Category Archives: Social values

“Occupy the Board Room”: Pick a Pen Pal in the Top 1% and Tell Them How the Other 99% Lives (#OccupyWallStreet)

I’ve been slow to post on a clever initiative, Occupy the Board Room, because there are lots of leftie groups trying to capitalize on Occupy Wall Street when their connection to the Occupy movement is thin at best. But this is a legitimate, well thought out program in the spirit of the great unwashed trying to capture the attention of the largely negligent and complacent elites.

One of the benefits of this approach is that there are people who are sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street but have commitments that limit their ability to participate (read child care) and may be sufficiently stressed financially that they can’t give as much as they’d like. The Occupy the Board Room site provides another outlet.

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Philip Pilkington: Exorcising The Inflation Ghost – An Attempt To Cure Our European Compatriots of Their Inflation Phobia Through Regression Therapy

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland. Simuposted in German on Faz.net

If the intensity of a phantasy increases to the point at which it would be bound to force its way into consciousness, it is repressed and a symptom is generated through a backward impetus from the phantasy to its constituent memories. All phobias are derived in this way from phantasies which, in turn, are built upon memories.

Sigmund Freud

There are certain words in our culture upon which so many taut emotions converge that they become nothing less than a breaking point for certain opinions and moral platitudes. ‘Sex’ is obviously one. ‘Inflation’ is another.

To even begin to unravel the complex of associations that the word ‘inflation’ brings to mind in the average citizen would be an enterprise worthy of a full book. But one of the key associations is that of robbery. People instinctively feel that if there is inflation occurring they are being robbed by someone or other – most likely some ominous governmental bureaucracy, like a central bank.

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David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet

By David Graeber, who is currently a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to that he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of ‘Debt: The First 5,000 Years’ which is available from Amazon.

Just a few months ago, I wrote a piece for Adbusters that started with a conversation I’d had with an Egyptian activist friend named Dina:

All these years,” she said, “we’ve been organizing marches, rallies… And if only 45 people show up, you’re depressed, if you get 300, you’re happy. Then one day, 200,000 people show up. And you’re incredulous: on some level, even though you didn’t realize it, you’d given up thinking that you could actually win.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement spreads across America, and even the world, I am suddenly beginning to understand a little of how she felt.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Jobs Plan: War with Iran

As much as your humble blogger still regards Elizabeth Warren as preferable to Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, the evidence from her campaign is that she is no progressive, unless you define “progressive” to mean “centrist/Hamilton Project Democrat willing to throw a few extra bones to the average Joe.”

We’ve warned repeatedly that Warren not being all that left leaning was a real possibility.

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A Victory for #OccupyWallStreet in the Most Unlikely of Places?

Please welcome Carol Smith, who is based in Austin and has considerable experience in financial services industry research and analysis. I’m pretty confident she’s also listened to more analyst conference calls than most Naked Capitalism readers have, and you’ll see her put her experience to good use.

By Carol Smith

A Financial Times article today showcased recent comments by bank executives and politicians (and even Erick Erickson of RedState.com!) sympathizing with the sentiments behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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Tom Ferguson: Congress is a “Coin Operated Stalemate Machine”

Readers may recall that we discussed a Financial Times op ed by University of Massachusetts professor of political sciences and favorite Naked Capitalism curmudgeon Tom Ferguson which described a particularly sordid aspect of American politics: an explicit pay to play system in Congress. Congresscritters who want to sit on influential committees, and even more important, exercise leadership roles, are required to kick in specified amounts of money into their party’s coffers. That in turn increases the influence of party leadership, since funds provided by the party machinery itself are significant in election campaigning. And make no doubt about it, they are used as a potent means of rewarding good soldiers and punishing rabble-rousers

A new article by Ferguson in the Washington Spectator sheds more light on this corrupt and defective system.

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As Many as 24 People Arrested for Trying to Close Accounts at #Citibank

Daily Kos publicized a story captured on Global Revolution, of perhaps as many as 30 people being arrested for attempting to close their Citibank accounts. Kos originally said 30 people were arrested; an update now says 17, again per Global Revolution.

The Post reports that 24 people were arrested; its characterization is that a “mob stormed” a branch at Laguardia Place. The basis for the arrests appears to be plenty dubious. Later accounts indicate that people trying to close their accounts were locked in the branch and then arrested for illegal trespass. This video (hat tip Mike Stark) appears to support the protestors’ claims. Notice that the people in the branch are not disruptive, and a woman outside the branch, who had documents to show she was a Citibank customer but apparently had been inside the branch, was grabbed by the police and forced into the branch:

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Curious Omissions from a New York Times Story on a Foreclosure Auction Protest

As readers may know, we’ve reported from time to time on efforts by community members to block specific foreclosure auctions, since this is a sign of how citizens place much less stock in the credibility of banks and legal procedures than they once did.

So we took interest in a report in the New York Times on an effort to block a foreclosure auction in Brooklyn that resulted in 9 arrests.

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On the Lack of Democratic Consent of Greeks to Austerity Programs

Michael Hudson, in the Real News Network segment, stresses that the bailouts (with tons of hairshirt measures) being imposed on Greece do not have the consent of the population. Hudson exaggerates a bit on how the debt was entered into. However, a critical aspect is that, as Floyd Norris pointed out, the overwhelming majority of the borrowings are subject to Greek law. That means Greece could repudiate that with no legal consequence. And collecting on the portion under English law would not be a party.

But a far more serious issue is the Greek banking system would collapse unless there was an immediate (or done over the course of a one week banking holiday) switch back to the drachma.

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On Making Unions a Productive Social Force

It has become fashionable to criticize unions in the US, when many of their shortcomings result from corrupt or at best unimaginative leadership. The fact that we have child labor laws, restrictions on working hours, workplace safety rules, were all the result of hard fought battles by workers. And as an article in Foreign Affairs stresses (hat tip reader Crocodile Chuck), Europe has much less income inequality than the US, which the author George Packer sees as a serious and difficult to remedy contributor to America’s decline. Strong unions have been a significant contributor to Europe’s less skewed distribution.

This discussion on Real News Network describes how unions have unduly narrowed their focus and gives some ideas and examples for ways they could be more effective on their own behalf and for the broader community

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#OccupyWallStreet Visits the Upper East Side

What a pleasant surprise. I was on the phone and heard chanting and drumbeats outside, and lo and behold, it was OccupyWallStreet across the street from me (on the west side of Park Avenue). Unfortunately, I have meetings this PM and so I could only run out briefly to see them on the street, but this was a perfect day to come this far uptown. The police told me they had walked up from Zuccotti Park, that’s a good 7-8 mile hike.

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Twitter Reports of Cops Beating Participants in #OccupyBoston, Breaking Up Encampment

The police decided to clear out the OccupyBoston crowd overnight.

The video footage shows the police moving in, then about 90 seconds of crowd unhappiness, and then it gets a bit chaotic. It looks like some veterans were forced to the ground with the crowd calling “Shame”.

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Iceland: From Crisis to Constitution

Yves here. I’m intrigued by the way Iceland’s post crisis experience does not get the coverage it warrants. This is a country whose banking system collapsed and its citizens suffered months of real privation (I dimly recall that it was difficult to import medicine, for instance, because no finance more or less means no trade). Yet after a period of serious dislocation, things somehow got sorted out, and with a cleaned up financial system and a much cheaper currency, the Icelandic economy has rebounded nicely.

One aspect of this housecleaning was writing a new constitution. Its preamble calls for a just society, an idea which seems to be at the core of OccupyWallStreet’s demands: “We, the people of Iceland, wish to create a just society with equal opportunities for everyone.” I think readers will find both the process of developing and ratifying this document as well as its major provisions to be eye-opening. The model for the US Constitution was the Corsican constitution of 1755. Could this Icelandic document also have a disproportionate impact?

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On Wall Street’s Private Police in NYPD Uniforms

We reported a bit more than a week ago on how JP Morgan had given a troublingly large donation of $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. As we recounted, that foundation was established in 1971, which was when the city was sliding into its fiscal crisis, as a way for companies and individuals to bolster the NYPD’s budget. And even though in theory contributions go into a general coffer, one has to suspect in practice that big donors will get more attention from the cops. Even though this donation was the biggest the police foundation had ever received, it was still peanuts relative to the total NYPD budget. Nevertheless, as Richard Kline pointed out, the gesture was significant:

To me, the telltale with the JippyMo ‘donation’ is that it was _publicly_ announced. Jamie the Demon and his top heads want the public to know that the banksters LIKE the police, as opposed to those daft, sloppy, protestors.

The bankster/Kochster assault on unions was excruciatingly badly timed. It aims directly at public service unions. At their pensions. At their staffing levels. At their equipment. One of the most cogent remarks coming out of the intitial Wisconsin action (before the org-heads diverted it into failing to elect more Democrats) came from the police there, to the effect that lower staffing levels threatened _their_ safety. The local police were markedly sympathetic to the capitol building occupation in Madison. Some of this has clearly been whispered in the ear of the financial oligarchs by their paid consultants to the effect that alienating the police is not in the interests of the 1%. I don’t think that the sum of money is especially relevant or substantial. What matters is that it is a public demonstration that the banksters _like_ the police, with the implication that they will be prepared to drop a little more loose change on them if they’ll clap the rabble into Rikers like good fellows.

And it turns out that big financial service firms have also been buying protection via the NYPD. Literally.

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