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The American Spring

Last fall I told anyone who would listen that these now past few months would not be the American Winter that followed the Arab Spring. No, it was going to take longer here for the numbers to rise and be heard. But the spring is finally here, the American Spring. Join in and be a part of your life and your country again.


Read this call to action and then join up with your neighbors and friends to take back America from the greed of Wall Street and the complacency of Washington. This is not the time for inaction, this is not the time to say "Occupy was interesting but it's over." Change is finally possibly but not if we remain on the sidelines.

From April 9-15 we will gather across America, 100,000 strong, in homes, places of worship, campuses and the streets to join together in the work of reclaiming our country. We will organize trainings to:

1. Tell the story of our economy: how we got here, who’s responsible, what a different future could look like, and what we can do about it
2. Learn the history of non-violent direct action, and
3. Get into action on our own campaigns to win change.

Add you name and your hopes here: American Spring.

The Government Made Me Do It

I heard it again the other day in what was a reasoned debate/conversation about the financial crisis of the past few years, someone said: "It wasn't Wall Street and the banks that made all those loans, they were forced to lower their lending standards by the government."

There is one and only one way to address that assertion - "Bullshit!" Unmitigated, unfounded, truthless bullshit! But presented with the facts, some people still need to cling desperately to their own fantasy version of reality.

Here are the facts, you only need to consider two numbers:

$1.4 trillion U.S. dollars
$140 trillion U.S. dollars

Notice that the second number is 100 times larger than the first. So here goes the easy explanation even for those who consider themselves math challenged. In the U.S. the grand total of "bad" real estate loans at the peak of the financial crisis was 1.4 trillion dollars. If the U.S. government wanted to step in to prevent the near financial collapse caused by these "bad" mortgages it could have done so for 1.4 trillion dollars. Just buy up all those bad loans and manage the portfolio. Crazy? Well since the U.S. government spent 2.5 trillion in the bank bailout, 1.4 trillion would have been a discount. And. . . less than half of those "bad" loans actually defaulted, the other half are still making their monthly payments.

So why didn't this happen? Well let's go back to the ridiculous argument that the banks and their Wall Street backers were forced to make these credit risky loans. Say the U.S. government had bought all the loans for 1.4 trillion and apologized for forcing the banks to be so financially irresponsible, wouldn't all of the financial problems gone away?

Well no, you see the 1.4 trillion of subprime ("bad") mortgages were not the problem, no matter who originated those loans or why they made them. You see Wall Street (AIG) used those 1.4 trillion of actual mortgages, loans with real property behind them; Wall Street used those loans to create 140 trillion dollars worth of fake collateralized investment paper . Mortgage default swaps and other byzantine derivative investments all based on that original 1.4 trillion in actual loans. That 140 trillion was sold worldwide and other bankers in other countries followed Wall Street's lead and ventured into the same speculative investment instrument creation based on their real estate markets.

Understand these "other" investment contraptions had no financial basis other than the actual mortgages. One hundred times more money was generated in investment paper than the real estate mortgages held in value.

1.4 trillion in mortgage debt X 100 = 140 trillion on top of the actual mortgage paper

Nothing justified the creation of wealth out of thin air. The mortgage back securities were worth 1.4 trillion the rest of the 140 trillion was slight of hand. No one, not one single soul on Wall Street has ever suggested that the government made them create that pile of worthless investment paper. It was fraud, it was irresponsible, it was greed and it was criminal.

And most of all, the government did not make them do it.

Now does anyone want to know why there is this movement called Occupy Wall Street?

read more

Occupy Oakland

Oakland has once again become the center of the Occupy movement on the West Coast. Last night was the largest confrontation with the most extreme violations of law and civil rights by both sides. Again I got close enough to the action to report but not so close that I am in jail. Over four hundred protesters and bystanders were arrested. Lots of tear gas and bean bag projectiles were fired by the renegade Oakland police and their support troops. Yes, rocks and bottles were thrown by protesters; I have already said their were violations on both sides.

But I wonder just how Yahoo News justifies this type of reporting, when all over the internet were onsite commentaries like this one. In fairness, it looks like the NYTimes basically rewrote the main stream media's press release as well. "Three police officers injured and one protester." I was three blocks away and saw over two dozen battered protesters receiving medical attention.

By the way if you want to feel the moment of conversion from a peaceful protester into a radical police hating revolutionary, read this post.

Do It Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks another in a year-long list of Occupy actions to bring economic sanity and fairness back to the American people. If you are in or around Washington D.C. please consider participating in any of the planned events for Occupy Congress.

Not in the capitol area, then take a moment to write to your elected senators and congresspersons and ask them to take the time meet with Occupy members who are there to make our needs known.

We can't all be there for every demonstration or every cause, but we can lend our support and our voice to those who are. Do It Tomorrow.

Find contact information for your congressional representatives.

NOT Occupying Obama

"Obama's hope of somehow harnessing the Occupy Wall Street movement as a left-wing of the tea party is a pipe dream. Obama was yesterday's messiah. He has turned out to be a false prophet and his erstwhile supporters are out for revenge."

That's the final conclusion of a short article on Yahoo! news. For those in the Occupy Movement it comes as no surprise. Conservatives will probably believe that it's just more propaganda because for them Occupy is an Obama election strategy. For the liberals this is a chilling message and therein lies the truth from my corner of the political landscape. The president and the democrats are not going to be able to mobilize the energy of the Occupy protest in 2012. Not a chance.

Yes there are voters at the camps and in the marches who will pull the lever for Barack but not nearly enough for him to win. And this is not merely youthful defection from a cause that simply could not have possibly taken over D.C. in what is now still less than three years in office.

The facts, as seen around the tents, is that Obama didn't really try. He is, as many of us expected, just another politician. His entire career has been about compromise and the center, which as it turns out is not a viable strategy when the other side will not budge. The republicans vote as a bloc, descent is not an option in that party. They have become a bloated intestinal blockage in the American system and they think nothing of destroying the country if it means they get their way. Obama's reaction to such obstinate, obstructionist policy has been to make more pretty speeches. 

We have been listening, which is one of the big reasons there is an Occupy Movement at all. This is not an anti-republican or anti-democrat protest. Remember it began as Occupy Wall Street. Not Occupy D.C. This is about the criminal actions taken by greedy, heartless bastards at the expense of everyone else in the country. Hell, everyone else on the planet, they nearly destroyed the world wide economy with their avarice.

The hard numbers on the ground are not with the president. Certainly not the 99% and not the 50.1% either, not with the anti-majority tilt of the electoral college. But fear not liberals, have hope independents, stay alert middle class, lower class and even the few patriots in the financial elite - there is another way.


More on that other way later, I promise.

Speaking Truth to Power

LINK

See what happens when someone from the main stream media gets the opportunity to tell the truth and they actually do it! We seldom see this level of honesty from inside the corporate media monopolies . Or is the wall beginning to crack? Are the 1% losing their stranglehold on what gets reported? Remember when Walter Cronkite, 'the most trusted man in America,' turned against the Vietnam War live on the nightly news...

Here is a link to a calmer explanation from Dylan Ratigan about the facts behind his rant.

And if you really want to delve into the current worldwide economic crisis (aka: depression) might I recommend one of my favorite economists Steve Keen. Here is an interview he did last week with the BBC. There is a video and a transcription; I recommend reading over listening because he makes many points worth pondering several times over.

Occupying Creeping Bureaucracy

"OccupySF follows consensus process. Peoples Reserve CU and OccupyMission are not organs of OccupySF, 

as they exist out of process." 

That's a recent tweet communication from someone regarding the organizational structure of Occupy San Francisco. The statement is both twitter-speak and Occupy lingo. I will translate: 

As with many non-hierarchal meeting structures, most of the Occupy groups use some form of consensus building process in order to reach decisions. For one such process you can view this short youtube video. The intention is not to get stuck in the old leader/committee/elite decision making process. Everyone should be involved with an equal voice no matter who you are or when you joined the movement. So ...

"OccupySF follows a consensus process." There are often local tweaks and twists to the process but the basics are usually the same and Occupy San Francisco uses just such a decision making process in the General Assembly (GA) meetings and in sub-groups created by the GA.

"Peoples Reserve CU and Occupy Mission are not organs of OccupySF." The Proposed People's Reserve Credit Union and the new encampment in the Missions District are not extensions of the original Occupy San Francisco @ Justin Herman Plaza organization. They are separate entities functioning under their own forms of decision making arrangement.

".. as they exist out of process." These are the key words that prompted my post today. The author means that both of these offshoot organizations weren't not created via the consensus process within OccupySF, therefore they exist outside of that process and are not authorized nor formally condoned by Occupy San Francisco. 

Fine. I do not disagree with the content of this tweet and I acknowledge the difficulty of communicating anything in 140 characters or less. So I have no issue with the original author. I do, however, have a big concern about that queasiness anyone including myself felt upon reading "as they exist out of process."

Insider speak is necessarily exclusive of those who don't know the secret handshake and don't have the decoder ring. We can excuse that in a twitter communication or a brief email but there is a more serious hidden agenda here, I would be interested if you had the reaction I did.

Did you find the communication strident? Did it sound vaguely like - "we have rules and if you don't follow the rules you are out." Should the 99% already be broken into ten groups of 9% or ninety-nine consensus meetings of 1% each? Yes there does need to be some sense of order and some means of processing the hearts, minds and feelings of members but guidelines become rules, rules become laws and laws lead to exclusion not inclusion.

Recent Images from Occupy

"It's the Inequility Stupid!"

"Some people question the validity of the "rebelious" artists who made big money - they are accused by revolutionary purists of being a part of the system, and for being rich. I do not share that feeling - I think that it's OK to make big money - it's OK to become rich if it's based on creating a real value - art, inventions, services of products. What is not OK is a legalized systemic swindle - and that is what we are against..." - Roger Waters

I lifted the title for today's post from a Mother Jones article It's the Inequality Stupid! it has several graphic representations of just how large and pervasive is the wealth gap in the United States. You think you know because you feel it every day but when you see the numbers graphically you have to wonder why anyone in the 99% isn't with us on this.

Here's another interesting piece, this one from the Washington Post, they call it The Big Lie. The big lie is that our current financial mess was caused by Washington and not by Wall Street. Now the reasonable assessment is that there is plenty of blame to go around. But the perverse explanation goes like this - Congress made the banks lend to borrowers who could not afford to own those houses. What a lot of people seem willing to overlook is that it was not the home loans that brought on the financial crisis. No, it was the packaging of those loans into fifty and one hundred million dollar portfolios and selling them to pension funds and other financial institutions with false ratings. Then creating a secondary market buying and selling derivatives on those suspect loans. 

Now when exactly did Congress passed legislation demanding that Wall Street banks create such risky investment products? What Congress did or rather didn't do was regulate. I know that is a dirty word for conservatives but you can't have it both ways. If government is the problem and they didn't do their job, then the problem was not enough regulation and enforcement. If Wall Street was the problem then who was supposed to stop them - the government? If so, how without regulation? 

The Tea Party wants to blame it all on big government and Occupy Wall Street - well the name does say it all. But do we really want to have another good versus evil standoff here? Isn't the country already locked into inaction by the republican/democrat divide. Please take note that both Washington and Wall Street are promoting the divisions between conservatives and progressives, they want us divided because united we scare the hell out of them.

So hug a liberal, kiss a conservative or at least talk to each other. Keep your eyes on the real target - "It's the Inequality Stupid!"

The Truth About TARP

"The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing."

You owe it to yourself, your children, your retirement savings, your home and your sanity to take fifteen minutes to read the analysis from Bloomberg.com, which provides for the first time the details of the 2007-2009 financial bailout of the U.S. banks. Over 29,000 pages of documents were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Federal Reserve resisted releasing these documents, the government clearly does not want you to know the truth about how much of the taxpayers money was used. Remember the $700 Billion dollar number - that was how much Congress approved for the Bush Bank Bailout in 2007. Want to know the real number for all the bailouts under both Bush and Obama including the secret monies that neither President approved - $7.77 Trillion. What the heck, it's only one more zero.

No more grumbling about Obama's spending or the Fed's 'Too Big to Fail' policies until you read this article.

Here's another little teaser:

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, Democratic Senator from Ohio. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and OccupyWall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now [on bank regulation].”

The Attack on Occupy

I'll bet there are some Occupy campers who are a bit tired of having old hippies telling them stories about the Vietnam War protests. But there is a subtle distinction I have not heard voiced yet - here is it. When we were protesting against the war in the late 60s and early 70s most of our parents were not with us. For them the United States at war meant World War II, pretty hard to be against that war when on the other side was Adolf Hitler. My father's reasoning on Vietnam was - "our boys are fighting and dying over there and we need to support them." In my late teens I was protesting a war, at that same age he was in one, so was everyone else in the country.

But in the 60s the "adults" did not make a distinction between the fighting on the ground in Vietnam and the insane policy in Washington D.C. which was also based on WWII mentality. The flag waving obscured the questions of policy and any rational basis for what we were doing in Vietnam.

Flash forward to today, we are all part of the 99%. We are on your side, marching with you against some incredibly over the top reactions on the part of local police, mayors and governors. But listen carefully to your elders about this because it really has very little to do with what the local mayor wants. These marching orders are coming from Washington. The good news is that you have struck a nerve, they are afraid we will wake up too many of the 99% and it will cost them their places of privilege.

For anyone who doesn't believe Washington, the Department of Homeland Security and yes, Barack Obama are not behind the militant crackdown on Occupy. Here is an article from the Guardian for you. For those who believe as I do that this is an organized repression, the article is most enlightening. 

Black Friday

The 1% President

Sure the 1% would have been happy with Mitt Romney, but the Perry blunders followed by Cain's loose zipper gave the super elite the chance to push their real guy - Newt. The timing couldn't have been better, the holidays are upon us, people will be distracted from the endless republican debate schedule and then BANG! January and the first presidential primaries. Newt could be the nominee by Valentines Day. Under even the most competitive circumstances the nominee will be in place after Super Tuesday March 6th.

Unfortunately then the conversation turns as it always does to the better or worse of two terrible choices. My liberal friends will once again say "but if you don't vote for Obama we will get Newt!" And my conservative friends will say - "sure it's that gas bag Gingrich but otherwise we are stuck with another four years of Obama." 

John McCain! John Kerry! Al Gore! Bob Dole! Michael Dukakis! Walter Mondale! 

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I will step off the path,

And chose a new future
that will make all the difference

(apologies to Robert Frost)

Images for a Monday

And now a word from the Right

One of my conservative friends challenged me to send him an Occupy article from the "main stream press" or better yet from something he actually reads. OK Chuck, how about Forbes Magazine; I've seen that in your office waiting room, so read this.

And as for a view from the left... I strongly disagree with the conventional wisdom that the Occupy Movement needs to have stated goals, even a legislative agenda. Here is a well researched article from Salon.com that lays out the reasons for Occupy staying away from politics as usual. I strongly recommend not only this article but the numerous embedded links that will walk you through the differences between contemporary American politics and a true citizen's movement against the current institutionalized two party stagnation. The article is really worth your time as it fully illuminates the strength and depth of the Occupy Uprising.

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political cartoon - Mike Lukovich

Saturday Art Returns!

and the students at UC Davis

Occupy Rant - 11/16

The first question usually is: "What do they want?"

Dutifully we walk our newly awakened friend through the Occupy saga. If they are a conservative acquaintance this comes with a big dose of dispelling the rumors and lies they have gleaned from Fox News or Ann Coultier. If you get your information via Rush Limbaugh, I simply ask you to lose my email address and crawl back in your cave, some people really are too stupid to live.

Yes, I am a bit annoyed today.

I saw Tom Brokaw on Charlie Rose last week and when he was asked about Occupy Wall Street he said all the right things but ended with "what is their end game?" There it is. A seasoned and rational news anchor with over 40 years experience, too damn lazy to take an hour to figure out a grassroots movement that is transforming the entire Middle East and is now prepared to change America and most of the Western world.

Take some responsibility. Educate yourself!

First step, you're already here, I have been writing about Occupy for over six weeks - Read My Blog! Then send the link to a friend.

Next, get yourself a twitter account, it takes two minutes to set up. Follow the posts from #Occupy #OccupyWallStreet and #Occupy_Together plus your local Occupy protest group, they are simple to find. Fresh new articles and reports will be linked in the twitter posts and you will have plenty to read to answer your burning question: What is this all about?

But wait! Why can't I just tell you? Well, it's complicated. This is a big country and an even bigger world. It's all tied together in a even more complex economic system. But you want the short, dirty, nasty version - here goes:

You are a victim. You are a victim of an economic system that has been rigged for you to fail. The unchecked greed of a small segment of our country has conspired with the government to hoard so much of the nation's wealth that they nearly collapsed the entire world's economy a couple of years ago. We, all of us, bailed their butts out and now they are preparing to do it again. "Our government" has been so corrupted by corporate money and the lobbies of big business that it will not regulate them to prevent another crisis. Europe is on the verge of an economic collapse which will be followed by civil unrest and riots. The rule of law will break down and the entire planet could well be plunged into a depression that will last for decades. Indeed, there will not be a full recovery within any of our lifetimes.


Think this is paranoia. You need to pay attention. The U.S. Congress is about to miss it's own mandated "Super Committee" budget cutting deadline and yet they will do nothing about the federal deficit for another year and a half. The Republicans are intentionally doing nothing to support economic recovery because they can use the bad news to defeat Obama. On the other side, Obama is a talking head with sweet words and no clue how to actually do anything to control the vicious greed of Wall Street. The suits on Wall Street and the CEOs in the corporate boardrooms continue to drain money and jobs from our economy yet Congress will not pass any regulations to prevent what happened just three years ago from happening again.


The Occupy Movement wants to force the government to respond to the extreme prejudice the American economy gives to corporations and the super wealthy. The word is "force" not "ask" not even "demand." For now the Occupy Movement is attempting to use non-violent tactics to force the government to act. How long that will hold is anyone's guess.


Once again, the whole world is watching. This time they are also hoping and praying that the United States of American gets it right because if we don't, if this economy collapses, there will be no place on earth that will not follow us down the black hole.


That's what Occupy is about - Care to join us?

Us vs. Them

Even using non-violent tactics against the establishment does not mean that thoughtful, liberal politicians will not respond with violence. Mayor Quan of Oakland admitted in an interview with the BBC that she had participated in "a conference call with 18 other cities" on how to end the Occupy encampments.

If you think these local city mayors are not taking orders from higher up the political machine chain, you just don't follow American politics closely enough. But here's the point - all these attacks do is give fuel to those small number in the protests who want to be violent. Throw one of us to the lions and three more step forward and one of those is not a non-violence player.

This is going to get more and more ugly. More arrests, more injuries and eventually there will be deaths. The police will resort to murder in defense of America's parks. But, of course, this has nothing to do with tents or parks or any physical aspect of Occupy. "They" are afraid we might succeed and their rape of the American and World economies will be stopped. It is all about money, power and greed. Those with all the stolen riches are scared and they are sending their minions to stop us.

They will not.

Today's Read

"Those who think that the cold weather will end the protests should think again. A new generation of leaders is just getting started. The new progressive age has begun."

Yes, today's must read comes from the New York Times, so my conservative readers will know it must be left wing propaganda. But give it a read anyway, you might find as others have that we share a lot more in common these days than ever before in our lifetimes. The article has a historical bent about how we got into economic troubles in the past and how we dug ourselves out.

The article is called The New Progressive Movement

Remember I read all of the articles you send me, so you owe yourself this one.