Matt Taibbi on "Occupy Wall Street"

Here is a journalist with his finger on the pulse of Wall Street corruption, Matt Taibbi, who has now turned his attention to the demonstrators. He is interviewed by Keith Olbermann:



Both Taibbi and Olbermann note the very suspicious "lack of coverage" for this movement given the extensive coverage of the "Tea Party" where a group of 20 would get national coverage. Here are demonstrations that have lasted for over 20 days with thousands attending, a large number of unions voting support, and 700 arrested on Saturday and some 30 arrested last week. And almost no coverage in the press. Extremely strange... unless you realize that the media is bought and sold -- like the politicians -- to sell the message of the ultra-rich, the message of more tax cuts, or a "tax burden", of a need to remove services and entitlements from the bottom 90%, the incessant demand that government be shrunk to the point where it can be "strangled in a bath tub".

We Need More of This

From Storyful.com:

Iceland’s first lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, joined protesters in a bold move to show her sympathy for people hit by the debt crisis. As the Icelandic president and MPs came under fire from angry protesters on Saturday, on their traditional walk to church marking the opening of the parliamentary session, the President’s wife broke away to join the protest. Protesters, demanding that the government do more to help struggling households, had lined the streets in central Reykjavik pelting politicians with eggs and yogurt.

She climbs over at 03:00 in the video...



More political leaders and heads of state need to crawl out from under the thumb of Wall Street and the big banks and join the bottom 90%.

Cephalopod Tricks

I love the ability of cephalopods to do camouflage as well as mesmerize predators and prey. My favourite is the cuttlefish.

Here's a scientist explaining an octopus:



Go read the original post and/or watch the bigger video.

The Horror of War

Here is the first of 20 videos from a 2001 BBC production War of the Century. It focuses on the fight between Hitler and Stalin. It is very graphic. The producers wanted to focus on how vicious the fighting was, how both sides stooped to war crimes. It is a very ugly insight into how brutal people can be. Soldiers on both sides who participated in war crimes are asked if they felt they had committed a crime (they mostly say "no" or justify it by saying "it was long ago and a different time) and they are asked if they would do it again (a few say "yes" and many beat around the bushes). The video exposes the hatred that is still there:

Then and Now

Back when the US was a heathy country under a good leader with a real vision for the future, here's what he had to say about high unemployment:

To those who say that our expenditures for Public Works and other means for recovery are a waste that we cannot afford, I answer that no country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. Some people try to tell me that we must make up our minds that for the future we shall permanently have millions of unemployed just as other countries have had them for over a decade. What may be necessary for those countries is not my responsibility to determine. But as for this country, I stand or fall by my refusal to accept as a necessary condition of our future a permanent army of unemployed. On the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return. I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any American to remain permanently on relief rolls.

That is a from a fireside chat by FDR on September 30, 1934. Compare that to the right wing Republicans who are happy to wreck the economy, leave unemployment high, allow home foreclosures to continue while they give ever more tax cuts to the ultra-rich. Or compare that to the timid and feeble actions of Obama and the Democrats.

How the mighty have fallen. Given the state of incompetence among the political class in America and given the supine acceptance of the lousy situation by the American public, I see no future recovery for the US. I see a lost decade or two for America just like the Japanese have suffered since 1991.

Here is the foreseeable future for the US:

How the Media Makes up "Facts"

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the NY city The Village Voice newspaper. It highlights how the NY Times newspaper in a matter of minutes "changes" the news from one of demonstrators being allowed onto a bridge then cut off and arrested to a much more hostile account where the demonstrators confront the police and force them into arresting a disorderly crowd.

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From The Village Voice:

The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story. Currently, the only mentions in the piece of police telling protesters they were allowed onto the bridge are in the words of the protesters themselves.

The wonderful thing about those with money and power: they get to define reality. The bottom 90% have to patch together bits and pieces to uncover what has been covered up. We live in lies all our life struggling to know what is really going on. It is those at the top who manipulate and deceive in order to protect their power. The media is owned by the ultra-rich. In the final analysis, the ultra-rich get to decide what is "news" that is fit for the rest of us to see. And of course, the ultra-rich help "guide" the police in "doing their duty".

In a "strange coincidence" the Wall Street bank JP Morgan Chase has decided now is the right time to "donate" to the NY Police:

A coincidence, I'm sure, but it sure is poetic. Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up speed, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unprecedented" $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, part of which will be used to boost surveillance systems. Well isn't that special.

The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD's main data center.

Wow! What a remarkable "coincidence".

US Unemployment

Here is a nice picture from Richard Green at USC:

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Green states:

Cuts in state and local government jobs (police officers, school teachers, firefighters, DMV workers) are putting a drag on employment growth. Moreover, this picture understates the problem, because total compensation to many state and local workers has been cut.

The US federal government needs a stimulus to both hire directly via a WPA program as well as to fund state and local authorities to re-hire teachers, police, firefighters, etc.

Sadly, the idiotic right wing party, the Republicans, are more interested in wrecking the economy so they can blame Obama and win the 2012 election than they are in saving the country for its citizens. Personally, I think the Republicans should be arrested for economic crimes -- condemning 25 million to unemployment and the loss of homes through foreclosure -- so that politicians who are interested in solving America's problems can step forward and put the country back on a path of progress.