Progressive Radio Host Sandy LeonVest Tuesdays @ 6pm - The Magnetic Force of the Moment -- Perils and Potential on the Road to Transformation

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/24

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

For all the head-scratching and hand-wringing in the corporate media over the “message” -- or lack of one -- as it turns out, the American people understand exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement is talking about.

Evidence that the occupy movement has triggered some deeply dormant impulse in the American psyche is everywhere. Here in Northern California, “occupiers” are standing their ground in San Francisco, Oakland and other major cities. In San Francisco, protesters are refusing to leave Justin Herman Plaza, and police are preparing for a standoff. In the largely working class city of Oakland, where poverty is endemic and gang-related shootings are a near-daily occurrence, the protests are growing larger by the day. Last week, “Occupy Oakland" was given a notice by city officials to vacate Frank Ogawa Plaza. There too, demonstrators are refusing to leave until their demands are taken seriously. Those demands include increased regulation of banks and Wall Street investment firms and fundamental changes to the system of economic distribution.

In other parts of the Golden State, Wells Fargo is being targeted by occupiers in an organized effort to collectively withdraw funds. Earlier this month, hundreds of protestors shut down a Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco's Financial District. Others are participating in protests, teach-ins and non-violence trainings in their cities or communities.

Here in Northern California, and across the nation, the “electricity of change” permeates the atmosphere. The potential for a collective awakening of “we the people” from cultural unconsciousness induced by the anesthesia of corporate consumerism is omnipresent.

It is a “Howard Beale moment.”

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Harvey Wasserman - Where Occupy and No Nukes Merge and Win!!!

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/24-5

by Harvey Wasserman

The global upheaval that is the Occupy Movement is hopefully in the process of changing---and saving---the world. 

Through the astonishing power of creative non-violence, it has the magic and moxie to defeat the failing forces of corporate greed. 

A long-term agenda seems to be emerging: social justice, racial and gender equality, ecological survival, true democracy, an end to war, and so much more. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power," said Jimi Hendrix, "the world will know peace." 

Such a moment must come now in the nick of time, as the corporate ways of greed and violence pitch us to the precipice of self-extinction. 

At that edge sits a sinister technology, a poisoned cancerous power that continues to harm us all even as 3 of its cores melt and spew at Fukushima. 

Atomic energy, the so-called "Peaceful Atom", has failed on all fronts. 

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Leonard Pitts - World's Eyes are on Occupy Movement

Published on Sunday, October 23, 2011 by the Miami Herald

http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/19/2460420/worlds-eyes-on-occupy-movement.html

by Leonard Pitts Jr.

"You say you want a revolution?"
— The Beatles

By one measure at least, the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is already bigger than the Tea Party ever was.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Occupy rallies were held in more than 900 cities around the country and across the globe last weekend. The Tea Party is big, but it is not known to have had an impact in Barcelona, London, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Brussels, Munich, Rome, Sydney, Manila, Lisbon, Paris and Zurich.

Granted, that observation is deceptive in one sense: it quantifies breadth, but not depth. That is to say, while the Occupy movement has spread broadly, there is as yet little evidence of its ability to seize political power and use it to execute the movement's agenda. Say what you will about the Tea Party — a straight line if ever there was one — but give it credit for moving quickly to translate its angst into political capital with which it impacted the 2010 midterms and presidential politics to this very day.

The Occupy movement, by contrast, remains what several people have called it: a primal scream.

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Chris Hedges - Occupiers Have to Convince the Other 99 Percent

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/occupiers_have_to_convince_the_other_99_percent_20111024/

Posted on Oct 24, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The occupation movement’s greatest challenge will be overcoming the deep distrust of white liberals by the poor and the working class, especially people of color. Marginalized people of color have been organizing, protesting and suffering for years with little help or even acknowledgment from the white liberal class. With some justification, those who live in these marginalized communities often view this movement as one dominated by white sons and daughters of the middle class who began to decry police abuse and the lack of economic opportunities only after they and their families were affected. This distrust is not the fault of the movement, which has instituted measures within its decision-making process to make sure marginalized voices are heard before white males. It is the fault of a bankrupt liberal class that for decades has abandoned the core issue of economic justice for the poor and the working class and busied itself with the vain and self-referential pursuits of multiculturalism and identity politics.

The civil rights movement, after all, achieved a legal victory, not an economic one. And for the bottom two-thirds of African-Americans, life is worse today than it was when Martin Luther King marched in Selma in 1965. King, like Malcolm X, understood that racial equality was impossible without economic justice. The steady impoverishment of those in these marginal communities, part of the Faustian deal worked out between the Democratic Party and its corporate sponsors, has been accompanied by draconian forms of police control, from stop-and-frisk to militarized police raids to the establishment of our vast complex of prison gulags. More African-American men, as Michelle Alexander has pointed out, are in prison or jail or on probation or parole than wereenslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began. The corporate state keeps some two-thirds of poor people of color in the United States trapped in internal colonies—either in the impoverished inner city or behind bars. And the abject failure on the part of the white liberal establishment to stand up for the rights of the poor, as well as its decision to throw its support behind Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who abet this institutionalized and economic racism, has left many in these marginal communities disdainful of protesters from the newly dispossessed white middle class.

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Barbara Ehrenreich - Throw Them Out With the Trash

Posted on October 23, 2011, Printed on October 23, 2011

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175457/

Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue 
By Barbara Ehrenreich

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

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Robert Scheer - Let Them Eat Keller

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/let_them_eat_keller_20111020/

Posted on Oct 20, 2011

By Robert Scheer

Funny, he doesn’t look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are “bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,” it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege. 

Perhaps his contempt for anti-corporate protesters was honed by the example of his father, once the chairman of Chevron. In any case, it is revealing, given the cheerleading support that the Times gave to the radical deregulation of Wall Street that occurred when Keller was the managing editor of the newspaper.

As the Times reported on its news pages in 1998, heralding the merger that created Citigroup as the world’s largest financial conglomerate: “In a single day, with a bold merger, pending legislation in Congress to sweep away Depression-era restrictions on the financial services industry has been given a sudden, and unexpected, new chance of passage.”

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Jim Hightower - Wall Street is Dazed and Confused

by: Jim Hightower, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/wall-street-dazed-and-confused/1319028757

Astonishingly, some Wall Streeters continue to be clueless about what the Occupy Wall Street movement is protesting. Yoo-hoo, Streeters: Note that the movement's name has the term "Wall Street" in it.

While there is a plethora of particular issues being raised by the protesters -- from the corrupting power of corporate money in our elections to the demise of middle-class wages -- the unifying theme is that each one adds to the rising tide of economic inequality that's enriching the most privileged few by knocking down America's workaday majority. And, Mr. and Ms. Streeter, guess who is the most powerful perpetrators of this greed-fueled disparity: Yes, you.

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"You Tube Video" - Occupy Wall Street - Chris Hedges shuts down CBC Kevin O'Leary

Watch the great video right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAhHPIuTQ5k

UPDATE -- CBC issues apology on 2011-10-18 
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/olearys-nutbar-remark-breach-of-...

CBC: "The watchdog says hundreds of complaints were filed after Mr. O'Leary called the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist "a nutbar" during CBC News Network's The Lang & O'Leary Exchange on Oct. 6. The remark came during a seven-minute segment about the Occupy Wall Street protests unfolding in the United States."
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Occupy Wall Street - Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges shuts down CBC commentator Kevin O'Leary as they discuss Wall Street protests.

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"RJ Eskow" - Occupy Wall Street Speaks for America: A "Centrist" Hit Job's Polling Data Helps Prove It

Tuesday 18 October 2011

by: Richard (RJ) Eskow, Campaign for America's Future [3] | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-street-speaks-america-centrist-hit-jobs-polling-data-helps-prove-it/1318953230

Thanks to a hit piece by one of those Beltway pseudo-"bipartisans" we can now state conclusively what many of us have long suspected: Occupy Wall Street speaks for the American majority. We've got the polling numbers to prove it. We now know where the real center lies.

It's easy to understand why people like Douglas Schoen are lining up to attack OWS. It shines a spotlight on their cardboard centrism - that think-tank designed, artificially-inseminated, vat-grown corporate ideology so widely rejected by the public at large. OWS represents the real American consensus, and that has them running scared.

But Schoen's Wall Street Journal editorial [4] falls so far short of the mark that it elicits only a soft sense of pity. It illustrates nothing except the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of those out-of-step Democrats who sell themselves to conservatism under the 'centrist' or 'Third Way' banner.

Oh, wait. It also provides enough data to undermine his entire argument - and possibly his entire ideology. Before we look at the numbers we should take a closer look at these "centrists" and why they're trying to kill Occupy Wall Street.

How to Succeed in Centrism Conservatism Without Really Trying

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"Rebecca Solnit" - Letter to a Dead Man About the Occupation of Hope

Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175455/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_this_land_is_your_%28occupied%29_land/

by Rebecca Solnit

Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi,

I want to write you about an astonishing year -- with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society.

I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring.

We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.

You lit yourself on fire on December 17, 2010, exactly nine months before Occupy Wall Street began.  Your death two weeks later would be the beginning of so much. You lit yourself on fire because you were voiceless, powerless, and evidently without hope. And yet you must have had one small hope left: that your death would have an impact; that you, who had so few powers, even the power to make a decent living or protect your modest possessions or be treated fairly and decently by the police, had the power to protest. As it turned out, you had that power beyond your wildest dreams, and you had it because your hope, however diminished, was the dream of the many, the dream of what we now have started calling the 99%. 

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