OccupyWashingtonDC to hold Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99%

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 7, 2011

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
press@october2011.org
Kevin Zeese 301-996-6582
Margaret Flowers 410-591-0892

OccupyWashingtonDC to hold Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99%
Wednesday, November 9th at 11:00 AM

OccupyWashingtonDC.org will hold a hearing on the economy for the 99% that will examine how to create a fair economy for all Americans. 

The Occupied Hearing will contrast with hearings on Capitol Hill which are destined to enrich the 1% and protect major donors. 

The Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99% will examine critical issues facing the economy and the federal budget.  The hearing will include testimony from people with great understanding of the issues facing the country as well as comments from the 99% who are directly affected by the economy.

One week after the hearing, OccupyWashingtonDC.org will put forward proposals that should be enacted to fairly fix the economy -- these proposals should not be considered our demands as our demands are much more transformative than a short-term fix of the economy and budget.

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Sarah Jaffe - ABC News: 1 Million People Move Their Money; Banks Hiking Fees Again

By Sarah Jaffe, AlterNet

Posted on November 6, 2011, Printed on November 7, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/700320/abc_news%3A_1_million_people_move_their_money%3B_banks_hiking_fees_again/#paragraph3

As "Move Your Money" caught on like wildfire, even the mainstream media got in on the story. ABC News called it a "Lightning bolt warning" to the "Goliath banks", and reports that 1 million customers have actually moved their money. 

Credit unions saw $4.5 billion in new deposits in October according to the report, and a Seattle business owner reports that he's taking four of his businesses and $3 million in business away from Chase and Bank of America. 

And of course, ABC notes, the banks say that they're going to have to recoup the losses from the customers who have left--with more fees. 

Rebuild the Dream's "move your money" pledge tracker counts 32,676 that pledged to close their Bank of America accounts on Saturday, 4,481 Citigroup accounts, and 17,554 Chase accounts--as well as 24,979 accounts at other big banks. 

Jill Richardson - Why the Most Important Fish We Need to Save Is One You've Never Heard Of

By Jill Richardson, AlterNet

Posted on November 6, 2011, Printed on November 7, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152978/why_the_most_important_fish_we_need_to_save_is_one_you%27ve_never_heard_of

Menhaden might be the most important fish you've never heard of. As far back as the 1860s, the U.S. caught more tons of menhaden than any other fish -- and in many years, more menhaden than the combined commercial catch of all other finned fish put together. You don't hear about them because they don't show up in fish markets or on dinner menus. Rather, they go into animal feed, cosmetics, health food supplements, linoleum, lubricants, margarine, soap, insecticide, and paint.

As you might guess, catching so much of one species of fish takes a toll not only on the population of that one species, but on marine ecology as a whole. Thus, this week, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), the body that regulates fishing on the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, will vote Wednesday, November 9 on whether to protect menhaden.

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Chris Hedges - Finding Freedom in Handcuffs

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/finding_freedom_in_handcuffs_20111107/

Posted on Nov 7, 2011

By Chris Hedges

Editor’s note: Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members. They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages of starvation and disease.

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Olivia Ward - Struggling to Find Happiness in the Age of Austerity

Published on Sunday, November 6, 2011 by The Toronto Star

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1081436--struggling-to-find-happiness-in-the-age-of-austerity

by Olivia Ward

We’re fed up, teed-off, mad as hell. And we’re not going to take it any more.

But whoa.

While protests burst national boundaries and a wave of anger roils across the world, there’s a growing urge to measure national happiness, well-being and what people like about their lives.

Given the current sour mood, experts say, that could be a good thing.

If we know what makes people happy, it should be easier to know what plunges them into countrywide malaise.

So governments from tiny Bhutan to giant China, France, Britain, Bolivia, the U.S. and Canada are poring over statistics in the hope of finding the key to national content. An idea that might warrant a cynical shrug as economic indicators slither south and jobs follow.

Can we find happiness in the age of austerity?

“Some may wonder whether it is opportune to talk about well-being, rather than just focusing on the economic growth needed to get our countries out of this crisis,” says Angel Gurria, chief of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development. “I strongly believe that . . . we have to consider a broader picture in our policy-making because a ‘growth as usual’ approach is simply not enough.”

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Brian Merchant - Fracking May Have Caused 50 Earthquakes in Oklahoma

November 3, 2011

By Brian Merchant

http://www.treehugger.com/energy-disasters/fracking-may-have-already-caused-50-earthquakes-oklahoma.html

martinluff via Flickr/CC BY 2.0

In a surprising turn of events, Cuadrilla Resources, a British energy company, recently admitted that its hydraulic fracturing operations "likely" caused an earthquake in England. Predictably, this news quickly sent a shockwave through the U.K., the oil and natural gas industries, and the environmental activist community. And it certainly feeds plenty of speculation that the same phenomenon could be occurring elsewhere.

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Washington's Blog - REAL Capitalists Move Our Money from Big Banks to Credit Unions

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, November 6, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27500

Posted on November 5, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog Believe in Free Market Capitalism?  Then Move Your Money! Conservative free market entrepreneurial capitalist Karl Denninger notes: If you have an account at a BANK, go move it to a CREDIT UNION. You know, a place that you own and is a mutual association of people? Yes. One that you own. Where the fees assessed go to provide services to…. you, not to feather the nests of bank executives and stockholders. Denninger is right. As HowStuffWorks points out: Banks are for-profit companies. They make money by charging intereston loans, collecting account fees and reinvesting all that money to earn more profit. But as for-profit companies, they also pay state and federal taxes. Credit unions, on the other hand, are not-for-profit institutions. Technically, credit unions are owned by their account holders, known as members. Any profit earned by a credit union is either invested back into the organization or paid out to members as a dividend [source: Federal Reserve]. As a not-for-profit institution, credit unions pay no state or federal taxes, meaning they can charge lower interest rates than banks for most financial services.

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Michael Doliner - Conservative Intellectuals and the Invisible Hand

COUNTERPUNCH.ORG   NOVEMBER 4-6, 2011

HTTP://WWW.COUNTERPUNCH.ORG/2011/11/04/CONSERVATIVE-INTELLECTUALS-AND-THE-INVISIBLE-HAND/

The Discrediting of Good Intentions

by MICHAEL DOLINER

The invisible hand just gave you the finger, son.

– Clyde “the possum” Ridenour

The expression “conservative intellectual” was, at least until the nineteen-fifties, an oxymoron. Conservatives, with their founder, Edmund Burke, insisted that not reason but custom was the true foundation of freedom. The rights of Englishmen, founded in long tradition and customary practice, were real. “The rights of man,” the brainchild of Enlightenment thinking, was but a chimera, a brainstorm without substance. The “reason” of the Enlightenment produced only a wind-egg and worse, the Terror. Conservatism attacked reason itself, so how could it then turn around and spawn conservative “think tanks” such as the Heritage Foundation, peopled with conservative intellectuals? 

The change seems to have come with books like The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism was what linked the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia together. Before that everyone thought one was extreme left and the other extreme right. No two regimes could have been more different. But no, they shared a new kind of political structure never imagined by the ancients who otherwise identified all known political structures.

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Frances Fox Piven - The War Against the Poor

Posted on November 6, 2011, Printed on November 6, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175463/

Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality 
By Frances Fox Piven

We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home.  Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news.  Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics.  Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

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Peter Walker and Matthew Taylor - Far Right on Rise in Europe, Says Report

Published on Sunday, November 6, 2011 by The Guardian/UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/06/far-right-rise-europe-report

Study by Demos thinktank reveals thousands of self-declared followers of hardline nationalist parties and groups

by Peter Walker and Matthew Taylor

The far right is on the rise across Europe as discontent with the fallout from globalisation reverberates across the continent, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to discuss the rapid spread of hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups.

The report, by the British thinktank Demos, attempts for the first time to examine attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused onto cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a big concern.

"We're at a crossroads in European history," said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. "In five years' time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency."

The report comes just over three months after Anders Breivik, a supporter of hard-right groups, shot dead 69 people at youth camp near Oslo. While he was disowned by the parties, police examination of his contacts highlighted the Europe-wide online discussion of anti-immigrant and nationalist ideas.

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