Tag: ek Politics

Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15m of Americans’ personal debt

Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian

Tuesday 12 November 2013 10.34 EST

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy’s Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before “abolishing” it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

…

The group is able to buy debt so cheaply due to the nature of the “secondary debt market”. If individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance the bank or lender that issued the funds will eventually cut its losses by selling that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true values – typically for five cents on the dollar – and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.

…

(Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University says) “Very few people know how cheaply their debts have been bought by collectors. It changes the psychology of the debtor, knowing this.

“So when you get called up by the debt collector, and you’re being asked to pay the full amount of your debt, you now know that the debt collector has bought your debt very, very cheaply. As cheaply as we bought it. And that gives you moral ammunition to have a different conversation with the debt collector.”

Occupy Wall Street’s debt buying strikes at the heart of capitalism

Alex Andreou, The Guardian

Wednesday 13 November 2013 11.20 EST

When the Occupy movement came into being in the summer of 2011, its critics said that a lack of identifiable objectives and strategy for achieving them meant it was doomed to fail. This was a monumental underestimation of its potential impact. Two years on, the debate about the ethics of corporate capitalism in its current form, the fairness of the remuneration of those at the top, the widening wealth gap and the morality of tax avoidance is alive and well. The concept of the “99%” is now part of the collective consciousness. All this is, in no small part, down to the fuse lit by the Occupy movement.

…

One of the most significant, and perhaps the most threatening to the status quo, is the Strike Debt group, of which the Rolling Jubilee project forms part.

The idea is that, those freed from debt and those sympathetic to the movement, then donate into the fund to keep it “rolling” forward; hence the name. The fund has already raised $600,000 and has used $400,000 of this to purchase and cancel an astonishing $14.7m of debt, primarily focusing on medical bills. This strikes at the very heart of the system, not only by using its own perverse rules against it, but critically by revealing the illusory and circular nature of debt.

Capitalism requires a layer of cheap, flexible labour to operate optimally. It is not a coincidence that the most successful global economy, by any traditional capitalist measure, is an authoritarian quasi-communist state. Many, myself included, have been arguing that our current predicament is not crisis-consequent austerity, but a permanent adjustment. David Cameron on Monday confirmed as much. The great lie, peddled by Thatcher and Reagan, was the idea that we could all be middle class, white-collar professionals within a neoliberal economy. It was simply not true.

…

This is why the debate on the back-door privatisation of medical and education services in this country matters so much. The extraction of profit from these two key areas changes the social contract in a fundamental way. The idea is no longer that the state will educate you and keep you healthy, so that you may continue to contribute with both your work and your taxes. It has mutated instead into “you will borrow money from the state’s private partners in order to become educated and stay healthy, so that you may continue to contribute to their bottom line”. All of the 99%, in a very real way, work in part for an assortment of financial institutions, largely invisible and certainly unaccountable.

Iceland’s – strangely unreported – decision to write down mortgage debt for its citizens, undermines that notion. A rejection of traditional systems of credit and money as a response to austerity, such as in the barter markets of Volos in Greece and Turin in Italy undermines that notion. The Rolling Jubilee project undermines that notion in a significant way, by asking the sizzling question: “If a corporation is prepared to accept five cents on the dollar in exchange for our debts, if that is our debt’s open market value, how much do we really owe?”

As it turns out Dylan Davies’ book The Embassy House which was the basis of the 60 Minutes Benghazi report by Lara Logan is published by Threshold, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is a division of…

Wait for it.

CBS.

It has been withdrawn from publication.

Nothing to see here.  Move along.

“60 Minutes” and the Benghazi Scandal Trap

Posted by Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

November 12, 2013

There are really two charges against CBS: that they were duped, and that the segment itself was an example, to borrow Logan’s terms, of misinformation, confusion, and intense partisanship. Journalists make mistakes; sources lie. DeYoung’s story ran in the Post on October 31st, and was followed up with passion elsewhere. (Dave Weigel has written about Media Matters’s role.) CBS lost some sympathy by apparently accepting, for a number of days, Davies’s explanation that the incident report, which was in his voice but didn’t have his signature, was the byproduct of lies he told a supervisor out of his immense respect for the man whose orders he hadn’t followed. Perhaps Logan thought that tracked; her apology-preview appearance on CBS’s “This Morning” only partly clarified the thinking. She was still defending Davies days after DeYoung’s report, telling the Times that the criticism was political. “We worked on this for a year. We killed ourselves not to allow politics into this report.” Then came the F.B.I. report, and there went the clarity Logan claims to have finally found in Davies’s story.

It’s a sad aspect of this story that Logan claims the segment was more than a year in the making. Where did the time go? In the fairly long piece, Logan fails to offer any real statement about the Administration’s perspective. Only two other people are interviewed on camera. One is a military man who doesn’t understand why the diplomats didn’t get out of Benghazi months earlier. Another is a diplomat who doesn’t understand why, at the critical moment, significant military forces didn’t move into Benghazi from across the border. Davies, who is somehow supposed to tie these threads together, doesn’t understand why, on the first day he first arrived in the city, he found Libyan guards “inside, drinking tea, laughing and joking” rather than looking sharp, and why everyone didn’t heed a private contractor, like him. Not that Davies is identified as such: he’s a “security officer,” Logan says. “A former British soldier, he’s been helping to keep U.S. diplomats and military leaders safe for the last decade.” (Nor does she mention that his book, promoted in the segment, was published by Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS, something she has admitted was a mistake.) But who knows what Davies said before or during the attack. His account is about as good as a spilled cup of tea, making the rest unreadable.

For many people their faith in the government narrative of events, their trust in elected officials and our governing elites began to be lost on a November day in Dallas 50 years ago.

Now being 120+ years old and living through the lies of the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations this was no surprise to me.  Heck, I remember the McKinley assassination.

Ah, it was a simpler time.  Filled with ignorance, bigotry, and greed.  Corporate titans of vast wealth and power were threatening to subvert our Democracy through the bribery and corruption of Washington D.C. politicians.

It was a lone gunman, a crazy anarchist.  Of course it was.

When Kennedy was killed, the official narrative was immediately questioned. Nearly five decades later, a new poll has found a clear majority of Americans still suspect there was a conspiracy behind the assassination. However, according to the Associated Press JFK poll, the percentage of those who believe accused shooter Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone is at its highest level since the mid-’60s. The survey, conducted in mid-April, said 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, 16 percent are still unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.

Transcript

Monsanto Wins Again: Voters Reject Washington GMO Labeling Initiative

By Mike Ludwig, Truthout

Thursday, 07 November 2013 13:27

Voters in Washington on Tuesday rejected Initiative 522, a ballot measure to label groceries containing genetically engineered ingredients that was leading in the polls for weeks before big biotech and processed food companies injected millions of dollars into the campaign, including more than $7 million in allegedly illegal donations from a trade group that concealed its corporate donors.

Some mail-in votes still need to be counted, and the Yes on 522 group had yet to concede as of Thursday morning, but Washington state officials reported that 54 percent of voters opposed Initiative 522 and 45.9 percent supported labeling. The No on 522 campaign had already claimed victory.

…

The campaign was the most expensive in the state’s history, drawing national attention and millions of dollars in out-of-state campaign cash. The No on 522 campaign raised an unprecedented $22 million, largely from big biotech firms and junk food companies. The Yes on 522 raised almost $8 million from GMO opponents and natural foods and products companies.

The Grocery Manufacturers of America donated $11 million from its member companies to No on 522 and was sued by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in October for concealing donors. The trade group then voluntarily revealed that members such as Pepsico ($2.4 million), Coca-Cola ($1.5 million) and Nestle ($1.5 million) gave hefty donations to defeat the labeling initiative.

The trade group began planning for the campaign about a year ago after it joined Monsanto and other labeling opponents in raising a whopping $46 million to defeat a similar GMO labeling initiative in California last year. At the time, the Grocery Manufacturers Association directed its employees to “scope out a funding mechanism to address the GMO issue . . . while better shielding individual companies from attack for providing funding,” according to evidence cited in the attorney general’s complaint.

With its record-breaking war chest, the No on 522 campaign beat back labeling proponents in the polls with flashy mailers and ad blitzes on radio and television. Labeling, opponents argued, would raise food prices, confuse consumers and hurt farmers. The campaign looked a lot like the “no” campaign in California and shared many of the same corporate donors, including biotech companies such as Monsanto, which spent $8 million in California and more than $5 million in Washington.

…

Despite victories for labeling opponents in Washington and California, a number of polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support GMO labeling. Most recently, a New York Times poll in July showed that 93 percent of American voters support labeling food with GMO ingredients.

Monsanto Calls Out the Dogs in St. Louis: New Anger, Old Crimes Point to Reparations

By Don Fitz, Barbara Chicherio and William Smith, Truthout

Thursday, 07 November 2013 09:03

The days of Monsanto greeting protesters at its World Headquarters (MWH) with balloons and pitchers of water are over. When 500 to 700 showed up for the October 12, 2013, March Against Monsanto (MAM), scores of police from half a dozen municipalities were there, several with dogs.

Also gone were police attempts to micromanage demonstrators. During a previous demonstration, police told picketers to stand on the pavement and not on Monsanto’s grass. At the next event, cops said that the pavement was too close to traffic and ordered people to stand on the grass. October 12 was noticeable by the absence of police commands concerning where to stand. At first, they seemed to have given up on controlling the increasingly large crowd.

…

In some ways, the protest at the MWH was similar to others involving 2 million people around the world. Food was the big issue of the day. People were outraged at Monsanto’s reckless pursuit of putting genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into food with unknown effects for consumers, especially children. They unleashed their anger at the company’s attempts to manipulate the world food supply. At its attacks on farmers. At the havoc that GMOs wreak on wildlife. And at the company’s complicity with land grabs for planting GMO monocultures in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

…

But the St. Louis event differed from other actions around the world. Because Monsanto originated in St. Louis, many nearby areas continue to be contaminated from its chemical past. These include East St. Louis, Illinois; Carter Carburetor in north St. Louis; and the Times Beach incinerator site, which burned dioxin (and probably Monsanto’s PCBs) in the 1990s.

…

St. Louis is not waiting with baited breath for Monsanto to do the right thing. Exactly the opposite occurred in its official response to actions of October 12: “While we respect that people can have different points of view, we hope that St. Louisans know Monsanto people for their role in the community and know the Monsanto company for its commitment to St. Louis.” This weak response highlights that Monsanto has a crumbling global image because its lies of ending world poverty, selling safe products and using environmentally sound practices are no longer believed.

…

Cries for reparations will not bring joy to Monsanto. As opposition expands beyond objecting to its crimes and includes demands for compensation to all of its victims, demonstrators may see fewer Monsanto balloons with happy faces and more police dogs.

Millions Against Monsanto: Five Lessons From the Battle Against GMOs

By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association, Truthout

Monday, 04 November 2013 09:25

There are arguably more important issues facing us today than the battle against Frankenfoods. The climate crisis and corporate control over the government and media come to mind. But the rapidly growing anti-GMO Movement illustrates the powerful synergy that can develop from the combined use of social media, marketplace pressure and political action. Recent developments in this sector indicate that out-of-control corporations, media, politicians and the proverbial “one percent” can be outsmarted and outmaneuvered. And quite possibly defeated.

In the wake of high-stakes multi-million dollar GMO labeling ballot initiatives in California in 2012, and Washington State in 2013, an army of organic food and natural health activists have put Corporate America and the political elite on the defensive. We’ve demonstrated that aggressive populist issue-framing; unconventional “inside-outside” coalition-building; marketplace pressure; and online list-building, mobilization and fundraising – strategically channeled into local and state-based political action – can begin to even up the odds between David and Goliath.

,,,

Forty percent of consumers believe that unlabeled genetically engineered foods and crops are unsafe. Another 40 percent are unsure. These numbers terrify large supermarket chains, biotech companies and food corporations. So does the notion that states such as Washington, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont will soon require mandatory labeling of GMOs – which will likely drive these controversial foods and crops off the market, just as labeling laws have already done in Europe.

…

One of the most important accomplishments of the right-to-know, anti-GMO movement has been to unite the advocacy and fundraising efforts of non-profit groups and health and green-minded for-profit businesses. After 20 years of often operating on shoestring budgets, activist groups (the “outsiders”) are now increasingly joining hands with a number of profitable organic/green/Fair Trade businesses (the “insiders”). This inside-outside strategy has managed to raise a not insignificant war chest of almost $20 million to support the state GMO labeling ballot initiatives in California and Washington in 2012 and 2013, while simultaneously pressuring major brands, such as Whole Foods Market, Trader Joe’s and Chipotle, to embrace GMO labeling.

…

One important consequence of marketplace pressure and boycotts is their potential to gradually divide our opponents. In the case of the anti-GMO movement, we’ve begun to drive a wedge between the biotech/industrial agriculture corporations, and their erstwhile allies, food manufacturers and supermarket chains. In the wake of the California GMO labeling ballot initiative (Proposition 37), the Organic Consumers Association and our allies launched a nationwide boycott of Traitor Brands, the organic and natural brands whose parent corporations spent $20 million, along with the biotech industry’s $30 million, to defeat Prop 37.

…

Over the past 12 months groups like the Organic Consumers Association, Mercola.com, Food Democracy Now, Natural News, Alliance for Natural Health, Center for Food Safety, Just Label It, Environmental Working Group, Cornucopia, Friends of the Earth, CREDO, and MoveOn have been able to send out anti-GMO or pro-labeling messages to literally millions of consumers and voters on a regular basis, generating thousands of grassroots volunteers, organizing thousands of local events and protests, and raising over $20 million, mainly in small donations. The anti-GMO movement may not have the deep pockets or the advertising and PR clout of the biotech and Big Food lobby when it comes to the corporate media, but we are rapidly developing our own mass media on the Internet and Facebook.

…

The anti-GMO movement, like other social change movements, has learned the hard way that corporations and the wealthy elite control not only the mass media, but the federal government, Supreme Court, and regulatory agencies such as the FDA, USDA, and EPA. After decades of sending petitions and lobbying the White House, Congress and the FDA, to no avail, it has become clear that the political elite, including President Obama, care more about their wealthy campaign contributors than they do about their constituents, including the 93 percent who, according to a recent New York Times poll, support mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods.

As a consequence the anti-GMO movement has moved its focus away from the unfavorable terrain of Washington D.C., and instead turned its attention to marketplace pressure, and state, county and local political campaigns, especially ballot initiatives.

…

Win or lose in Washington State on November 5, the anti-GMO Movement has evolved into a savvy army of grassroots activists who are committed to the ongoing battle to reclaim our food and farming systems, part of a larger battle to transform the entire political and economic system.

Look around you.

In the 7th cavalry, we’ve got a captain from the Ukraine; another from Puerto Rico. We’ve got Japanese, Chinese, Blacks, Hispanics, Cherokee Indians. Jews and Gentiles. All Americans. Now here in the states, some of you in this unit may have experienced discrimination because of race or creed. But for you and me now, all that is gone. We’re moving into the valley of the shadow of death, where you will watch the back of the man next to you, as he will watch yours. And you won’t care what color he is, or by what name he calls God. They say we’re leaving home.

We’re going to what home was always supposed to be. Now let us understand the situation. We are going into battle against a tough and determined enemy.

I can’t promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God, that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off, and I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together. So help me, God.

Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer. McGovern was employed under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. McGovern was born and raised in the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program. McGovern now works for “Tell the Word,” a ministry of the inner-city/Washington Church of the Saviour.

Transcript

Transcript

So where was that Terry McAuliffe “Mandate” the Centerist NeoLiberal Third Way Blue Dog DLC DNC Villager 1%ers were promising?

Oh, it was an Invisible Inflation Confidence Fairy.

By every objective measure these people are failures.  Non-performers unable to deliver the results they promise.

Liars and Confidence Men.  Thieves and Grifters.

And they think you mere marks and rubes.  You gonna take that?

Evidently not.  Otherwise it would actually have been a mandate.

Organlegging is the name of a fictional crime in the Known Space universe created by Larry Niven. It is the illicit trade of black market human organs for transplant. The term organlegging is a portmanteau combining the words “organ” and “bootlegging”, literally the piracy and smuggling of organs.

The crime developed as a response to the Organ Bank Problem, a concept featured prominently in the early Known Space stories, particularly those set in the 21st and 22nd century.

…

In Niven’s universe, it was possible to transplant nearly any organ in the body (and prevent rejection) by the mid 21st century. Since any organ could now be replaced, in theory one could use the organ banks to extend life indefinitely. To maintain communal organ banks, one needs donors (i.e. dead people). When the death rate is reduced (via the organ banks), the number of donors decreases. Thus, the supply of organs would continually reduce.

Compounding this problem, the high success rate of organ transplants tended to discourage research into other viable medical treatments. As a result, medical research was stagnated to a large extent, focusing primarily on improving transplants and little else. Repairing a failing organ (which could presumably fail again later) was considered secondary to the “complete” solution of replacing the failing organ.

An example in the Known Space universe was that anyone who wore eyeglasses was considered a reasonable candidate for an eye transplant (one or both); whereas in the real world, today’s nearsighted population can solve the problem (temporarily) by wearing corrective lenses or (more permanently) by undergoing laser surgery.

On Earth, the problem led to a repressive society almost unrecognizable by today’s standards. Since the average citizens wished to extend their lives, the world government sought to increase the supply by using condemned criminals to supply the organ banks. When this failed to meet the demand, citizens would vote for the death penalty for more and more trivial crimes. First violent crimes, then theft, tax evasion, false advertising, and even traffic violations became punishable by the organ banks. This failed to solve the problem, as once the death penalty was passed for a crime, people stopped committing it. This resulted in nearly every crime meriting the death penalty. Further attempts to alleviate the problem by declaring certain groups of cryogenically frozen people to be dead in law (the so-called “Freezer Bills”) and harvesting their organs also proved to be unsuccessful. The freezer vaults represented a finite supply and therefore were eventually exhausted.

• New Jersey Governor
• Virginia Governor
• New York City Mayor

Likely to be an early night.

More (but not much more) to come.

Vonnegut called them cat’s asses.

So your little more.  I do occasionally find something of interest at the Great Orange Satan and living in Stars Hollow as I do I found this little piece about a local election (in the biggest City in the State thank you) amusing-

Who Cares About VA, NJ, or NYC Elections? The Real Action is the Bridgeport, CT School Board!

by LunkHead @ Daily Kos

Tue Nov 05, 2013 at 09:28 AM PST

New Jersey and New York City are foregone conclusions.

Virginia is a contest that is really about the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.

Bridgeport is about whether or not we can protect our children from the looters in the educational industrial complex.

You see, the pro-privatization slate for the school board was defeated in the Democratic Primary by the Connecticut Working Families Party candidates, and so in the general election will be face Republicans, who are being tacitly, and in some cases explicitly, supported by the Democratic Party establishment (including governor Malloy).

I certainly try to vote WFP at every opportunity, they didn’t field or cross-endorse any candidates in Stars Hollow so I wasn’t able to this year.  Our local Democrats are at least pro-zoning and the environment however misguided they are about some other issues so I generally vote a straight ticket.  That and I know many of the Republicans personally and they’re straight up assholes the lot.  Those SAT fill in the dot ballots are a heck of a lot less convenient than the old mechanical voting booths, but you can put up a whole lot of stations for not much money.  They’ve also cut back on polling stations which I think sucks so I signed a petition to change that back.

They ran out of stickers so I can’t prove I voted, but it’s ok I have a lot left over from previous elections.

Your thoughts below.