LOGO: Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines. A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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November 17, 2011
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Featured Reports
AP / Julia Xanthos

The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg is now secure at the top.
Featured Reports

Why the First Amendment Won’t Protect Occupiers

Those who believe the courts will come to the rescue have bought into the popular mythology surrounding the amendment’s depth and reach.
Featured Reports
AP / Seth Wenig

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead.
 
Digs

Occupy Wall Street

Find all of our Occupy movement coverage from Truthdig editors, contributors and commenters, as well as the latest from Twitter and around the Web.
 
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You may wonder what kind of goons Brookfield Properties—the owners of Zuccotti Park—hired to secure the area after Occupiers were evicted from the premises early Tuesday morning. At least one careless bigot numbered among the crowd.

Do the Occupiers know what they’re talking about when they chant, “We are the 99 percent!”? With a quick animation, The Guardian breaks down the key economic data representing the conditions that have brought thousands of the disempowered and discontented into the streets all across the country.

Thank goodness New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg deeply understands the meaning of free speech and what it does and doesn’t look like, or else his forced decampment of Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park HQ would look like a completely overstated and egregious abuse of political power.  (more)

 
Arts and Culture

Howard Jacobson’s novel “No More Mr. Nice Guy” travels well-worn territory: the male midlife crisis in search of laughs.


Italian clothing company Benetton’s latest foray into multiculturalism, this time with interfaith overtones, has landed the retailer in hot holy water with the Vatican. In a blatant bid to stay relevant while broadcasting a shock-inducing message of love in the time of globalization, Benetton launched an ad campaign ... (more)


Edward P. Morgan, in this excerpt from “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy,” maintains that “the mass media’s ‘’60s’ discourse is chiefly one of ghosts, accusations, and smoke and mirrors that has long played on audience emotions and diverted public attention to what is essentially a symbolic form of spectator politics.”

 
 
 
Reports

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top.


Here is a surefire way to cut $7.1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade. Do nothing.


All politicians lie, but Gingrich specializes in a brand of self-puffing fantasy.


The program to oust the Occupy Wall Street movement from its sites of occupation is now under way. The Occupied, who own the police, have grown tired of the Occupation.


It wasn’t quite Berkeley in 1964, but it wanted to be, and that might be the ultimate significance of the thousands-strong gathering Tuesday night in Sproul Plaza on the Cal campus.


Those who believe the courts will come to the rescue have bought into the popular mythology surrounding the amendment’s depth and reach.


We got word just after 1 a.m. Tuesday that New York City police were raiding the Occupy Wall Street encampment.


Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak.


This should be the Republicans’ election to lose. They seem well on their way.


The U.S. attorneys who have declared war on California’s medical marijuana industry remind me of the prohibition agents in the HBO show “Boardwalk Empire.”

 
Ear to the Ground

The United Colors of Benetton is forced to pull an ad that showed the pope kissing the imam of Al-Azhar Mosque; the AP reveals information about how cities organized the Occupy evictions; and a study exposes the dangers of using mice to study every disease. These discoveries and more after the jump.


All right, members of the 112th United States Congress, if you keep saying you’re about to have a total political meltdown and then nothing happens, we’re going to stop believing you. Once again, the fearsome government shutdown was avoided Thursday when squabbling factions on Capitol Hill ... (more)


The sponsors of Proposition 8 and other contested laws are entitled to defend such measures when the state refuses to do so, the California Supreme Court declared Thursday afternoon. The ruling could push the long argument over same-sex marriage—which has wearied its proponents and adversaries—to the desks of federal judges, including those on the U.S. Supreme Court.


Father Eduardo Samaniego, the Jesuit pastor of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., protested foreclosures by Bank of America against those in his flock and beyond by moving $3 million of his parish’s funds to a local credit union. (more)


In the name of providing valuable “work experience” to young people, British supermarkets and department stores—one of which makes the equivalent of more than 5½ billion U.S. dollars annually—are holding job seekers’ unemployment benefits hostage to squeeze them of weeks of free labor without any promise of a permanent position.


On Thursday, two months into the Occupy Wall Street movement, protesters turned out en masse in New York, Los Angeles and other flash points around the country to continue their call for financial reform and to make a show of solidarity after New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his counterparts in ... (more)


The chairman of AIG, which is now majority owned by the United States Treasury thanks to a $182.3 billion bailout, was on Bloomberg TV, appropriately enough, when he declared that the “Occupy Wall Street crowd” has “a very simplistic view of things.”

 
 
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A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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