How the credit-card industry robs restaurants — and dares them to try to get the money back.
Category: #OccupyWallStreet
Picture this
Don’t you find it a bit odd that they felt threatened enough to shut down?
SF Weekly – KCBS reports that a small group of senior citizens between the ages of 69 and 82 successfully shut down a Bank of America in Bernal Heights with nothing more than walkers and oxygen tanks. That’s right: No shouting, chanting, tear gas, or window-smashing.
The group, which dubbed itself “Wild Old Women” set up camp right outside the BofA, holding signs in what they were calling “a run on the bank.”
While the protesters said they had no intention (or oxygen) of storming the bank, as occupiers in other communities have done, officials at Bank of America shut the doors and locked them as they spotted the slow-moving group make its way to the front of the bank.
Bill Clinton
Mitt doubles down
Mitt Romney does an interesting little tap dance here when confronted by an Occupy New Hampshire protester about corporate personhood:
AMY GOODMAN: And in a moment, we’re going to have a very interesting discussion about what’s going on in Indiana around worker rights. But I wanted to turn to one last clip. A day after narrowly winning the Iowa caucus, Mitt Romney came under intense questioning in New Hampshire Wednesday by a member of Occupy Boston and Occupy New Hampshire over his past comment that corporations are people. The exchange took place at a televised town hall during which Senator John McCain endorsed Romney.
MARK PROVOST: You’ve said that corporations are people. But in the last two years, corporate profits have surged to record highs, directly at the expense of wages. That’s in a JPMorgan report. Now, it seems that the U.S., it’s a great place to be a corporation then, but increasingly a desperate place to live and work. So would you refine your earlier statement from “corporations are people” to “corporations are abusive people”? And would you be willing to reverse the policies of both the Obama administration and his predecessors around corporate-centric economic policies that only see wealth and income, you know, just go to the top, at record highs seemingly, every—faster every year? And the people in this country are in a permanent economic stagnation. So, I just want to see some color on that.
MITT ROMNEY: Where do you think corporations’ profit goes? When you hear that a corporation has profit, where does it go?
MARK PROVOST: [inaudible] profit, I mean, it depends—
MITT ROMNEY: Yeah, but where does it go?
MARK PROVOST: Well, it depends. If they retain it, there’s retained earnings, that means that they’re not spending it on—they’re not distributing it as dividends, and that means they’re not using it for capex, capital expenditure. You know, so they could just hoard it. That’s retained earnings. Right? But as profits, it goes to shareholders. So it goes to the 1 percent of Americans that own 90 percent of the stocks.
Continue reading “Mitt doubles down”
Occupy broadcaster evicted
For no discernible reason. A little “selective enforcement,” perhaps?
Earlier this morning, Global Revolution Studios was ordered to vacate from their building by the NYPD in conjunction with the building department. It took three separate departments visiting 13 Thames to finally come up with a reason to remove the Global Revolution team with a posted notice despite having all applicable paperwork for the department of buildings in order. The reason given to me by the Global Revolution team is “A made up sprinkler condition.” Supporting this allegation of falsified conditions is that the very same building passed the same inspection standards back in 2011 in the month of November with no comments or concerns as to the buildings integrity or its sprinkler system.
It’s also odd how the first floor and cellar is imminently perilous to human life, and the floors directly above are perfectly fine. Even the person living illegally in the basement is perfectly fine where he is, meaning it’s specifically the area that Global Rev occupies and nothing else. One could accurately allege that this was a direct attack against one of the major voices of the movement and considering Global Revolutions direct affiliation with the Occupy movement; has made it an obvious target for this attack on free speech. The overreaching plan of these actions has been to suppress the ability of Occupy to communicate and to share the movements’ collective stories as they unfurl. By being a nexus of streams and information, authorities are attempting to do a top-down decapitation of the movements’ media coverage by once again isolating the information to the general public.
The United States of ALEC
Why bother having elected officials at all? Cut out the middleman and let the corporations pass the laws directly!
RICHMOND — In recent years, Virginia legislators have proposed bills that would legalize the use of deadly force in defending your home, call for companies that hire illegal immigrants to be shut down and give businesses tax credits to fund private school tuition for needy students.
All of those bills — and more than 50 others — have been pushed by a conservative group that ghostwrites bills for legislators across the nation, according to a study set to be released in the coming days.
In many instances, the bills are identical to model legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business, free-market group whose members include legislators as well as private companies, which pay thousands of dollars to have a seat at the table.
ALEC, as the group is known, has seen seven of its bills passed by the Virginia General Assembly, including measures on education, taxes and health care, according to the study, conducted by the liberal group ProgressVA. One of the resulting laws laid the groundwork for Virginia’s legal challenge of the federal health-care law passed in 2010.
And for the coming legislative session, the first bill introduced in the Senate is an ALEC bill that changes voter requirements — forcing registered voters to cast provisional ballots if they cannot provide identification.
Critics say the group’s low profile cloaks an ambitious agenda driven by corporate interests.
Occupy Philly
Highlights from 2011:
Occupy Wall Street
While cops were busy tonight at Times Square, Occupy protesters ripped down the barricades and retook Zucotti Park:
Watch live streaming video from occupyboston at livestream.com
O’Donnell: Fire ‘outlaw’ cops
It’s about time somebody on TV other than Keith Olbermann expressed outrage about the NYPD’s good-squad tactics regarding Occupy Wall Street members and reporters:
On the “Rewrite” segment of his show Wednesday night, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said the only way for the New York Police Department to remain respectable was for the department to terminate officers who prevent reporters from covering protests.
NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly had ordered officers to avoid interfering with media access. But in December police officers prevented the New York Times from photographing arrests at an Occupy Wall Street protest.
O’Donnell said officers that violated the non-interference policy should be fired, not just disciplined.
“Firing them is the only way to demonstrate that the NYPD respects the Constitution of the United States of America,” he remarked.
The video is here.
OWS vs. legalized bribery
It could be that 2011 will go down in the books as the year when even the lowest of “low-information” voters realized, thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement, that government has become dysfunctional because the interests of our elected officials are at odds with the interests of the electorate:
From its inception, OWS has focused on the concept of legalized bribery, as the continually rising cost of a political campaign – an average of $1.4 million for a successful House run, up fourfold in real dollars since 1976, and nearly $10 million for a Senate seat – has been largely subsidized by wealthy donors, corporations and special interests, in return for legislation that favors their interests. It’s a form of regulatory capture that most first-world democracies outlaw as corruption, but that Americans know as “the way things are,” along with “ask your doctor” pharmaceutical ads and campaigns pitching products directly to young children. The result is an almost total lack of confidence in our elected officials, as reflected by Congress’ almost impossibly low 9 percent approval rating.
The fact that Congress is moving away from the rest of the public is exactly why Occupy Wall Street has found such a giant hole in the political conversation to step into, and why our national representatives have kept their distance even when polls showed the public responding powerfully to our complaints and slogans. In a true market of political ideas, we’d have been prime targets for coopting. Instead, President Obama works “99 percent” into his speeches, and business as usual continues…
Despite such indifference, Occupy Wall Street resonated where previous protests petered out by creating and holding a physical space where it was impossible to avert one’s gaze… The 99 percent rediscovered the collective power of our voice, and started using it to make a whole lot of noise… In 2012, expect to hear more of that noise from Occupy the Caucuses and Occupy Congress. Money talks, but we do too.
Good diagnosis. Now it’s time to start working on a cure.