Bi-partisanship in Washington is rare these days, but it does occasionally surface. It did this week, when the Senate passed the “Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act”(S.1619) – the one sponsored by Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and co-sponsored by 22 other Senators, including five Republicans.[1] If ever passed by the House – the Senate vote in favor was 65 to 35, with 16 Republicans in support – the Act would allow affected American companies and workers to petition the Department of Commerce for countervailing import duties, to offset injury caused to them by the undervalued currency of a trading partner. It would also ease the criteria that the Treasury Department uses when adjudicating such petitions, with plaintiffs no longer obliged to demonstrate that any currency misalignment was the product of deliberate exchange rate manipulation.
Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it. And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.
We, the General Assembly of Occupation ___________, constituting all who have joined together in __________, whether in person or virtually, to be part of our movement to reclaim, through non-violent means, American democracy from the corporatists, militarists, and theocrats, declare the following to be our operating principles and goals:
Last week, I sat in a room and listened to a billionaire tell me, and a couple of hundred other people, that the thing he fears most is the government. He justified his fear by saying that the government is often arbitrary in its rulemaking and in the way it uses its power. Also, he hates Obama and accused the president of encouraging the Wall Street protesters when "he should be doing the exact opposite."
By Doctor Cleveland on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 4:28pm | Politics, Business, Social Justice
It's become disturbingly clear that the people occupying Wall Street, and the centers of several other major American cities, have no plan for the future. No vision. No coherent ideas. No sense at all of what to do next.
I just googled Occupy Baltimore, found wwwdotOccupyBaltimoredotcom, and thought, hey they're making progress. But at the bottom of the page, above links to 124 other Occupy domain links, is a link to Occupy Party. If you followed the discussion in Genghis' latest article, Lost in Liberty Square, he commented:
I recently changed cellphones, for only the second time in my life. I held onto my first cellphone for five dented, dinged and battered years, and did not replace it until it vanished on me entirely -- possibly because it had at long last dissolved into its constituent atoms -- while I was traveling.
A hero (heroine is usually used for females) (Ancient Greek: ἥρως, hḗrōs), in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion.[1] Later, hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice—that is, heroism—for some greater good of all humanity. This definition originally referred to martial courage or excellence but extended to more general moral excellence.
It took me half an hour to find the Internet Working Group at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in downtown Manhattan. The protesters have been here 24-hours a day for three weeks to denounce corporate greed and economic inequality. They sleep on the ground under blue tarps, which I discovered after almost stepping on one.
I wasn't sure what the Internet Working Group was, but it sounded intriguing. The www.occupywallst.org website promised a meeting at 5 p.m, so I took the subway downtown and plunged into the ragged mass of thousands packed into an unremarkable urban plaza of less than an acre. The organizers have been calling the park by its original name, Liberty Plaza, though they've refashioned it Liberty Square, which sounds more like an iconic protest setting and less like a suburban shopping mall.
By Donal on Thu, 10/06/2011 - 1:41pm | Social Justice
Over lunch hour, I walked over to see what was happening at Occupy Baltimore (OB). I first noticed a row of galvanized steel traffic barriers around the square that had a lot of bicycles locked to them. I recognized some of the bikes from Day One. In the middle of the square was a fellow with a small amp playing guitar and harmonica. But there was no central focus.
By Ramona on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 10:05am | Politics, Media
For her CNN "Out Front" debut on Monday, Erin Burnett went to the Occupy Wall Street protesters to see for her corporate-shilling self what the heck all the fuss was about. She couldn't find a single person who knew why they were protesting. Imagine that.
What are we going to do since the cost of education is skyrocketing? Students these days graduate with enormous debt or they don't get the opportunity to attend post secondary training.
Long ago when I started college it was an inexpensive 1200.00 a year that included books. I didn't really have debt when I graduated from college. That isn't the case for students today, and with the cost of tuition rising as much as 20% in one year at some state colleges, soon enough the middle and lower classes will be unable to afford post-secondary education. And the thing is, we'd become a thriving first world nation in part because we expanded access to education to almost everyone.
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President pretty much boils down to Suskind's view that Obama's incompetent management blighted his first two years in particular by causing him to blow two key decisions: he didn't put Citicorp into Chapter 11 (or even Chrysler) and in creating the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) he opted for coverage instead of cost reduction.
Punishing Citicorp ( or somebody)
And the score was....Geithner 1, Volker 0.
Suskind subscribes to the moral hazard school: when something's gone wrong, someone should suffer. Perhaps even those responsible. Somehow I'm reminded of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, but never mind.
I walked over to see Occupy Baltimore today. First I saw a large group of people doing jumping jacks. That turned out to be Health City. Then I got to McKeldin Square, at the corner of Pratt and Light Streets in view of Inner Harbor. There were maybe fifty people, including a dozen journalists and half a dozen police (poh-leece), three of them on motorcycles. A few dozen onlookers stood around the edges of the small plaza but it seemed clear that they weren't part of it.
No one was doing calisthenics, but a few casually-dressed people were on their knees writing signs on sheets. I felt like saying, "Please don't misspell morons." A camera-toting fellow was interviewing a fellow with a beard, who made it clear that he didn't speak for everyone, but who was the only one speaking. A fellow wearing a LaRouche breadboard was handing out flyers, and a few folk were holding copies of a thin Workers' Week paper. The bearded fellow invited anyone to make a sign.
Charlie Rose will moderate the GOP debate to be held on the Dartmouth college campus in Hanover, New Hampshire on Oct 11. Also on the panel will be Julianna Goldman, W.H. correspondent for Bloomberg Television and Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post.
This debate may be a pivotal experience for the Republican contenders because it will focus on the economy and Charlie Rose and the panel will have at their disposal a Bloomberg Terminal. For those who don't know, this terminal is a coveted, high dollar mother lode of financial information. I don't know if the screens will be viewable by the television audience, but the presence of actual facts may sober up some of the participants.
By Donal on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 12:18am | Technology
On our way back from PA, and no internet access, the wife and I stopped in for the final day of the Solar Decathlon. The shuttle dropped us close to the media trailer, and Charlotte filled us in as to who had won. As I expected, the University of Maryland maintained their lead from Friday and WaterShed (above) was declared the overall winner. Purdue's INhome surprised me by finishing second, New Zealand's First Light closed to third and Middlebury's Self-Reliance took fourth.
Today's horrible story about a man's suicide after being fired from his job makes me think of Willy Loman, and the anxieties of power and employment that have always been part of American society. In "Death of a Salesman," Arthur Miller broke with tradition and wrote a classical tragedy about an ordinary man. This is something we take for granted now, but when Miller was writing, people in the theatre were seriously debating whether or not it was even possible to write a tragedy with a prosaic
Over lunch hour, I walked over to see what was happening at Occupy Baltimore (OB). I first noticed a row of galvanized steel traffic barriers around the square that had a lot of bicycles locked to them. I recognized some of the bikes from Day One. In the middle of the square was a fellow with a small amp playing guitar and harmonica. But there was no central focus.
