Taxes

How Conservatives exploit the myth of “Wealthy Elderly” to justify gutting social security

November 17, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Right-wingers somehow think that seniors with incomes under $30,000 a year must sacrifice to balance the budget

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The austerity gang seeking cuts to Social Security and Medicare has been vigorously promoting the myth that the elderly are an especially affluent and privileged group. Their argument is that because of their relative affluence, cuts to the programs upon which they depend is a simple matter of fairness. There were two reports released last week that call this view into question.

The first was a report from the Census Bureau that used a new experimental poverty index. This index differed from the official measure in several ways; most importantly it includes the value of government non-cash benefits, like food stamps. It also adjusts for differences in costs by area and takes account of differences in health spending by age.

While this new measures showed a slightly higher overall poverty rate the most striking difference between the new measure and the official measure was the rise in the poverty rate among the elderly. Using the official measure, the poverty rate for the elderly is somewhat lower than for the adult population as a whole, 9 percent for the elderly compared with 14 percent for the non-elderly adult population. However with the new measure, the poverty rate for the elderly jumps to 14 percent, compared with 13 percent for non-elderly adults.

By this higher measure, we have not been nearly as successful in reducing poverty among the elderly as we had believed. While Social Security has done much to ensure retirees an income above the poverty line, the rising cost of health care expenses not covered by Medicare has been an important force operating in the opposite direction.

The other report suggests that this situation could get worse in the years ahead. The Pew Research Center released a study on wealth by age cohort. While many observers (including me) focused on the change in wealth over the last 25 years, what is perhaps more striking about this study are the levels of wealth it reported.

The report showed that the median wealth for a household over age 65 is $170,500. This measure includes everything that they own, including equity in their home. With the median house selling for roughly $170,000, this study implies that the typical household over age 65 would essentially have enough money to pay off their mortgage. They would then have nothing else to live on except their Social Security.

The situation looks even worse for the near elderly: the cohorts between the ages of 55 to 64. (Wealth typically peaks in these years, so these people are unlikely to have more wealth when they cross age 65.) The median wealth for this group was reported as $162,000. Using the Pew findings, the typical household in the 55 to 64 year old cohort would fall 5 percent short of the money needed to pay off the mortgage on the median home.

Alternatively, if they were to use this wealth to buy an annuity at age 65, it would be sufficient to get them an annuity of roughly $10,000 a year or just over $800 a month. This would supplement Social Security income that comes to less than $1,200 a month for a typical worker. The monthly premium for Medicare Part B is $100, which would leave $1,100 from a monthly Social Security check for a typical retiree.

Note that this calculation assumes that they have no equity in their home so they would either being paying rent or still paying off a mortgage out of this money. It is also worth remembering that the Medicare premium is projected to rise considerably more than the cost of living each year. This means that as retirees age, rising Medicare premiums will be reducing the buying power of their Social Security check each year. And this is the median; half of all seniors will have less income than this to support themselves.

This is the group that the Very Serious People in Washington want to target for their deficit reduction. While the Very Serious People debate whether people who earn $250,000 a year are actually rich when it comes to restoring the tax rates of the 1990s, they somehow think that seniors with incomes under $30,000 a year must sacrifice to balance the budget. There is a logic here, but it ain’t pretty.

Source: https://www.alternet.org/story/153079/how_conservatives_exploit_the_myth_of_%22wealthy_elderly%22_to_justify_gutting_social_security/?page=entire

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Democracy, Economy, Health, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Taxes, USA, Welfare Benefits

Crackdowns reach epicenter of Wall Street protests

November 16, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

JUDGE RULED THAT THEIR FREE SPEECH RIGHTS DO NOT EXTEND TO PITCHING A TENT AND SETTING UP CAMP FOR MONTHS AT A TIME

NEW YORK (AP) — Crackdowns against the Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country reached the epicenter of the movement Tuesday, when police rousted protesters from a Manhattan park and a judge ruled that their free speech rights do not extend to pitching a tent and setting up camp for months at a time.

It was a potentially devastating setback. If crowds of demonstrators return to Zuccotti Park, they will not be allowed to bring tents, sleeping bags and other equipment that turned the area into a makeshift city of dissent.

But demonstrators pledged to carry on with their message protesting corporate greed and economic inequality, either inZuccotti or a yet-to-be chosen new home.

“This is much bigger than a square plaza in downtown Manhattan,” said Hans Shan, an organizer who was working with churches to find places for protesters to sleep. “You can’t evict an idea whose time has come.”

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman upheld the city’s eviction of the protesters after an emergency appeal by the National Lawyers Guild.

The protesters have been camped out in the privately owned park since mid-September. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he ordered the sweep because health and safety conditions had become “intolerable” in the crowded plaza. The raid was conducted in the middle of the night “to reduce the risk of confrontation” and “to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood,” he said.

By early Tuesday evening, some protesters were being allowed back into the park two by two. But they could each take only a small bag.

Still, some protesters believed the loss of Zuccotti Park may be an opportunity to broaden and decentralize the protest to give it staying power.

“People are really recognizing that we need to build a movement here,” Shan said. “What we’re dedicated to is not just about occupying space. That’s a tactic.”

But without a place to congregate, protesters will have a harder time communicating with each other en masse. The leaders of the movement spent most of Tuesday gathering in small groups throughout the city — in church basements and on street corners — and relaying plans in scattered text messages and email.

Robert Harrington, owner of a small importing business in New York, stood outside the barricade with a sign calling for tighter banking regulations.

“To be effective it almost has to move out of the park,” Harrington said. “It’s like the antiwar movement in the ’60s, which started as street theater and grew into something else.”

“The issues,” he added, “are larger than just this camp.”

Protesters milling around Zuccotti Park said they were dismayed by the court ruling.

Chris Habib, a New York artist, said he hoped the group could settle on a new protest site during a meeting later Tuesday evening. He was confident the movement would continue even if its flagship camp was dismantled.

“A judge can’t erase a movement from the public mind,” he said. “The government is going to have to spend a lot of time in court to defend this.”

Pete Dutro, head of the group’s finances, said the loss of the movement’s original encampment will open up a dialogue with other cities.

“We all knew this was coming,” Dutro said. “Now it’s time for us to not be tucked away in Zuccotti Park, and have different areas of occupation throughout the city.”

The aggressive raid seemed to mark a shift in the city’s dealings with the Wall Street protests. Only a week ago, Bloomberg privately told a group of executives and journalists that he thought reports of problems at the park had been exaggerated and didn’t require any immediate intervention.

The New York raid was the third in three days for a major American city. Police broke up camps Sunday in Portland, Ore., and Monday in Oakland, Calif.

The timing did not appear to be coincidence. On Tuesday, authorities acknowledged that police departments across the nation consulted with each other about nonviolent ways to clear encampments. Officers in as many as 40 cities participated in the conference calls.

When New York police began their crackdown at 1 a.m., most of the Occupy Wall Street protesters were sleeping.

Officers arrived by the hundreds and set up powerful klieg lights to illuminate the block. They handed out notices from Brookfield Office Properties, the park’s owner, and the city saying that the plaza had to be cleared because it had become unsanitary and hazardous.

Many people left, carrying their belongings with them. Others tried to make a stand, locking arms or even chaining themselves together with bicycle locks.

Dennis Iturrralde was fast asleep on a cot when the shouting woke him up. Dark figures were running through the tents in the dim orange light of streetlamps. Something slammed into the cot, flipping him to the ground.

“They came in from both sides, yelling, ‘You have 20 minutes to vacate the premises!’” said Iturralde, a Manhattan cook.

Within minutes, police in riot gear had swarmed the park, ripping down tents and tarps. The air was filled with the sound of rustling tarps, rumbling garbage trucks, shouts and equipment crashing to the ground.

“They were tearing everything apart,” Iturralde said. “They were hitting people, spraying people if they didn’t move fast enough.”

Around 200 people were arrested, including a member of the City Council and at least a half-dozen journalists. The arrested journalists included a reporter and photographer from The Associated Press who were held for four hours before being released.

Earlier in the day, another judge had issued a temporary restraining order that appeared to bar the city from preventing protesters from re-entering the park, but it was unilaterally ignored by the police and city officials.

In contrast to the scene weeks ago in Oakland, where a similar eviction turned chaotic and violent, the police action was comparatively orderly. But some protesters complained of being hit by police batons and shoved to the ground.

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, who has been supportive of the Occupy movement, was among those arrested outside of the park. Police Commission Ray Kelly said Rodriguez was trying to get through police lines to reach the protesters.

“The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day,” Bloomberg said. “Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with, as the park has been taken over by protesters, making it unavailable to anyone else.”

The police commissioner said officers gave the crowd 45 minutes to retrieve their belongings before starting to dismantle tents, and let people leave voluntarily until around 3:30 a.m., when they moved in to make mass arrests.

“Arresting people is not easy,” he said, adding that he thought the officers “showed an awful lot of restraint in the face of “an awful lot of taunting, people getting in police officers’ faces, calling them names.”

The ouster at Zuccotti Park came as a rift within the movement had been widening between the park’s full-time residents and the movement’s power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.

Some residents of the park have been grumbling about the recent formation of a “spokescouncil,” an upper echelon of organizers who held meetings at a high school near police headquarters. Some protesters felt that the selection of any leaders whatsoever wasn’t true to Occupy Wall Street’s original anti-government spirit: That no single person is more important or more powerful than another person.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/crackdowns-reach-epicenter-wall-street-protests-235327049.html

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Corporations, Corruption, Economy, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Money, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Politics, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Surveillance, Taxes, USA

Occupy Wall Street: Police violence reveals a corrupt system

November 16, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Better-off Occupy Wall Street protesters are learning something about the relationship between citizen and state

At four in the morning in lower Manhattan, as what remains of the Occupy Wall Street encampment is loaded into trash compacters, some protesters have still not given up on the police. Kevin Sheneberger tries to engage one NYPD officer in a serious debate about the role of law enforcement in public protest. Then he sees them loading his friend’s tent into the back of a rubbish truck. Behind him, a teenage girl holds a hastily written sign saying: “NYPD, we trusted you – you were supposed to protect us!”

The sentiment is a familiar one. Across Europe, over a year of demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience, anti-austerity protesters have largely shifted from declaring solidarity with the police – as fellow workers whose jobs and pensions are also under threat – to outrage and anger at state violence against unarmed protesters. Following last month’s police brutality in Oakland, and today’s summary eviction of the Occupy Wall Street camp, American activists too are reaching the conclusion that “police protect the 1%”.

The notion that law enforcement is there to protect a wealthy elite from the rest of the population is not news to those protesters from deprived and ethnic minority backgrounds, many of whom have been subject to intimidation in their communities for years, but for those from more privileged backgrounds, the first spurt of pepper spray to the face is an important education in the nature of the relationship between state and citizen in the west. “Who do you guys work for?” Shouts one Manhattan protester, as police load arrestees into a van. “You work for JP Morgan Bank!”

In times of economic and democratic crisis, it makes sense for faltering governments to use police violence and the threat of arrest to bully citizens into compliance. In the context of protest, however, police harassment has three other, important effects. The first and most important of these is consciousness-raising.

The spectacle of police beating and brutalizing unarmed civilians for the crime of sitting on the pavement and demanding a fairer world brings home the point of the struggle to public and protesters alike. The second is galvanizing: attacks on peaceful protesters rarely make the police or government look anything but weak and cowardly, and have tended only to increase public support for civil disobedience. “This is going to explode now,” 26-year-old Katie tells me, as we watch demonstrators marched out of Zuccotti Park one by one. “They don’t realize what they’ve done.”

Fighting the police can focus the energy of a movement – but it can also drain that energy. In Britain, a year of arrests and vicious crackdowns have left anti-cuts protesters debilitated and depleted, and the challenge for the American movement will be to remember its purpose in the face of police brutality. “That’s the whole point of violent resistance,” says Sheneberger. “It exposes the corruption of the power that’s resisting you.”

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/15-1

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Censorship, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Employment, Income Inequality, Law, Martial Law, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Psychology, Revolution, Rights, Surveillance, Taxes, USA

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the World has ever seen

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That’s why we’re nearly bankrupt

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. “The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture.”

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses’s scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you’re likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you’re likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world’s common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I’m sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots’ labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses’ self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people’s wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/08-7

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Censorship, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Rights, Surveillance, Taxes, USA, War

The Police State makes its move: Retaining one’s humanity in the face of tyranny

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

For days now, we have endured demonstrably false propaganda that the fallen soldiers of U.S. wars sacrificed their lives for “our freedoms.” Yet, as that noxious nonsense still lingers in the air, militarized police have invaded OWS sites in numerous cities, including Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, and, in the boilerplate description of the witless courtesans of the corporate media, with the mission to “evict the occupiers”.

Hundreds of NYC riot police forcibly evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park early on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011.U.S soldiers died protecting what and who again? These actions should make this much clear: The U.S. military and the police exist to protect the 1%. At this point, the ideal of freedom will be carried by those willing to resist cops and soldiers. There have been many who have struggled and often died for freedom-but scant few were clad in uniforms issued by governments.

Freedom rises despite cops and soldiers not because of them. And that is exactly why those who despise freedom propagate military hagiography and fetishize those wearing uniforms-so they can give the idea of liberty lip service as all the while they order it crushed.

When anyone tells you that dead soldiers and veterans died for your freedom, it is your duty to occupy reality and inform them of just how mistaken they are. And if you truly cherish the concepts of freedom and liberty, you just might be called on to face mindless arrays of fascist cops and lose your freedom, for a time, going to jail, so others might, at some point, gain their freedom.

I was born in Birmingham Alabama, at slightly past the mid-point of the decade of the 1950s. Many of my earliest memories involve the struggle for civil rights that was transpiring on the streets of my hometown.

My father was employed at a scrap metal yard but also worked as a freelance photojournalist who hawked his work to media photo syndicates such as Black Star who then sold his wares to the major newsmagazines of the day. A number of the iconic photographs of the era were captured by his Nikon camera e.g., of vicious police dogs unleashed on peaceful demonstrators; of demonstrators cartwheeled down city streets by the force of fire hoses; of Dr. King and other civil rights marchers kneeled in prayer before arrays of Police Chief Bull Connor’s thuggish ranks of racist cops.

In Birmingham, racist laws and racial and economic inequality were the progenitors of acts of official viciousness. The social structure in place was indefensible. Reason and common decency held no dominion in the justifications for the established order that was posited by the system’s apologists and enforcers; therefore, brutality filled the void created by the absence of their humanity.

And the same situation is extant in the growing suppression of the OWS movement in various cities, nationwide, including Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan. The 1% and their paid operatives-local city officials-are striving to protect an unjust, inherently dishonest status quo. Lacking a moral mandate, they are prone to the use of police state forms of repression.

Dr. King et al faced their oppressors on the streets of my hometown. Civil Rights activists knew that they had to hold their ground to retain their dignity…that it was imperative to sit down in those Jim Crow-tyrannized streets when necessary in order to stand up against the forces of oppression.

At present, we have arrived at a similar moment. If justice is to prevail, it seems, the air of U.S. cities will hold the acrid sting of tear gas, the jails will again be filled, the brave will endure brutality-yet the corrupt system will crumble. Because the system’s protectors themselves will bring it down by revealing its empty nature, and the corrupt structure will collapse from within.

Yet, when riot police attack unarmed, peacefully resisting protesters, the mainstream media often describes the events with standard boilerplate such as “police clash with demonstrators.”

This is inaccurate (at best) reportage. It suggest that both parties are equal aggressors in the situation, and the motive of the police is to restore order and maintain the peace, as opposed to, inflicting pain and creating an aura of intimidation.

This is analogous to describing a mugging as simply: two parties engaging in a financial transaction.

Although mainstream media demurred from limning the upwelling of mob violence at Penn. State as involving any criteria deeper than the mindless rage of a few football-besotted students unloosed by the dismissal of beloved sport figure.

Yet there exists an element that the Penn. State belligerents and OWS activists have in common: a sense of alienation.

Penn. State students rioted because life in the corporate state is so devoid of meaning…that identification with a sports team gives an empty existence said meaning…These are young people, coming of age in a time of debt-slavery and diminished job prospects, who were born and raised in, and know of no existence other than, life as lived in U.S. nothingvilles i.e., a public realm devoid of just that-a public realm-an atomizing center-bereft culture of strip malls, office parks, fast food eateries and the electronic ghosts wafting the air of social media.

Contrived sport spectacles provisionally give an empty life meaning…Take that away, and a mindless rampage might ensue…Anything but face the emptiness and acknowledge one’s complicity therein, and then direct one’s fury at the creators of the stultified conditions of this culture.

It is a given, the cameras of corporate media swivel towards reckless actions not mindful commitment…are attuned to verbal contretemps not thoughtful conviction-and then move on. And we will click our TV remotes and scan the Internet…restless, hollowed out…eating empty memes…skimming the surface of the electronic sheen…

These are the areas we are induced to direct our attention-as the oceans of the earth are dying…these massive life-sustaining bodies of water have less then 50 years before they will be dead. This fact alone should knock us to our knees in lamentation…should sent us reeling into the streets in displays of public grief…

Accordingly, we should not only occupy-but inhabit our rage. No more tittering at celebrity/political class contretemps-it is time for focused fury. The machinery of the corporate/police state must be dismantled.

If the corporate boardrooms have to be emptied-for the oceans to be replenished with abundant life-then so be it. If one must go to jail for committing acts of civil disobedience to free one’s heart-then it must be done.

Yet why does the act of challenging the degraded status quo provoke such a high decree of misapprehension, anxiety, and outright hostility from many, both in positions of authority and among so many of the exploited and dispossessed of the corporate/consumer state.

For example, why did the fatal shooting incident in Oakland, California, Nov. 1, that occurred near the Occupy Oakland Encampment-but, apparently, was wholly unrelated to OWS activity cause a firestorm of reckless speculation and false associations.

Because any exercise in freedom makes people in our habitually authoritarian nation damn uneasy…a sense of uncertainty brings on dread-the feeling that something terrible is to come from challenging a prevailing order, even as degraded as it is.

Tyrants always promise safety; their apologist warn of chaos if and when the soul-numbing order is challenged.

Granted, it is a given that there exists a sense of certainty in a prison routine: high walls and guards and gun mounts ensure continuity; an uncertainty-banishing schedule is enforced. Moreover, solitary confinement offers an even more orderly situation…uncertainty is circumscribed as freedom is banished.

The corporate/national security state, by its very nature is anti-liberty and anti-freedom. Of course, its defenders give lip service to the concept of freedom…much in the manner a pick-pocket working a subway train is very much in favor of the virtues of public transportation.

A heavy police presence has ringed Zuccotti Park from the get-go, and whose ranks have now staged a military style raid upon it, a defacto search and destroy mission-because the ruling elite want to suppress the very impulse of freedom. These authoritarian bullies don’t want the concept to escape the collective prison of the mind erected and maintained by the corrupt jailers comprising the 1% who claim they offer us protection as, all the while, they hold our chains…all for our own good, they insist…for our safety and the safety of others.

Although, from studying on these prison walls, the thought occurs to me…that what we might need is protection from all this safety.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/15

Filed Under: Banks, Campaigning, Censorship, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Income Inequality, Law, Martial Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Rights, Surveillance, Taxes, USA

Rise up and support the real revolution

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

“Promise, promise, lie (making money, making money, making money), lie, lie, lie, lie, promise.”

Sound familiar? It should — that’s the sound of your elected politicians. Between all the false promises there is nothing more than lies and profit. It’s a truth and its verification only requires the fundamental ability to read and the problem-solving skills of a 3rd grader. Let me explain.

The system that your politicians work for is no longer your system. It is their system. It is planned, modified, and controlled by them. It benefits their own interests and their own interests only. To realize this truth is very simple — all you have to do is look at the legislation. They create it, present it, pass it, and it’s written on paper for all to decipher.

So, let’s look at this legislation. What does it do?

Well, for the people, it creates restrictions. It decides what you as an individual cannot do. It decides what is considered to be wrong. It decides what you can be reprimanded, penalized, fined or incarcerated for. To the people, legislation is nothing more than the continual loss of our freedoms.

Now, let’s take a look at the corporate side of legislation. What does it do? It creates “regulations”, not restrictions. Regulations enable corporations instead of restrict them. Regulation is nothing more than a cute word that allows corporate entities to be exempt from the very same laws that apply to the individual. Basically, regulations set standards on how much crime can be committed by corporations.

It requires a very limited amount of thinking to understand almost immediately that this situation alone is a recipe for disaster. I need not delve any further for one to realize that restrictions for consumers, but freedom for profiteers, equals a fascist system. You don’t have to look into the specifics of the laws, or any law specifically to see that we lose freedom as corporations gain it. Nearly every piece of legislation that is created by the federal government serves to directly benefit either big business or the government itself.

Meanwhile, they use our tax monies to run rampant across the global landscape as they leverage their political powers to maximize the profits for corporations (which in turn reward them with commissions). They rape, rob, pillage, destroy, corrupt, and pollute in the name of profits. They deface the earth while simultaneously committing genocides which they then contort and present to us as either an act of liberation for oppressed peoples, or the elimination of a terror threat.

I’m not sure about you, but I want absolutely nothing to do with a system that operates in this fashion. It’s 110% absolutely and completely ludicrous for anyone to obey the laws of murderous dictators who repeatedly commit high-crime against humanity on a global level.

If you knew that somebody was going to rape a 12-year-old girl before blowing her brains out and lighting her body on fire in front of her family, would you give them 20% of your paycheck to do so? I don’t think you would, and it’s for that same reason that I don’t believe you should pay income tax.

Our system is completely defunct, both financially and morally. It’s not only insufficient for our best interests as a society, it’s downright destructive. It suffers an absolute lack of reasoning and has no room whatsoever for even an ounce of human compassion.

The flags, the fake debates, the false promises, the “god bless our nation” — it’s nothing more than pure deception. It’s proven to be so convincing that although its creators don’t deserve the title of Human, one could easily say it’s a masterpiece worthy of the title of genius. This picture of America — a magical fairyland with freedom and prosperity for all — is painted with blood on the dead flesh of freedom.

Do not stand up for it. Do not represent your government, just as they don’t represent you. Denounce your association with them. Refuse to participate in a system that wreaks havoc on innocent human life. Refuse to play their game any longer. Refuse to believe their lies and refuse to let anyone else tell you otherwise. We are humans, living beings, individuals with souls who are born free. Refuse to be tied down by authority.

Do not be dumb. Do not be like the battered woman with broken arms who says she’s in love. Do not remain loyal to a hand that doesn’t feed you. Do not believe that you have to do what everyone else does, or that it’s right simply because they do it. Rise above the scum who run this system, let them know that you know the truth, that you’re not afraid and that you refuse to participate. Do it with your family, your friends, whoever you care about.

Rise above this oppressive regime of global control freaks. They are nothing. They are mental, physical and spiritual slumlords. They have nothing to hide behind except an illusion. They are weak, insecure and miserable. As the days pass by, their time to remain in charge grows shorter. It’s happening around the world — people are revolting. There is a knowledge being consumed and it is empowering the people.

The biggest myth that they ever created is that “freedom isn’t free”.

It is free, take it. Participate. Occupy. Denounce support for politics and corruption once and for all.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/10/rise-up-and-support-real-revolution.html

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Censorship, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Education, Environment, Federal Reserve, Health, Income Inequality, Law, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Monsanto, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Poverty, Privacy, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Taxes, USA, War

Three Ways Elites Rig the System

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

From low capital gains taxes to stock buy-backs, here are the ways the elites ensure the markets benefit them.

A growing number of Americans suspect that the American economic system is rigged in favor of the rich and merely affluent. That growing number of Americans is right.

Here are three of the many ways that markets for compensation are rigged to benefit not only the top 1 percent but also the top 10 percent, a group that includes many well-paid professionals:

Financial sector compensation. By now the phrase “too big to fail” has become so familiar that it is known by its acronym: TBTF. What needs to be emphasized is that TBTF is the basis for the huge bonuses paid to elite American bankers who benefit from a government that socializes their losses while allowing them to keep their profits.

Here’s their business model: “We place highly leveraged bets, sometimes as much as 35 or 40 to 1. In return, the government implicitly agrees to bail out our banks, and if we’re fired, we’ve negotiated sweetheart deals with golden parachutes. If we bet right, then our banks keep the windfall profits and we get big bonuses. If we bet wrong, not to worry — the taxpayers will bail out our banks and the government will pay for the cost of the bailouts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Suckers!”

While TBTF rigs pre-tax income for financial elites, American tax law rigs their after-tax income to their benefit. In the 1980s, capital gains tax rates were equal to income tax rates. But then in the 1990s Clinton and the Republican Congress lowered the capital gains rates. So billionaires who derive most of their money from their investments and savings pay taxes at a lower rate than the majority of Americans, who, like Warren Buffett’s proverbial secretary, rely on their labor income.

Andrew Mellon, who dominated American economic policymaking as treasury secretary in the 1920s during the administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, was denounced by the liberal reformers of his day as the embodiment of plutocracy. But here is what he had to say about taxing capital versus wages in his 1924 book, “Taxation: The People’s Business”:

The fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages, salaries or from investments is beyond question. In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in duration; sickness or death destroys it and old age diminishes it; in the other, the source of income continues; the income may be disposed of during a man’s life and it descends to his heirs.

Surely we can afford to make a distinction between the people whose only capital is their mental and physical energy and the people whose income is derived from investments. Such a distinction would mean much to millions of American workers and would be an added inspiration to the man who must provide a competence during his few productive years to care for himself and his family when his earnings capacity is at an end.

To which today’s conservatives, no doubt, would reply: “Andrew Mellon was a liberal!”

CEO compensation. In the last generation, American CEOs have been much better paid than their European and Asian counterparts, without having done remarkably better jobs.

American CEO compensation is rigged with perfect legality by two practices. The first is allowing the compensation of CEOs to be determined by boards of directors, whose members are frequently cronies of the CEO. Well-paid cronies, in many cases. You can be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for attending a few board meetings and rubber-stamping whatever your friend the CEO wants. When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act sought to impose more responsibility on board members, this was denounced as an assault on the foundations of free enterprise. Freebie enterprise, is more like it.

CEO compensation is also inflated by the practice of stock buy-backs. Several decades ago, the practice of rewarding CEOs with company stock options was supposed to improve the performance of their companies and of the American economy as a whole. That worked out well, didn’t it?

American companies routinely and legally drive up the prices of their stock by buying back shares in the stock market. This is the equivalent of a celebrity author buying mass quantities of his or her own book, in the hope of driving it up best-seller lists. Stock buy-backs do not strengthen the company or lead to innovation. They merely inflate the wealth of the CEO and other company employees who are paid with stock options.

Long-term shareholders might object, but they are a dying breed. Most shareholders want to maximize the price of stocks before they cash out by selling them to the proverbial “greater fool.” Thanks to buy-backs, stock options have aligned the interests of CEOs and shareholders — but at the expense of prudent, long-term investment in American companies and American industries.

Professional compensation. Bailed-out bankers and crony capitalist CEOs are not the only Americans who benefit from rigged markets for compensation. Let’s not forget the professional class, which makes up roughly 10 percent of the population (the approximate number of Americans with graduate or professional degrees).

The professions are guilds. To put it another way, they are the most powerful unions in America. They are unions for the affluent. They rig labor markets the way that guilds have always done — by preventing anybody who doesn’t belong to the guild from practicing the trade.

In most states of the Union, you can’t practice law or medicine without both passing exams and possessing a medical degree or a law degree. In the early 20th century, law was an undergraduate degree. Then law schools began requiring four-year college education as a prerequisite, in order to keep the lawyer labor market tight by weeding out Americans who can’t afford at least seven years of higher education.

While raking in rents from their credentials, America’s affluent professionals are delegating more and more of their work to poorly paid subordinates — nurses and health aides, paralegals, adjuncts. While gouging students and parents with high tuitions, today’s universities and colleges assign more and more teaching to “freeway fliers” — often graduate students paid near-poverty wages or affluent professionals who teach as a hobby. God forbid that a well-paid, tenured professor should have to teach undergraduates, instead of jetting to conferences in luxury hotels.

Note that none of these methods of rigging the market to artificially inflate incomes — TBTF, stock buy-backs that drive up stock options, the professional credentials cartel — can be blamed on capitalism or markets. There are still genuine entrepreneurs who get rich by founding companies that provide new and useful goods and services, and there are still genuine capitalists who get rich by investing in them. But getting rich the old-fashioned way by getting customers to buy what you sell is hard, compared to paying politicians to rig markets and tax policies in your favor.

Once upon a time, rigged market capitalism in America benefited the many, and not just the few. Between the 1930s, the New Deal raised the wages of working-class Americans by rigging labor markets in their favor. From the 1920s the New Dealers inherited a system of low immigration, which lasted until the 1970s and helped to create tighter labor markets at the bottom. The black Southern poor who moved North in the Great Migration benefited disproportionately when jobs were opened up for them by the cutoff of mass European immigration.

The New Deal’s minimum wage and maximum hours legislation helped millions of the working poor to join the working class or middle class. And liberal New Deal Democrats promoted unions in peace and war, with the result that by the 1950s about a third of the private sector workforce was unionized (today it is less than 7 percent).

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government has systematically derigged labor markets for the many while rigging compensation markets even more for the elite few. Mass immigration, including mass illegal immigration, resumed after the 1960s, lowering wages for the poorest workers and weakening the ability of unions to organize. In the late 20th century, Congress allowed inflation to erode the real value of the minimum wage. Even after several increases, it is still lower, in real terms, than it was in the 1960s. And having effectively destroyed private-sector unions, the right is now trying to eliminate public sector unions, on the theory that schoolteachers and emergency responders are a much greater threat to the American economy than the reckless bankers who created a near-Depression and the CEOs who are rewarded for offshoring one industry after another.

What is rigged can be derigged; that is the lesson of the derigging of the institutions that raised the incomes of the American middle and working classes, between the Great Depression and the 1980s. TBTF can be eliminated, either by allowing giant, interconnected financial institutions to fail, or, more realistically, by turning them into tightly regulated public utilities that don’t make risky bets. CEO compensation practices can be reformed by law. Corporations are creations of the governments that charter them, and charters can contain any rules that lawmakers choose to put into them. And the rents extracted by the academic-professional complex can be reduced, by lowering the barriers to entry to the professions or, more radically, by reorganizing medicine, law and university teaching so that they are no longer structured as trades run by medieval guilds.

Of course, to succeed, this agenda has to be promoted by politicians, many of whom are members of the credentialed professional guilds, dependent on campaign donations from financial and corporate elites whose compensation depends to a large degree on markets that are legally rigged.

Source: https://www.alternet.org/economy/153025/3_ways_elites_rig_the_system/?page=entire

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Economy, Income Inequality, Money, Occupy, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Taxes, USA

The war against the poor in America

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Rampant poverty and further welfare cuts have created a need to move towards a moral economy of the many, not few.

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 (OWS) movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in US politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target and branding itself as a movement of the 99 per cent, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behaviour or the personal behaviour of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.

Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protesters have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99 per cent” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top one per cent over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80 per cent)

The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages - for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian EP Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by 18th century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just, moral economy.

Being poor by the numbers

A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top one per cent.

Some facts: early in 2011, the US Census Bureau reported that 14.3 per cent of the population, or 47m people - one in six Americans - were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19m people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp programme, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959 and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the US poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or healthcare costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.

Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them ”debt poor”. Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.

Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it’s clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increasedfor the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7 per cent in 2001 to 12.5 per cent in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49 per cent higher in the US than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.

“Indeed, in US politics, ‘poverty’, along with ‘welfare’, ‘unwed mothers’ and ‘crime’, became code words for blacks.“- Frances Fox Piven

In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilisation to reduce labour costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labour Board decisions became far less favourable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.

Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labour’s share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn’t earn even a poverty-level livelihood - and even that’s not the whole of it. The poor and the programmes that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.

Campaigning against the poor

This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.

As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanised African-Americans for jobs, public services and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in US politics “poverty”, along with “welfare”, “unwed mothers” and “crime”, became code words for blacks.

In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous “war on drugs” that largely ignored major traffickers in favour of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive programme of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale “reform” of the main means-tested cash assistance programme, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organised right against workers.

This was not only war against the poor, but the very “class war” that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don’t like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalisation of government services through privatisation, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks and financial institutions.

The poor - and blacks - were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organisations and lobbyists in Washington DC promoted the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.

Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programmes that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and, by the 1990s, the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan “end welfare as we know it”.

A movement for a moral economy

The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organisations such as the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatisation of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (such as requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences - welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children programme and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.

“The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping - and gasp was all we did for decades.“- Frances Fox Piven

The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when “recovery” arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, whichaccounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labour market lost 6.1 per cent of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.

The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programmes. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programmes have been crippled, the federal food stamp programme has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program”, it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the programme’s funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.

The organised right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinise government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.

The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping - and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.

Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011117132329620899.html

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Employment, Health, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Occupy, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Taxes, USA, War

Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House: Thoughts on the Importance of Nonviolence in the Occupy Revolution

November 15, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Violence Is Conventional

Violence is what the police use. It’s what the state uses. If we want a revolution, it’s because we want a better world, because we think we have a bigger imagination, a more beautiful vision. So we’re not violent; we’re not like them in crucial ways. When I see a New York City policeman pepper-spray already captive young women in the face, I am disgusted; I want things to be different. And that pepper-spraying incident, terrible though it was for the individuals, did not succeed in any larger way.

Police violence at Occupy Wall Street. In fact, seen on Youtube (704,737 times for one posted version) and widely spread, it helped make Occupy Wall Street visible and sympathetic to mainstream viewers. The movement grew tremendously after that. The incident demonstrated the moral failure of the police and demonstrated that violence is also weak. It can injure, damage, destroy, kill, but it can’t coerce the will of the people, whether it’s a policeman assaulting unarmed young women or the US Army in Vietnam or Iraq.

Imagine that some Occupy activists had then beaten up the cop. That would have seemed to justify him in the eyes of many; it would’ve undermined the moral standing of our side. And then what? Moral authority was also that young Marine veteran, Shamar Thomas, chewing out thirty or so New York cops in what became a Youtube clip viewed 2,652,037 times so far. He didn’t fight them; he told them that what they were doing is wrong and dishonorable. And brought the nation along with him. Which violence wouldn’t do.

Violence Is Weak

As Jonathan Schell points out in his magnificent book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, violence is what the state uses when its other powers have failed, when it is already losing. In using violence the state often loses its moral authority and its popular support. That’s why sometimes their visible violence feeds our victory, tragic though the impact may be. It’s also telling that when the FBI or other government agencies infiltrate a movement or an activist group, they seek to undermine it by egging it on to more violence.

The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make us more like them, and if we’re like them they win twice—once because being unlike them is our goal and again because then we’re then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is not; some call our power people power. It works. It’s powerful. It’s changed and it’s changing the world.

The government and mainstream-to-right media often create fictions of our violence, from the myth that protesters were violent (beyond property damage) in Seattle in 1999 to the myth of spitting in returning soldiers’ faces in the Vietnam era to generally smearing us as terrorists. If we were violent, we’d be conventionally dangerous and the authorities could justify repressing us. In fact, we’re unconventionally dangerous, because we’re not threatening physical violence but the transformation of the system (and its violence). That is so much more dangerous to them, which is why they have to lie about (or just cannot comprehend) the nature of our danger.

So when episodes of violence break out as part of our side in a demonstration, an uprising, a movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a corruption, a coercion, a misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it’s a paid infiltrator or a clueless dude. Here I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate.

Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them.

We Are Already Winning

The powers that be are already scared of the Occupy movement and not because of tiny acts of violence. They are scared because right now we speak pretty well for the 99%. And because we set out to change the world and it’s working. The president of Russia warmed at the G20 Summit a week or so ago, “The reward system of shareholders and managers of financial institution should be changed step by step. Otherwise the ‘Occupy Wall street’ slogan will become fashionable in all developed countries.” That’s fear. And capitulation. And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opened a recent column thus: “Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street….” We have set the agenda and framed the terms, and that’s already a huge victory.

This movement is winning. It’s winning by being broad and inclusive, by emphasizing what we have in common and bridging differences between the homeless, the poor, those in freefall, the fiscally thriving but outraged, between generations, races and nationalities and between longtime activists and never-demonstrated-before newcomers. It’s winning by keeping its eyes on the prize, which is economic justice and direct democracy, and by living out that direct democracy through assemblies and other means right now.

It’s winning through people power direct-action tactics, from global marches to blockades to many hundreds of Occupations. It’s winning through the creativity of the young, from the 22-year-old who launched Move Your Money Day to the 26-year-old who started the We Are the 99% website. And by tactics learned from Argentina’s 2001 revolution of general assemblies and politica afectiva, the politics of affection. It’s winning by becoming the space in which we are civil society: of human beings in the aggegate, living in public and with trust and love for one another. Violence is not going to be one of the tools that works in this movement.

Violence Is Authoritarian

Bodily violence is a means of coercing others against their will by causing pain, injury, or death. It steals another’s bodily integrity or very life as property to dispose of as the violator wishes. Since the majority in our movement would never consent to violent actions, such actions are also imposed on our body politic against our will. This is the very antithesis of anarchy as an ideal in which no one is coerced. If you wish to do something the great majority of us oppose, do it on your own. But these small violent bands attach themselves to large nonviolent movements, perhaps because there aren’t any large violent movements around.

As Peter Marshall writes in his history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, “Indeed the word violence comes from the Latin violare and etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act violently means to treat others without respect…. A violent revolution is therefore unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human relations. Given the anarchists’ respect for the sovereignty of the individual, in the long run it is non-violence and not violence which is implied by anarchist values.” Many of us anarchists are not ideological pacifists; I’m more than fine with the ways the Zapatistas rebels in southern Mexico have defended themselves and notice how sadly necessary it sometimes is, and I sure wouldn’t dictate what Syrians or Tibetans may or may not do. But petty violence in public in this country doesn’t achieve anything useful.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

In downtown Oakland, late on the evening of November 2 after a triumphant and mostly nonviolent day of mass actions, a building near Occupy Oakland’s encampment was seized, debris was piled up as if to make barricades that were only show barricades to set afire, not defend, trash cans were set on fire, windows broken, rocks thrown, and then there were altercations with the police. If the goal was to seize a building, one witness pointed out, then seize it secretly, not flamboyantly. The activity around the seizure seemed intended to bait the police into action. Which worked; police are not hard to bait. Activists and police were injured. What was achieved?

Many other activists yelled at the brawlers because they felt that the violence-tinged actions did not represent them or the Occupy movement and put them in danger. It was appalling that the city of Oakland began, a week earlier, by sending in stormtrooper police before dawn rather than negotiating about the fate of the Occupy Oakland encampment. But it was ridiculous that some people tried to get the police to be violent all over again. And it was tragic that others bore the brunt of that foray, including the grievously injured veteran Kayvan Sabeghi—another veteran, a week after Scott Olson.

Earlier this fall, the publishing group Crimethinc issued a screed in justification of violence that’s circulated widely in the Occupy movement. It’s titled “Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists,” though most anarchists I know would disagree with almost everything that follows. Midway through it declares, “Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for themselves. Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical…. It is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.”

If nonviolence/people power is privilege, explain this eyewitness account from Oakland last Wednesday, posted on the Occupy Oakland site by Kallista Patridge: “By the time we got to the University building, a brave man was blocking the door screaming “Peaceful Protest! This is my city, and I don’t want to destroy it!” He cracked his knuckles, ready to take on an attack, his face splattered in paint from the Whole Foods fiasco [in which downtown Oakland’s branch of the chain store was spraypainted and smashed up based on a rumor that workers were told they’d be fired if they took the day off for the General Strike]. Behind the doors were men in badges. I was now watching a black man shield cops from a protest. The black flag group began pointing out those attempting to stop them, chanting ‘The peace police must be stopped,’ and I was, personally, rather disgusted by the strategy of comparing peacefully pissed people to police….”

This account is by a protestor who also noted in downtown Oakland that day a couple of men with military-style haircuts and brand new clothes put bandannas over their faces and began to smash stuff. She thinks that infiltrators were part of the property destruction and maybe instigated it, and Copwatch’s posted video seems to document police infiltrators at Occupy Oakland. One way to be impossible to sabotage is to be clearly committed to tactics that the state can’t coopt. If an infiltrator wants to nonviolently blockade or march or take out the garbage, well, that’s one more of us. If an infiltrator sabotages us by recruiting for mayhem, that’s a comment on what those tactics are good for.

What Actually Works

The language of Crimethinc is empty machismo peppered with insults. And just in this tiny snippet, incoherent. People who don’t like violence are not necessarily fearful or obedient; people power and nonviolence are strategies that are not the same as the ideology pacifism. To shut down the whole central city of Seattle and the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting on November 30, 1999, or the business district of San Francisco for three days in March of 2003, or the Port of Oakland on November 2, 2011—through people power—is one hell of a great way to stand up. It works. And it brings great joy and sense of power to those who do it. It’s how the world gets changed these days.

Crimethinc, whose logo is its name inside a bullet, doesn’t actually cite examples of violence achieving anything in our recent history. Can you name any? The anonymous writers don’t seem prepared to act, just tell others to (as do the two most high-profile advocates of violence on the left). And despite the smear quoted above that privileged people oppose them, theirs is the language of privilege. White kids can do crazy shit and get slapped on the wrist or maybe slapped around for it; I have for a quarter century walked through police lines like they were tall grass; people of color face far more dire consequences. When white youth try to bring the police down on a racially diverse movement—well, it’s not exactly what the word solidarity means to most of us.

Another Occupy Oakland witness, a female street medic, wrote of the ill-conceived November 2 late-night antics, “watching black bloc-ers run from the cops and not protect the camp their actions had endangered, an action which ultimately left behind many mentally ill people, sick people, street kids, and homeless folks to defend themselves against the police onslaught was disturbing and disgusting in ways I can’t even articulate because I am still so angry at the empty bravado and cowardice that I saw.” She adds, “I want those kids to be held accountable to the damage that they did, damage made possible by their class and race privilege.” And physical fitness; Occupy Oakland’s camp includes children, older people, wheelchair users and a lot of other people less ready to run.

As Oakland Occupier Sunaura Taylor put it, “A few people making decisions that affect everyone else is not what revolution looks like; it’s what capitalism looks like.”

How We Defeated the Police

The euphemism for violence is “diversity of tactics,” perhaps because diversity has been a liberal-progressive buzzword these past decades. But diversity does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decisionmaking doesn’t apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don’t spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics—and chase away the real diversity of the movement. Most of us don’t want to be part of an action that includes those tactics. If you want to fight the police, look at who’s succeeded in changing their behavior: lawyers, lawmakers, police watchdog groups like Copwatch, investigative journalists (including a friend of mine whose work just put several New Orleans policemen in prison for decades), neighborhood patrols, community organizers, grassroots movements, often two or more players working together. You have to build.

The night after the raid on Oakland, the police were massed to raid Occupy San Francisco. About two thousand of us stood in and around the Occupy encampment as helicoptors hovered. Nonviolence trainers helped people prepare to blockade. Because we had a little political revolt against the Democratic money machine ten years ago and began to elect progressives who actually represent us pretty well, five of our city supervisors, the public defender, and a state senator—all people of color, incidentally- stood with us all night, vowing they would not let this happen.

We stood up. We fought a nonviolent battle against four hundred riot police that was so effective the police didn’t even dare show up. That’s people power. The same day Occupy Oakland took its campsite back, with people power, and the black bloc kids were reportedly part of the whole: they dismantled the cyclone fencing panels and stacked them up neatly. That’s how Occupy San Francisco won. And that’s how Occupy Oakland won.

State troopers and city police police refused to break up the Occupy Albany (New York) encampment, despite the governor’s and mayor’s orders. Sometimes the police can be swayed. Not by violence, though. The master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. And they sure won’t build a better house.

People Power Shapes the World

Left violence failed miserably in the 1970s: the squalid and futile violence in Germany and Italy, the delusional Symbionese Liberation Army murdering Marcus Foster, Oakland’s first black school superintendent, and later gunning down a bystander mother of four in a bank, the bumbling Weather Underground accidentally blowing three of its members up and turning the rest into fugitives for a decade; all of them giving us a bad name we’ve worked hard to escape.

Think of that excruciating footage in Sam Green’s Weather Underground documentary of the “days of rage,” when a handful of delusions-of-grandeur young white radicals thought they’d do literal battle with the Chicago police and thus inspire the working class to rise up. The police clobbered them; the working class was so not impressed. If you want to address a larger issue, getting overly entangled with local police is a great way to lose focus and support.

In fact, the powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years have been almost entirely nonviolent. The Civil Rights Movement included the Deacons for Defense, but the focus of that smaller group was actually defense—the prevention of violence against nonviolent activists and the movement, not offensive forays. Schell points out that even the French and Russian Revolutions were largely nonviolent when it came to overthrowing the old regime; seizing a monopoly of power to form a new regime is when the blood really began to flow.

I think of the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 as the last great armed revolution, and it succeeded because the guerrillas with guns who came down from the mountains had wide popular support. People power. People power overthrew the Shah of Iran that year, in a revolution that was hijacked by authoritarians fond of violence. In 1986 the Marcos regime of the Philippines was overthrown by nonviolent means, means so compelling the army switched sides and refused to support the Marcos regime.

Armies don’t do that if you shoot at them, generally (and if you really defeated the police in battle—all the police, nationwide?-you’d face the army). Since then dozens of regimes, from South Africa to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Nepal to Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Tunisia have been profoundly changed through largely nonviolent means. There was self-defense in the Deacons for Defense mode in the Egyptian uprising this year, but people power was the grand strategy that brought out the millions and changed the country. Armed struggle was part of the ongoing resistance in South Africa, but in the end people power and international solidarity were the fulcrom of change. The Zapatistas used violence sparingly as a last resort, but “our word is our weapon,” they say, and they used other tools in preference, often and exquisitely.

The powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years have used the strategy of people power.

It works. It changes the world. It’s changing the world now. Join us. Or don’t join us.

But please don’t try to have it both ways.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/14-8

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Corporations, Corruption, Democracy, Economy, Income Inequality, Law, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Occupy, Police, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Self-Sustainability, Surveillance, Taxes, USA

Iceland’s New Bank Disaster

November 14, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Naked Capitalism

The problem of bank loans gone bad, especially those with government-guarantees such as U.S. student loans and Fannie Mae mortgages, has thrown into question just what should be a “fair value” for these debt obligations. Should “fair value” reflect what debtors can pay – that is, pay without going bankrupt?

Or is it fair for banks and even vulture funds to get whatever they can squeeze out of debtors?

The answer will depend largely on the degree to which governments back the claims of creditors. The legal definition of how much can be squeezed out is becoming a political issue pulling national governments, the IMF, ECB and other financial agencies into a conflict pitting banks, vulture funds and debt-strapped populations against each other.

This polarizing issue has now broken out especially in Iceland. The country is now suffering a second round of economic and financial distress stemming from the collapse of its banking system in October 2008. That crisis caused a huge loss of savings not only for domestic citizens but also for international creditors such as Deutsche Bank, Barclay’s and their institutional clients.

Stuck with bad loans and bonds from bankrupt issuers, foreign investors in the old banks sold their bonds and other claims for pennies on the dollar to buyers whose web sites described themselves as “specializing in distressed assets,” commonly known as vulture funds. (Persistent rumors suggest that some of these are working with the previous owners of the failed Icelandic banks, operating out of offshore banking and tax havens and currently under investigation by a Special Prosecutor.)

Foreclosure Time is not sufficient, because much property has fallen into negative equity – about a quarter of U.S. real estate. And for Ireland, market value of real estate covers only about 30% of the face value of mortgages. So Bailout Time becomes necessary. The banks turn over their bad loans to the government in exchange for government debt. The Federal Reserve has arranged over $2 trillion of such bank-friendly swaps. Banks receive government bonds or central bank deposits in exchange for their bad debts, accepted at face value rather than at “mark-to-market” prices.At the time when those bonds were sold in the market, Iceland’s government owned 100% of all three new banks. Representing the national interest, it intended for the banks to pass on to the debtors the write-downs at which they discounted the assets they bought from the old banks. This was supposed to be what “fair value” meant: the low market valuation at that time. It was supposed to take account of the reasonable ability of households and businesses to pay back loans that had become unpayable as the currency had collapsed and import prices had risen accordingly.
The IMF entered the picture in November 2008, advising the government to reconstruct the banking system in a way that “includes measures to ensure fair valuation of assets [and] maximize asset recovery.” The government created three “good” new banks from the ruins of its failed banks, transferring loans from the old to the new banks at a discount of up to 70 percent to reflect their fair value, based on independent third party valuation.

The vultures became owners of two out of three new Icelandic banks. On IMF advice the government negotiated an agreement so loose as to give them a hunting license on Icelandic households and businesses. The new banks acted much as U.S. collection agencies do when they buy bad credit-card debts, bank loans or unpaid bills from retailers at 30% of face value and then hound the debtors to squeeze out as much as they can, by hook or by crook.

These scavengers of the financial system are the bane of many states. But there is now a danger of their rising to the top of the international legal pyramid, to a point where they are in a position to oppress entire national economies.

Iceland’s case has a special twist. By law Icelandic mortgages and many other consumer loans are linked to the country’s soaring consumer price index. Owners of these loans not only can demand 100% of face value, but also can add on the increase in debt principal from the indexing. Thousands of households face poverty and loss of property because of loans that, in some cases, have more than doubled as a result of the currency crash and subsequent price inflation. But the IMF and Iceland’s Government and Supreme Court have affirmed the price-indexation of loan principal and usurious interest rates, lest the restructured banking system come to grief.

This is not what was expected. In 2009 the incoming “leftist” government negotiated an agreement with creditors to relate loan payments to the discounted transfer value. On IMF advice, the government handed over controlling interest in the new banks to creditors of the old banks. The aim was to minimize the cost of refinancing the banking system – but not to destroy the economy. Loans that were transferred from the old banks to the new after the 2008 crash at a discount of up to 70% to reflect their depreciated market value. This discount was to be passed on to borrowers (households and small businesses) faced with ballooning principal and payments due to CPI indexing of loans.

But the economy’s survival is not of paramount interest to the aggressive hedge funds that have replaced the established banks that originally lent to the Icelandic banks. Instead of passing on the debt write-downs to households and other debtors, the new banks are revaluing these loan principals upward. Their demands are keeping the economy in a straight jacket. Instead of debt restructuring taking place as originally hoped for, the scene is being set for a new banking crisis.

Something has to give. But so far it is Iceland’s economy, not the vulture funds. With the IMF insisting that the government abstain from intervention, the government’s approval rating has plunged to just 10% of Icelanders for floundering so badly while the new owners call the shots.

The New Banks have written off claims on major corporate debtors, whose continued operations have ensured their role as cash cows for the banks’ new vulture owners. But household debts acquired at 30 to 50 percent of face value have been re-valued at up to 100 percent. The value of owners’ share equity has soared. The Government has not intervened, accepting the banks’ assertion that they lack the resources to grant meaningful debt relief to households. So unpayably high debts are kept on the books, at transfer prices that afford a windfall to financial predators, dooming debtors to a decade or more of negative equity.

With the preparatory work done, the time has come for the Vultures to cash in through re-sale of New Bank equity shares by yearend. The New Banks have kept their corporate cash cows afloat while window-dressing owners’ equity with unrealistic valuations of consumer debts that cannot be paid, except at the cost of bankrupting the economy.

There is a feeling that Iceland’s government has been disabled from acting as an honest broker, as bank lobbyists have worked with Althing insiders – now backed by the IMF – to provide a windfall for creditors.

The problem becoming a global one. Many European countries and the United States face collapsed banks and derailed banking systems. How are the IMF and ECB to respond? Will they prescribe the Icelandic-type model of collaboration between Government and hedge funds? Or should the government be given power to resist drive by vulture funds to profiteer on an international scale, backed by international sanctions against their prey?

The policy danger now facing Europe

An economic crisis is the financial equivalent of military conquest. It is an opportunity for financial elites to make their property grab as Foreclosure Time arrives. It also becomes a political grab to make real the financial claims that had become uncollectible and hence largely fictitious “mark-to-model” accounting. Populist rhetoric is crafted to mobilize the widespread financial distress and general discontent as an opportunity to turn losers against each other rather than at the creditors.

This is the point at which all the years of financial propaganda pay off. Neoliberals have persuaded the public to believe that banks are needed to “oil the wheels of commerce” – that is, provide the credit bloodstream that brings nourishment to the economy’s moving parts. Only under such crisis conditions can banks collect what has become a fictitious buildup of debt claims. The overgrowth of mortgage debt, corporate debt, student loans, credit-card debt and other debts are fictitious because under normal circumstances there is no way for them to be paid.
At least in the United States and Britain, the central bank can print as much domestic currency as is necessary to pay interest and keep these government bonds liquid. Public agencies then take on the position of creditor vis-à-vis debtors that can’t pay.

These public agencies then have a choice. They may seek to collect the full amount (or at least, as much as they can get), as in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the United States. Or, the government may sell the bad debts to vulture funds, for a fraction of their face value.

After the September 2008 crash, Iceland’s government took over the old, collapsed, banks and created new ones in their place. Original bondholders of the old banks off-loaded the Icelandic bank bonds in the market for pennies on the dollar. The buyers were vulture funds. These bondholders became the owners of the old banks, as all shareholders were wiped out. In October, the government’s monetary authority appointed new boards to control the banks. Three new banks were set up, and all the deposits, mortgages and other bank loans were transferred to these new, healthier banks – at a steep discount. These new banks received 80 percent of the assets, the old banks 20 percent.

Then, owners of the old banks were given control over two of the new banks (87% and 95% respectively). The owners of these new banks were called vultures not only because of the steep discount at which the financial assets and claims of the old banks were transferred, but mainly because they already had bought control of the old banks at pennies on the dollar.

The result is that instead of the government keeping the banks and simply wiping them out in bankruptcy, the government kept aside and let vulture investors reap a giant windfall – that now threatens to plunge Iceland’s economy into chronic financial austerity. In retrospect, none of this was necessary. The question is, what can the government do to clean up the mess that it has created by so gullibly taking bad IMF advice?

In the United States, banks receiving TARP bailout money were supposed to negotiate with mortgage debtors to write down the debts to market prices and/or the ability to pay. This was not done. Likewise in Iceland, the vulture funds that bought the bad “old bank” loans were supposed to pass on the debt write-downs to the debtors. This was not done either. In fact, the loan principals continued to be revalued upward in keeping with Iceland’s unique indexing designed to save banks from taking a loss – that is, to make sure that the economy as a whole suffers, even suffering a fatal austerity attack, so that bankers will be “made whole.” This means making a windfall fortune for the vultures who buy bad loans on the cheap.

Is this the future of Europe as well? If so, the present financial crisis will become the great windfall for vulture banks, and for banks in general. Whereas the past few centuries have seen financial crashes wipe out the savings and creditor claims (bonds, bank loans, etc.) that are the counterpart to bad debts, today we are seeing the bad debts kept on the books, but the banks and bondholders that provided the bad loans being made whole at taxpayer expense.

This is not how economic democracy was expected to work during the 19th-century drive for Parliamentary reform. And by the early 20th century, social democratic and labor parties were supposed to take the lead in moving banking and credit along with other basic infrastructure into the public domain. But today, from Greece to Iceland, governments are acting as enforcers or even as collection agents on behalf of the financial sector – as the Occupy Wall Street movement expresses it, the top “1%,” not the bottom 99%.

Iceland stands as a dress rehearsal for this power grab. The IMF and Iceland’s government held a conference in Reykjavik on October 27 to celebrate the ostensible success in their reconstruction of Iceland’s economy and banking system.

In the United States, the crisis that Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel celebrated as “too good to let go to waste” will be capped by scaling back Social Security and Medicare as soon as the autumn Doomsday Clock runs down and the Congressional Super-Committee of 12 (with President Obama holding the 13th vote in case of a tie) gets to agree to make the working population pay Wall Street for its bad loans. The Greek austerity plan thus serves as a dress rehearsal for the U.S. – with the Democratic Party playing the role as counterparts to Greece’s Socialist Party that is sponsoring austerity, and expelling labor union leaders from its ranks if they object to the grand double-cross.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/icelands-new-bank-disaster.html

Filed Under: Banks, Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Economy, Media, Military Industrial Complex, Money, Politicians, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Protests, Revolution, Rights, Self-Sustainability, Taxes

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