted by force, and who was in a packed court 25 at the Royal Courts of Justice to hear the judgment.

In a statement he said: "This judgment is disappointing. In a world where there is such a gap between rich and poor, the voice of protest needs continually to be heard. The church must not be seen to side with the 1% rather than the 99%."

George Barda, 35, one of three named defendants, said: "It's disappointing but predictable."

He said of the five-day hearing before Christmas, during which he gave evidence: "It was a fairly lengthy hearing, but there was hardly any listening."

The corporation's lawyers told the judge it was their "sincere and genuine hope" that the OccupyLSX protesters would leave with dignity when the time came, and with no need for enforcement.


Michael Paget, counsel for OccupyLSX, said the appeal would be sought on the grounds that the injunction was too far-reaching. He said the corporation had accepted people could protest at the cathedral every day. "So the real issue is, should they be there overnight?" But Lindblom rejected that definition of a "semi-permanent" camp.

The corporation had said there was an overwhelming case for the court's intervention because of the impact on the churchyard of the camp. The limited interference with the protesters' rights entailed in the removal of the tents was justified and proportionate, given the rights and freedoms of others, it argued.

The corporation's lawyers had told Lindblom, who visited the camp during the hearing, that it acted as a magnet for disorder and crime in the area, impacted on worshippers, affected trade and caused waste and hygiene problems.

"The freedoms and rights of others, the interest of public health and public safety and the prevention of disorder and crime, and the need to protect the environment of this part of the City of London all demand the remedy which the court's orders will bring," said Lindblom in his lengthy judgment. The City had no "sensible" choice but to take action.

"Conscious of its duties under statute, it gave the defendants an ample opportunity to remove the protest camp without the need for time and money to be spent in legal proceedings."

Praising the protesters for their conduct during the hearing, he said: "Whilst I recognise that this outcome will be disappointing to the defendants, I wish to pay tribute to all who participated in the hearing for the courteous and helpful way in which they conducted themselves."

Stuart Fraser, the corporation's policy chairman, said: "We took this action to clear the tents and equipment at St Paul's. We hope the protesters will now remove the tents voluntarily. If not, and subject to any appeal proceedings, we will be considering enforcement action as soon as possible."

The Liberal Democrat MEP for London, Sarah Ludford, said it was the right decision. "Protests should not morph into tent cities. The right to protest is too precious to be undermined by long-term encampments which disrupt normal life to an unacceptable extent, beyond the inevitable and legitimate inconvenience of a one-off demo."

The bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, said: "Whatever now happens as a result of today's judgment, the protest has brought a number of vital themes that the St Paul's Institute remains committed to exploring and, now through London Connection, we want to ensure they continue to have a voice."

[Peter Lemkin]

Occupy London LSX did a brilliant mock trail of Blair for warcrimes and genocide on Iraq!!!!! Well worth watching IMO. This is most, not all of it. http://www.livestream.com/occupylsx/vide...m=ui-thumb

[video]http://www.livestream.com/occupylsx/video?clipId=pla_5009adde-6faf-4117-9389-6e441ecd72f8&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb[/video]

[Peter Lemkin]

"Law & Order: SVU" on Wednesday night aired the episode featuring footage produced on a fake Occupy Wall Street camp that was raided by real Occupy Wall Street protestors in early December.

The episode, titled "The Official Story," tackles the sexual assault of a high profile CEO of a military contractor corporation; he's found beaten and bruised in Central Park. It turns out the crime -- and the coverup -- is tied to a conspiracy that goes far beyond angry youths protesting injustice in a public square. One of the protestors they question admits to threatening and verbally assaulting the CEO, though not carrying out the actual crime.

The production of the episode made headlines after the OWS protestors, having recently been kicked out of Zuccotti Park by the City of New York, crashed the fake reproduction of their camp. Stocked with a library and kitchen, the camp was shut down after the protestors entered and "mockuppied," as they called it.

"There are certainly some folks who feel really offended by the attempt to kind of use this very real, very living movement, this economic justice movement that's making real change for working families in this country, to use it in some kind of story line in this dramatic cop show,"

[Peter Lemkin]

Time: December 21, 2012 all day
Location: Earth
Event Type: global, day, of, actionEvent Description

It's the end of the world as we loathe it.
Let us use our collective awareness of the most talked about date in recent history to bring attention to the fragility of our current financial, social and religious institutions by disassociating ourselves from their operation for one day, as a species, en mass.
No work performed. No shopping done. No traveling planned. No services rendered. No taxes paid. No religion observed. No false authority placated.
Let us demonstrate our ability to live together, for each other, without need of great lies perpetrated upon us. Without the abuses we inflict on each other on which our slavery depends.
Let us all reclaim our planet for the 100% of all beings that depend upon and inhabit it.
Let us end the world as we loathe it.

[Peter Lemkin]

Just a reminder...there is a new and rapidly GROWING website to attempt to coordinate all Occupy activities and Peoples HERE....join and help us stage the rEVOLUTION Now!