Occupy the Budget

I have no deviant desires - The American Dream

I am married and I live in the suburbs.

My street looks like every street you have seen in every commercial since 1957.Ever since I first came here, I couldn’t think of living anywhere else.

I have two children – both bright – a girl and a boy. I can’t wait to watch them grow up.

I love my car. My impeccable home. I love being fit, and I love a good day’s work. I love being straight and never confused about my sexual identity. I love my wife. I love being monogamous.

I love my neighbors who come out on Saturday mornings and cut their grass, and chitchat to me while we washdown our cars and driveways.

Every second Saturday, after the kids are safely off to bed, I take a Viagra. My wife and I will then finish watching our Saturday night crime drama, and then for the next 20 or so minutes I remind my wife of why she really married me in the first place. After which she usually takes a Sleep Eze-type product because she says she likes getting a good Saturday night sleep.

The kids are always up early on Sunday mornings, diligently doing their homework at the kitchen table, while Mom bakes cookies and makes bread in her new breadmaker. That’s when the kitchen really shines. We don’t go to church, except for the high holidays, but we still know we are blessed.

My wife booked us a trip to the Caribbean. She said we could get double airmiles if we put the entire trip on our VISA card.

When our neighbors ask how the trip was I tell them it was brilliant, just as theirs had been. It’s not a lie.

Sure, we all comb our hair the same way, and we are a little obsessed with dandelions and flossing our teeth. And so what if we all like to go to the same movies, watch the same TV, and eat the same popcorn. It’s a good life here.

Uncomplicated.

I’m not a complicated man.

I have no deviant desires.

Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore

Next Steps for the Movement Against Corporate Power

Pepper-Spray Creator Decries Use of Chemical Agent on Peaceful Occupy Wall Street Protesters‏

Kamran Loghman, the expert who developed weapons-grade pepper-spray, says he was shocked at how police have used the chemical agent on non-violent Occupy Wall Street protesters nationwide — including students at University of California, Davis, female protesters in New York City, and an 84-year old activist in Seattle.

Slavoj Žižek on social unrest, fall of communism, and Miloš Forman films

Slavoj Žižek during his Prague visit spoke about the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S.

Arundhati Roy speaking at the People's University in Washington Square Park, New York‏

# Occupy Wall Street

Michael Moore

Michael Moore and The Occupy Movement

You Can't Evict an Idea Whose Time has Come

Two months ago, just 200 of us set up an encampment at Wall Street's doorstep. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol – with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative about our economy, our democracy, and our future.

Chris Hedges

Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak.

They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Arundhati Roy

Occupy Wall Street is so important...

Jeffrey Sachs -Reaganomics

OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Direct democracy in Zuccotti Park -new versions of democracy

”mental environmentalism,” is an antidote to the “pollution of our minds” by “infotoxins…commercial messaging and the…financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity.”

“online flash mob” -this is a new way of demonstrating that labor unions and traditional political organizers know almost nothing about.

Protesters have spoken of the need to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act that, since 1933, had separated investment and commercial banking. (Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 to facilitate the merger of Travelers Group and Citicorp, now Citigroup, setting off what many believe to be a decade of ruinous speculation. Some of the Glass-Steagall provisions are reflected in the Volcker Rule included in the Dodd-Frank Act.). But to argue for Glass-Steagall is to infer that the existing financial institutions are essentially acceptable, when in truth some of the Occupy Wall Street activists apparently don’t believe the current banking system should exist at all. The same is true of tax reform: a tax on Wall Street would go to politicians controlled by Wall Street.

In Zuccotti Park

Naomi Klein Receives Rainforest Action Network Challenging-Business-As-USual

The promise and potential of the Occupy movement.

"The same logic that is destroying our economy is also destroying our environment."

Be part of the whyoccupy conversation

A global video conversation between Occupy protesters, a vehicle for individuals to explore and develop ideas for joining the individual protests together and keeping up the extraordinary momentum they have generated already.

Occupy: the intellectual high ground

Naomi Klein, Jeffrey Sachs, Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek are among those who have spoken to the New York or Boston protesters. Naomi Wolf was arrested while backing a related demo. Noam Chomsky delivered a public lecture in Boston. Writers, including Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, have signed the Occupy Writers online petition.

Naomi Klein -Standing for another kind of society

Naomi Klein speaking in front of Wells Fargo HQ

Occupy SF

The People vs Goldman Sachs: Cornel West & Chris Hedges presiding

Democracy in action

Norman Solomon: The Emperor Has No Clothes

The necessary 'paradigm shift' needed, will only come from the bottom up"

Danny Glover

@ Occupy Oakland

Bill Moyers

People "Are Occupying Wall Street Because Wall Street Has Occupied the Country"

Cornel West

Real Time with Bill Maher

Joseph Stiglitz -"Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%",

Around the world, political influence and anti-competitive practices (often sustained through politics) have been central to the increase in economic inequality. And tax systems in which a billionaire like Warren Buffett pays less tax (as a percentage of his income) than his secretary, or in which speculators, who helped to bring down the global economy, are taxed at lower rates than those who work for their income.

The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: The rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth - and their influence. The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn't allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphon.

The protesters have been criticised for not having an agenda. But this misses the point of protest movements. They are an expression of frustration with the electoral process. They are an alarm.

Cornel West

Brother West & Ron Christie at Real Time with Bill Maher

The Future of #Occupy

Angela Davis

Occupy Oakland - General strike

El mundo es un libro. Aquellos que no viajan solo leen la primera página

Entre los bosques y el agua

The “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School

Comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.

During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, thatstocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened.

But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.

Economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

Economists fell in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives.

This romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.

Short Sainthood for Steve Jobs

Apple wasn’t built by a saint. It was built by an iron-fisted visionary

“There is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself”

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

complex systems few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy

concerted political power.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Cornel West: Creating a Progressive US

One percent of the population owns 41% of the wealth and 22% of children of color live in poverty. We are losing the war that has been waged by plutocrats against the poor over the past thirty years as wealth has been systematically flowing from the poor to the wealthy.

Angela Davis Speaks at Occupy Philly

"This is what a flash mob looks like!" and "We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!"

Angela Davis quotes Audre Lorde, engaging the dialectics of our dynamic force complete with its internal contradictions, and she concludes with the world-echoing call from Oakland: "General Strike! Occupy Everywhere!"