Deep State Division

SUBHEAD: The military may play a role reducing the toxic influence of neocon and neoliberals within the Deep State.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 18 January 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan17/rogue-deep-state1-17.html)


Image above: Mashup by Juan Wilson of split in US intelligence agencies. From (https://www.pinterest.com/explore/central-intelligence-agency/).

Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

Suddenly everybody is referring to the Deep State, typically without offering much of a definition.

The general definition is the unelected government that continues making and implementing policy regardless of who is in elected office.

I have been writing about this structure for ten years and studying it from the outside for forty years.
Back in 2007, I called it the Elite Maintaining and Extending Global Dominance, which is a more concise description of the structure than Deep State. Going to War with the Political Elite You Have (May 14, 2007).

I've used a simplified network chart to explain the basic structure of the Deep State, which is the complex network of state-funded and/or controlled institutions, agencies, foundations, university research projects, media ties, etc.

The key point here is you can't separate these network nodes. You cannot separate The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the national labs (nukes, energy, etc.), the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, the National Security State (alphabet soup of intelligence/black budget agencies: CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.), Silicon Valley and the research universities. They are all tied together by funding, information flows, personnel and a thousand other connections.

For the past few years, I have been suggesting there is a profound split in the Deep State that is not just about power or ideology, but about the nature and future of National Security: in other words, what policies and priorities are actually weakening or threatening the long-term security of the United States?

I have proposed that there are progressive elements within the sprawling Deep State that view the dominant neocon-neoliberal agenda of the past 24 years as a disaster for the long-term security of the U.S. and its global interests (a.k.a. the Imperial Project).

There are also elements within the Deep State that view Wall Street's dominance as a threat to America's security and global interests. (This is not to say that American-based banks and corporations aren't essential parts of the Imperial Project; it's more about the question of who is controlling whom.)

So let's dig in by noting that the warmongers in the Deep State are civilians, not military. It's popular among so-called Liberals (the vast majority of whom did not serve nor do they have offspring in uniform--that's fallen to the disenfranchised and the working class) to see the military as a permanent source of warmongering.

(It's remarkably easy to send other people's children off to war, while your own little darlings have cush jobs in Wall Street, foundations, think tanks, academia, government agencies, etc.)

These misguided souls are ignoring that it's civilians who order the military to go into harm's way, not the other way around. The neocons who have waged permanent war as policy are virtually all civilians, few of whom served in the U.S. armed forces and none of whom (to my knowledge) have actual combat experience.

These civilian neocons were busily sacking and/or discrediting critics of their warmongering within the U.S. military all through the Iraqi debacle. now that we got that straightened out--active-duty service personnel have borne the brunt of civilian planned, ordered and executed warmongering--let's move on to the split between the civilian Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the DoD (Department of Defense) intelligence and special ops agencies: DIA, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, etc.

Though we have to be careful not to paint a very large agency with one brush, it's fair to say that the civilian leadership of the CIA (and of its proxies and crony agencies) has long loved to "play army".

The CIA has its own drone (a.k.a. Murder, Inc.) division, as well as its own special ops ("play army" Special Forces), and a hawkish mentality that civilians reckon is "play army special forces" (mostly from films, in which the CIA's role is carefully managed by the CIA itself: How the CIA Hoodwinked Hollywood (The Atlantic)

Meanwhile, it's not exactly a secret that when it comes to actual combat operations and warfighting, the CIA's in-theater intelligence is either useless, misleading or false. This is the result of a number of institutional failings of the CIA, number one of which is the high degree of politicization within its ranks and organizational structure.

The CIA's reliance on "analysis" rather than human agents (there's a lot of acronyms for all these, if you find proliferating acronyms of interest), and while some from-30,000-feet analysis can be useful, it's just as often catastrophically wrong.

We can fruitfully revisit the Bay of Pigs disaster, the result of warmongering civilians in the CIA convincing incoming President Kennedy that the planned invasion would free Cuba of Castro's rule in short order.

There are many other examples, including the failure to grasp Saddam's willingness to invade Kuwait, given the mixed signals he was receiving from U.S. State Department personnel.

Simply put, if you are actually prosecuting a war, then you turn to the services' own intelligence agencies to help with actual combat operations, not the CIA. This is of course a sort of gossip, and reading between the lines of public information; nobody is going to state this directly in writing.

As I have noted before:

"If you want documented evidence of this split in the Deep State--sorry, it doesn't work that way. Nobody in the higher echelons of the Deep State is going to leak anything about the low-intensity war being waged because the one thing everyone agrees on is the Deep State's dirty laundry must be kept private.

As a result, the split is visible only by carefully reading between the lines, by examining who is being placed in positions of control in the Trump Administration, and reading the tea leaves of who is "retiring" (i.e. being fired) or quitting, which agencies are suddenly being reorganized, and the appearance of dissenting views in journals that serve as public conduits for Deep State narratives."

Many so-called Liberals are alarmed by the number of military officers Trump has appointed.

Once you realize it's the neocon civilians who have promoted and led one disastrous military intervention (either with U.S. Armed Forces or proxies managed by the CIA) after another, then you understand Trump's appointments appear to be a decisive break from the civilian warmongers who've run the nation into the ground.

If you doubt this analysis, please consider the unprecedentedly politicized (and pathetically childish) comments by outgoing CIA director Brennan against an incoming president.

Even if you can't stand Trump, please document another instance in which the CIA director went off on an incoming president-- and this after the CIA spewed a blatant misinformation campaign claiming a hacked Democratic Party email account constituted a successful Russian effort to influence the U.S. election--a surreal absurdity.

Let me translate for you: our chosen Insider lost the election; how dare you!

A number of observers are wondering if the CIA and its Deep State allies and cronies will work out a way to evict Trump from office or perhaps arrange a "lone gunman" or other "accident" to befall him.

The roots of such speculations stretch back to Dallas, November 1963, when a "long gunman" with ties to the CIA and various CIA proxies assassinated President Kennedy, an avowed foe of the CIA.

Setting aside the shelfloads of books on the topic, both those defending the "lone gunman" thesis and those contesting it, the unprecedented extremes of institutionally organized and executed anti-Trump campaigns is worthy of our attention.

Given my thesis of a profound disunity in the Deep State, and the emergence of a progressive element hostile to neocons and neoliberalism (including Wall Street), then it's not much of a stretch to speculate that this rogue Deep State opposed to neocon-neoliberalism has Trump's back, as a new administration is pretty much the only hope to rid the nation's top echelons of the neocon-neoliberal policies that have driven the U.S. into the ground.

Rather than being the bad guys, as per the usual Liberal world-view, the Armed Forces may well play a key role in reducing the utterly toxic influence of neocon-neoliberals within the Deep State.

If you have wondered why academics like Paul Krugman and the CIA are on the same page, it's because they are simply facets of the same structure. Krugman is a vocal neoliberal, the CIA is vocally neocon: two sides of the same coin.

I invite you to study the chart above with an open mind, and ponder the possibility that the Deep State is not monolithic, but deeply divided along the fault lines of Wall-Street-Neocons-Neoliberals and the progressive elements that rightly view the dominant neocon-neoliberals as a threat to U.S. national security, U.S. global interests and world peace.

We can speculate that some of these progressive elements view Trump with disdain for all the same reasons those outside the Deep State disdain him, but their decision tree is simple: if you want to rid America's Deep State of toxic neocon-neoliberalism before it destroys the nation, you hold your nose and go with Trump because he's the only hope you have.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: America versus the Deep State 1/10/17
Ea O Ka Aina: The deepening Deep State 12/5/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is Deep State tanking Hillary? 10/31/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is the Deep State dumping Hillary? 9/26/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Is the Deep State for Hillary?  8/9/16
Ea O Ka Aina: The Deep State Long Game 8/12/16

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For Old Order, and Earth, the jig is up

SUBHEAD: The existing Wall Street/Washington establishment has been repudiated and ended. 

By David Stockman on 9 November 2016 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-09/david-stockman-jig-america%E2%80%99s-voters-just-fired-their-ruling-elites)


Image above: Painting of scene of French Revolution at Musee Carnavalet titled 'Prise Du Louvre' by Jean Louis Bezard 1833. From (https://edu.hstry.co/timeline/the-french-revolution-b992).

[IB Publisher's note: Word is that Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Chrisie and Sarah Palin are up for Cabibet posts and the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines as well as 'Clean Coal' are getting the Green Light under the Trump Administration.]

America’s voters fired their ruling elites last night. After 30 years of arrogant misrule and wantonly planting the seeds of economic and financial ruin throughout Flyover America, the Wall Street/Washington establishment and its mainstream media tools have been repudiated like never before in modern history.

During the course of the past year, upwards of 70 million citizens—–59 million for Trump and 13 million for Bernie Sanders—-have voted for dramatic change. That is, for an end to pointless and failed wars and interventions abroad and a bubble-based economic policy at home.

The latter showered Wall Street and the bicoastal elites with vast financial windfalls—-even as it left 90% of Flyover America behind, where households struggled with stagnant wages, vanishing jobs, soaring health costs, shrinking living standards and diminishing hope for the future.

The voters also said in no uncertain terms that they are fed-up with a “rigged” system that has one set of rules for establishment insiders and another for everyone else. In essence, that’s what servergate, the Clinton Foundation pay-to-play scandals and the trove of Wikileaks DNC/Podesta hacks was all about.

Indeed, in his brawling style, the Donald in effect convinced a huge slice of the electorate that the Clintons amounted to America’s leading crime family. And while he may have exaggerated the extent of their personal crimes and misdemeanors, the latter functioned as a proxy for the beltway racketeering that has become the modus operandi of the Imperial City.

Stated differently, the people did connect the dots. There is a straight line from repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Rubin-Clinton democrats in the late 1990s through the resounding repudiations of the Clintons last night. This string includes:

• The M&A roll-up of the giant Wall Street banks after 1998
• The subprime mortgage scams, housing booms and subsequent crash during the next decade
• The panicked multi-trillion bailouts of the Wall Street gambling houses in the fall of 2008 and the lunatic spree of central bank money pumping that followed
• The soaring stock market fueled by the Fed’s free money that arose therefrom
• The egregious global fund-raising and shakedowns of the Clinton Foundation 
• Personal wealth accumulations by the Clinton’s personally, capped by Hillary’s notorious $250,000 off-the-record speeches to Goldman Sachs.

What happened was that during the eight Obama years, Washington essentially borrowed $10 trillion, or nearly as much as the first 43 presidents did over 220 years, while the Fed expanded its balance sheet by 5X more than had happened during its first 94 years of existence.

This feckless resort to monumental public borrowing and money printing did generate a faux prosperity in the Imperial City and a $25 trillion gain in financial wealth among the gambling and financial asset owing classes at the top of the economic ladder.

But the bicoastal elites in Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and its environs, luxuriating in their good fortune, essentially assumed that all was fixed and all was forgotten from the dark days of the financial crisis.

Not at all. The rubes remembered. No one in America supported the Wall Street bailouts except a few ten-thousands Wall Street operators, hedge funds and other gamblers; and the politicians and Keynesian policy apparatchiks who saw it as a new route to power and spoils.

What happened last election night —especially in the rust belt precincts where 70,000 factories have already closed and 6 million breadwinner jobs have disappeared – was nothing less than the third vote on TARP.

Whereas the cowardly House GOP had capitulated to Wall Street and their spineless leaders on the second vote in late September 2008, the rank and file voters of Flyover America last night proclaimed  loudly that it had not been done with their leave. Not at all.

The resentments and anger on main street has not only been simmering for years; its inhabitants have also figured out that it was on their backs that Wall Street was rehabilitated and then inflated to hideous valuations that bear no relationship to the faltering economy of main street.

Indeed, after getting a bailout they hated, main street then got a rogue central bank run by clueless Keynesian academics who deliberately and callously savaged savers and retirees; and also tried purposefully to trash worker wages with even more inflation than what was already destroying their jobs and shrinking the purchasing power of their paychecks.

We are now more convinced than ever that 2% inflation targeting is the greatest governmental assault on the working classes known to modern history.

And the working classes of Flyover America—-whose jobs are most exposed to the China Price on goods and the India Price on services—-finally said they are not going to take it any longer.

That’s a start, but it’s way too late for orderly reform and incremental change. The essence of last night’s thunderbolt— Brexit 2.0 on steroids — is that the ruinous rule of the existing Wall Street/Washington  establishment has been repudiated and ended.

But there is nothing to replace it. Donald Trump has no coherent program at all—-just a talent for name-checking the symptoms and rubbing them raw.

So as I said on Fox Business last night at about 11:30 PM, when I called the election for Trump long before the networks could bring themselves to face the truth, the election is over and the nation’s long nightmare has just begun.

For months and years to come, the Imperial City will be ungovernable and the nation will be racked with fiscal, financial, political and even constitutional crisis. By kicking the can in a ruinous direction for decades, America implicitly opted eventually for the bleeding cure.

To wit, the giant stock market bubble will now crash. The stock-price obsessed C-suites of corporate America will now panic and begin pitching inventory and workers overboard. We will be in an official recession within 6 months. The Federal budget will plunge back into trillion dollar annual deficits very soon.

Accordingly, Washington will descend into permanent warfare over the debt ceiling and an exploding $20 trillion+ public debt. Any notion of a Trump economic revival program—-even if it could now be confected—will be stillborn in the financial and fiscal chaos ahead.

And most important of all, the almighty Fed will be stranded high and dry—-out of dry powder and under political attack like never before from angry politicians and citizens alike.

The jig is up.

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The Raptor has Landed

SUBHEAD: The result is a sterile, boring, vacant chamber for Wall Streeters to throw parties.

By James Kunstler on 1 March 2016 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/eyesore-of-the-month/march-2016/)


Image above: Exterior of WTC Transportation Hub under construction looks like robot raptor. From original article.

Behold the Eyesore of the Month! And hail architect Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Transportation Hub on its grand opening this month.

Starchitecture’s latest bowling trophy is less huge (yuge-uh!) than it looks. Check out the scale of construction vehicles at it’s beak end (or is that cloaca?)

[IB Publisher's note: Cloaca, (Latin: “sewer”), in vertebrates, common chamber and outlet into which the intestinal, urinary, and genital tracts open. It is present in amphibians, reptiles, birds, elasmobranch fishes (such as sharks), and monotremes. A cloaca is not present in placental mammals or in most bony fishes.]

The cost if this extravaganza is $4-plus billion according to Business Insider (http://www.businessinsider.com/wtc-transportation-hub-is-4-billion-2014-12).

It is not, by the way, New York City’s main train station. That distinction is shared by the enduringly grand Grand Central Station as well as the subterranean latrine known as Penn Station.

This new “hub” is just an entrance to the Jersey-bound PATH trains and a bunch of converging NYC subway lines that boil down to it being the city’s “18th-busiest subway stop” (according to the NY Times) – which isn’t saying a whole lot.

No doubt the project was cooked up in the same spirit of paranoid jingo-narcissism as the grandiose piece of shit known as “Freedom Tower” that was put up in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to provide a fresh target for the aggrieved peoples of the world.

Below is the acclaimed interior, dubbed “the Occulus” — a reference to the skylight on the raptor’s curved spine.


Image above: Interior of WTC Transportation Hub event space looks like an ice hockey rink. From original article.

The result is a sterile, boring, vacant chamber (soon to grow dingy) for Wall Streeters to throw parties (a.k.a. an “event space.”)

Remember - history is a prankster. With the banking and finance system heading south this year, and the political parties blowing up, and the USA heading into a terra incognita of social disorder, imagine how the raging 99-percenters will treat the partying Wall Streeters in their event space.

 Duck and cover, Goldman Sachtsers!

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Is Stock Market Too Big to Fail?

SUBHEAD: Who knows what will trigger Fed intervention? That information is for only the Fed insiders.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 1 September 2015 for Of Two Minds -
(http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/is-stock-market-now-too-big-to-fail.html)


Image above: "Too Big to Fail" painting by Barbara Kruger, 2012. From (https://www.kensingtondesign.com/frieze-london-11-14-october-2012-book-tickets-avoid-disappointment/frieze-art-fair-512-barbara-kruger-too-big-to-fail-2012-spruth-magers-berlin-london/).

Correspondent Bart D. recently speculated that the U.S. stock market was now "too big to fail," that is, that it was too integral to the global financial system and economy to be allowed to fail, i.e. decline 40+% as in previous bubble bursts.

The U.S. stock market is integral to the global financial system in two ways.Now that investment banks, pension funds, insurers and multitudes of 401K retirement plans are dependent on current equity valuations, a crash would impair virtually the entire spectrum of finance from hedge funds to banks to insurers to pension plans.

A decimation of these sectors would impact the U.S. economy and thus the global economy very negatively.

By turning the health of the economy into a reflection of the stock market, the Status Quo has made the stock market into the one bellwether that matters. In effect, the stock market is now integral to the economy as a measure of sentiment and evidence that all is well with the economy as a whole.

The stock market is now the signal everyone follows: if stocks are rising, we're told that means the economy is healthy. Conversely, if stocks decline sharply, the implication is the economy is weak.

In other words, it's not just valuations that make stocks integral to the economy and Status Quo--the market's signaling is now the key to sentiment.In economist Michael Spence's work, the information available to participants is asymmetric: roughly speaking, those on the "inside" have better information than those on the "outside."

The stock market addresses this asymmetry by signaling what's really going on via price: if the market sells off, that tells even those with little other information that all is not well in the economy.

A rising market sends the opposite signal: everything's going well. If the participant isn't experiencing good times himself, he will still defer to this signal, reckoning that his own financial stagnation is an anomaly rather than the norm.

This explains why a rising stock market is now essential to the Status Quo: if the market reverses, everyone who sees mostly stagnation in their corner of the economy will realize that is the norm, not a local aberration.

If the stock market is now too big to fail, the Federal Reserve will have to prop it up whatever the cost. Ultimately, this may require direct purchases of stocks--an action that other central banks are already pursuing.

This shouldn't surprise us. After all, the Fed directly bought $1.5 trillion in mortgages (mortgage backed securities) to prop up the housing market, and a few trillion dollars in Treasury bonds to push interest rates down.

Just as a speculative guess, perhaps the line in the sand that will trigger Fed intervention is an extension of previous tops in the S&P 500: a line that is support that the Fed cannot let become resistance.

Just as a parlor game, let's note that this line around 1,620 is about 100 points below the 200-week moving average at 1,711, which is about 200 points below the current level of 1,914.

Who knows what will trigger Fed intervention; that information is asymmetric, i.e. only known to Fed insiders. Perhaps a break below 1,711 will cause the Fed to ready its financial blitzkrieg.

A drop to 1,620 or so would represent a 23+% decline from all-time highs--a decent correction by historical standards, but one that--if reversed in short order--would not necessarily trigger a financial meltdown.

That cannot be said of a drop that erased 50+% of the SPX's current value. If the market is indeed now too big to fail, the Fed will be forced to take unprecedented action if the decline hurtles past correction to carnage and full-blown meltdown.

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I’m Not Crazy, I’m Scared

SUBHEAD: Bloomberg's Richard Breslow, author of "Trader's Notes" is painfully accurate with his latest take on the "markets."

By Richard Breslow 24 April 2015 for Zero Hedge -
(http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-24/i%E2%80%99m-not-crazy-i%E2%80%99m-scared-why-one-trader-time-it-different)


Image above: Illustration of "Stock Market Crash Ahead".  From (http://www.profitsrun.com/featured/are-you-ready-for-the-next-big-market-crash/).

The Standard & Poor's Index (SPX) flirted with all-time highs. The Nasdaq Index made 15 year highs; Chinese equities, and so many other equity indices are flying. Bonds sold off this week, but the German 10-year yield is still 17/100th percent, the U.S. 10-year yield unable to get beyond 2%, and Greek bonds had a two-day rally that would be truly impressive if it wasn’t on volume that made it just an exercise moving wide bid/offer spreads, representing sentiment not trading.

The US dollar is selling off on the view that Greece is saved, the Fed is scared, and a “we can’t sit with positions because it never works” mentality. The only really new thing the market needs to digest is that commodities may be nearing a bottom

Happy days seemingly, but there have been some very discordant and troubling comments from the creme-de-la-creme of smart - and big - investors.

Over the last three days, we have reported that some of the most important investment voices in the world are more than a little scared about the ravenous appetite for risk playing out in the market, and the fact that they have been ignored is beyond unnerving.  

Central banks are driving all investment decisions, and what this implies is that they are in this trade so deeply that there is no obvious or practical exit.

Over the course of this week we have heard Larry Fink of Blackrock talking about the severe risks of investing in Europe; Bill Gross of Janus saying German bonds are the short trader’s dream; Pimco warning that markets have not addressed the potential of a Fed tightening (I remember 1994); the incoming CEO of Allianz, that TWO trillion dollar asset manager, saying,

 “We see generally meager growth prospects, political dangers and risks of a stock market crash.” 

Even Abby Cohen thinks it is a stock pickers world, not a buy anything and kick back world. And yet, the market didn’t even blink.

What is different this time?

Central Banks and their sovereign wealth funds have become the major players dominating market activity.

One central banker after another has admitted they are fixated on market reaction to their comments and actions. They are relying on markets blessing their actions even though it was market dysfunction (and regulatory malfeasance) that brought us here.

This is a dangerous situation. The focus must return to the REAL economy; we cannot trade our way out of past mistakes.

And we must look at commodities. One thing central bankers do, because forward curves drive all their forecasts, is extrapolate ad infinitum current trends into the future. 

No central bank in the world got oil right, and that is  arguably the most important commodity in the world.

Well, oil has made new year-to-date highs. Why do you think Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities auctions have been blowing off the shelves?

If central bankers have this wrong, their forecasts are wrong, and the Fed, for one, will be way behind the curve. I posit that a lot of central bankers will be tacking right if Brent Oil holds above $63 a barrel.

So the big question to ponder is why all these very smart people who control trillions of dollars of assets don’t seem to be voting with their money.

If the biggest fund managers and thought leaders of the world were radically changing their asset allocations, wouldn’t we see it? Not if central banks are all on the other side of the trade.

Maybe they think they can just hold to maturity. A wise central banker told me I should learn to live with central banks being the dominant force in the market, whether I like it or not. I, unhappily, think he is right. Oh, how I wish Louis Rukeyser could get them on his couch.

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Bank Derivative Losses

SUBHEAD: Among other things the rapidly plunging price of oil could potentially mean gigantic losses for the big banks.

By Michael Snyder on 7 December 2014 for Economic Collapse-
(http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/new-law-make-taxpayers-potentially-liable-trillions-derivatives-losses)


Image above: Illustration by Victor Juhasz of bankster holding world hostage. From (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/gangster-bankers-too-big-to-jail-20130214).

If the quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble implodes, who should be stuck with the bill?

Well, if the “too big to fail” banks have their way it will be you and I. 

Right now, lobbyists for the big Wall Street banks are pushing really hard to include an extremely insidious provision in a bill that would keep the federal government funded past the upcoming December 11th deadline.

This provision would allow these big banks to trade derivatives through subsidiaries that are federally insured by the FDIC.  What this would mean is that the big banks would be able to continue their incredibly reckless derivatives trading without having to worry about the downside.

If they win on their bets, the big banks would keep all of the profits.  If they lose on their bets, the federal government would come in and bail them out using taxpayer money.  In other words, it would essentially be a “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition.

Just imagine the following scenario.  I go to Las Vegas and I place a million dollar bet on who will win the Super Bowl this year.  If I am correct, I keep all of the winnings.  If I lose, federal law requires you to bail me out and give me the million dollars that I just lost.
Does that sound fair?

Of course not!  In fact, it is utter insanity.  But through their influence in Congress, this is exactly what the big Wall Street banks are attempting to pull off.  And according to the Huffington Post, there is a very good chance that this provision will be in the final bill that will soon be voted on…

According to multiple Democratic sources, banks are pushing hard to include the controversial provision in funding legislation that would keep the government operating after Dec. 11. Top negotiators in the House are taking the derivatives provision seriously, and may include it in the final bill, the sources said.

Sadly, most Americans don’t understand how derivatives work and so there is very little public outrage.

But the truth is that people should be marching in the streets over this.  If this provision becomes law, the American people could potentially be on the hook for absolutely massive losses…

The bank perks are not a traditional budget item. They would allow financial institutions to trade certain financial derivatives from subsidiaries that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. — potentially putting taxpayers on the hook for losses caused by the risky contracts.

This is not the first time these banks have tried to pull off such a coup.  As Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg has detailed, bank lobbyists tried to do a similar thing last year…

Five years after the Wall Street coup of 2008, it appears the U.S. House of Representatives is as bought and paid for as ever. We heard about the Citigroup crafted legislation currently being pushed through Congress back in May when Mother Jones reported on it. Fortunately, they included the following image in their article:


Click to enlarge image above.

Unsurprisingly, the main backer of the bill is notorious Wall Street lackey Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a former Goldman Sachs employee who has discovered lobbyist payoffs can be just as lucrative as a career in financial services. The last time Mr. Himes made an appearance on these pages was in March 2013 in my piece: Congress Moves to DEREGULATE Wall Street.

Fortunately, it was stopped in the Senate at that time.

But that is the thing with bank lobbyists.  They are like Terminators – they never, ever, ever give up.
And they now have more of a sense of urgency then ever, because we are moving into a period of time when the big banks may begin losing tremendous amounts of money on derivatives contracts.

For example, the rapidly plunging price of oil could potentially mean gigantic losses for the big banks. 

Many large shale oil producers locked in their profits for 2015 and 2016 through derivatives contracts when the price of oil was above $100 a barrel.  As I write this, the price of oil is down to $65 a barrel, and many analysts expect it to go much lower.

So guess who is on the other end of many of those trades?

The big banks.

Their computer models never anticipated that the price of oil would fall by more than 40 dollars in less than six months.  A loss of 40, 50 or even 60 dollars per barrel would be catastrophic.
No wonder they want legislation that will protect them.

And commodity derivatives are just part of the story.  Over the past couple of decades, Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world.  At this point, the amounts of money that these “too big to fail” banks are potentially on the hook for are absolutely mind blowing.
As you read this, there are five Wall Street banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars in exposure to derivatives.  The following numbers come from the OCC’s most recent quarterly report (see Table 2)…

JPMorgan Chase
Total Assets: $2,520,336,000,000 (about 2.5 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $68,326,075,000,000
(more than 68 trillion dollars)

Citibank
Total Assets: $1,909,715,000,000 (slightly more than 1.9 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $61,753,462,000,000
(more than 61 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs
Total Assets: $860,008,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $57,695,156,000,000
(more than 57 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America
Total Assets: $2,172,001,000,000 (a bit more than 2.1 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $55,472,434,000,000
(more than 55 trillion dollars)

Morgan Stanley
Total Assets: $826,568,000,000 (less than a trillion dollars)

Grand Total
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,134,518,000,000
(more than 44 trillion dollars)

Those that follow my website regularly will note that the derivatives exposure for the top four banks has gone up significantly since I last wrote about this just a few months ago.

Do you want to be on the hook for all of that?

Keep in mind that the U.S. national debt is only about 18 trillion dollars at this point.

So why in the world would we want to guarantee losses that could potentially be far greater than our entire national debt?

Only a complete and utter fool would financially guarantee these incredibly reckless bets.
Please contact your representatives in Congress and tell them that you do not want to be on the hook for the derivatives losses of the big Wall Street banks.

When this derivatives bubble finally implodes and these big banks go down (and they inevitably will), we do not want them to take down the rest of us with them.

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Do the Corporatists want us to fail?

SUBHEAD: Wall Street and the Fortune 100 are not screaming about impending catastrophe of U.S. Default.

By Curtis Ellis 8 October 2013 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/curtis-ellis/do-the-corporatists-want-_b_4054104.html)


Image above: Illustration of corporatism by LibertyManiacs. From (http://libertymaniacs.deviantart.com/art/Corporatism-213145097).

The fiscal chaos mounts and the usual suspects over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce seem unable to work their will on a Congress driving toward the cliff with its foot on the gas.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wonders why business leaders are silent about what he sees as a catastrophic situation that threatens America's pre-eminence in the world.

He wrings his hands over shattering the debt ceiling.

At some point in mid-October -- on the 17, according to the latest estimates -- the Treasury will reach the legal limit on its ability to borrow. If Congress refuses to increase the legal limit on the amount of debt outstanding, the Treasury will be unable to pay its bills. Precisely how this would play out is subject to some debate, but there is no question that it would involve a great deal of uncertainty, in the best case, or a catastrophic default that can safely be regarded as the worst case.

Johnson is flummoxed why Wall Street and the captains of the Fortune 100 are not screaming about impending catastrophe at the top of their lungs.

The silence of much of the business and financial elite on the debt ceiling -- as well as on the sequester and the government shutdown -- is somewhat shocking. This is a group that is usually quite vocal in promoting its self-interest. It benefited greatly from the expansion of the global economy after 1945, and that shifting perception of what business needs was part of the pressure that encouraged the Republican Party to become much more international in its orientation.

But Johnson misses the key question: does the globalist corporate elite really need the United States of America anymore?

The answer seems to be "no" - or more accurately, "Hell no!"

The corporatists at the misleadlingly named U.S. Chamber of Commerce (it's really the Multinational Chamber of Commerce), the Business Roundtable, Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street and boardroom cronies have been leading the charge to render the United States moot through the TransPacific Partnership and the TransAtlantic Partnership.

These deals, which they are assiduously crafting behind closed doors, would replace elected governments, including our own, with an international authority of the elites, by the elites and for the elites with the power to enforce rules protecting corporatist interests the world over, national laws be damned.

Ralph Gomory has long said the interests of American-in-name-only multinational corporations have diverged from the interests of the United States. While discussing the current government dysfunction, the Washington Post's Wonkblog spelled out the terms of the divorce [emphasis added]:

Few of America's biggest businesses are purely American anymore, having taken full advantage of free trade and lower labor costs around the world. That has two effects. First, since they've off-shored or automated much of their workforces, it's harder to tell a legislator that Washington dysfunction is hurting jobs in their district. And second, their stake in America isn't as large as it used to be: If business conditions deteriorate at home, they can invest more heavily in Brazil or China instead.

Fiscal chaos that undermines the United States actually serves the interests of corporatists who care little for our representative government (or anyone else's). This crowd is happy to clip the wings of an American eagle that stands in the way of their global hegemony.

Washington burns and the silence of business leaders is the dog that didn't bark.
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Fortress of Lies

SUBHEAD: We have crossed into the realm where anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares.

By James Kunstler on 11 March 2013 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2013/03/fortress-of-lies.html)


Image above: "Charm Offensive" The White House trying to make amends with the press corps and other voices on the left in 2010. From (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1010/44024.html).

History has a special purgatory where it sometimes stashes feckless nations punch drunk on their own tragic choices: the realm where anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares. We've surely crossed the frontier into that bad place in these days of dwindling winter, 2013.

Case in point: Mr. Obama's choice of Mary Jo White to run the Securities and Exchange Commission.

A federal prosecutor back in the Clinton years, Ms. White eventually spun through the revolving door onto the payroll of Wall Street law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, whose clients included Too Big To Fail banks JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and UBS AG, defending them in matters stemming from the financial crisis that began in 2008, as well as other companies that needed defending from allegations of financial misconduct, such as the giant HCA hospital chain (insider trading), General Electric (now a virtual hedge fund with cases before the SEC), and the German-based Siemens Corporation (federal bribery charges).

A republic with a sense of common decency -- and common sense -- would have stopped the nomination right there and checked the "no" box on Mary Jo White just for violating the most basic premise of credibility: that trip through the revolving door that shuttles banking regulators from the government agencies to the companies they used to oversee and sometimes back again.

Has there not been enough national conversation about the scuzziness of that routine to establish that it's not okay? Does it not clearly represent the essence of dysfunction and corruption in our regulatory affairs? Didn't President Obama promise to seal up the revolving door? So how could Mary Jo White possibly be taken seriously as a candidate for the job?

And how is it possible that everyone and their uncle, from The New York Times editorial page to the Sunday cable news political shows to the halls of congress, is not jumping up and down hollering about this?

Well, because anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares.

The funny part is that, when challenged over her past connections to the banks and companies she would now have to regulate, Mary Jo White offered to recuse herself from future cases involving them. So, from the get-go as SEC head, Ms. White would not concern herself with the doings of JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley?

How is it that gales of laughter did not blow Mary Jo White clean out of the hearing room?

Is there not another qualified person from sea to shining sea who could come in and do the job without one hand tied behind his or her back?

Now it also turns out that upon leaving Debevoise & Plimpton, Ms. White is scheduled to collect monthly retirement checks from the company amounting to a half million dollars a year -- that's for life, by the way -- while she supposedly runs the SEC. How is that not a conflict of interest?

The remedy proposed by Ms. White and her attorneys was for her to take the retirement loot as a lump sum during her tenure as SEC chair, after which she could revert to collecting her pension in the $42,500 monthly payouts.

Pardon me, but, well ...what the fuck? What planet are we on?

As if that's not enough, Ms. White's husband, John W. White, is a partner at another giant Wall Street law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, which frequently tangles with the SEC on behalf of its clients.

Mr. White proposed to change his pay structure while his wife runs the SEC. More gales of laughter. He is also on the advisory committee of the Financial Standards Accounting Board, the group that oversees national accounting practices and which, in 2009, infamously changed its Rule157 so that TBTF banks could "mark to fantasy" the fraudulent CDOs and other bond-like "innovative" securities that they created -- many of which they had to eat after the housing bubble bust when the collateral for these swindles lost its value and the "innovators" could no longer pawn the stuff off on credulous pension funds and other client "muppets."

The silence over this disgraceful matter -- and many others like it, including the dead hand in the empty suit posing as US Attorney General -- indicates that not only is the rule of law extinct in this country, but so are public figures of principle and credible news organs.

Nobody has made a noise about it. Anything goes, nothing matters, and nobody cares. So, the objection to it has to come from outside the authorized channels.

And the consequences will mount outside the Fortress of Lies that the establishment has become.

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We Could Be Heroes

SUBHEAD: A letter to my dismal allies on the importance of the radical right abandoning all interest in truth and fact.

By Rebecca Solnit on 27 September 2012 for Tom Dispatch -  
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175598/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_we_could_be_heroes/)


Image above: Detail of watercolor with anti-imperialist message painted by Chinese Gu Yuan in 1951 for sale for $450,000. From (http://www.childlit.com/battledore/shop/index.php?productID=176).

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

Leftists Explain Things to Me
The poison often emerges around electoral politics. Look, Obama does bad things and I deplore them, though not with a lot of fuss, since they’re hardly a surprise. He sometimes also does not-bad things, and I sometimes mention them in passing, and mentioning them does not negate the reality of the bad things.

The same has been true of other politicians: the recent governor of my state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was in some respects quite good on climate change. Yet it was impossible for me to say so to a radical without receiving an earful about all the other ways in which Schwarzenegger was terrible, as if the speaker had a news scoop, as if he or she thought I had been living under a rock, as if the presence of bad things made the existence of good ones irrelevant. As a result, it was impossible to discuss what Schwarzenegger was doing on climate change (and unnecessary for my interlocutors to know about it, no less figure out how to use it).

So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.

Instead, I constantly encounter a response that presumes the job at hand is to figure out what’s wrong, even when dealing with an actual victory, or a constructive development. Recently, I mentioned that California’s current attorney general, Kamala Harris, is anti-death penalty and also acting in good ways to defend people against foreclosure. A snarky Berkeley professor’s immediate response began, “Excuse me, she's anti-death penalty, but let the record show that her office condoned the illegal purchase of lethal injection drugs.”

Apparently, we are not allowed to celebrate the fact that the attorney general for 12% of all Americans is pretty cool in a few key ways or figure out where that could take us. My respondent was attempting to crush my ebullience and wither the discussion, and what purpose exactly does that serve?

This kind of response often has an air of punishing or condemning those who are less radical, and it is exactly the opposite of movement- or alliance-building. Those who don’t simply exit the premises will be that much more cautious about opening their mouths. Except to bitch, the acceptable currency of the realm.

My friend Jaime Cortez, a magnificent person and writer, sent this my way: “At a dinner party recently, I expressed my pleasure that some parts of Obamacare passed, and starting 2014, the picture would be improved. I was regaled with reminders of the horrors of the drone program that Obama supports, and reminded how inadequate Obamacare was. I responded that it is not perfect, but it was an incremental improvement, and I was glad for it. But really, I felt dumb and flat-footed for being grateful.”

The Emperor Is Naked and Uninteresting  
Maybe it’s part of our country’s Puritan heritage, of demonstrating one’s own purity and superiority rather than focusing on fixing problems or being compassionate. Maybe it comes from people who grew up in the mainstream and felt like the kid who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, that there were naked lies, hypocrisies, and corruptions in the system.

Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other things worth discussing. Often, it’s not the emperor that’s the important news anyway, but the peasants in their revolts and even their triumphs, while this mindset I’m trying to describe remains locked on the emperor, in fury and maybe in self-affirmation.

When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well.  Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.

Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to one lovely young man talking about the rage his peers, particularly his gender, often have.  But, he added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy, though it might sometimes provide the necessary energy for getting things done.

There are so many ways to imagine this mindset -- or maybe its many mindsets with many origins -- in which so many are mired. Perhaps one version devolves from academic debate, which at its best is a constructive, collaborative building of an argument through testing and challenge, but at its worst represents the habitual tearing down of everything, and encourages a subculture of sourness that couldn’t be less productive.

Can you imagine how far the Civil Rights Movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger!

Picture Gandhi’s salt marchers bitching all the way to the sea, or the Zapatistas, if Subcomandante Marcos was merely the master kvetcher of the Lacandon jungle, or an Aung San Suu Kyi who conducted herself like a caustic American pundit. Why did the Egyptian revolutionary who told me about being tortured repeatedly seem so much less bitter than many of those I run into here who have never suffered such harm?

There is idealism somewhere under this pile of bile, the pernicious idealism that wants the world to be perfect and is disgruntled that it isn’t -- and that it never will be. That’s why the perfect is the enemy of the good. Because, really, people, part of how we are going to thrive in this imperfect moment is through élan, esprit de corps, fierce hope, and generous hearts.

We talk about prefigurative politics, the idea that you can embody your goal. This is often discussed as doing your political organizing through direct-democratic means, but not as being heroic in your spirit or generous in your gestures.

Left-Wing Vote Suppression
One manifestation of this indiscriminate biliousness is the statement that gets aired every four years: that in presidential elections we are asked to choose the lesser of two evils. Now, this is not an analysis or an insight; it is a cliché, and a very tired one, and it often comes in the same package as the insistence that there is no difference between the candidates. You can reframe it, however, by saying: we get a choice, and not choosing at all can be tantamount in its consequences to choosing the greater of two evils.

But having marriage rights or discrimination protection or access to health care is not the lesser of two evils. If I vote for a Democrat, I do so in the hopes that fewer people will suffer, not in the belief that that option will eliminate suffering or bring us to anywhere near my goals or represent my values perfectly. Yet people are willing to use this “evils” slogan to wrap up all the infinite complexity of the fate of the Earth and everything living on it and throw it away.

I don’t love electoral politics, particularly the national variety. I generally find such elections depressing and look for real hope to the people-powered movements around the globe and subtler social and imaginative shifts toward more compassion and more creativity. Still, every four years we are asked if we want to have our foot trod upon or sawed off at the ankle without anesthetic. The usual reply on the left is that there’s no difference between the two experiences and they prefer that Che Guevara give them a spa pedicure. Now, the Che pedicure is not actually one of the available options, though surely in heaven we will all have our toenails painted camo green by El Jefe.

Before that transpires, there’s something to be said for actually examining the differences.  In some cases not choosing the trod foot may bring us all closer to that unbearable amputation. Or maybe it’s that the people in question won’t be the ones to suffer, because their finances, health care, educational access, and so forth are not at stake.

An undocumented immigrant writes me, “The Democratic Party is not our friend: it is the only party we can negotiate with.” Or as a Nevada activist friend put it, “Oh my God, go be sanctimonious in California and don't vote or whatever, but those bitching radicals are basically suppressing the vote in states where it matters.”

Presidential electoral politics is as riddled with corporate money and lobbyists as a long-dead dog with maggots, and deeply mired in the manure of the status quo -- and everyone knows it. (So stop those news bulletins, please.) People who told me back in 2000 that there was no difference between Bush and Gore never got back to me afterward.

I didn’t like Gore, the ex-NAFTA-advocate and pro-WTO shill, but I knew that the differences did matter, especially to the most vulnerable among us, whether to people in Africa dying from the early impacts of climate change or to the shift since 2000 that has turned our nation from a place where more than two-thirds of women had abortion rights in their states to one where less than half of them have those rights. Liberals often concentrate on domestic policy, where education, health care, and economic justice matter more and where Democrats are sometimes decent, even lifesaving, while radicals are often obsessed with foreign policy to the exclusion of all else.

I’m with those who are horrified by Obama’s presidential drone wars, his dismal inaction on global climate treaties, and his administration’s soaring numbers of deportations of undocumented immigrants. That some of you find his actions so repugnant you may not vote for him, or that you find the whole electoral political system poisonous, I also understand.

At a demonstration in support of Bradley Manning this month, I was handed a postcard of a dead child with the caption "Tell this child the Democrats are the lesser of two evils." It behooves us not to use the dead for our own devices, but that child did die thanks to an Obama Administration policy.  Others live because of the way that same administration has provided health insurance for millions of poor children or, for example, reinstated environmental regulations that save thousands of lives.

You could argue that to vote for Obama is to vote for the killing of children, or that to vote for him is to vote for the protection for other children or even killing fewer children. Virtually all U.S. presidents have called down death upon their fellow human beings. It is an immoral system.

You don’t have to participate in this system, but you do have to describe it and its complexities and contradictions accurately, and you do have to understand that when you choose not to participate, it better be for reasons more interesting than the cultivation of your own moral superiority, which is so often also the cultivation of recreational bitterness.

Bitterness poisons you and it poisons the people you feed it to, and with it you drive away a lot of people who don’t like poison. You don’t have to punish those who do choose to participate. Actually, you don’t have to punish anyone, period.

We Could Be Heroes
We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.
Dismissiveness is a way of disengaging from both the facts on the ground and the obligations those facts bring to bear on your life. As Michael Eric Dyson recently put it, “What is not good are ideals and rhetorics that don’t have the possibility of changing the condition that you analyze. Otherwise, you’re engaging in a form of rhetorical narcissism and ideological self-preoccupation that has no consequence on the material conditions of actually existing poor people.”

Nine years ago I began writing about hope, and I eventually began to refer to my project as “snatching the teddy bear of despair from the loving arms of the left.” All that complaining is a form of defeatism, a premature surrender, or an excuse for not really doing much. Despair is also a form of dismissiveness, a way of saying that you already know what will happen and nothing can be done, or that the differences don’t matter, or that nothing but the impossibly perfect is acceptable. If you’re privileged you can then go home and watch bad TV or reinforce your grumpiness with equally grumpy friends.

The desperate are often much more hopeful than that -- the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, that amazingly effective immigrant farmworkers’ rights group, is hopeful because quitting for them would mean surrendering to modern-day slavery, dire poverty, hunger, or death, not cable-TV reruns. They’re hopeful and they’re powerful, and they went up against Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s, and they won.

The great human-rights activist Harvey Milk was hopeful, even though when he was assassinated gays and lesbians had almost no rights (but had just won two major victories in which he played a role). He famously said, “You have to give people hope.”

In terms of the rights since won by gays and lesbians, where we are now would undoubtedly amaze Milk, and we got there step by step, one pragmatic and imperfect victory at a time -- with so many more yet to be won. To be hopeful means to be uncertain about the future, to be tender toward possibilities, to be dedicated to change all the way down to the bottom of your heart.

There are really only two questions for activists: What do you want to achieve?  And who do you want to be?  And those two questions are deeply entwined. Every minute of every hour of every day you are making the world, just as you are making yourself, and you might as well do it with generosity and kindness and style.

That is the small ongoing victory on which great victories can be built, and you do want victories, don’t you? Make sure you’re clear on the answer to that, and think about what they would look like.

Love,

Rebecca

• As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org’s anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Also, she wrote some books.
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An Evening in Freedom Park

SOURCE: Shannon Rudolph (shannonkona@gmail.com) SUBHEAD: Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have a vibrant night life most people have not seen. By Fidel Amos on 10 October 2011 for YouTube - (http://www.youtube.com/user/fidelamos#p/u/0/pdVYKhhHHV8) Image above: Still from video below. Fidel's Wandering Eye takes a walk amongst the protestors at Wall Street's Freedom (Zuccotti) Park on Monday night, October 10th 2011. One commnet on this video read:

"the world should look like this more often.. seeing people come together instead the whole "wake up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat" idea. this is REALLY living. we aren't in our little homes in front of the propaganda box (TV). we must keep this peaceful no matter what. our actions will determine the outcome. not one person deserves to lose their life over this. no matter how crazy things get, keep calm and take care of each other. the people united will never be defeated."

Video above: An after dark walk and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. From (http://www.youtube.com/user/fidelamos#p/u/0/pdVYKhhHHV8). .

Occupy Wall Street in Hawaii

SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com) SUBHEAD: Finally the two-week old "Occupy Wall Street" demonstration has caught fire and the attention of the media. By Shannon Rudolph on 30 September 2011 for Island Breath - (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/09/occupy-wallstreet-in-hawaii.html) Image above: Poster for Kona Occupy Wall Street solidarity demonstration. Click to enlarge. There will be an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Kona on the the Big Island on Monday, 3 October into 2011 at 3:00pm on the Highway just south of Henry Street. Also another demonstration is now scheduled in Hilo on Monday 10/3 from 4pm-6pm Image above: Poster for Hilo Occupy Wall Street solidarity demonstration. From Shannon Rudolph. If you want to help support "Occupy Wall Street" movement you canmail donations of food and resources to: The UPS Store Re: Occupy Wall Street 118A Fulton St. #205 New York, NY 10038 Non-perishable goods only. We can accept packages of any size. We're currently low on food. "Build it and they will come" - Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams Video above: Occupy Wall Street demo at NY Police Headquarters on 9/30/11. From (http://youtu.be/GBBCE9_5v8E). See also Occupy Wallstreet: https://occupywallst.org

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Tour Inside Occupy Wall Street By Juan Gonzalez on 30 September 2011 for Democracy Now! - (http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/30/inside_occupy_wall_st_a_tour)

JUAN GONZALES: Here in New York, protesters continue to camp out in a park in the Financial District as part of an action called, Occupy Wall Street. Democracy Now!’s Mike Burke was at the protest encampment last night and filed this report.

MIKE BURKE: We’re just blocks from Wall Street and the former World Trade Center. We’re in a park called Liberty Plaza. For the past 13 days, thousands of protesters have gathered and hundreds of slept here over night for an unprecedented protest, for an action called Occupy Wall Street. Behind us now is the General Assembly, and nightly meeting where the protesters gathered to decide what action should come next. Moments ago, we spoke to some of the organizers behind Occupy Wall Street.

PATRICK BYRNE: My name is Patrick Byrne. I am 23 years old. I’m from Tucson, Arizona although I live in Bed-Stuy until I can’t pay for it anymore, which is next month and then I’m officially moved in here. I’m on the Press Relations Working Group right here at Occupy Wall Street. I think there is a very real sense in this country, and there has been for a long time, that things are not working. We have right now an 80% of the country thinks we’re on the wrong track. We have only a 15% approval rating of Congress. Those numbers aren’t acceptable. People are coming out here to voice their disapproval with the system and to voice themselves in a direct, democratic fashion. It is really refreshing for people to have a voice, and it’s really refreshing for people to think they can affect change in this system that essentially has made it so only 1% of the population are citizens.

MARISA HOLMES: My name is Marisa Holmes and I have been with the New York General Assembly from the beginning. Basically, every night we have an occupation here of 200 to 300 people a night sleeping and organizing themselves. We have a Food Committee, Medic Team, Legal Team—a couple of different Media Teams working. Really it is about self organization, participation, and democratic process.

MIKE BURKE: What keeps you coming back every single night?

MARISA HOLMES: Incredible momentum and support I’ve been getting from around the world. We have an Occupy Chicago, an Occupy L.A., an Occupy Milwaukee, an Occupy Atlanta, an Occupy Tampa. It is crazy. We have international support from Spain, Greece, Egypt, Tunisia. So, hearing all of their stories and their actions, and realizing that this is a global movement keeps me coming back.

MIKE BURKE: The protest movement and Occupy Wall Street received a significant boost this week when one of the city’s major unions voted to endorse the occupation.

JACKIE DI SALVO: My name is Jackie Di Salvo. I am an English professor at the City University of New York at Baruch College in the Graduate Center. The Transit Workers Union, which is the most militant public-sector union in this city, which is the one union that has had the guts to break the Taylor Law, which is an anti-strike law and strike, and suffered great penalties for it, they endorsed Occupy Wall Street today. Tomorrow at 5:30, there is a rally at one Police Plaza organized by many rank-and-file trade unionists from my union, the Professional Staff Congress, to condemn the police brutality and harassment. At the end of that rally, they’re going to march to Occupy Wall Street. I have to say that this is a working class group, by and large. They’re describe as middle-class in the press, but a lot of these young people are unemployed, underemployed, underpaid, working a couple of part-time jobs, so they identify very easily with the labor movement. Many of them wish they had a union.

MIKE BURKE: Let’s take a quick tour of Liberty Plaza, the home of the Occupy Wall Street movement. For the past two weeks, the media center here at Occupy Wall Street has been the way the protesters have gotten word out to the rest of the country and the world. Over here is the food area. Hundreds of people here have been eating donated food every day: muffins, apples, power bars. They have been serving three meals a day to the hundreds of protesters who have been camping out here. Tents are spread throughout this part of Liberty Plaza. Protesters are preparing to spend another night, the 13th night in a row inside this park, as part of Occupy Wall Street. The Police have barred the use of tents, but it has not stopped protesters from staying here even in the rain and the cold. On the northern end of Liberty Plaza space has been set aside for protesters to make homemade posters. Some of them read: "You are the 99%,” “System Change. Not Climate Change,” “Wall Street Bonuses = Money From Crime.”

THEO VINCENT: My name is Theo Vincent. I am an artist, dancer, actor, model, songwriter, singer. You name it; I do it. I’m basically here because I am fighting for my family and my friends, I’m fighting for everybody who’s going through the same thing we have gone through over the last couple of years. There’s a certain 1% that has taken everything from us. They’re not even looking out for us. They’re supporting our politicians; our politicians support them. There has to be an end. There has to be restrictions on these lobbyists that buy out campaigns. It is causing us to go to war, and to still be in wars that we should not be fighting. It’s causing us to lose our homes and mortgages to go up. That is what our message is…

MIKE BURKE: Here in the western part of Liberty Plaza, the space has largely been used for small gatherings, for classes, for teach-ins. On Wednesday we observed a class on direct democracy, another one on how to facilitate a meeting. Just hours ago, we caught up with one local professor who just returned from Spain. He was talking about how Occupy Wall Street fits into the global movement.

GERARDO RENIQUE: My name is Gerardo Renique. I’m a professor of history, Latin-American history in the City University of New York. As a historian I see the current crisis and events of the last two decades from a long-term perspective. What we’re going to—I think it is—the consolidation of a particular economic model that it is grounded in the financial sector and a sort of casino capitalism. I do not see in the near future an economic structure that will be creating enough jobs to absorb the number of young people graduating out of high schools and universities. One of the questions that this type of demonstration raises, is the fact that we need to start thinking of a new alternative, one: to come out of the crisis, and I would say an alternative model of civilization.

MIKE BURKE: While the Occupy Wall Street protest has been festive and peaceful, the New York police have arrested dozens of protesters over the past week. In at least two instances senior police official pepper sprayed peaceful protesters. The official, Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, is now under investigation.

MICHAEL TRACEY: My name is Michael Tracey. I am a journalist. I created a flyer that depicts Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna on Saturday in a video I think surfaced two days ago, pepper spraying protesters unprovoked after they had actually been given an order by him and were complying with it. He is standing on the sidewalk near Union Square, and the protesters that he had instructed to vacate were doing so. Even then, as there were walking away, he indiscriminately started spraying them with pepper spray. This was caught on video. After the first video, which had surfaced a few days earlier, depicted him just spraying women in the face with pepper spray. When I looked this image I just saw the rage in his face. What really came to my mind is that we can do better than this collectively. Protesters deserve respect from officers and officers deserve respect from protesters. This image belies the mutual respect that should be afforded.

MIKE BURKE: I caught up with one of the victims that was pepper sprayed by Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna last Saturday. I asked her to describe what happened.

YELL: My name is Yell. I was standing on the sidewalk watching someone gets thrown into the street and brutally attacked and arrested as I was waving a peace sign saying, “What are you doing?” We were remaining peaceful. That is what I was doing. I was not being aggressive. I was not being violent in any way. I was not given a warning that I was about to be pepper sprayed. I did not even get to see him come at me. I turned my head and it happened. It took 45 seconds to even realize I had been pepper sprayed. It was very scary.

MIKE BURKE: Are you afraid to keep coming to the protests after that?

YELL: It takes a lot more to scare me. I’m definitely not scared. It gives me more reason to want to be out there now, to participate in every march, and every general assembly. I want to be more active. I want to be more a part of it because people out there have seen what happened and they want us to keep going, and I’m going to keep going. I see no ending for me in the future. I’m going to keep fighting.

MIKE BURKE: This Saturday will mark the beginning of the third week of the Occupy Wall Street protest. A major demonstration is scheduled here in the Financial District and lower Manhattan. Protesters say they’re planning to stay here indefinitely and hope that Occupy Wall Street inspires similar protests across the country.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: I teach at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. I am here because I am so enthusiastic about the possibilities of this sit-in, over the marches that are occurring over postal worker issues, the sister demonstrations that are starting in Chicago and Los Angeles, and maybe in Boston. I think we desperately need a popular uprising in the United States. None of us know. I study movements. None of us know the exact formula for when those movements erupt, but it could be. And if that is true, then these people who are here are really wonderful. I would do anything to help them.

MIKE BURKE: For Democracy Now! this is Mike Burke with Hany Massoud and

JUAN GONZALEZ: That’s it for Democracy Now!. I’m Juan Gonzalez.

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"Occupy Wall Street" censorship

SUBHEAD: Yahoo has been censoring email messages concerning "Occupy Wall Street" protests.  

By Lee Fang on 20 September 2011 for Think Progress -  
(http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/09/20/323856/yahoo-censoring-occupy-wall-street-protests)

 
Image above: Yahoo screen announces censorship with "Suspicious activity has been detected on your account" when it detects words "Occupy Wall Street". From original article. Click for video.

Thinking about e-mailing your friends and neighbors about the protests against Wall Street happening right now? If you have a Yahoo e-mail account, think again. ThinkProgress has reviewed claims that Yahoo is censoring e-mails relating to the protest and found that after several attempts on multiple accounts, we too were prevented from sending messages about the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations.

Over the weekend, thousands gathered for a “Tahrir Square”-style protest of Wall Street’s domination of American politics. The protesters, organized online and by organizations like Adbusters, have called their effort “Occupy Wall Street” and have set up the website: www.OccupyWallSt.org. However, several YouTube users posted videos of themselves trying to email a message inviting their friends to visit the Occupy Wall St campaign website, only to be blocked repeatedly by Yahoo. View a video of ThinkProgress making the attempt with the same blocked message experienced by others (click full screen for a better view of the text):

ThinkProgress tried other protest websites, like AmericansforProsperity.org and TeaPartyPatriots.org, and both messages were sent smoothly. However, emails relating to the "Occupy Wall Street" protest were blocked with the following message (emphasis added):

Your message was not sent Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent. If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help. We apologize for the inconvenience.

ThinkProgress has sent a request for more information to Yahoo, and will post any reply once we have received it with Yahoo’s explanation for its apparent censorship.

It’s not the first time Yahoo has been accused of political censorship. Yahoo officially partners with the repressive Chinese regime to provide the government with access to emails related to groups viewed as dissidents. An explosive investigation by Der Spiegel found that Yahoo provided Chinese authorities with access to emails from journalists, and the snooping resulted in the same journalists being sent to prison camps.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have continued, but if you own a Yahoo e-mail account, you might not know about it.

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Tahrir Moment on Wall Street  
By Staff on 19 September 2011 for AdBusters - 
  (http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/tahrir-moment-wall-street.html)  
Image above: "Occupy Wall Street" protesters in Liberty Square, NYC on Saturday. From original article.
 
On Saturday, September 17th, many of us watched in awe as 5,000 Americans descended on the financial district of Lower Manhattan, waved signs, unfurled banners, beat drums, chanted slogans and proceeded to walk toward the "financial Gomorrah" of the nation. They vowed to "occupy Wall Street" and to "bring justice to the bankers," but the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints. Undeterred, protesters walked laps around the area before holding a people's assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone's throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three hundred spent the night, several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day and as we write this article, the encampment is rolling out sleeping bags once again. When they tweeted to the world that they were hungry, a nearby pizzeria received $2,800 in orders for delivery in a single hour. Emboldened by an outpouring of international solidarity, these American indignados say they'll be there to greet the bankers when the stock market opens on Monday. It looks like, for now, the police don't think they can stop them. ABC News reports that "even though the demonstrators don’t have a permit for the protest, [the New York Police Department says that] they have no plans to remove those protesters who seem determined to stay on the streets." Organizers on the ground say, "We're digging in for a long-term occupation." Now the world is watching and wondering: Could this be the spark of a "Tahrir Moment" in the USA?

#OCCUPYWALLSTREET was inspired by the people's assemblies of Spain and floated as a concept by a double-page poster in the 97th issue of Adbusters magazine, but it was spearheaded, orchestrated and accomplished by independent activists. It all started when Adbusters asked its network of culture jammers to flood into Lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens and peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street for a few months. The idea caught on immediately on every social network, and unaffiliated activists seized the meme and built an open-source organizing site. A few days later, a general assembly was held in New York City and 150 people showed up. These activists became the core organizers of the occupation. The mystique of Anonymous pushed the meme into the mainstream media. Their video communique endorsing the action garnered 100,000 views and a warning from the Department of Homeland Security addressed to the nation's bankers. When, in August, the indignados of Spain sent word that they would be holding a solidarity event in Madrid's financial district, activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond vowed to do the same.

There is a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a Ponzi scheme run by and for Big Finance. People everywhere are waking up to the realization that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3 trillion (50 times more than the sum of all the commercial transactions). Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, "in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year."

"CEOs, the biggest corporations and the wealthy are taking too much from our country and I think it's time for us to take back," says one activist who joined the protests last Saturday. Jason Ahmadi, who traveled in from Oakland, California, explained that "a lot of us feel there is a large crisis in our economy and a lot of it is caused by the folks who do business here." Bill Steyerd, a Vietnam veteran from Queens said, "It's a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers."

There is not just anger. There is also a sense that the standard solutions to the economic crisis proposed by our politicians and mainstream economists – stimulus, cuts, debt, low interest rates, encouraging consumption – are false options that will not work. Deeper changes are needed … like a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions; reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act in the USA; implementing a ban on high frequency "flash" trading. The "too big to fail" banks must be be broken up, downsized and made to serve the people, the economy and society again. The financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 meltdown must be brought to justice and given lengthy prison terms. Then there is the long-term mother of all solutions: a total rethinking of Western consumerism that throws into question how we measure progress.

If the current economic woes in Europe and the US spiral into a prolonged global recession, then people's encampments will become permanent fixtures in financial districts and outside stock markets around the world. Until our demands are met and the global economic regime is fundamentally reformed, our tent cities will keep popping up everywhere.

Bravo to those courageous souls in the encampment on New York's Liberty Street. Every night that #OCCUPYWALLSTREET continues will escalate the possibility of a full-fledged global uprising against business as usual.

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