"Les Leopold" - 10 Things to Know About Wall Street's Rapacious Attack on America

By Les Leopold, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2011, Printed on October 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152629/10_things_to_know_about_wall_street%27s_rapacious_attack_on_america 

When you climb out of the subway at Wall Street, you might wonder why there are no protestors in the cavernous alley by the stock exchange. That’s because since 9/11, Wall Street has been barricaded shut to prevent possible attacks. But up the block at Zuccotti Park between Liberty and Cedar streets, west of Broadway, the party’s on.

There you’ll find a festive group of about 1,000 people, mostly young folks having a good time accompanied by the occasional cluster of old lefties singing songs. People make signs while sitting on the ground then prop them up wherever they can find a space. They gather at tables filled with donated food and browse boxes of donated books. You also can’t miss the swarm of media folks milling around asking questions, taping interviews and taking notes: they’re the ones in dress suits who spend most of their time interviewing each other. My favorite sign held by an occupier is painted on a skateboard: “This is what Freedom Looks Like.” My son would agree.

And my recurring thought is, “It’s about f’ing time.”

What took us so long? How much worse did it have to get before public outrage would finally focus on those who caused the problem and those who are milking us dry? Several of us have been pleading in blog after blog for more than two years to build a broad-based assault on Wall Street. Where was our answer to the Tea Party? Well, here it is.

There’s no telling where this Occupy Wall Street can lead, especially if a virtuous media feedback loop continues: The more protestors, the more coverage, the more protestors. It’s about the only good thing the mainstream media has done in years.

If unions throw into the mix full force, we may have something powerful in the making. It’s far too early to tell, although the October 5 labor march in New York that drew upwards of 25,000 people was certainly a good sign. Will labor come back and do it again each and every week? Will unions mobilize support for the satellite occupiers in city after city? Or will most of their energy go into the Obama/Democratic Party re-election campaigns as if nothing much has happened? (They should listen to protestors, who agree that corporations and the wealthy are destroying our democracy by buying candidates of both parties.)

Already you can hear the chattering classes mumble about the lack of focus, the lack of consensus and the lack of a coherent agenda in this nascent movement. But they have this coherent call: We are the 99 percent, and we demand our fair share. The irrefutable fact is that 99 percent of us really are being screwed by the 1 percent who are looting our country (actually it’s more like the top 1/10 of one percent). So if you still harbor any doubts that Wall Street is the right target, here are 10 reasons to consider:

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"Melissa Gira Grant" - Sex Work to Pay Off College Loans? How the College Debt Racket Sucks Young People Dry

By Melissa Gira Grant, AlterNet
Posted on October 7, 2011, Printed on October 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152657/sex_work_to_pay_off_college_loans_how_the_college_debt_racket_sucks_young_people_dry_--_and_led_many_to_occupy_wall_st.

The young man standing next to the “Jail Sallie Mae, Cancel All Student Loan Debt” sign in Liberty Plaza last night could very well end up in jail himself – not for protesting economic injustice and marching on Wall Street, but for doing sex work to pay off his student loans. "My loans are $1,300 a month," he said. "My rent is $1,300 a month. My salary is $2,600 a month. You can see the problem. So I work as a prostitute for food and utilities."

Though he works a day job in the tech sector, it’s not enough to get by. "But it could be worse," he continued. "I could have to do sex work for all of it." 

With the Department of Education estimating that outstanding US student loan debt will soon exceed $1 trillion and job growth stalled, students face the very real prospect that there’s no way to ever pay back their debts. As of this May, new graduates are leaving college with an average of $22,900 in debt each, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, makes the class of 2011 the most indebted in history. They are members of a generation of students who knew taking out loans to finance a degree – or two – was a gamble on their own futures. As Lindsay Personett, a recent graduate from Oklahoma City University, put it at Wednesday’s solidarity march to support the Wall Street occupiers, “Kids are told to get this expensive degree and you’ll get a job. You end up owing too much and owning nothing.”  

Wednesday also saw solidarity walk-outs to Occupy Wall Street from hundreds of students from the New School, New York University, Columbia University, and several CUNY campuses. According to CBS Local, 150 students walked out at Brooklyn College to join the tens of thousands in Foley Square and Liberty Plaza. The student walk-outs are part of a larger national walk-out action, supported by OccupyColleges.org, which spanned at least 100 campuses across the US. Their demands go beyond calls for “job creation.” They are questioning the convergence of interests in the education and financial systems that require them to take on soaring, unforgivable, high-interest debt in order to get an education. The Huffington Post reports: 

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"Michael Hudson" - Financial Polarization and Corruption -- Obama’s Politics of Deception

By Prof. Michael Hudson

Global Research, October 7, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26973

The seeds for President Obama’s demagogic press conference on Thursday were planted last summer when he assigned his right-wing Committee of 13 the role of resolving the obvious and inevitable Congressional budget standoff by forging an anti-labor policy that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and uses the savings to bail out banks from even more loans that will go bad as a result of the IMF-style austerity program that Democrats and Republicans alike have agreed to back.

The problem facing Mr. Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing patter talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests – the Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department.

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"Robert Reich" - The Wall Street Occupiers and the Democratic Party

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Wall-Street-Occupiers-by-Robert-Reich-111008-948.html

October 8, 2011 By Robert Reich

Will the Wall Street Occupiers morph into a movement that has as much impact on the Democratic Party as the Tea Party has had on the GOP? Maybe. But there are reasons for doubting it.

Tea Partiers have been a mixed blessing for the GOP establishment -- a source of new ground troops and energy but also a pain in the assets with regard to attracting independent voters. As Rick Perry and Mitt Romney square off, that pain will become more evident.

So far the Wall Street Occupiers have helped the Democratic Party. Their inchoate demand that the rich pay their fair share is tailor-made for the Democrats' new plan for a 5.6 percent tax on millionaires, as well as the President's push to end the Bush tax cut for people with incomes over $250,000 and to limit deductions at the top.

And the Occupiers give the President a potential campaign theme. "These days, a lot of folks who are doing the right thing aren't rewarded and a lot of folks who aren't doing the right thing are rewarded," he said at his news conference this week, predicting that the frustration fueling the Occupiers will "express itself politically in 2012 and beyond until people feel like once again we're getting back to some old-fashioned American values."

But if Occupy Wall Street coalesces into something like a real movement, the Democratic Party may have more difficulty digesting it than the GOP has had with the Tea Party.

After all, a big share of both parties' campaign funds comes from the Street and corporate board rooms. The Street and corporate America also have hordes of public-relations flacks and armies of lobbyists to do their bidding -- not to mention the unfathomably deep pockets of the Koch Brothers and Dick Armey's and Karl Rove's SuperPACs. Even if the Occupiers have access to some union money, it's hardly a match.

Yet the real difficulty lies deeper. A little history is helpful here.

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"Ari LeVaux" - Thanks to the FDA, You Really Have No Idea What's In Your Food

By Ari LeVaux, AlterNet

Posted on October 7, 2011, Printed on October 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152660/thanks_to_the_fda%2C_you_really_have_no_idea_what%27s_in_your_food

For years, polls have shown that about 90 percent of Americans support the labeling of foods that contain genetically modified organisms (GMO). That's about as close to a consensus as you're going to get in this country. But amazingly, in this supposed bastion of freedom and democracy we're denied the fundamental right to know what's in our food -- a right that more than 50 other nations, including China and Russia, offer their citizens.

That's China and Russia, as in the big scary authoritarian countries known for communism, corruption and rampant human rights violations. They're at least doing a better job of trying to look like they care about protecting the freedom to choose what people put in their bodies. In the U.S., it's estimated that 60-70 percent of processed food may contain some GMO, but the food is not required to be labeled. This glaring disconnect between America's purported democratic ideals and the reality of how public agencies like the Food and Drug Administration can knowingly fail its citizens might be about to crumble, says Andrew Kimbrell of the Center For Food Safety.

His organization is part of a broad coalition of groups petitioning FDA for mandatory labeling of GMO-containing foods. Hundreds of other organizations have joined the effort, including consumer advocates, farmers, concerned parents, businesses, environmentalists, food and farming organizations, and members of the health care and faith-based communities. The goal of the coalition, called Just Label It, is to collect enough citizen signatures to its petition that the FDA will have to take action. Or force President Obama to make the FDA act.

There are three reasons why Kimbrell believes that now, despite decades of undue influence of the biotech industry on FDA policy, the agency's GMO armor will crack.

"First of all, Obama promised, when he was a candidate, to impose labels," Kimbrell says, referring to a stump speech in 2008, recorded by Food Democracy Now, when the junior senator from Illinois promised to "let folks know when their food is genetically modified, because Americans have a right to know what they're buying."

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"Mitch Potter" - Don’t Mistake Occupy Wall Street for Team Obama

Published on Sunday, October 9, 2011 by the Toronto Star/Canada

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1066942--don-t-mistake-occupy-wall-street-for-team-obama

Occupation Up, Obama Down

by Mitch Potter

NEW YORK—The mushrooming Occupy Wall Street protests, now on the verge of spreading to more than 1,000 cities and towns across the U.S. and beyond, may have come of age this week.

But the second most interesting number (apart from the anger-tracking figures updated at OccupyTogether.org) is 38 per cent — President Barack Obama’s approval rating, according to the latest Gallup survey.

Occupation up, Obama down. It’s an equation the White House is desperate to change, as the Democratic machine grapples with how best to harness the progressive populist uprising to generate electoral energy for November 2012.

The rolling fury that took hold of lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park three weeks ago remains audaciously leaderless. But it is also changing quickly, as new blood arrives to bolster the cause, in ways that are dismaying to Occupy Wall Street’s earliest adopters.

On Wednesday, it was the arrival of Big Labor that seized the headlines, as unionists marched in the thousands through Manhattan’s financial district. But in the encampment that night — and truly, the hardcore actually sleeping on these paving stones comprise 140 characters or less — fear of co-optation was rampant.

The Occupy Wall Street hardcore sees itself as bigger than partisan politics. And the disappointment with Obama — after what they view as a series of business-friendly surrenders on financial regulation, the environment, budgets and even health-care reform — borders on contempt.

But they don’t own Occupy Wall Street anymore. That was evident Thursday morning, when the encampment began to fill with even more arrivals. And some of the new faces showing up in Zuccotti seem more representative of the working-class angst gripping the country.

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"Eric Margolis" - Afghanistan, Ten Years of Aimless War

Published on Saturday, October 8, 2011 by Eric Margolis

http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/afghanistan-ten-years-of-aimless-war.aspx

by Eric Margolis

Operation Enduring Freedom – the dreadfully misnamed ten-year US occupation of Afghanistan – has turned into Operation Enduring Misery.

The renowned military strategist, Maj. Gen. J.F.C Fuller, defined war’s true objective as achieving desired political results, not killing enemies.

But this is just what the US has been doing in Afghanistan. After ten years of war costing at least $450 billion, 1,600 dead and 15,000 seriously wounded soldiers, the US has achieved none of its strategic or political goals.

Each US soldier in Afghanistan costs $1 million per annum. CIA employs 80,000 mercenaries there, cost unknown. The US spends a staggering $20.2 billion alone annually air conditioning troop quarters in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The most damning assessment comes from the US-installed Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai: America’s war has been “ineffective, apart from causing civilian casualties.”

Washington’s goal was a favorable political settlement producing a pacified Afghan state run by a regime totally responsive to US political, economic and strategic interests; a native sepoy army led by white officers; and US bases that threaten Iran, watch China, and control the energy-rich Caspian Basin.

All the claims made about fighting “terrorism and al-Qaida,” liberating Afghan women and bringing democracy are pro-war window dressing. CIA chief Leon Panetta admitted there were no more than 25-50 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan. Why are there 150,000 US and NATO troops there?

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"Christopher Ketcham" - How Income Inequality Is Destroying Our Culture

By Christopher Ketcham, Orion Magazine
Posted on October 7, 2011, Printed on October 8, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152652/the_reign_of_the_one_percenters%3A_how_income_inequality_is_destroying_our_culture

Christopher Ketcham's essay "The Reign of the One Percenters," was published on Orion's website and is forthcoming in the November/December 2011 issue of the magazine.

Author's note: When I wrote the first draft of "The Reign of the One Percenters" in the autumn of 2010, I had little hope that the kids in New York would pull off anything like the growing revolt in Liberty Square and beyond. I am delighted to be proved totally wrong.

Some thoughts, then, for present and future Occupiers everywhere. I'd suggest they take a page from the Populist movement of the 1890s. Like Occupy Wall Street, Populism was a broad, economics-driven revolt that targeted a predatory elite of corporate capitalists-the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age-who had captured government and established monopoly power over the political economy. The Populists were social visionaries, anticipating and driving the Progressive Era of reform of the early 1900s. They sought to dismantle the centralized power of corporations in the economy and return economic liberty to individuals and small business. Long before anyone else, they envisioned the graduated income tax, the secret ballot, the regulation of banks, the right of workers to set the terms of their labor. They transformed the political discourse of their time.

In the midst of this our Second Gilded Age, the Occupiers need remember that the Populists also formed a political party-the People's Party-and they ran candidates who won office, and they formed real-world cooperatives between business and labor to challenge the hegemony of corporate capitalism. Theirs was not a platform of quixotic revolution, but one of radical reform that took decades of hard labor to bear fruit.

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"Rodrigue Tremblay" - The Five Macro Crises of Our Times -- The Financial, Energy, Political, Moral and Demographic Crises

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay

Global Research, October 7, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26983

"Men accept change only when it is a necessity, and they see a necessity only in a crisis.”Jean Monnet (1888-1979), French political economist and statesman 

“I have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions, in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy….. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war." Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), 16th President of the United States (1861-65)

“The faster the present generation draws down the fossil energy legacy upon which persistently exuberant lifestyles now depend, the less opportunity posterity will have to live in anything like the same way or the same numbers. Yet most contemporary political proposals for solving problems of economic stagnation or inequity amount to plans for speeding up the rate of drawdown of non-renewable resources.” William Catton, American environmental sociologist and population ecologist 

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"John Nichols" - Should Obama Face a Challenge in the Democratic Primary?

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

http://www.thenation.com/article/163802/should-obama-face-challenge-democratic-primary

John Nichols | October 5, 2011

The Illinois 10th Congressional District Democrats work in Barack Obama’s political heartland, the northern suburbs of Chicago, which so warmly embraced a young state senator’s bid for the US Senate in 2004 and the presidency in 2008. Long before Obama became a national phenomenon, he had liberals swooning in Glenview, Deerfield and Northbrook. But early last month, after President Obama overruled his own Environmental Protection Agency and scuttled anti-smog regulations, the blog of 10th District Dems featured a plaintive post: “Do I still believe his promises? I want to… I really want to.” Even as the grassroots group was spreading the word that “volunteers are needed for Avon, Antioch, Grant, and Lake Villa for President Obama’s campaign,” sincere activists were speculating on its website about whether President Obama is a “monumental fraud.” The frustration with Obama is real and widespread, extending from environmental issues to economics to foreign policy. “I’ve been going door-to-door a lot in the past few weeks” for Democratic candidates, says Sharon Sanders, a member of the group. “We’re only hitting Democrats, and they are so discouraged about everything—as I am.”

So what about a challenge to Obama? Should a progressive take on the president in the rapidly approaching Democratic caucuses and primaries?

“Boy, have I given this some thought,” says Sanders. “I’m fifty-fifty on it. On the one hand, it would wake up Obama and the Democratic voters and perhaps get them out to vote.” On the other hand, she worries about taking steps that could strengthen the hand of conservative forces she fears are hellbent on “destroying any fragment of what’s left of our democracy and taking away all essential government programs.”

In labor temples, lecture halls and library meeting rooms across the country in recent months, I have had hundreds of discussions with folks like Sanders: hard-working, deeply committed grassroots party activists who line up well to the left of a president they see as too quick to compromise on economics, civil liberties and wars. Some prominent progressives have stepped up, endorsing a letter in mid-September arguing that without a primary challenge, “progressive principles past and present [will] be betrayed.” The signers include Ralph Nader, Cornel West, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Kozol, Rabbi Michael Lerner, former South Dakota Senator James Abourezk and Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica. It is not just unmet expectations that lead roughly a third of Democratic voters to tell pollsters Obama should face a primary challenge; it is also a sense that the president cannot energize the Democratic base and win in 2012 unless he is forced to define himself as a dramatically more progressive candidate.

Once upon a time, the sense of malaise and frustration of so many of the party faithful, along with encouragement from prominent activists and ideologues, would have guaranteed a primary challenge to a sitting president. It would have come from a prominent senator, like Estes Kefauver in 1952, Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Edward Kennedy in 1980—or, in the Republican column, from an ideological gadfly like Ronald Reagan in 1976 or Patrick Buchanan in 1992.

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