Hearts for the mayor. How to lose the public relations battle by being yourself:
Aerial footage (KTLA) ports action:
http://www.ktla.com/videogallery/66717798/News/VIDEO:-Police-Make-Arrests-at-Port-of-LA-Occupy-
“The protests stretched from San Diego to Anchorage, brought work to a standstill in Oakland and Longview, Wash., and led to the closure of a major marine terminal in Portland, Ore. Demonstrators caused smaller disruptions in Seattle and in Long Beach, where a driving rain and threats of arrest put a damper on an early morning picket line.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-occupy-ports-20111213,0,67827.story
Longshoremen tacit support for port action?
“The longshoremen's union did not officially support the protests, but its membership cited a provision in its contract that allowed workers to ask to stay off the job if they felt the conditions were unsafe.”
In Portland, another take on the widespread disruption that occurred up and down the western U.S. Coast:
“After an appeal by union leaders tonight, Occupy Portland protesters agreed to end their picket outside a Schnitzer Steel plant in North Portland.
“Officials from the International Longshore & Warehouse Union Local 8 explained to protesters that union workers in the plant wouldn't get paid if the protest continued.
"'We support the Occupy' movement, said Michael Gardner of the union's labor relations committee. 'We just don't necessarily agree with shutting down the docks.'”
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2011/12/occupy_portland_upd...
Truck drivers weigh in:
“We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11 children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores.”
http://cleanandsafeports.org/blog/2011/12/12/an-open-letter-from-america...
Margot Paez reporting on port action:
Press TV interview with Rodney Shakespeare and others on EU situation:
Take the time to listen to the panelists in the video (transcribed):
“So I am afraid, that is the basic situation, and as regards to the UK, we are already ruled by the bankers who are trying to be in charge using the financial system to control everybody else. The situation is quite disgraceful, we have to throw off this global elite, and go to a new paradigm of thinking.”
“I think that Europe is going to collapse, and when, for example, the bonds etc are defaulted, that is going to hit the derivatives, commitments of the American banks and is going to be big, big trouble. If you look at it, if only a tiny percentage of the derivatives go wrong, three or four percents of the total might be equivalent to nearly the same as the world's GDP.”
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/214880.html
Also from PressTV a Max Heiser video interview with Greg Hunter:
Hunter: Well, I think the [European Central Bank] ECB played chicken with the fed and they were flubbing around with what they were trying to do with this [European Financial Stability Facility] ESFF fund and they had enough money and they were going to get enough money and they couldn't get enough money.
“And finally the Fed stepped in with of course 5 other central banks including the ECB and said we're going to start printing money; we are going to start with dollar swaps. Of course, the stock market goes shooting up: Yey the bankers are saved.”
“This is a banker savior thing. This is not good for the common guy. If you're in the stock market, great. You're making the inflation play.”
The interview continues:
"So we can't really call it classic inflation. It's something else. It's a kind of a reword of criminality. It's a criminal inflation- I guess you could call it.
“Hunter: [laughs] Yes, a criminal inflation, they have a dual mandate. They don't really care about people, employed or unemployed. Politically they care.
“They care for their power structures that people don't find out that in the last wake of the last crisis 16 trillion dollars, which a lot of people don't really know.”
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/215104.html
And here's more from the same article, because the information is just too good not to repeat:
“In fact, the banking system or the shallow banking system might have another ten or twenty trillion in bad debts they just found, they just discovered and they were back to a deflationary spiral again and this goes ad infinitum between pillar and post.
“Does there seem to be any event that is going to capture or to rectify this trend because if interest rates are near zero as they are now the continuation of flooding the system with more debt via debt-based currency only creates more debt so in fact this will never end. Will it?
“Hunter: Ultimately, it will end in some sort of currency crisis because what they're doing with their dollars is they're loaning more money; they're loaning more money to Greece; they're loaning more money to Italy; they're buying bonds.
“It's creating more debt. They're really not paying anything off. I don't think the world, the Central bankers ever intended to pay anything off.”
So it appears the world banking debacle will probably get worse before it gets better. Printing money is not a popular thing to do when everyone knows that inflation will pass the cost directly to them. What most media outlets consistently fail to mention is that the Occupation Movement is really based on mainstream ideas shared by disparate political interests. Does anyone support creeping inflation caused by currency manipulators? Does anyone support another meltdown because irresponsible banking officials can't borrow enough money from the taxpayers to stay afloat? If not, you are probably a supporter of the cause whether or not you choose to acknowledge it.
There is no reason why the premises of the Occupation Movement are not endorsed by any number of groups or organizations. Unfortunately, more often than not they pander for votes or money, something we haven't spent a lot of time with, so the primary effort has always been to disseminate the message, to educate the uninformed, such that their interests won't be trampled by the people who have a motive to conceal that information, (along with their own culpability and criminality)
.
But if the occupy phenomenon reaches a point where it becomes a viable political entity, along will come the baggage associated with those endeavors. At some point the movement will have to decide whether it is content to disseminate a message of economic equality, (the lack of which implies an aberrant form of capitalism has taken hold of the global economy). Or does the movement become a political party, a PAC, or perhaps a giant lobbying firm with several million members?
Whatever the working draft becomes, the spring of an election year is a good time to launch it.
So now the National Defense Authorization Act becomes the only legislation that our esteemed members of Congress can come up with to address these festering problems, because they have summarily dismissed any proposals articulated here and in the streets and public squares across America. It figures.
This legislation, for the sake of all Americans, must be stopped. If not, it will supply the proof that lawmakers are more concerned with containment of the message and the messengers than actually addressing the concerns and interests of their constituents.
Occupy the tax code. Cuomo does an about-face::
“. . . taxing the top 1 percent is far easier now than it was a few months ago.”
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2011/12/13/occupy-the-tax-code/
There goes my laptop. (They never told me about this in journalism school):
© AnarchyMedia.org
Recent comments