tvxs.gr | Καπιταλισμός: μια ιστορία αγάπης by tvxorissinora

It really amazes me to see bobble heads from the punditocracy feign confusion about why people are taking to the streets to not only #OccupyWallStreet but to protests country- and worldwide against austerity and "deficit" measures that only exist to protect the ever increasing riches of the global 1%.

So do yourself a favor: Watch Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story right now here. If you have Netflix On-Demand, queue it and watching it ASAP, given it's one of those movies that will disappear from the service once their contract with STARZ is over.
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Plutocracy is a word I have been throwing around in my tweets, as a way to not only describe the unelected 1% who took outright control of the US government through their 2008 Financial Coup, but really to speak of a global network of military-industrial-political fat-cats who have come to control the world economy. The word itself has a long history dating back to Ancient Rome, where areas such as Carthage didn't have a democracy but a polis dedicated to representing the interests of only those who were wealthy land & trade owners. The word itself comes from plutos (wealth) and cracia (rule, government).

The term, as you can imagine, has never been popular in the United States; especially when used to describe its politico-economic dynamics of its system of government. So the word plutocracy has been relegated to the real of academic punditry.

Until, that is, a triumvirate of financial analysts wrote a few papers trying to describe why CITI had a vested interest in only focusing on the super-rich since they were the ones driving the financial boom. Ajay Kapur, Niall McLeod and Narendra Singh (who, by the way, quit CITI a year after publishing their reports) are those three analysts and they are the ones who coined the term plutonomy. Two of these reports are the CITI memos that were featured in Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and have become evidence of the financial crime scene now referred to as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

Here's how Kapur, McLeod and Singh define plutonomy (I have changed paragraph formatting for readability):
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Been pushing this for some time, but it synergizes well with the Occupy Wall Street movement. I decided to go into somewhat more detail on this action and focus specifically on four target banks as being the absolute worst.

I have personally been switching my money (credit cards, accounts, mortgage) away from the big bad mega-banks that screwed Americans with predatory lending and took taxpayer handouts with better banks and financial institution. And I invite you to join me. It is a way of moving your money at least a step away from the worst of Wall Street.

In particular I pick four banks to target: Bank of America, Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo

I base my recommendations on three things:

1. Customer service complaints. The banks that get the most customer service complaints are as follows: (according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, I think these numbers are from 2009)

Bank of America: 7,230 complaints (25.5% of total)
J.P. Morgan Chase: 4,890 complaints (17.3%)
Citigroup: 3,742 complaints (13.2%)
Wells Fargo: 2,695 complaints (9.5%)
HSBC North America: 1,963 complaints (6.9%)
Wachovia: 1,265 complaints (4.5%)
U.S. Bancorp: 1,027 complaints (3.6%)
National City: 586 complaints (2.1%)
The Royal Bank of Scotland Group: 537 complaints (1.9 %)
Key Corp: 343 complaints (1.2 %)
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On the 13th of July of this year, Adbusters published on their blog a post titled #OccupyWallStreet : A shift in revolutionary tactics. Adbusters describes themselves as "a global network of culture jammers and creatives working to change the way information flows, the way corporations wield power, and the way meaning is produced in our society". A collective with a long history of global campaigns such as the No Logo and Turn Off TV week, the collective put out a call to action after the success of the Egyptian and Spanish revolutions of earlier this year.

Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."

— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.

One of the most interesting aspects of the dynamics of #OccupyWallStreet is its apparent internet spontaneity. This blogpost by Adbusters would have us believe the idea sprouted in their forums. That like a blog design theme, you can create a template to organize and window dress a political movement with a few lines of code, some markup language and a hashtag. Indeed, #OccupyWallStreet is being called a hashtag movement.

Yet #OccupyWallStreet is more than just a hashtag. It's part of a wave of populist unrests caused by almost exactly the same economic conditions and that have all as their igniting moment the 2008 Global Financial Crisis :

• almost complete collapse of a once stable middle class through mortage foreclosures, crushing personal debt and wiped-out savings and pensions,
• growing unemployment among 20-30 years olds,
• weakened labor unions through union-busting practices and austerity policies,
• growing police and paramilitary forces along with curtailment of civil liberties and growing violations of human rights,
• increasing labor immobility with growing anti-immigration policies, even in "border-free" areas like Europe

#OccupyWallStreet isn't happening in a vacuum. As the middle and working classes are wiped-out of the economic planning of a global economy focused only on what analysts at CITIbank named Plutonomy, these are the civil and social unrests they warned investors about.

So let's take a quick look at some of the worldwide and US uprisings that precede #OccupyWallStreet; some by years like the Republic Windows and Doors Factory Occupation, others by weeks, like the Clapping Protests in Belarus and to those that are still unfolding like the #Syntagma protests in Greece.
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We at the Nigerian Humanist Movement are deeply concerned over yet another move by the Nigerian Parliament to criminalize same sex marriage in the country. dailytimes.com.ng/article/​senate-ban-gay-marriages-nigeria The 'Bill for an Act to Prohibit Marriage Between Persons of Same Sex, Solemnization of Same and for Other Matters Related Therewith sponsored by Senator Domingo Obende has scaled through the second reading and was referred to the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Human Rights for further legislative work.
This bill is a big distraction and a waste of Nigeria's limited legislative resources. It will worsen Nigeria's human rights records and undermine efforts by Nigerians to foster true democracy, national dialogue and tolerant pluralism . Similar bills considered by the Parliament in 2006 and 2008, were never passed into law. Nigerian Humanists are wondering why the current members of the parliament deemed it necessary to bring up this bill again at a time the nation is facing clear and urgent threats and challenges of insecurity, crime and conflict, religious fundamentalism and terrorism, poverty and social unrest.
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