From the Won't-Be-Fooled-Again Desk:

It's outrageous that America is the only developed country that doesn't provide paid family leave. If you agree join Hillary's campaign today! -- Daily Kos

Really? That's the criterion we're supposed to use to choose the next president?

How about out-of-control military spending? Is that outrageous? What's she going to do about that?

Banks too big to fail? Pretty outrageous, you'd think. Will Goldman Sachs let her do anything about them?

Economic injustice? Outrageous. She's a big populist now; what's her plan?

Aging, crumbling infrastructure: Outrageous. Will she rebuild it?

Surveillance State abuses: Outrageous. If she has a solution, it's a secret.

Her actions at State that helped to create outrageous messes in Afghanistan, Honduras and Libya. What will she do about them?

The chaos in Syria and Iraq: Outrageous. Does she have a fix?

The PATRIOT Act is still pretty much intact. That's outrageous, too.

More outrageous, even, than that America is the only developed country that doesn't provide paid family leave, outrageous as that is.

2016: Winning

The Daily News reports that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, moving ahead with his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination -- "It's Jeb's turn!" bumper stickers are already at the printers, is meeting with potential donors and lining up support in the downtown Manhattan financial community. Since Hillary Clinton has also been engaged for many months in regular seances in the offices of Goldman Sachs, it's already clear who is not going to lose the 2016 election: Wall Street.

Occupy 2011: What do they want?

Ask the Los Angeles City Council
Local cops and city officials have been less than supportive of the consciousness-raising efforts of OccupyLA. Unlike police in Boston and New York City, say, who helpfully club, mace, arrest and otherwise harass demonstrators on a daily basis, the LAPD, county sheriffs and municipal leaders have gone out of their way to clear the path for protestors in front of Los Angeles' city hall. The city council went so far as to pass by a vote of 11-0 a resolution, written by councilmember Richard Alarcon, that is a model response to efforts by citizens to air grievances. The gist:

...Angelenos, like citizens across the United States, are reeling from a continuing economic crisis that threatens our fiscal stability and our quality of life...."Occupy Wall Street"['s]  first official Resolution on September so", 2011, available at http://occupywallst.org/forum/first-official-release-from-occupywall-street/, provid[es] an overview of the goals and unifying principles of the "Occupy" movement....[T]he "Occupy" demonstrations are a rapidly growing movement with the shared goal of urging U.S. citizens to peaceably assemble and occupy public space in order to create a shared dialogue by which to address the problems and generate solutions for economically distressed Americans....[T]he causes and consequences of the economic crisis are eroding the very social contract upon which the Constitution that the United States of America was founded; namely,...allowing every American to strive for and share in the prosperity of our nation through cooperation and hard work...[T]oday corporations hold undue influence and power in our country....[O]ur economic system can only be called broken when one considers that currently, over 25 million Americans who seek work are unemployed; more than 50 million Americans are forced to live without health insurance; and, even using our current poverty measure that is widely recognized to be inadequate and outdated, more than 1 in 5 American children are growing up poor in households that lack access to resources that provide basic survival needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter....[T]he U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released a "CDC Health Disparities & Inequalities Report - United States, 2011" revealing that income inequality in the United States is the highest in the world among any advanced industrialized nation, with wide-spread inequities in U.S. health outcomes by income, race, and gender....[O]ver the past 30 years, both the average and the median wage in America has remained almost stagnant while the average individual worker contribution to GDP has soared to 59% and the economy has doubled, all after adjusting for inflation; and highest in the world among any advanced industrialized nation, with wide-spread inequities in U.S. health outcomes by income, race, and gender....[A]lmost all the gains to the economy have accrued to the very top income earners-largely the top 1%, who now control 40% of the wealth in the United States, in great part as a result of policy changes that are reversible such as taxation; and...the Institute for Policy Studies indicates that the top 1 percent of Americans own half of the country's stocks, bonds and mutual funds; and...the 400 richest Americans at the top control more wealth than the 180 million Americans at the bottom....[T]he Los Angeles County Federation of Labor has officially endorsed "Occupy Los Angeles" and "Occupy Wall Street" in a statement of support saying: "The Los Angeles labor movement stands with its sisters and brothers occupying Wall Street, downtown Los Angeles, and cities and towns across the country who are fed up with an unfair economy that works for 1% of Americans while the vast majority of people struggle to pay the bills, get an education and raise their families...The Occupy Wall Street movement is mobilizing for a fair economy across the country including in Los Angeles. This movement is taking a stand against the corporate bullies, banks and investment firms that not only created our economic collapse in 2008, but continue to take advantage of it today, making billions in profits while demanding further wage and benefit cuts from American workers."...Americans must resolve some of the divisive economic and social realities facing our nation in a peaceful way to avoid the further deterioration of our greatest asset -- our human capital....[O]ne of the factors spurring recent violent revolutionary protests in the Middle East is high income inequality, though the sobering reality is that income inequality in the United States is even higher than that of some of the countries torn asunder by violent revolution; for instance, according to the C.I.A. World Fact Book, the United States Gini coefficient, which is used to measure inequality, is higher than that of Egypt's pre-Revolution....[T]he fiscal impact of the continuing economic crisis is disastrous to education, public services, infrastructure and essential safety-net services that have historically made America successful, with school class sizes growing while teachers are laid off and forcing Cities and States to make sobering choices that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable, such as how to cut hours and services from public safety provision, delaying or neglecting to maintain essential physical infrastructure including roads, sewers, and water and power delivery; and cutting services provided by our libraries, recreation, and park facilities....[O]ne of the largest problems causing our economy to continue to flounder is the foreclosure crisis, with some banks continuing the use of flawed, and in some cases fraudulent, procedures to flood the housing market with foreclosures, such as the recent revelations of widespread foreclosure mismanagement by mortgage servicers who fail to properly document the seizure and sale of homes, in some cases foreclosing without the legal authority to do so, prompting the 50-state Attorney General investigation of foreclosure practices....California has been particularly hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis, with: • 1 in 5 U.S. foreclosures in California; and • 1.2 million foreclosures in California since 2008, with a projection of a total of 2 million California foreclosures by the end of 2012; and • More than a third of California homeowners locked in an underwater mortgage, with few banks offering any type of principal reduction modification, even given Federal, State and City programs offering to split the balance of a modification with the bank....[T]he costs of the foreclosure crisis to California taxpayers includes: • Property tax revenue losses estimated at $4 billion; and • Local, county and state government losses to respond to foreclosure-related costs estimated at $17 billion --including costs such as the maintenance of blighted properties, sheriff evictions, inspections, public safety, trash removal, and other costs at $19,229 for every foreclosure....[W]ith the concurrence of the Mayor,...the City of Los Angeles hereby stands in support for the continuation of the peaceful and vibrant exercise in First Amendment Rights carried out by "Occupy Los Angeles"....

You could slap Michael Bloomberg and Boston mayor Thomas Menino upside the head with this declaration without much hope they'd get the message. (Totally parenthetically, it's worth pointing out that L.A.'s response demonstrates the superiority of legislative government over the executive model: it is difficult to imagine a group of citizens arranging a face-to-face with the mayor of a big eastern city the way the organizers of OccupyLA were able to with their council representative. Like members of state assemblies and Congress, councilors are more likely to be responsive to voters than are mayors -- or governors or presidents). It is also worth noting that Los Angeles is practically the only locale being occupied that has suffered no major confrontations between police and protesters.

The Los Angeles city council resolution
The OccupyUSA Blog by Greg Mitchell (The Nation)
City Council Unanimously Passes Occupy L.A. Resolution -- Protesters Struggle to Distance Themselves From Democrats, Unions by Simone Wilson (LA Weekly 2011-10-12)
Occupy Los Angeles
OccupyLA
Occupy Wall Street
OccupyBoston
Police, protesters adjust as occupations expand (Associated Press 2011-10-15)

Occupy 2011: When OWS Protesters Become Trespassers

by Jeff Norman

Is fighting economic injustice such a righteous pursuit that it entitles Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protesters and their disciples to indefinitely control whatever space they invade? Even though the whole movement is centered around the word “occupy,” deciding which property to take over, or how long to monopolize it, doesn’t seem to be based on any guiding principle. Occupiers need to clarify what, in their eyes, makes terrain seizable.

The owners of Zuccotti Park in New York are apparently authorized to prohibit camping and similar activities, and yesterday they gave entrenched demonstrators a day’s notice to vacate the park long enough for workers to clean and inspect it. Thereafter, they warned, only those who obey park rules will be allowed to use the premises.

The decision announced early this morning to postpone the scheduled cleaning, made no mention of those rules.

The protesters say the City of New York should neither enforce the rules nor “evict” occupiers from the park. But what they haven’t explained is how the police could legally or morally justify ignoring a property owner’s trespass complaint.

Although occupiers pride themselves on adhering to a strict and democratic decision-making method, it’s not clear how – or if – that procedure honors the wishes of park owners, besieged neighbors and various non-OWS users of the park.

The movement’s overall mission has great legitimacy, but its land grabbing policy requires some elucidation.

This article was also published by Citizen Jeff and The Huffington Post.
____________________

Rights trump 'interests.'

"The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," enshrined in the Constitution, is a sacred privilege of citizenship. It must be protected more ferociously than, oh, say, private property. 

"Land grabbing" is a loaded description of the Occupy Movement's ad hoc encampments. When Proudhon declared La propriété, c'est le vol!, he didn't have in mind temporary occupations of public or, as in the case of Zucotti Park, quasi-public spaces (nor, in the spirit of Proudhon, should private property be exempt from occupation if circumstances warrant). The inconveniences engendered by occupiers are insignificant when measured against the wrongs that are being protested.

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime," Balzac wrote. It hardly needs mentioning in present company that Occupy exists only because crimes of epic proportions perpetrated by the oligarchs who control the political mechanisms of this republic continue unabated despite the havoc they wreak on most of its inhabitants. Fixating on Occupy's possible violations of health codes, noise ordinances or park regulations misses the bigger picture. To ask the protestors to expend time and energy explaining the legal or moral -- moral? really? -- justifications of the occupations is to ask them to take their eye off the ball. 

The guardians of public order and private property -- from cops on the beat to prosecutors to magistrates -- make judgements all the time about which rules and regulations need to be enforced, to what degree and against whom. It is for the City of New York to explain why the unimpeded flow of vehicular traffic or a prohibition against handing out food in a park exceeds the right of the people peaceably to assemble. Besides, the demonstrators, as proper heirs to Gandhi and MLK, are not attempting to avoid prosecution; they just don't want dangerous unnecessary confrontations with armed police and private security personnel.

In any case, this is a political fight, not a legal confrontation or debate about right and wrong. Physically "occupying" is a political tactic; it requires no legal sanction. In fact, like sit-ins, it draws much of its power from the willingness of the occupiers to defy authority. That the demonstrators hold the high moral ground, as I believe, is beside the point. The outcome, as always, will be determined by who is strong not who is right.

For now, the good guys are winning. The oligarchs and their political camp followers are nervous and confused and, in most locales -- Oh, Oakland! -- overreacting. This is a "which side are you on?" moment, as the old Labor anthem had it. (It seems to me that the Oakland "general strike" and the shut down of the port is to be celebrated. It is only when the confrontation begins to really cost the oligarchs that they will be willing to relinquish some of their power.) The Occupy Movement has already changed the focus of the political debate and transformed public opinion; if it goes on long enough and gets big enough, the occupiers might even force a change in the arrangement of power. It would be a shame if the movement gets distracted by nitpicking in its own ranks.

Parenthetically, the Constitution does not mention that the people's cause must meet some standard of righteousness.  You and I may believe that to be for economic justice is to be on the side of the angels; John Paulson and his cohort would probably beg to differ (okay, "beg" is the wrong word). It wouldn't matter if the assembled were petitioning for free Jujubes, wax lips, Zagnuts, candy cigarettes and Sugar Babies for all; the right to do so would stand. -- John Gabree

Pictures of Occupy.

Energizing the Base: Heckuva job running the economy, Larry

Clip File: Pensions -- The Next Casualty of Wall Street

"Nobody wants to admit it, but the next casualty of the Wall Street meltdown will probably be your golden years. For years corporations have been trying to choke the life out of traditional pensions, working hard to get out from under the risk-and the cost-of providing for their retirees. Between last year's credit crunch and changes to federal pension laws, they may get their wish.

"Nearly $4 trillion worth of retirement savings were wiped out in the first weeks of the 2008 financial freefall. Half of the drop was concentrated in traditional pension plans, also known as defined-benefit plans. While most workers in these plans haven't had their monthly benefits cut, unlike the 46 million people riding the stock market with 401(k) defined-contribution plans, the storm clouds are gathering."

The rest of the story: Pensions -- The Next Casualty of Wall Street by Mark Brenner (Labor Notes 2009-10-23)