This Congress is a criminal enterprise.
Katrina vanden Heuvel: As we head into a presidential election year, I’d wager a lot the mainstream media will focus their attention on the horse race for the White House and other prime time campaigns. But this is a moment—when we are seeing a real shift in our politics, from Wisconsin to Ohio to Occupy—to be recruiting and supporting what I’d call 99 percenter candidates: those who share the core convictions of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement. MORE...
Jason Leopold:Important questions have been raised about what role, if any, the federal government has played in dismantling the Occupy encampments around the country and what the protesters and civil liberties groups say is ultimately an attempt to stifle dissent.
While we wait for those answers, Kolin, a political science professor at Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York, has done a masterful job of tracing the origins of the "political repression of mass-based movements" and the rise of the "police state" in his exhaustively researched book, "State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush." (Click here to read an excerpt.) MORE...
Police officers in riot gear form a line near Occupy Los Angeles protesters outside City Hall in Los Angeles, November 30, 2011. (Photo: Ted Soqui / The New York Times)
John Cassidy (The New Yorker):Like many people who voted for Obama in 2008, I have been critical of some of his actions and inactions. What has bothered me most has not been any one thing in particular, but his overall failure to articulate and defend the vision of an activist government tackling market failures and protecting the public interest, which Teddy Roosevelt helped to create. Yes, the President has done some positive things and made some good speeches, and, yes too, he has faced enormous difficulties, but all too often his heart hasn’t seemed to be in the fight.
Today, at last, he found his voice, or Teddy Roosevelt’s voice—or, as some are suggesting, Elizabeth Warren’s voice. Anyway, it was a big improvement. MORE...
Pres. Obama travels to Osawatomie, Kansas to deliver remarks on the economy where he invoked Theodore Roosevelt's populism and challenged Republican belief in trickle-down economics.Howie P.S.: Now we have to pay attention and watch how this message plays out. Chris in Paris (AMERICAblog) gives voice to some skepticism on this front. Politico offers "Barack Obama channels Teddy Roosevelt." More skepticism about "President Obama's Latest Big Damn Speech About the Economy" from The Rude One. Chris in Paris (AMERICAblog) posts again: "Prosecuting Wall Street not possible, but prosecuting food stamp fraud is."
That’s a theory that speaks to our individualism, Obama said, "but here’s the problem, it doesn’t work. It has never worked."
He highlighted the 99% protests and agreed with the premise of the demonstrators: the richest 1% are obtaining more wealth than the rest of the American population.
"This kind of inequality – a level we haven’t seen since the Great Depression – hurts us all. When middle-class families can no longer afford to buy the goods and services that businesses are selling, it drags down the entire economy, from top to bottom," he said.
The President promoted his economic priorities, including the extension and expansion of a payroll tax cut, which Congress has rejected.
Speaking to an enthusiastic audience, Obama said a strong economy starts with education, which he declared a "national mission."
The speech was billed as a "make-or-break moment for the middle class and all those working to join it," according to the White House. "We shall go up or down together," he said.
Rhodes Pictures, with video (01:24):
On December 3rd, community activists and occupiers canvassed East New York, Brooklyn in preparation for December 6th National Day of Action.
Just from the few hours, conversing and handing out flyers, over 300 community members are already interested in being involved.
“This action is part of a national kick-off for a new frontier for the occupy movement: the liberation of vacant bank-owned homes for those in need, and the defense of families under threat of foreclosure and eviction. Actions will take place in more than 25 cities across the country…”
occupyourhomes.org
This is only the beginning.
FORECLOSE ON THE BANKS, NOT ON PEOPLE
Protesting education cuts hundreds of Garfield high students march to Seattle City Hall.
Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who bought his first Mac in 1984. He attended Seattle Central Community College but dropped out; not long afterward, he was hired by a company that specialized in optical character recognition, transferring printed material into digital records for storage. Eventually, Kachel was laid off, but for a long time he continued to make a decent living; keeping up with advances in audio and video production, he picked up freelance work editing online content. He also programmed and played keyboards in a band, and had a gig as a night-club d.j.; sometimes, between technology jobs, he worked in his adoptive parents’ janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer and DVDs. His favorite movie was “Stalker,” the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s visually and aurally very, very strange,” Kachel said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.” MORE...
Not a theme song. A meme song. Originally broadcast on Le Show.Howie P.S.: The Washington Post finds this work of art worthy of their attention and features this line from the lyrics:
“When push comes to shove / what you need isn’t love / it’s a spritz from above / from the pepper spray cop.”What is weird for me is that I first started enjoying Shearer's political satire almost 45 years ago when he was writing for the UCLA Daily Bruin and I was a fledgling political activist there.
We’ve already accepted it’s a slow news day, so we might as well talk about Miley Cyrus. The teen pop sensation (I think that’s the right word) released a new music video this week standing up for the Occupy Wall Street protestors. And by “standing up for,” I mean using footage from the protests and combining them with generic messages about standing up for what you believe in and never giving up and whatever else pop music is about these days. MORE...
(CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE)Following a speech at a Manchester high school in New Hampshire, an Occupy protester handed President Obama a note that criticized his “silence” over the “police brutality” going on over the protests. Obama took the note, paused and studied its contents for a few moments before continuing on to shake hands at the event.MORE...
Michael Moore:This past weekend I participated in a four-hour meeting of Occupy Wall Street activists whose job it is to come up with the vision and goals of the movement. It was attended by 40+ people and the discussion was both inspiring and invigorating. Here is what we ended up proposing as the movement's "vision statement" to the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street: MORE...
You've been seeing this across the country... Americans assaulted, clubbed, dragged, pepper-sprayed... Why? For exercising their right to free speech and assembly -- protesting the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the top.
And what's Washington's response? Nothing. In fact, Congress's so-called "super committee" just disbanded because Republicans refuse to raise a penny of taxes on the rich. MORE..
A couple of weeks ago, activist Mark Read was preparing to project a message—now dubbed the "bat signal"—onto the Verizon Building for Occupy Wall Street's two-month anniversary. He had gotten a 12K lumen projector from an anonymous donor. He had secured collaborators Max Nova and JR Skola of the art group Dawn of Man. But in order to sustain the projections for more than a few minutes, he needed a room to set up shop. He posted signs in the public housing complex across the way from Verizon, offering $250 for three hours of window use.H/t to Marcia Kato.
"None of the calls seemed to be working out," Mark Read says of the days leading up to last Thursday's protest. "I was preparing to just go back and stalk the building or the lobby."
That's when he heard from Denise Vega, a native New Yorker and single mother of three who was down for the OWS cause from the get-go. MORE...
Gaius Publius (AMERICAblog):Shepard Fairey is the man who did the iconic Hope poster that boosted the Obama 2008 campaign.
This is his latest, an Occupy Hope poster for the Occupy campaign. As you can see, his thinking seems to have evolved (h/t Amanda Terkel for the link).
Click the pic for a full-sized GIF image, suitable for reproduction. As Fairey said: "[F]eel free to share it." The rest of Fairey's statement is here.
You don't have to agree with his support for Obama — or his hope — to support his support of Occupy.
(Me, I live in Hope that Obama will Change, but I spend part of my day with fictional characters. Maybe that explains it.)
There's certainly no question that this great image stands on its own.
Egyptians protest in Cairo's Tahrir Square, April 1, 2011. (Photo: Andrea Bruce / The New York TimesIn the wake of such a massive, popular and nonviolent win like the Egyptian Revolution and with the seemingly similar phenomenon of Occupy movements sweeping the US, it is easy to want to sift for gold in the form of organizing lessons. But for a moment, let us also remember that Egypt is simply a different society, economy and country than our own. Just because some lessons look attractive does not mean they are transferable.Howie P.S.: "Mehrdad Azemun is national field director for National People's Action, based in Chicago, Illinois."
That said, the most valuable organizing nugget I carried back with me is the continual necessity for acting and thinking boldly. As an organizer here in the US, I was taught to be pragmatic and practical - go for what you can win in a specific time horizon. As an organizer, we ask leaders to dream, to name the things that hold them back from being happy, free and prosperous. And then, we set limits on those dreams, or cut them into bite-sized chunks that are so small, they sometimes bear little resemblance to the massive, audacious canvas that the leaders first painted for us. We negotiate ourselves down before we even get to the real negotiation table. MORE..
A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.” MORE...Howie P.S.: Here's a panel ("Occupy Under Fire") from the full Chris Hayes show (44:23) with retired Philadelphia police Captain Ray Lewis, Laura Flanders, Melissa Harris-Perry, Michelle Goldberg (The Daily Beast) and James Poulos.
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