Posted something similar last night but General Discussion has been removed.

I hope that I am not overstepping any boundaries here but I attended the Demands Committee meeting (I guess someone changed that to the Objectives/Research Team?) and General Assembly last night and saw that there is a HUGE need to create a Strategies Team.  Currently and to my knowledge, there is not a group who is creating strategies on how to achieve Occupy Los Angeles' objective/demands.  We need people who are lawyers/legal professionals, poitical insiders, former and/or current banking/investment personnel, former lobbyists, etc. to help us deal with the obstacles we will face in bringing our demands to politicians for them to act upon.

Thoughts any and everyone?

• Recruit the homeless for permanent occupation and develop teams to serve their special needs. As government and society act to resolve their needs, occupation will itself be resolved.

• Urge the national government to restore the Bank of the United States, created by Alexander Hamilton under George Washington's administration. This bank, a regular commercial bank operated by the Treasury Department, was closed by Andrew Jackson effectively deregulating the banking industry. Banks printed their own currency with the result that by the Civil War, one-third of currency in circulation was counterfeit. To combat this problem, Lincoln created the Secret Service and set a new standard currency in the greenback under the Treasury Department to pay for the Union Army. Bankers sought to make monetary policy more conducive to their needs and the Treasury Department sought to wrest control of financial panics from the hands of Morgan and others, so the Federal Reserve was set up as a consensus-building organization to establish base interest rates and manage the amount of currency in circulation, essentially overseeing the lifespan of bills. This has resulted in the weakening of public interest considerations in monetary policy and to strengthen it, banks need to know that the government has an option besides bailout; banks that fail will be absorbed into the Bank of the United States. Their retail contracts (i.e., personal checking, savings, debit cards, credit cards, etc.) will remain in the bank along with their residential mortgage contracts (96% of which are already financed through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), while their commercial, monetary instrument, and international banking contracts will be sold to private competitors.

• Single payer health care will dramatically lower national expenditures for healthcare and insurance while dramatically raising the standard of living for the whole nation. This measure together with the previous will break the virtual dictatorship of the FIRE sector of the economy over the rest of the economy, producing the greatest possible business stimulus to move towards full employment.

• Legalization of hemp will create a whole new economy based on an infrastructure no longer dependent upon petroleum. The diversion of energy technology, together with the downstream products from the petroleum to the hemp industry will move hundreds of billions of dollars of business from the oil industry, eliminating our need to make the international petroleum trade a "vital interest" requiring military intervention throughout the world, and in particular the Middle East. The occupation at home can end the multiple occupations abroad by making this demand.

• The "dismal science" of economics is not a science at all because it substitutes the exchange of labor, which has a measurable flux, for the exchange of "value," the boundaries of which are nebulous. <i>Wealth of Nations</i> establishes labor as the source of economic value, however, labor can be calculated through a science called thermodynamics, which is governed by two laws:

1) Energy is neither created nor destroyed, but changed from one form to another.

2) All transactions occur at a loss.

The second of these laws renders impossible the notion of profit as a "surplus labor," and it therefore follows that profits do not inhere in the "value" of a transaction, but in the lack or inequity of compensation for some participants in the transaction. Compensation of any amount is only offered, in fact, where the law deems it necessary, and then only to the standards the law establishes.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for Occupy and will do what I can for them. I invite one and all to visit my web page where I have written about these and other related matters:

http://http://home.roadrunner.com/~markwrede/

Thank you.