The occupation of wallstreet

[Mazmaz]

I didn't know they were publishing their own newspaper.
http://www.cbc.ca/photos/galleries/1...eb_8column.jpg

[kuronosan]

Zealot, if you really want to ask some good questions you should video tape it and ask them things related to the outcome. What do they think of the gaining support? What do they hope to change? If there was a message they want to send to the masses and this is their opportunity, what message would they send?

I'm sure you're trying to get a feel for this as part of your push to hopefully run for some office someday, but if you really want to help and really want to get to know them, you should probably be a little more person-centered than "making an appearance". If you want to be a voice, you have to deliver their message, not the other way around.

[notorious bum]

Right, incase you missed all the hub-bub yesterday about unions and large droves of community organizers, they kinda have something going on now. I second the motion of simply surveying the area and digesting information before throwing out any suggestions.


edit: I thought this was an awesome little history lesson from 1 of the protestors on DN's broadcast yesterday that I was meaning to include in one of my posts.

“As the world is watching. Let’s Occupy Wall Street. Let’s not forget the history of occupation on which the Street was built. In 1685, the Dutch West India Company enslaved African peoples after failing to effectively employed American Indians, to construct Wall Street to barricaded the land the white man has seized from native peoples. The Dutch called their colony New Amsterdam and needed to secure from the indigenous who were fighting to take back land that had sustained for thousands of years. They were also protecting it from British colonizers. The Wall secured space for white men to disparately trade shares and bonds until they formalized the practice through the founding of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792.”

[Kytele]

The white male privilege in this thread is painfully showing for some posters, as per usual.


It's ok for huge multi million dollar corporations to get handouts when they're on the verge of functional collapse but not the American public?


Some people would kill for that kind of blissful ignorance. Let me know how it works out when you find out one day the rug will be pulled out from under you someday too.

[Kuya]

I think some of these posters would say that corporations getting handouts is bad too and that they oppose all welfare, including corporate welfare. But that position is a contrivance. In practice there is lots of corporate welfare nd less social welfare. That's a reality that can't be hidden by their half-hearted appeals to social & economic justice.

[Senoska]

stating again i don't buy into your premise whatsoever.

I dont understand how you don't. This is simple reason. You're like willfully ignorant or something. Who guarantee's you militay protection? Or police, or a fire department? Who makes the roads you drive on? Your postal workers, etc are all not guarantee'd to you, but I bet you'd throw a fit if any of those things disappeared, because as a citizen of the 'best country in the world,' you should fucking have them.

[Meresgi]

I get when people say "Well other countries have it far worse then the US", because it's true. No we arnt living in mud houses and drinking septic water, but that doesn't mean we don't have the right to complain about what's going on here on our homefront as much as anyone else. To think that since it's not as bad as other 3rd world countries, we should just sit back and deal with it is foolish. We may not be suffering for clean water and shelter, but we are still slaves to this system in our own right and it's getting worse with each passing year. I could honestly see in 10 years when most institutions are privatized and suddenly most people don't have water.

[Olo401]

Going to Occupy Providence tonight for the first time.. would've gone sooner but I wanted to get rid of this damn chest cold first.

[Senoska]

Going to Occupy Providence tonight for the first time.. would've gone sooner but I wanted to get rid of this damn chest cold first.

I dont want either of them anymore. The whole system of the two parties is broken.

[Senoska]

Example of it being broken : Try to add a third party:

Say this was the 2008 election:
R: XXXXXXX
D: XXXXXXXX - Winner

Now add a third party, lets say they're a progressive party.

R: XXXXXX - Winner
D: XXXXX
P XXX

[Indalecia]

1) that what happened with Teddy and Bullmoose

2) its gonna be hilarious if a revolution does kick off and China decides to join the party.
Fucking. Hilarious.

[WahiGuard]

2) its gonna be hilarious if a revolution does kick off and China decides to join the party.
Fucking. Hilarious.

Actually on the Livestream the other night, there was talk of all the Occupations that are supposed to start soon. China was one of the mentioned cities, and someone had said 'that actually sounds dangerous'
And I think on the Occupy map China is listed.. Maybe they`ll start the 15th.

[Talint]

"They're pitting Americans against Americans"

Sometimes I wonder about these elected people (I doubt they're really "officials" over anything).

[ronin sparthos]

"They're pitting Americans against Americans"

Sometimes I wonder about these elected people (I doubt they're really "officials" over anything).

Tea Party = Patriotic citizens exercising their right to protest big gov't. Praise those proactive souls so willing to speak out against the forces of Obamacare, vaccinations, gay marriage and social programs. God is most certainly on their side and thus nothing less than divine will is at work here.

Occupy Wall Street = Hippie college kids engaging in class warfare. They're too young and naive to understand that the American way is to scrape by while overloaded in debt beneath the heel of fatcats. If only they'd work harder, perhaps one day they could hope to reach the upper echelons of our good land.

[WahiGuard]

I honestly have no idea how people vote for them. Yes we hate big guvment but we`re going to restrict a female`s right to her own health. @.@

[Olo401]

"They're pitting Americans against Americans"

Sometimes I wonder about these elected people (I doubt they're really "officials" over anything).

Not a mob..

http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/6...rtyprotest.jpg


Mob:

http://images1.dailykos.com/i/user/151025/99dc.jpg

Ummm... ? Maybe it's those co-opted yellow Gadsen flags?

[Kuya]

Looks like there is some blowback on a reporter who was attacking these protests:

J]ournalism watchdog group FAIR says that, Burnett misreported the facts in an attempt to make the protesters look uninformed. Burnett, whose fiancée is a Citigroup executive, is now being framed as the next generation of CNN personalities that stray from the network's commitment to being the "only credible, nonpartisan voice left."

Neither CNN nor Burnett are winning supporters from fellow journalists either. Dave Weigel called Burnett's Tuesday night segment "hippie punching," and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted, "Man, the blowback on Erin Burnett's visit to #occupywallst is like a crossover hit." Now, the press critics are weighing in, not only criticizing Burnett but an unnerving shift in CNN's approach that draws comparisons to Fox News. Eric Jackson at Forbes called her "vapid" in a sprawling take-down, and The Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik wrote off her new show OutFront completely in his Wednesday column:

Two of the fundamental attributes of good journalism are curiosity and a respect for the people on whom you report. Burnett got an "F" on both those counts with her Occupy Wall Street piece. Not only didn't she listen hard enough to learn anything from the people in the group, she and her producers positioned the speakers to be seen as objects of derision. That is deplorable.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/busin...-street/43407/

She reminds me of Solanis.

[Kuya]

This is the definition of objective reporting ladies and gentlemen:

Glenn Greenwald at Salon followed up on Wednesday afternoon with a post that thoroughly traces Burnett's career from her job as a Goldman Sachs analyst through her tenure at CNBC and now as CNN new star. The unavoidable ties between Burnett and Wall Street--husband is a Citigroup executive after all--clashes with CNN's ability to produce objective journalism so badly, he says, it's "embarrassing":

[Correction]

BofA chief: We have a 'right to make a profit'

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Bank of America's CEO defended his bank's new $5 fee on debit cards on Wednesday, saying that customers and shareholders understand the bank has a "right to make a profit."

Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan defended the move, which the bank announced last week in response to new caps on debit card swipe fees that the banks charge retailers.

Bank of America's announcement of a new debit card fee was followed today by an announcement of new checking account fees by Citibank . These new bank fees have fueled a populist backlash that has coincided with a series of protests against Wall Street banks around the nation.

Moynihan stopped short of criticizing President Obama who earlier this week said to ABC that banks don't have an "inherent right" to a "certain amount of profit."

But BofA's chief did say banks have an inherent right to make a profit in an interview Wednesday with CNBC's Larry Kudlow at the Washington Ideas Forum, sponsored by the Newseum, the Aspen Institute and the Atlantic magazine.

"I have an inherent duty as a CEO of a publicly owned company to get a return for my shareholders," Moynihan said.

Moynihan said that the bank will talk to its customers, teammates and shareholders and "they'll understand what we're doing -- understand we have a right to make a profit."

Moynihan said the bank had made the fee clear and transparent to its customers and noted the bank had given plenty of advance notice because the fee won't kick in until next year.

But he said the new charge was necessary because the "ability to be profitable" in retail banking has changed. He added that Wall Street reforms in the so-called Dodd-Frank Act will cost his bank "billions."

When Kudlow asked Moynihan if he felt the bank was under attack, Moynihan said "no."

"We have the best bank in the world, we do a great job for our customers," he added.

Later, Moynihan was asked about an entirely different issue, whether he supported a proposed tax on millionaires that Senate Democrats proposed today.

He said he'd echo what he hears from his millionaire customers: "Yes, but what for?"

"If the belief is that it puts our fiscal house in order, then they support that," Moynihan said.

lol@the bolded

[Correction]

New op-ed in the Times highlights a lot of frustration people have over this new debit card fee structure:

Charging for Debit Cards Is Robbery

By LLOYD CONSTANTINE
Published: October 6, 2011

WHEN Bank of America told its customers recently that it would start charging them $5 a month to use debit cards, it argued that it was forced to make that change because of regulations that altered the economics of the cards. Other banks agreed. The chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, put the effects of the regulations this way: “If you’re a restaurant and you can’t charge for the soda, you’re going to charge more for the burger.” Both banks were responding to the Federal Reserve’s actions to limit the interchange fees banks charge stores each time a debit card is used for a purchase.
Your Money Guides

But the banks’ simplistic statements are merely an attempt to rationalize and obfuscate one of the largest illegal transfers of wealth from consumers to banks in American history.

Debit cards were developed by banks as a replacement for paper checks. When a consumer pays with a debit card instead of a check, the bank saves money. In the 1980s, Visa calculated the savings at 55 cents to $1.60 per check. The savings is much higher today. For decades, Bank of America, the founding owner and member of Visa (originally called BankAmericard) and all of the Visa and MasterCard banks, including Chase, hid the identity of their debit cards from stores by designing them to look and function like their signature authorized credit cards and by charging stores the same price for debit and credit transactions. Banks did this despite the fact that purchases made with a debit card didn’t involve a loan from the bank, posed very little fraud risk and were extravagantly profitable to banks because they eliminated the costs of processing and clearing checks.

The practice of deceiving stores and forcing them to accept overpriced debit transactions was challenged in a 1996 antitrust lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard, in which I was the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. In 2003, that resulted in a $3.4 billion settlement to stores, a court order to redesign the debit cards and a reduction in the price banks charge stores for common debit transactions — to an average of 42 cents per transaction from an average of 63 cents.

However, that lower price was still much too high, as the Federal Reserve well knew. The Fed had been established in 1913 in large measure to end the then widespread practice of banks’ charging a similar “interchange” fee for the use of paper checks. Those check interchange fees were slowing the growth of interstate commerce, and the Fed quickly prohibited them. The interchange fees that banks now charge stores for debit transactions are economically and functionally identical to the check interchange fees prohibited by the Fed almost a century ago.

When A.T.M. cards were first used at stores as point-of-sale debit cards, no interchange fees were charged. In many instances debit card networks like Shazam and Tyme actually paid stores to accept debit transactions. They did this so banks, which owned the networks, could reap the huge profits of eliminating checks. But Bank of America, Chase and their Visa/MasterCard partners wanted to have their burgers and eat them, too. They instituted the illegal practices challenged and eliminated in the Visa Check antitrust litigation. Later, the Dodd-Frank Act directed the Fed to continue the process of addressing high and anticompetitive debit interchange fees by examining whether the banks could justify those fees on the basis of the costs banks incurred in processing debit card transactions. After initially deciding that debit interchange fees should be lowered from 44 cents to 7 to 12 cents, the Fed, in yet another huge handout to big banks, revised the fee range to 21 to 24 cents.

That is the change in economics which Bank of America cites as it attempts to begin charging a large new fee to its debit cardholders. It’s a free country, but also one where competition is supposed to prevail and prevent companies, including banks, from simply raising the price of their burgers without suffering the competitive consequences. Recently, Netflix learned that a company can’t adopt a big price increase without suffering the consequences. When it tried to, it lost hundreds of thousands of its customers.

Retail customers of Bank of America and of any other bank that follows its lead should swiftly move their business. I am certain that other banks will welcome the competitive opportunity that Bank of America has given them with its arrogant and disingenuous action and justification.

Lloyd Constantine, a commercial litigator, is the author of “Priceless: The Case That Brought Down the Visa/MasterCard Bank Cartel.”

Keep squeezin' that rock BoA, it'll bleed until it slips out of your hands and you get bought by some Canadian banking firm.