I attended my first revolution this week. I have to confess I was a little nervous as I walked closer to Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, the epicenter for this once unimaginable American Autumn. For one thing, I'd been tweeting and blogging about Occupy Wall Street since the second day of the protests -- even wrote a screed asking why it was being ignored by the mainstream media that got me on on the TV with Keith Olbermann -- but the sad irony was that I hadn't yet journeyed the 100 miles north from my Philadelphia comfort zone to cover it myself.

Now I'd successfully lobbied my editors at the Philadelphia Daily News to send me up here, but they loaded me down with questions. What do the protesters want, exactly? Why is this different from all the other left-wing protests? Why now? And be sure to write about all the fringe people -- the Ron Paul fanatics and the bandana-wearing anarchists and what not.

The announcement yesterday that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will not run for president represents the latest Fox News failure in its attempt to put its stamp on the Republican primary season. Having turned itself into a purely political operation, and one that unapologetically works towards a partisan goal, Fox News and its chief Roger Ailes want very much to play the kingmaker role this election cycle and anoint, at least unofficially, a Fox News Candidate in 2012.

But it seems every time Fox News sets its collective sights on a possible Republican candidate (preferably one with a Tea Party flavor), he or she implodes, or in the case of Christie, refuses to get in the race.

By now everybody knows that Hank Williams, Jr. was suspended from ESPN and Monday Night Football for that strange and now infamous interview where he seemed to compare the president of the United States to Adolf Hitler. I say: Bring Hank back. Bring him back with no conditions, limitations, fines, fees, or rules.

What's more, I'm publicly offering to buy the man a beer, at the time and place of his choosing, with no strings attached.

And if he's willing, I'll do something else too: I'll take him to an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. That'd get him off that weak, corporate-brewed Tea Party tea and onto the hard stuff (caffeine, that is). We all need some of that, because it's time to wake up and smell the coffee: The big banks and corporations are ripping us off, and we're being distracted by big media, big banks, and big money.

— from TomDispatch

In some ways, Zuccotti Park, the campsite, the Ground Zero, for the Occupy Wall Street protests couldn’t be more modest. It’s no Tahrir Square, but a postage-stamp-sized plaza at the bottom of Manhattan only blocks from Wall Street. And if you arrive before noon, you’re greeted not by vast crowds, but by air mattresses, a sea of blue and green tarps, a couple of information tables, some enthusiastic drummers, enough signs with slogans for anything you care to support (“Too big to fail is too big to allow,” “The American Dream: You have to be asleep to believe it,” “There’s no state like no state,” etc.), and small groups of polite, eager, well-organized young people, wandering, cleaning, doling out contributed food, dealing with the press, or sitting in circles on the concrete, backpacks strewn about, discussing. If it were the 1960s, it might easily be a hippie encampment.

— from AlterNet

The corporate media appear to be obsessed with the idea that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a cohesive message. Of course, that misses the point: as Nathan Schneider wrote in Yes! magazine, “More than demanding any particular policy proposal, the occupation is reminding Wall Street what real democracy looks like: a discussion among people, not a contest of money.”

And despite the handwringing about the movement's supposed lack of focus, it does have a simple-to-understand message that fits neatly on a bumpersticker: "We Are the Other 99 Percent."

I was struck by a wave of irony-wave this morning. There I was sipping my morning coffee watching Morning Joe and the latest GOP Presidential poll flashed on the screen. There were two candidates tied for first place; Mitt Romney and Herman Cain.

I shot straight up and shouted, "Holy unintended consequences Batman!"

Yes boys and girls, there it was, the law of unintended consequences writ large. The ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Christian, Wonder Bread-white Tea Party had so terrorized potentially electable candidates they ended up elevating a Mormon they can't stand and a black Pizza palace guy - (who, BTW, doesn't seem to understand that "999" is just "666" upside down.)

On the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, while still a relatively young man, it is interesting to juxtapose him to Alan Greenspan, one of the other iconic figures of our time. One made us rich, with a vast array of new products and new possibilities. The other made us poor with a long lasting downturn that could persist for more than a decade.

The two of them can be taken as symbols for the best and worst of modern capitalism. Jobs is the symbol of capitalism when it works. Again and again he broke through barriers, creating new products that qualitatively altered the market by making vast improvements over the competition.

— from Truthdig

How can anyone possessed of the faintest sense of social justice not thrill to the Occupy Wall Street movement now spreading throughout the country? One need not be religiously doctrinaire to recognize this as a "come to Jesus moment" when the money-changers stand exposed and the victims of their avarice are at long last offered succor.

Not that any of the protesters have gone so far as to overturn the tables of stockbrokers or whip them with cords in imitation of the cleansing of the temple, but the rhetoric of accountability is compelling. "I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail," one protester told New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. That prospect has evidently aroused concern in an industry that has largely managed to escape judicial opprobrium.

So, it turns out that greed isn't good after all - at least not for the vast majority of the American people. But this is a lesson that many U.S. opinion leaders still resist.

For the past three decades - since Ronald Reagan's Republican landslide in 1980 - the United States has undertaken arguably the most destructive social experiment in American history, the incentivizing of greed among the rich by halving their top marginal tax rates.

The idea - once famously sketched out by right-wing economist Arthur Laffer on a napkin - was to slash the tax rates on the rich to spur a "supply side" bonanza of economic growth and higher tax revenues for the government.

No matter how the media folks seem befuddled by what they claim is a lack of clarity from those at the Occupy Wall Street and its solidarity events throughout the nation, I hear one clear and concise message from them all. I am not speaking for them, but I live where they live in life and in spirit. And there are millions more like me out here. Enough is enough.

Working people in this nation have always given themselves to a hard day’s work for honest pay at a living wage and decent benefits and modest time off for a brief annual vacation or to stay home sick when needed. But as the decades of assault on the working class have continued from the 1980s forward, workers have had to do more with less both at work and at home and have been expected to be cheerful, even grateful, while doing so. Enough is enough.

We are the 99 percent of Americans in a blessed land that belongs to us all, and is not a property to be owned by the few who enrich themselves at the expense of the many.

With Bank of America the latest bank to grind its heels on the necks of patriots who paid for its bailout, something powerful and profound is happening in America.

Spontaneous support is rising in town after town, from sea to shining sea, for what is called the Occupy Wall Street movement.

We have entered an American autumn of protest that could bring an American Spring of renewal as the movement continues to gather steam. I expect the largest mass protest in history when millions of people ultimately descend on Washington to demand we return to the time-honored values of our good, great and hurting country that has lost its way in the corridors of political and financial power.

Drones have a congressional caucus now.

Here it is.

Here are its bipartisan (yay!) members.

Here are some constituencies that do not have their own congressional caucuses:

London - The many criticisms of capitalism leveled over a century ago by Karl Marx, the co-author of the Communist Manifesto, may prove to be more right than wrong.

Evidence both anecdotal and empirical of many of Marx's observations abounds across London, the city where the German-born Marx, who held a doctorate in philosophy, lived for three decades before his death in 1883.

Income inequity - an element of the capitalism Marx criticized - is at historic high in Britain as in the US.

The richest ten percent in Britain live 100 times better off than the poorest, according to a report published last year in the Guardian newspaper.

— from Truthout

Cancel my subscription
To the resurrection
Send my credentials to the
House of detention
I got some friends inside..."
-- James Douglas Morrison

Before anything else, I would like to apologize for the mess outside your office. It's been three weeks since all those hippies and punk-rockers and students and union members and working mothers and single fathers and airline pilots and teachers and retail workers and military service members and foreclosure victims decided to camp out on your turf, and I'm sure it has been quite an inconvenience for you. How is a person supposed to spend their massive, virtually untaxed bonus money on a double latte and an eight-ball with all that rabble clogging the sidewalks, right?

Your friends at JP Morgan Chase just donated $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation, the largest donation ever given to the NYPD. You'd think that much cheese would buy a little crowd control, but no. Sure, one of the "white shirt" commanding NYPD officers on the scene hosed down some defenseless women with pepper spray the other day, and a few other protesters have been roughed up here and there, and having any kind of recording device has proven to be grounds for immediate arrest, but seriously...for $4.6 million, you'd think the cops would oblige you by bulldozing these troublemakers right into the Hudson River. Better yet, pave them over with yellow bricks, so you can walk over them every day on your way in to work.

First, thanks to reader Karen Evans for reminding me about something I'd long forgotten: The 1962 Port Huron Statement -- which was really more a manifesto than a statement. Reading the statement nearly half a century after it was penned, I have to agree with Karen that those involved in the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement would do well to sit down, yellow markers in hand, and read this remarkably timely document from beginning to end.

I will not yak on about this but rather I cherry picked a few paragraphs for those who just want a taste. The entire statement, which is quite long, is here:

— from AlterNet

It should come as a surprise to nobody that the corporate media's early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has featured an abundance of hippie-punching but very little about the substantive issues driving thousands of Americans to take over the streets of cities across the country.

As I approached the 30 or so activists who have been camped out for weeks in front of the Federal Reserve Building as part of OccupySF – a protest smaller than those in New York, Boston or Los Angeles – I'd been primed by news stories heaping scorn on these ostensibly confused, foul-smelling rebels-without-a-cause, but what I encountered was very different.

At a time when the country is demanding that Wall Street pay up, Democrats and Republicans are insisting that China be punished instead. In a rare case of bi-partisan unity, the Senate voted 79 to 19 in favor of opening discussion on a punitive trade bill that would shut out Chinese products coming into the U.S. Another highly provocative incident showcased U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Admiral Mike Mullen, accusing the Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, of giving official support to the Haqqni terrorist network. This would make Pakistan an official state sponsor of terrorism, opening it up to a possible military invasion. After reading all the patriotic chest thumping in the mainstream media, it would be possible to forget that there are large anti-Wall Street protests emerging all over the nation. This is precisely the point.

[click image to enlarge]

A new president finds some new, unsurprising bedfellows.

At the Take Back The American Dream conference session titled "Make Work Pay: Why Empowering Workers & Holding CEO's Accountable is Vital to Economic Growth" Christine Owens of the Nationsal Employers Law Project described to the audience how wages are declining. "Job growth is extremely slow. We have a net deficit over 11 million jobs, and 75% of the jobs that are returning pay between $7.50 and $13.50 an hour."

We are in a very deep hole, and this explains why personal income is falling as well, in the wage and poverty data. Meanwhile corporate CEO pay has exploded.

Lately, the phrase "public servants" has struck me as ironic, not because government officials fail to serve the public, but because much of the public serves them. The public is the servants. Activist groups and individuals devote themselves to bettering the fortunes of political parties or politicians, at the expense of pressuring government officials to represent public demands.

Nobody favors eliminating elections, and nobody favors eliminating activism. But there are those who cannot see how prioritizing money-marinated, gerrymandered, cable-news-controlled, unverifiable elections will reverse the train wreck in progress. And there are those who cannot see what it would mean to engage in activism that wasn't aimed at promoting electoral victories.

Note: Every time I put up a new blog entry about fundraising, what basically happens is that the same people who have already donated two or three or more times during this cycle dig down into their sofa cushions and kick in another five or ten dollars. That's great and I really appreciate it, but what I REALLY want is to get the folks who haven't donated yet (and who can AFFORD to!) to open up their wallets.

Hi folks! This should be my last appeal this quarter. I'm going to close the fundraiser at the end up this week, and let the chips fall where they may.

Obviously it's unlikely that we'll meet our goal, but let see what happens over the next few days, and whatever does happen, we'll find some way to struggle on.

"Enraged young people," The New York Times worries aloud, are kicking off the dust of phony democracy, in which "the job of a citizen was limited to occasional trips to the polling places to vote" while decision-making remains in the claws of a rarified elite of overpaid corporate executives and their corrupt pet politicians.

"From South Asia to the heartland of Europe and now even to Wall Street," the paper continues, "these protesters share something else: wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over. They are taking to the streets, in part, because they have little faith in the ballot box."

Don't be fooled by the complaints that the Occupy Wall Street movement hasn't got a clear set of demands. Everybody in a position of power knows exactly what the people want. They simply don't want to acknowledge it. Because, one issue at a time, the demands all boil down to one thing: we don't want you running the world any more. You're bad at it. Your motives are evil. The future you imagine is a vision of hell.

If I were in charge, I wouldn't want to acknowledge that, either.

It's an old trick: when an angry mob descends on your castle, ask what its demands are. The commoners will argue and bicker and eventually hand up a watered-down set of conditions for not torching the castle. Those can be negotiated down to a few easily-managed, cosmetic modifications to the status quo. Demands met, mob disperses. Nobody's happy, nothing has really changed.

It's a curiosity, a singular spectacle, to say the least -- or a political farce, to say the most. While weirder-than-thou Rethugs play whack-a-mole roulette -- anointing, then shredding favorites -- dispirited lefties dream up ways to press -- even displace -- a fallen incumbent. Suckered by one media nutcase after another, the simpleminded, image-driven fringe pray for the perfect earthly redeemer for president. Look, perfection rides in with the Rapture that will obliterate earthling voters and transcend an increasingly unchristian politics.

A far more reality-based left rejects a painfully can't-do, won't-do, non-liberal, non-reformer, whose perpetual warfare, corporate-friendly welfare, and joblessness promise to finish off remnant liberalism. That prospect quickens were this president, having trading off big mandates for today's "absolute underdog" status," to get trashed by a synthesized, tarnished GOP non-entity.

Usually it’s the giant stories that catch your eye. The wars, the uproars, the Arab Spring -- the things you can’t miss. But every now and then, news stories about easily overlooked subjects somehow manage to shine the strongest light on a changing world.

The Cohn sisters, Claribel and Etta, from a wealthy Baltimore family, arrived in Paris in 1905, spent time with Gertrude Stein, and soon began buying the work of unknown artists with names like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse for a song. Before they were done, they had amassed a remarkable collection of modern art (and artistic objects from around the world), now lodged permanently at the Baltimore Museum of Art. They were art admirers, collectors, and at heart early global shoppers par excellence. It was, of course, the beginning of what would soon enough be known as the American Century and American writers, artists, and shoppers, too, were flocking to the Old World for solace, refuge, and kicks.