Displaying 0 To 0 Of 0 Comments Hi Cher – did not get a chance to tell you how glad we are you’re back. Missed you a LOT. Everything yesterday and today is excellent and useful. I use a lot of it in doing policy analysis, so I read it very carefully – you always have excellent things for us! Hope you and family are well. Sorry not to see you, AdLib, and funk, but we will hope for another time soon. WELCOME BACK!!!! » Posted By choicelady On October 12, 2011 @ 7:33 pm LIVE BLOG: GOP Debate Tonight on Bloomberg TV Hah! That’s it! Cain is an Al Qae’da operative! Baggers will eat that up. » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 8:46 pm You write fine, bito! And your research is boffo. Don’t “misunderestimate” yourself. (I find I have to rethink that word every time. Damn.) » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 8:43 pm It sounds reasonable – but you nailed the problem: it shifts the burden onto us, off the rich, and kills what sustains us in the process. It’s a gift to Grover. » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 8:34 pm Who wins if no one watched? I forgot it entirely – had a glass of wine and made dinner. On the whole, a vastly more satisfying activity. So as with a tree falling in the woods – if no one watched, was anything said? And YOU guys had to go and spoil it as a philosophical question by actually WATCHING! » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 8:33 pm Occupy Wall Street Came West… Why? Oh wow – so fast! I sure will miss having you nearer, but where you’re headed is not THAT far away so we will see each other! Enjoy the cool – I will live vicariously through you! » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 8:25 am Sally – this is sort of freaky. Apparently she did, some of the early Baggers have joined, and I remain deeply skeptical of their motivations AND their impact on the choices the movements they’ve infiltrated make because of their presence. Creeps me out. I keep thinking “Fifth Column”, “Fifth Column”… » Posted By choicelady On November 19, 2011 @ 12:29 pm I know – I’m just exhausted trying to deal with my allies who all do feel excluded – homeless advocates, people of color, those working against foreclosure – who have NO help from anyone in OWS at least here in northern CA. Maybe I’m just burned out trying to move policies only to be sneered at by some snot nosed kid saying it’s CAMPING in the public space to make the visual point that is important. Oh? Really? Maybe this is more about the media I’m reading that are filtering issues, but it distressed me no end that we could not move the Sacramento Occupy people to stand with Latino hotel workers. Except for three of them, none could be bothered with such trivial issues. They had a PARK to occupy. I’m just exhausted trying to find a way to make this more than about the city sites. I just don’t care anymore – if this does not move into action, it will do nothing good. I am horrified by the polls where people favor the TEA PARTY over OWS – that says the messages have NOT come through to ordinary people. Is that the media or the movement? If they continue, fine, I guess it does help, but I’ve yet to see one single policy or concrete act of help toward those who have been on the streets for years. That is my worry – it’s sucking life out of movements that desperately need help but find people drawn away to demonstrate but not clearly for what. I would not stand in the way of OWS, but please understand that I see harm from some of it – not all of it, and I think there are huge variations, city to city. I’m just worried and frustrated by the stasis that seems to be creeping in. I just do not want this to do harm rather than good. » Posted By choicelady On November 16, 2011 @ 11:36 am Well, I am one of them, Cher. So much of this just infuriates me since it has no core which the Free Speech movement did. That came out of a very specific silencing of radical ideas – but there are NO radical ideas in OWS that I can determine. It’s not essential that everyone has the SAME goal, but it is essential that everyone has SOME goal, and I’ve yet to hear one. As you know, my own husband was the editor of the SF State paper during the 1968 activism there – they united around their own silencing over Black Studies. White, Black, Asian, Latino – they had a focus that minority studies were meant to be equal to European studies (meaning everything else.) They got beaten, my husband and many others spent 60-plus days in jail – they were not looking after their own immediate interests but JUSTICE. I’ve yet to hear that from OWS. There is a peg upon which MANY things could be hung, including revamping the distribution of wealth with massive changes in the tax laws, with mortgage revaluations and a suggestion that all mortgages – everyone’s – be pegged to a bank holiday in which mortgages are reduced to 1% interest for all holders that would radically change income AND prevent foreclosures. But SOMETHING – ANYTHING. I just am not hearing it. I see no solidarity with the anti-foreclosure groups, the labor unions, with anything or anyone. Today I got an email from LIFETIME, a group of women who went through CalWORKs the welfare-to-work program now threatened with extinction in CA. They, the poorest of poor women, have been closed OUT of OWS especially women of color. People of color are angry – they got shut out totally. It cannot be a movement and certainly will not be a revolution when the issue is camping overnight and the rights of those attempting to do that. Their rights have been harmed in a few instances over a few days. Where were they – where ARE they – for the people whose rights are shut down DAILY? Until the apparent elitism of this group of people gives way to real democracy and some form of activism, I will see them as whiners and not much more. There’s not a bank for blocks around Chavez Park in Sacramento or Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, so what they have done is take the people’s public space for their own. And that, to my mind, is doing exactly what the banks do – take people’s space. Again. As Always. Breaks my heart, but I am coming to hate this movement because it has harmed people I know, homeless people with NO resources, who now cannot even have coffee where they have tried to live quietly and in their own fragile community of other homeless people but who are being ignored and dismissed by the new privileged occupiers. I want this to become something important. I can see almost no way that it will if things don’t change radically as the FSM did in the 60s and the later student and activist movements did. Otherwise it’s just anger – and that’s not a program, not a movement, not change. » Posted By choicelady On November 15, 2011 @ 7:17 pm And I’d love to know where HE was when the churches were being firebombed and “steeplejacked” every time they raised these issues? He had the bully pulpit – he never gave house room to the social justice work he claims we “should have” done. Well – we WERE and got not a lick of notice from the media no matter what. We were abandoned by him and his ilk – but we never EVER stopped fighting for what was right. » Posted By choicelady On November 15, 2011 @ 2:50 pm I would respectfully disagree that it is even yet a movement. Like nationalism, it lacks any kind of focus, and focus IS critical to the next steps. Revolutions are always political. This is not since it has no core goals. The disparity of issues from Save the Whales to Legalize Drugs has eroded the solidarity of “We are the 99%” that had some real legs. There have been almost NO social revolutions in history – most are political but those are few in numbers, too. This may be a movement – but of what? If there is no focus, it will poop out into general disgruntled upset and change nothing. Too much of this has become centered on the right to camp. It is about the 1% of the 99%. I am appalled by the actions of the police, but dismayed by the apolitical nature of the people. If moving them off he camping issue and “no one can tell ME what to do” carping, and that inspires movement into focused and sustained change, then this is actually a good thing. Not done WELL, because the police are not behaving well, but it may galvanize people to get something coherent going. General dissatisfaction is neither a movement nor a revolution, and being pissed off is just being pissed off if there is no electoral or policy change that one seeks. I am worried that the Baggers STILL are more coherent – stupid as wingnuts – but coherent than is OWS in any of its incarnations. What brought change in the 60s was focus on two things: civil rights and anti-war. This movement today has no values that one can get organized, and it NEEDS them. Otherwise it’s doomed. What IS happening is that people NOT directly involved are tackling issues that OWS has raised – leaving the very policy wonks the OWS people disdain to try to fix the problems. Maybe that’s good, I do not yet know. But that has to happen or we go nowhere. » Posted By choicelady On November 15, 2011 @ 2:47 pm Wow – in Oakland and Sacramento OWS groups are driving the homeless OUT of the parks. Glad Portland Occupy has more sense and good compassion! » Posted By choicelady On November 13, 2011 @ 4:34 pm I’m not yet sure what that helps? Different federal courts have different outcomes. The 9th Circuit in San Francisco is GREAT while others in the South – not so much. What will be the point of the occupation? Those who think the whole system is screwed are just wrong. You need to pick the targets VERY carefully or we wind up being the Baggers – or Michael Moore. Not sure anymore who is worse. Michael did some GREAT films though – can’t say that for the Baggers. OK – Michael 1 Baggers 0. » Posted By choicelady On November 5, 2011 @ 10:23 am Woo hoo – Rachel just posted the latest poll on NO on 2, repealing the union busting Kasich law: NO leads by TWENTY POINTS! And if voters got a “do over” on governor, Strickland would win by double digits. To any and all “sit it out, don’t vote, show the Dems” people – you’re not screwing a party by not voting. You are screwing your neighbor. Come Nov. 8 in Ohio? VOTE NO on 2!!! Send Wall Street’s allies a HUGE message that we will NOT sit back and be run over by them and their GOP flunkies. Human beings have the same right to collectively organize as capital has to collectively organize. We will NOT be deprived of our rights! » Posted By choicelady On October 19, 2011 @ 6:33 pm Two of the folks in the photos are my activists! The story in today’s Sacramento Bee and the NY Times is that it’s harrrrdddd to unpack your online banking. Oh come ON – it might take a couple of months, but honestly… Pay your bills. Immediately disconnect the online bill notification from creditors and tell them to send you paper bills next month. If you have an automatic payment, end it. Pay those next bills with checks (we ALL have them), then close the Bank account leaving only what needs to clear. Two months tops – then set up your online payments at your credit union or community bank for the third month. How freaking lazy do people need to BE? This is not rocket science. If people want an excuse, that’s not flying with me. Hell – you’d have to do it if you moved, so what’s the big deal? » Posted By choicelady On October 16, 2011 @ 11:49 am Bloomberg wants to paint himself as the “middle”, but he’s clearly on the edge – the RIGHT edge. He needs to be careful. Wall Street may fund him. People vote. He claimed they had an agreement at 6 am NY time, so if this is not working for him by noon, then he lied. We all have long, long memories…Baggers do not. We do. » Posted By choicelady On October 14, 2011 @ 1:00 pm He’s obviously a commienazi. Bet he wants VA benefits, Social Security and Medicare thereby ripping off Wall Street… » Posted By choicelady On October 14, 2011 @ 12:55 pm Yesterday afternoon I stood with Unite Here! outside our Hilton Hotel as they picketed demanding a contract with decent benefits. A handful of Occupy Sacramento people joined in, and, as planned, 8 of the Unite Here! folks sat in the street and in order to get busted. The process was a formality – could have been Kabuki it was so structured – save for two VERY funny moments. One of the eight was a woman, and when she assented to be busted, she then reached out her hand to the arresting cop who, without thinking I believe, helped her up. It was very gentlemanly of him and thus VERY funny! The last protester – the leader – had his birthday yesterday, so in addition to cheering for him, we sang “Happy Birthday” to him. The cops were laughing. These are the serious moments of this nationwide – worldwide – movement. People are being asked to work for LESS with fewer benefits. I hope OWS keeps the focus on Wall Street, but every other city needs an alliance with labor, organized or not. This morning on MSNBC the leader of the Tea Party – a woman – said the problem with OWS is that they are focused on government intervention when it was (I am NOT making this up) ‘TOO MUCH REGULATION’ that caused the 2008 collapse. She said it needed to be “free enterprise” that finds the solution. Uh-huh. Sure. » Posted By choicelady On October 14, 2011 @ 10:52 am I’m so sorry! What a legacy he left us! » Posted By choicelady On October 14, 2011 @ 10:44 am That’s actually not what I heard first thing this morning (3 am Pacific Time – don’t ask why I was up…) I had a very odd experience yesterday. Due to a federal matter over reducing states’ rights on concealed carry laws, I was in direct contact with Bloomberg’s office – they are opposing this law as do we. I then got an alert from Faithful America, an interfaith organization, about this planned eviction and their opposition to it, and immediately sent it to the mayor’s contact person I’d been talking to, suggesting that the faith community was taking a HUGE interest in OWS and that we though that rather than make this confrontational, instead they work WITH the protesters as other cities are doing.My contact person agreed to pass the Faithful America alert to the mayor. This morning I heard that was the plan, both at 3 am and then at around 9 am on NPR. There was to be a cooperative plan to clean up the park. So this is weird – I bet he got a lot of flak from WS types and is huffing and puffing to placate them. But the fact is – he did NOT evict them, there was a huge turnout of labor and others early in the morning to stand ground, and confrontation was averted. I suspect Mr. Bloomberg is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He’d best be careful about that – people ARE listening. » Posted By choicelady On October 14, 2011 @ 10:42 am KT – THIS is what I fear, not the gov’t infiltrators but RW ones. They need to be watched carefully – anyone fomenting violence needs to be suspected FIRST of being RW rather than not. » Posted By choicelady On October 11, 2011 @ 2:03 pm Hey – those bonuses don’t get taxed anyway. Andrew! Don’t you know about loopholes? How naive of you! » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 3:31 pm Hmmm – I seem to recall quite a bit of violence against elders, those with disabilities, anyone asking honest questions about health care. Why did all that get a pass? We saw the mob mentality just last week in the booing of an active military man who said he was gay. Yeah – it’s all in where you stand. Look – I’m pretty fed up with the narcissism of some of the OWL protesters, too – the allied march for “peace” that tried to storm the Air and Space museum was just stupid. The kids who are trashing washrooms in small businesses – making NO distinction among types of businesses while probably mouthing sentiments about the wonders of small owners – are disgusting. But they got called out by their own side and told to stop that behavior. I NEVER saw a Bagger do anything but smirk when people got shoved around at Bagger town hall meetings. NEVER. Cantor is despicable in his hypocrisy. I guess mauling people exercising democracy is fine. Standing up to giant corporations is mob rule. Well, I hope the “mob” turns on him at election time. He speaks for NO one other than the rich. » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 3:28 pm Already did. They’re starting to repeat themselves. It’s not upsetting those who are hard working people who are out there. It upsets only the Right – and they were the ones in the 1990s who were waiting for the Black Helicopters and White UN buses. Still are. » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 3:22 pm Em – the Baggers are about 60% Dominionists per a Pew survey of the new Congress earlier this year. The sheer decline in TP attendance at rallies shows that many who slavishly followed the Bagger party now see they were sold a bill of goods. The Ryan budget to kill SS and Medicare was a real eye-opener at least for that Bagger woman who yelled, “Keep the government out of my Medicare!” The phenomenon of astroturf activity has a dwindling return for the promoters once the REAL policies become obvious. You CAN fool some of the people all of the time, but the numbers get smaller every day once the handwriting is on the wall. That’s the ONLY good news I can give you though! » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 1:59 pm One reason why we MUST have a thoughtful Dem in the White House another four years is that in just this past session, SCOTUS did more damage to the idea of public election funding than I could have dreamed. In the “McComish” decision this August, they ruled that publicly funded candidates could NOT receive funds equal to those being spent by PRIVATE money. Why? It was “chilling to free speech”. HUH??? The majority decision, a 5-4 which will surprise no one, made precisely this argument. So embedded inequality now is the law of the land. Public money KILLS free speech. Private money sets speech free. We need a democratic president to assure that these bought and paid for justices will NOT get an invincible 5-4 for the rest of our lives. » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 1:55 pm One needs no further evidence that you are correct than to look at the various movements started by people of wealth including Buffet, Gates Senior, Silicon Valley millionaires, and many others who are calling for higher tax rates on themselves. Patriotic Millionaires (patrioticmillionaires.org) and other similar organizations are led by people making millions who understand the dangers lurking in high levels of economic inequality. They have called on Congress to act to raise taxes on those netting over $1 million. They don’t seem distressed by this. So it’s not clear what gloom and doom others hoarding their tax rates think will come. » Posted By choicelady On October 9, 2011 @ 1:51 pm Thanks, cyrano – wonder if we know each other? The universe of people who followed the legal changes that made theft perfectly lawful is quite small! I admit to being pissed the other night at Michael Moore’s disparaging, “these are real people, not policy wonks” as if those of us who care about legislation and using the law for justice are inhuman! The Civil Rights movement had ONE goal – legal changes. The movement alone would have changed very little. I don’t know who wrote the laws – staffers who will go unnamed I’m sure – but they solidified the movement in the Civil Rights Act. Without that, we’d STILL be marching, fighting, having dogs and fire hoses turned on us. That is what this movement must strive to do – if OSW does not engage the MAJORITY of Congress in writing new laws to keep this from happening again, we are doomed. Thank you for the link! That’s super! » Posted By choicelady On October 7, 2011 @ 2:02 pm Over at TO/OT AdLib asked me if any of the Wall Street big shots have been indicted. The answer is not entirely clear since yes, S&P is under investigation, but it’s not clear yet whether charges will be brought. The ickiest thing we all have to understand is that not one single thing that happened at the Wall Street level was ILLEGAL. However angry we are at banks, they acted inside the laws we allowed to occur. Bankers will NOT be changing their pinstripes to jail stripes. They were immoral, corrupt, undemocratic, dogmatic, and utterly irresponsible – and every bit of that was completely legal. Back in the early 90s when I was teaching a course on corporate power for Cornell U’s Industrial and Labor Relations program, one of my smartest students came in with an article about a weird thing called “derivatives”. And from there, things went downhill – legally. Starting with the S&L bailouts under Carter, morphing to Bush I, on through Clinton and of course Bush II – we all sat around while laws and procedures were changed to permit the unthinkable. We permitted stock trading by banks even BEFORE the end of Glass Steagall – a Clinton supported bill; we permitted the lowering of capital requirements for bank assets, we permitted the trading of invisible commodities – derivatives – in purely speculative ways, futures trading became nothing more than roulette, day trading online and entry into the market by companies that were not vetted for financial security, discriminatory lending that jacked interest rates outside of market demand, the opening of state-sanctioned mortgage lending without adequate scrutiny – all of it, perfectly legal. So all the calls to see heads roll on Wall Street? Ain’t gonna happen. The time to get angry was January 1989 when Bush I’s Secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady, was on the Today show talking about the S&L meltdown. When the host (forget who) asked if there should not be a 25-cent fee on every $1000 of deposits above a certain level to pay back taxpayers for the bailouts, Brady recoiled in horror and said, “Absolutely NOT! This is free enterprise!” It was that moment that should have told us we were being screwed. Lots of us, mostly union labor people, knew it. We once had newspapers that reported it. We complained but largely ignored how the lobbyists entered the Capitol and WROTE legislation – something that started with Newt at a level and pace previously unseen. The Gramm-Leach-Bailey Act overturning Glass Steagall that separated commercial and investment banking was mostly formality – that Clinton signed without whimper. You can read the story of the unraveling of our national financial security at If anyone was midwife to this rebirth of the robber barons, it was Alan Greenspan. Again – nothing he did was illegal. This is NOT about thwarting the law. This is about American passivity while the law thwarted us. The handful of people calling for reform were shot down, ignored, called “Luddites” and told we were working in the Stone Age so get with the program- this is the New World Order! We had the recession of 1982 with nearly 11% unemployment, the Wall Street collapse of 1987, the S&L debacle of 1988-90, NAFTA that gave us a bounce and hid fundamental weaknesses that led to the Silicon Valley bubble bursting c. 2000, and the slow but steady deterioration of stability through Autumn of 2008 and the collapse we have today. Prior to that we saw sectional disasters in the demise of the Rust Belt industries, Southern textiles and clothing (thanks, NAFTA), on and on and on. Jacob Hacker’s “The Great Risk Shift” http://www.greatriskshift.com/index.html and David Cay Johnston’s “Perfectly Legal” http://www.perfectlylegalthebook.com/author.htm and “Free Lunch” http://www.freelunchthebook.com/author.html are highly readable chronicles of what we were doing to ourselves. And allowed, almost without a whimper, to happen. So no – you will NOT be seeing your fave CEO taken away in chains. The Enron mess was actually an anomaly – they did not have to do illegal and manipulative things to be stinking rich. That was just dumb. They could easily have accumulated nearly that much money with all the laws they had at their disposal. Wall Street knew this.They have played entirely by the rules. They just knew the “Golden Rule” – he who has the gold makes the rules – and did precisely that. Dismissing “policy wonks” is a disaster because it is via minute legal changes that this nation lives and dies as a democracy vs. an oligopoly. Where you will see prosecutions is at the state level because that IS where fraud occurred and did so incredibly. Most mortgages that have resulted in foreclosure originated with mortgage brokers – unregulated and unmonitored companies such as Countrywide but also small players. They sold largely unregulated “products” to largely uninformed buyers who were recruited. One of the recruiting tools? Going to Black and Latino churches and offering them $350 per mortgage when congregants signed up. So churches funneled their members to these brokers for the incentives. Everyone thought – promised – this would be the new financial freedom for communities of color so often “redlined” by traditional banking practices. When it got dicey is when they found people who would have qualified for FHA conventional loans – and told them they did not but could get in on this “deal” the subprime offer that was vastly higher interest. It got dicey when they falsified documents saying an applicant had more income than was real. It got dicey when they justified NINA loans – No Income, No Assets – with false papers. These are the people who did illegal things – and all most banks did was buy the mortgages. Most banks – not all but most – never originated these subprime mortgages – most were through unregulated mortgage companies or S&Ls. The banks bought the mortgages – or bundles of parts of mortgages as if you were buying strips from a paper shredder – rather than being responsible for the illegal offerings. So again – no. The banks did nothing illegal. The mortgage companies did, and that is where the prosecutions are occurring. So the moral of the tale is – we let this happen, we did not object, this movement, as always, comes way too late, and policy issues DO matter. No matter how powerful this OWS movement is – if it does not change laws, if it does not help elect congressional people with concern about citizens instead of corporations, it will make NO difference. We are a nation of laws. The fundamental issue is – change the laws. » Posted By choicelady On October 7, 2011 @ 9:55 am We had one today in Sacramento – started out with nobody much – about 10 scattered people, so I left and did go to work. Heard by noon there were 500 people, so I will check back tomorrow. One thing did concern me about the few I saw is that they were all ANSWER folks. While I agree with a lot they say, they have become virulently anti-Semitic and anti-everything else. I did not feel easy about being with them since they could not “see” me as an ally. So I will wait til my labor friends are more visible – they get who I am. The effort will continue in Sacramento, Sue, so come on down – Cesar Chavez Park, betwen 9th and 10th and J and I streets. » Posted By choicelady On October 6, 2011 @ 4:16 pmComments Posted By choicelady
http://thethinred.blogspot.com/2011/04/glass-steagall-dead-for-2-decades-and.html
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