Here is a picture I took looking up at the Downtown L.A. Bank of America building from a patch of grass owned by Brookfield Properties, the same owners of Zuccotti Park in NYC. This picture was taken just before my arrest defending an encampment in a solidarity action on November 17.
I wrote about the action an my arrest experience here.
Inspired in part by popular uprisings in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, the “Occupy Wall St.” has managed to maintain a presence in NY’s financial district for 10 days. Meanwhile, corporatist/nationalist “mainstream” media ignores the movement as the police brutally crack down on the non-violent mostly young protesters.
Anthropologist and Activist David Graeber (whose books I highly recommend) has an essay in the Guardian suggesting that what we are watching are “the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans” who are demanding “a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008″:
There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world’s financial architecture, when anything seemed possible…
It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an “economy” is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they’d been before.
Meanwhile, members of the emerging defiant generation who take action against Wall St. crime are met, predictably, with the heavy cloven hoof of the pigs — witness this video of these peaceful young women getting corralled and pepper-spayed for daring to express their 1st Amendment Rights:
NYPD spokesliar Paul Browne asserted that this use of pepper spray was “appropriate“.
Various other coverage on the Web:
A solidarity movement is starting to manifest in Los Angeles (#OccupyLA), with a demonstration planned today (Monday) at 2Pm at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights to coincide with Obama’s fundraising visit.
Local Activists are also planning an occupation of Downtown beginning October 1.
The Obama Administration's Environmental Vision: Green Lighting Arctic Drilling, A Pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands, and Delaying Carbon Emissions Regulations
The Obama Administration has recently made three moves that undermine the possibility of a green future by supporting dirty energy projects and deregulation.
1. ARCTIC DRILLING:
Though Congress has passed no new oil drilling safeguards following the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dept. of the Interior last month gave Shell the green light to start their plans to drill in the Arctic, despite how dangerous it is.
2.TAR SANDS and the KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE:
The State Department is fixing to approve Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport oil from the Alberta Tar Sands across the U.S to Texas Refineries.
James Hansen, NASA scientist and the first person to warn Congress of the dangers of climate change, lists the negative impact from tar sand development:
The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal Forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation, habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and Caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities.
But worse still is that exploitation of the tar sand’s dirty produce would “make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.” Hansen concludes that if the oil from tar sands is burned together with conventional oil and gas and coal, “it is essentially game over” for our species.
Other scientists also agree that the pipeline sucks.
But nothing to worry about, agrees the company who wants to build the pipeline — what could go wrong? Meanwhile the State Department is following the Corporate Script, asserting without meaningful investigation that there will be “no significant” environmental impact.
Lots of protesters getting arrested in front of the White House, meanwhile. For more, see here.
3. EMISSIONS STANDARDS:
On September 2, Obama announced his decision to delay the implementation of emissions regulations that would have, according to the National Resources Defense Council, “saved up to 4,300 lives and avoid as many as 2,200 heart attacks every year.” This, in order to reduce “regulatory burdens” on the richest corporations in the history of humankind.
This decision means that the Obama administration will accept the Bush Era standards, which Lisa Jackson, the current EPA manager, wrote were “not legally defensible.”
The American Lung Association is pissed, and so is this asthmatic (former?) Obama supporter.
Congressional Leaders and the U.S. President have worked out the framework of a deal to lower the Federal deficit by slashing certain kinds of spending while doing nothing to increase revenue by taxing corporations or the rich.
Economist Paul Krugman calls the deal a “disaster” which “amounts to an abject surrender on the part of the president” to “raw extortion”, and wonders why Obama didn’t utilize any of the tools he had at his disposal to avoid this “catastrophe”.
The Young Turks Cenk Uygur, recently ushered from the insider’s club for his insufficiently partisan critical stance, remembers how President Clinton was able to avoid a debt ceiling challenge from Gingrich republicans in his day. Why didn’t Obama use this or any of the other available methods to avoid a similar challenge now?
Constitutional Lawyer cum Journalist G. Greenwald isn’t buying the myth of Obama’s weakness, and points to the president’s own pronouncements and actions to argue that brutal cuts to Social Security and Medicare is precisely what the corporatist Obama want.
The whole debt ceiling debate has been a political show — a display of tooth and nail fighting between parties that agree on fundamentals:
Ballooning war spending? Significant cuts are off the table.
Taxing corporations the rich? Don’t hold your breath.
In a DN interview, Economist Richard Wolf puts the debt agreement disaster in historical perspective:
In the ’50s and ’60s, the top bracket, the income tax rate that the richest people had to pay, for example the ’50s and ’60s, it was 91 percent. Every dollar over $100,000 that a rich person earned, he or she had to give 91 cents to Washington and kept nine. And the rationale for that was, we had come out of a Great Depression, we had come out of a great war, we had to rebuild our society, we were in a crisis, and the rich had the capacity to pay, and they ought to pay. Republicans voted for that. Democrats voted for that. What do we have today? Ninety-one percent? No. The top rate for rich people today, 35 percent. Again, nobody else in this society—not the middle, not the poor—have had anything like this consequence.
So, over the last 30, 40 years, a shift from corporate income tax to individual income tax, and among individuals, from the rich to everybody else. To deal with our budget problem without discussing that, putting that front and center, making that part of the story, that’s just a service to the rich and the corporations. There’s no polite way to say otherwise. And there’s something shameful about keeping all of that away and focusing on how we’re going to take out our budget problems by cutting back benefits to old people, to people who have medical needs. There’s something bizarre, and the world sees that, in a society that has done what it has done and now proposes to fix it on the backs of the majority.
Even worse this not-so-sleight-of-hand robbery comes at a time when globalizing corporations are achieving liberty from any merely national interests — expanding overseas and laying off domestic labor.
The Associated Press reports that “strong second-quarter earnings from McDonald’s, General Electric and Caterpillar on Friday are just the latest proof that booming profits have allowed Corporate America to leave the Great Recession far behind.”
Again Richard Wolf traces the historical trajectory:
You know, 30, 40 years ago, we spoke about corporations moving production jobs out of the United States. Ten or 15 years ago, we began to talk about outsourcing, moving white-collar jobs out. The most recent addition to that is the decision of corporations, as they look around the world, to say, you know, the growth of our market, the growth of demand, it’s in Asia, it’s in Latin America, it’s in parts of—it’s not here. The American people are exhausted. Their wages are going nowhere. We have high unemployment. And the fact is, no one is going to lend them much more money because they’re tapped out. So they’re not a growing market. So you see American corporations literally focused, for production and for consumption, elsewhere. That means they’re going to take care of themselves in the world.
Power industries have resorted to extreme measures in order to produce energy for an insatiable civilization, exploiting increasingly remote crevices of the planet in the pursuit of corporate profit — without regard to heavy environmental costs.
Below are three examples: oil from tar sands, coal from mountaintop removal, and nukes from a demonstrably unsafe and under-regulated industry.
Tom Radford’s documentary film about oil extraction from Alberta’s Tar Sands tells the story of Canada’s sorry environmental trajectory, its obstructionism to a global climate deal, the pollution of the Athabasca River and the devastating effects on the humans and other organisms in the area.
A choice sequence from the documentary:
Narrator: In Kyoto, Canada promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 6%. Now, 20 years later, the tar sands are booming and the emissions are up 26%.
Bill McKibben: If you set out to devise a method to harm the planet, you couldn’t come up with a better one than what Canada is doing at the tar sands. You’ve got to bring in energy to heat this stuff up enough to get it out. Once you spent all that energy in getting it out, then you refine it into gasoline and burn it again. If any significant portion of that tar sands continues to get exploited and burnt, then we’ll simply have too much carbon in the atmosphere
Tim Flannery: For every barrel of oil that you get from the tar sands, you release three times the as much carbon that you get form a conventional oil well in Texas or Saudi Arabia. So there is a big carbon liability… if the world followed followed Canada down that route… we would cook the earth.
Recent development from Mother Jones, on the devastating health effects of mountaintop removal mining:
A new study linking Appalachian mountaintop removal mining to birth defects offers compelling new evidence of the practice’s impact on human health..
Researchers at Washington State University and WVU pored over nearly 2 million central Appalachia birth records from 1996 to 2003. Their findings are disturbing: Kids born near mountaintop mining operations suffered higher rates of a bevy of birth defects, including central nervous system, musculoskeletal, urogenital and circulatory and respiratory problems.
I’ve posted on mountaintop removal before, and described how it saves the coal industry labor costs by simply blowing up mountains to get to the coal deposits inside.
In the process, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Mining companies are clear cutting thousands of acres of some of the world’s most biologically diverse forests. They’re filling local rivers and streams with blasted debris, polluting drinking water with toxic waste and sacrificing the safety and sanctity of countless communities.
“The Last Mountain“, a critically acclaimed new documentary about mountaintop removal is playing in theaters this month. Here is a promotional trailer:
BTW, if you want to find your own electric connection to mountaintop removal, here is a useful tool.
Although the Fukushima disaster has largely disappeared from U.S. “news” media that prefer to giggle at pictures of pee-pees, al-Jazeera is probably right to assert that it is “much worse than you think“.
The article quotes a longtime high level nuke industry exec Arnold Gundersen who claims that “Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind.”
The disaster has led global support for nuclear power to subside, but in the U.S. the AP has reported on how “federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them.”
Meanwhile, these doctors are suggesting a connection between Fukushima and a 35% spike in infant mortality in the U.S. pacific northwest.
As corporations and the rich become expert at tax avoidance, the bill for Washington’s Imperial Swan Song gets passed along to chumps like you and me. Consider these stats:
Over the past 12 years income for the richest U.S. Americans quadrupled as their tax rate was almost cut in half.
Corporations and the wealthy use offshore banks and tax havens to avoid paying taxes and other government regulations.
Many of the largest corporations avoid paying any taxes at all.
Half of your income taxes go to pay for the Imperial military machine.
And here is 9 other things the rich don’t want you to know about taxes.
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings asks a relevant question: What if we all stopped paying taxes?
Here are some charts come (from a collection at Mother Jones and the WRL) to help visualize:
PS: Here are ways to resist war tax, from the War Resisters League.
The idea that the U.S./European intervention is motivated by humanitarian concerns appears plausible at first glance because Gaddafi was slaughtering protesters and openly threatening to slaughter more — so “intervention” could be sold as a humanitarian act.
But a bit of critical reflection on the wider context of this policy reveals how shallow such an explanation is.
First, there is the question of consistency. If the U.S. (et. al.) were motivated by humanitarian concern, then what of concern for the protesters being slaughtered in the streets of other autocratic states, like Syria, Yemen or Bahrain?
The White House managed to verbally condemn the crackdown in Syria, but the Yemeni and Bahraini regimes, important assets in the imperial project, get a pass or even support – Secretary of State Clinton asserted that Yemen had the “sovereign right” to invite Saudi Arabian forces into the country to violently crush dissent.
And what about Israel? Siddharth Varadarajan asks the multi-billion dollar question:
Why does only Libya get attacked or referred to the International Criminal Court and not other countries? If there is one country in the Middle East which has threatened international peace and security for decades and which, even as these words are being written, has launched its air force, yet again, against a defenceless civilian population, it is Israel. Yet never have the cheerleaders for the war on Libya argued in favour of a mandatory no-fly zone to protect the Palestinian and Lebanese people from Israeli airstrikes.
This selective application of humanitarian intervention exposes it as a whitewash.
Furthermore, if concern for humanity was a motivating factor for the U.S. (et. al.), then what of concern for its own citizens? Writing in the NYT, Bob Herbert reminds us that this “humanitarian intervention” is also “pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war… while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home.”
“Humanitarian Concern”, like “Spreading Democracy”, is a PR label cynically used to sell imperial military projects to a (still-too-naive) domestic market, as well to serve as cover for complicit (and equally cynical) international institutions.
So, too, is the use of the euphemistic term “no-fly zone”, which had some Arab League support until it turned out to mean the shock and awe of missile strikes to inaugurate more or less unbounded military action, with its own inevitable civilian casualties.
But if not concern for humanity, then what motivates the U.S.(et. al.) attack on Libya?
Well, there is always the geopolitics of a dwindling oil supply. Or profits for the military-industrial-complex, which over decades gets to provide weapons to both Gaddafi and the coalition forces attacking him.
Cha-ching.
In a discussion with Oliver Stone, Micheal Moore and Christopher Hedges, Al-Jazeera’s Marwan Bishara “examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex”:
And here is another relevant quote from an older article by Normon Solomon on the same topic, “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex“:
In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”
I never thought that I would see the day when Peter Tosh’s anthem would become a reality, but it looks like it might happen if enough people go to the polls tomorrow.
If anybody knows of any compelling reasons why marijauna should not be legalized, please let me know – I can’t find any.
By increasing the legality of this particular plant, CA Prop 19 would eliminate a disproportionately applied (i.e. racist) law that puts people in cages for the possession of a plant that grows from the earth. (Last year, CA police made 60,000 marijuana possession arrests, mostly of “young men of color”, even though “white” people use it more. )
Other benefits: It will increases tax revenue for a cash strapped state, and (possibly, hopefully) reduce the violence of the drug wars in Mexico, which has already claimed tens of thousands of lives.
But if all of this isn’t enough, just listen to Snoop:
No surprise, but Peter Tosh’s son Dave is also down. He makes his plea here.
