Naomi Wolf in The Guardian: we hear that Occupy Wall Street has no clear message, but is it precisely because the dis-organization has a clear message, set of goals, and growing force that we’re seeing efforts to shut the 24/7 demonstrations down?
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process.
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No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
When I saw this list – and especially the last agenda item – the scales fell from my eyes. Of course, these unarmed people would be having the shit kicked out of them.
Update: Joshua Holland at AlterNet says Naomi Wolf’s piece “takes an enormous leap away from any known facts to suggest that Congress is ordering cities to smash the Occupy Movement in order to preserve their own economic privilege.”
Phi Beta Iota: It is not Congress that is ordering the leap; it is a combination of Wall Street/Goldman Sachs, Representative Peter King of New York/Michael Bloomberg, and the national security mafia using the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as its stalking horse. Congress is corrupt, inept, and incoherent.
An in-depth exploration of the masterful abilities of the ancient Egyptians that can be activated within you, and the technology for free energy we are on the verge of rediscovering.
“Whenever the people are well informed” an optimistic Thomas Jefferson wrote, “they can be trusted with their own government.” Sure – but what if the people have no clue?
Most of the big challenges facing America and the world today – from climate change to disease to population growth – revolve around science and technology. If we – We, the People – are going to make smart decisions on what to do about these problems, we need to have at least a rough understanding of the basic science involved. Problem is, we don't.
Economist Steve Keen is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis and now he says we are already in a Great Depression. He says the way to escape it is to bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system and pay off people's debt.
He admits what he is advocating is radical but says it is time governments gave money to debtors to pay down debt instead of to creditors such as banks who have held onto it.
Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
Remember the footage in the “Inside Job” documentary of a single Chinese worker working in an otherwise empty giant factory? That factory could be productive, but the international currency system is preventing it.
That's the irony. If all the world's currencies collapse in one day, productive potential will be exactly the same as it was the day before, but production will fall idle all over the world because currency is the medium of exchange that facilitates production.
This is the main problem. If it's not fixed it will become an even bigger problem; but it will still be the same problem. Fix the currency problem and production will be up and running again. Don't fix it, and it will be The Day the Earth Stood Still (original version). And that day could drag into years if something isn't done about it.
