Inside Occupy Wall Street LA …… Just the FACTS Mam, Please Just the Facts

Submitted by Rancho Larry on

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Now Up On the WallStreetSwindler.com

By Larry Alger for the WallStreetSwindler.com

Oct 11 2011 Los Angeles CA

Hey Everybody, including Kampers and Supporters of OccupyLosAngeles.org!
Do the Work—Get The History

I have been downtown several times now and talked to a lot of people who have expressed a ton of stuff to me as 100% Rightness when, in fact, I know they were mistaken about a lot. I guess that goes with THIS PART of the territory, as youth, diverse experience, education, ideological backgrounds, and yes even a little just plain craziness here and here are floating around. Make up your own mind but GET THE FACTS, that is the battle cry from the OLA core group I’ve met.

Ironic isn’t it that here we are about 60 years down the road of life, standing in the very shadow of the iconic image of Jack Webb’s LAPD detective’s City Hall, talking about Just The Facts. It was Jack Webb that made famous the saying “Just the FACTS Mam, Please Just the Facts.” In fact, it is 60 years later and that request resonates stronger than ever to this very day. As for those I’ve spoken to in any coordinating level of responsibly at OLA, Everyone states: Get Educated! Read at our library, attend our classes, and get the FACTS!

That’s WHY OLA conducts classes on site in many different categories. They want people to Do The Work. They attempt to expose as many people to as many different historical perspectives and as much philosophy as people can handle. The Kampers must try to cull FACTS for themselves (that pesky free will stuff) and then decide for themselves. It is a noble pursuit but at this level there is a VERY wide range of colors, densities, and smells of “factual” smoke being passed around. I’ve seen classes range from a laRouche flavor history of the Glass–Steagall Act
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass-Steagall_Act on Wikipedia ) and it’s laRouche colored smoked implications, to a class about Industrial Hemp (I passed on that one). THAT is quite a jump, but stick around OLA and you’re likely to see such fare on a weekend class schedule. OLA encourages everybody to KNOW what they are talking about, and their Kamper semantics can get VERY PRECISE. In fact, I’ve seen some struggles of folks semantically wrestling, seemingly ad infinitum.

 

I say Do The Work! And I believe that the Factual History of the Economic Meltdown is LESSON ONE for EVERYONE!

While I have seen that OLA openly entertains all points of view, they do live in a slice of the real world down there, adjacent to both Parker Center AND Skid Row. Any view espoused that portends violence in any way, any view that conflicts with the OWS covenant of Non-Violence, will not be encouraged let alone endorsed.

OK here is an example of THAT. I was at one of the Open Mic sessions on the south lawn Monday. So this middle aged black lady, ethnically and modestly dressed took control of the Bull Horn. This is the peoples mic, and you, me, or anybody can just step up and blare away on your Thought d’ jour. It occurs to me that this may be the latest, most public version of Joe Pyne’s old Beef Box. He was an early local LA talk show host on the old channel 11, anyone remember that, when George Putnam was a pup? Anyway……

She did several minutes about the plight of teachers and had some pretty harsh words for the LAUSD. As she went on you could see her anger building up as she told more and more details of her story about her personal experience. She finally said, “That this maybe the most important point in time she has ever seen”.
She was not around for the initial human rights battles of the 60s and the Vietnam movement of the 70s (remember Kent State was in 1970). She felt so impassioned by this time that she professed her willingness to sacrifice her life for the cause of justice. She went on to say that we should all be ready to make any sacrifice we can for the cause, and well she got cloudier and cloudier from there. She implored that we fight the just fight and then she jumped from there to SOMETIMES IT IS Necessary to take up arms against the tyranny of oppressive governments like the middle Arabs have done.

She soon realized this rant was not going down on the crowd real well and put down the bullhorn. Almost immediately a young man I had seen around all day, mostly picking up litter into big trash bags, grasped the bull horn and said that OLA IS a non violent organization that does NOT and will NOT endorse the use of violence in any way. I liked that so much I took up the bullhorn next and told the crowd,
“Look we ARE the 99% and ULTIMATELY we derive 100% of our power through our citizen enfranchisement. We will NEVER have the kind of money to lobby Congress or sleep in the Lincoln bedroom, not us. I said People, People, People, it’s all about Ballots NOT Bullets. Our American BLESSING IS THAT WE DO NOT NEED to do anything with weapons LIKE the Arabs had to. Our blessing is that we, the 99% get to win every damn time because we FREEKING OWN THIS PLACE through the ballots, Every Time. BUT ONLY IF WE DO THE WORK! So People, People, People, DO THE WORK” !!! Ok enough of my rant. Please Do the Work beginning with lesson one.

Even if you’ve seen all this stuff before WATCH THEM AGAIN ASAP so it is fresh. Do the Work!

Lesson ONE. Get educated on the history of this Meltdown mess. Know what you’re talking about.

For HONEST background on how we got into this financial mess in the first place——

Go to PBS.org and watch these programs online.

They accurately document the history of the Economic Meltdown:

pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning

pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown

pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion

 

Do The Work!

Rancho Larry

alhs06's picture

Important to fix the problem

Submitted by alhs06 on

Understanding the strategies used by the 1% which has led to our financial meltdown is an important lesson to us all, it will help in protecting the future rights of The 99%.

More importantly is understanding that there is a problem that needs to be addressed immediately. We see the damage & we repair the damage, understanding the task @ hand, which is fixing the hole before we sink. We can then debate the action's & fault's on how the hole got there in the first place, trying to recognize the symptoms &  prevent future holes. If we stop now & attempt to educate the membership we risk splintering the membership by debating blame, & attempting to place it at the feet of a distinctive group or affiliation, beyond the unethical elected official's who belong to all party's.

Solidarity must be paramount to our movement if it is to be successful.

Stay focused & stay on task. Do not lose sight of the founding group doctrine which is:

Occupy Wall Street is leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

"Long Live Occupy, Long Live The 99%"

My picture reads

"Sell a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you ruin a perfectly good business opportunity."

The 1% philosophy

Wall Street/Banks continue business as usual

Submitted by nancy4436 on


Matt Taibbbi,  reporter for Rolling Stone magazine posted the following.  It appears the 1% are laughing at us and going on with buiness as usual.
Occupy Wall Street: Washington Still Doesn't Get It

POSTED: October 21, 8:25 AM ET

 

I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.

The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:

1) Bank of America is shifting a huge collection of Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts onto its own federally-insured balance sheet. This move of risky instruments off the uninsured Merrill balance sheet onto the commercial bank's balance sheet was done to prevent Bank of America's creditors from attacking the firm with collateral calls and other sorties. Essentially, an irresponsible debtor, B of A, is keeping a loan shark from breaking his legs by getting his rich parents to co-sign his loan. The parents in this metaphor would be the FDIC.

The FDIC naturally is not pleased with this development, but the Fed, the supreme banking regulator, is apparently encouraging this move. Here's how Bloomberg characterized this move:

In short, the Fed's priorities seem to lie with protecting the bank-holding company from losses at Merrill, even if that means greater risks for the FDIC's insurance fund. 

Again and again, the Fed proves it has no appetite for allowing Wall Street to eat its own pain, and continually encourages banks to stick the government with its losses and bad assets. This move will allow Bank of America to keep a Band-Aid over its disastrous financial situation far longer than it would be able to in a genuinely free market. People should be outraged at this development.

2) Barack Obama is apparently expressing willingness to junk big chunks of Sarbanes-Oxley in exchange for support for his jobs program. Business leaders are balking at creating new jobs unless Obama makes compliance with S-O voluntary for all firms valued at under $1 billion. 

Here's how to translate this move: companies are saying they can't attract investment unless they can hide their financials from investors. So the CEOs and gazillionaires on Obama's Jobs Council want the politically-vulnerable president to give them license to cook the books in exchange for support for his jobs program. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

"All you're going to do is have more fraud. The ultimate losers are going to be investors," said Jeff Klink, a former federal prosecutor whose Gateway Center firm helps clients prevent and detect fraud.

If the financial crisis proved anything, it's that Wall Street companies in particular have been serial offenders in the area of dishonest accounting and book-cooking. Sarbanes-Oxley is obviously no panacea, but removing it in exchange for a temporary, election-year job boost is exactly the kind of myopic, absurdly irresponsible shit that got us into this mess in the first place. For Obama to pull this in the middle of these protests is crazy. 

If anyone thought OWS has already done its job, and Washington has gotten the message already, think again. They're not going to change until the protesters force them to change, it seems.

 

 

Careful friends, don't let dogmatic organizations, like Answer hijack  the Occupy LA.  Let the direction of our future be decided  through discussion among all.

 

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