Occupy Wall Street – Are you with it?

[Heather Smith]

This is what we are saying. I took a lot of inspiration after hearing a program covering the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial dedication yesterday. Apparently his friend Cornel West did too…because he immediately went to the Supreme Court, held a sign that quoted Gandhi saying, “Poverty is the Worst Kind of Violence” and was arrested. Who would have known it is illegal to stand on the steps of the Supreme Court with a political sign…and of course, ironic considering they protect the right to free speech. I also took note that the quote itself…pointing out poverty…is considered political. I think there is the potential for something great to happen…people can pick up the banner of MLK. Here is the link to the West arrest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQNH4wphca0

Take a chance to read MLK’s last sermon before he was killed…he talks about the next step in the Civil Rights movement…income inequality. Better yet…listen to the audio. MLK was controversial and as West said, he would be down there getting arrested. I think Mr. West was showing the Occupy people (some who were with him)…where to go. That packs a powerful punch being arrested in front of the institution that passed Citizen’s United but won’t allow free speech on it’s own doorstep.

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action. MLK

 

[Trace One]

But the system has been gamed, Jordan..There is no free market. The cards are stacked, and increasingly so. I can’t understand how you can miss that, it is covered pretty thoroughly in many many many articles.

[Trace One]

Steve, you seem hopelessly naive and unread..Do you really think attacking Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraquis was a good choice? Lettin our country be known for torturing prisoners – a fact used against us with the hikers in Iran who were recently released, and stated that the fact that the US tortures people gives them cover to keep torturing..

The lies about WMD, do you know nothing about that? Judith Miller? Curveball? The Downing Street Memo, which stated that in the run up to the Iraq war, the “facts were being fixed” to convince americans of the need for war. Was it a good idea, the only way to go, to bankrupt our country with unfunded wars? Was that a good idea?

sheesh..

different universes.. If you would like to start to read up on realilty, I am happy to give you a list..

but really, you hardly seem ready to have an opinion, even..Just google Iraq War and WMD and read up on Wikipedia, for goodness sakes!

[Heather Smith]

I want you to be rewarded for working hard. I don’t want to see American’s working two minimum wage jobs and still unable to afford health insurance. I think that is a myth…if you work hard you will succeed. That is the point of the protests. The numbers don’t lie…the income inequality continues to widen in our country. The power does come from the people…this country is founded on protest…heck, the Tea Party likes to rant against government…note the tea they dumped was privately owned. Can you imagine going on a cargo ship and dumping a corporations product? haha. I am not against capitalism…what I want is a fair playing field. Neither my voice nor yours is heard…we can’t afford the price of being heard.

Like Trace says…corporate profits are privatized while corporate losses have been socialized. If my business goes out because I make bad decisions…or even if I don’t! I will not be bailed out. I will not receive millions, go on to give myself insane salaries and then have the audacity to point to granny down the street who was the victim of predatory lending and blame this mess on her. http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/82-Year-Old-Brooklyn-Woman-Refuses-to-Be-Evicted-Vows-to-Barricade-Herself-in-Home-128064123.html

All one has to do is read this forum to see that people are hurting. This isn’t capitalism…this is a plutocracy. 

plu·toc·ra·cy

 [ploo-tok-ruh-see] Show IPA

noun, plural -cies.

1.

the rule or power of wealth or of the wealthy.

2.

a government or state in which the wealthy class rules.

3.

a class or group ruling, or exercising power or influence, by virtue of its wealth.

[Steve Mercer]

Well it is interesting you bring up the subject of immigration.  Since a number of states are performing their own experiments by inacting draconian immigration legislation.  When the state of Georgia decided that all employers were required to use the National E-verify system as a condition for employment. There were farmers who  had thousands of acres of produce in the field close to harvest.  Right after the law was enacted,  the employers began to receive phone calls from the Migrant workers who come to Georgia every year to harvest the farmers crops.  Basically the phone conversation went like this “If we come to Georgia this year we are going to just get in trouble with the law.  So we are not coming this year”  Now the farmers have a big problem. So they go to their legislators for help.  The first thing the state of Georgia did was hold job fairs (they have a lot of unemployed people right?)  Over the entire state they got a hand full of responses.  So then when pressed further they said well we support the Federal Guest worker program.  Only one problem… an employer has to fill out all the paperwork 18 mos. in advance and even then there is a quota system so the employer is not guarenteed they will get the workers they need every year.  Well obviously that did not solve the problem either.  So then the state said well we will just open up the prisions and have the prisoners harvest this crop.  After they started that practice not long into it at 3 o’clock in the afternoon the prisoners in the field threw their picking baskets down and said take me back to prison I would rather be locked up than doing this.  Now I just saw the other day that the state of Alabama is going to use prison labor to help with the harvest…. hum  you might ought to find a Alabama farmer and see how that is working for him.  And now the Fed is proposing the same thing. It has already cleared committee in the House.  They had an exemption for Agriculture but that was removed.  Does food prices need to quadruple before these folks see  the error of their ways?  Since you are in an industry that requires products from  Agriculture… i.e. trees, shrubs, flowers and the horticultural industry has the same issues as the farmers do.  How many grand design projects do you think you will get to do if the price of trees and shrubs quadruples in price?   The fact is there are just certain jobs out there that Americans don’t want.  And somebody still has to do the work.  Every time we have a recession or depression this very issue comes up.   That somehow these folks are taking American jobs away from American Workers.  And yet when you call these people’s bluff and hand them a picking basket or hand them a nursery spade to go and hand dig nursery stock in the blazing heat or bitter cold for 12 hrs a day for days on end at minimum wage employers get no takers.  Somebody has to do the work.  We can’t all be chiefs.

 

s.

[Steve Mercer]

This is because the banks are getting free money from the Fed and then the Fed is paying banks interest on the money the bank in loaning the Fed.  (by buying T-bills) the bank has no risk and no motivation to loan to small business.  Until these failed policies are changed we will remain right were we are… in a HUGE financial hole!

 

s.

[Steve Mercer]

It is very easy to make those determinations Trace from your arm chair armed with the benifet of hindsight. Shucks I could make every decision correctly too if I have the benifit of hindsight.  “Never critisize a man until you walk a mile in his shoes”  you have heard this be for correct? 

 

s.

[Trace One]

Steve, I am glad you can be so charitable to the people who made the decision to invade Iraq and bandrupt our country and ruin our reputation. It is not hindsight with which I am judging them, however – thousands of people marched against the war before the war, it was obvious to all of us that it was a fiasco waiting to happen. The lies the Bush admin told have been well-documented – starting with connecting Iraq to 9/11 AT ALL..

There is no hindsight going on here – we knew it was a mistake, a con job, before the invasion. We lived through Viet nam. We lived through Bush stating categoricallly in his campaign, “NO nation building.” We knew death destruction and deception when we saw it..And we spoke up.

so forget your silly polly-anna charitable thoughts about these murderers and torturers, and try to learn some history.

Really! the Downing Street Memo, ” the facts are being fixed around the  policy.” look that up for starters. Doug Feiths alternate intellligence gathering unit, the group that provided cover for Dick Cheney. Joe Wilson and yellow-cake – look up that story..Or just visit a VA hospital.

It only takes good men to do nothing for evil to succeed, and you for some reason are choosing to remain blind..Perhaps you don’t like history? Better at numbers?

Then look up the number of deaths, the millions of refugees that our war of choice caused. Get your head around that. The destruction of the history of Iraq really pains me, the looting of the museums and historical sites as we let the country descend into chaos and bloodshed, reaching an apex by 2006-2007. The palettes of money we shipped over there, the waisted billions on projects like the Embassy, all just gone to garbage..

But I can’t fight willful ignorance, there are better ways to spend the day..

[Leslie B Wagle]

I’m no clear if you are disturbed with the legislators or the protestors who think they can’t find jobs or both.

 

Temporary agriculture work is horrifically rough but I’m surprised it would get garbled into the immigration influx, as it should be another subject that has gone on for generations…. in the east along a “corridor” of crops that ripen with the well known plant hardiness zones. But the large number of newly visible (since I moved to NC) people I see everywhere in urban areas sure don’t do farm work, so they must be doing something else. Not that the argument we will need to have future consumers as made previously isn’t relevant with our declining birth rate, etc. but I don’t think farm workers settle and commute from urban areas to the fields. This is new, and is supported by a host of businesses wanting cheap labor and knowing nobody is going to do anything about it, or even dare to ask awkward questions. 

 

A church near our Mall is holding 2-hr. once a week “homework helpers” sessions for neighborhood children that I’ve been working with. They are cute, darling, well-behaved but it turns out, 100% hispanic…which means, in the stages of becoming bilingual. The organizers thought we were helping by enabling the mothers to enroll in a special GED course hosted by a local community college, but they haven’t even singed up for that, as it turns out. To their credit, they don’t drop off the kids and go shop; they sit around the edge of the big room while we help with the homework. So they know the kids are being well cared for. But they don’t have enough command of English to possibly enroll in the adult part of it, and I’m wondering how this whole thing is going to turn out. 1/2 successful I guess. It’s clear the moms couldn’t help with the homework and the kids would suffer. A little off subject, but just sayin’, the population arrives at this from the nearby apartments, and unlike the earlier migrants who followed predictable crops, we’re dealing with an influx of unpredictable scope for a long time to come and with nobody having any grasp of limits on how much of it we can service.

As for the small business loans, that’s truly sad – it’s an overreaction to the days of “subprime” and added fear of not being capitalized enough, while closures of smaller institutions is still going on, just not getting a lot of news coverage.

 

[alland]

Everyone try to get the article by Matt Taibbi in the new Rolling Stone magazine. He lists a detailed set of reform demands that a clear leader of the OWS movement could use….

Break up the monopolies

Pay for your own bailouts

No public money for private lobbying

Repeal tax breaks that enable hedge funding

Change the way bankers get paid

the artcle explains each in detail….

 

[Heather Smith]

See…we agree.

[Heather Smith]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/my-advice-to-the-occupy-wall-street-protesters-20111012

[alland]

Thank You for the link Heather….

[steve phillips]

Very well said, Joshua!

 

99% support them too, I believe.  The only negativity comes from the media – no suprise there.

 

Your last remark…

All it took were the less than 100 ppl to speak up last month and NOW go to youtube and look at  the throngs worldwide!  And Craig, I don’t think things need to get violent.  Today, MSNBC reports, “Fight to End Capitalism grows”.  I see this only getting bigger and that was the only thing true about the headline.

99 to 1 are not very good odds, I know who I would put my money on…if I had any.  Yes, it will be interesting.

[steve phillips]

My, My, Eric!

 

You are probably one of the 5 who have booked his trip to Estonia for the conference, it must be nice!!!   Fill us in when you get back, we are clueless, you know.

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