There are some amazing northern lights going on across America, and the rest of the world, tonight

My nephew saw them in Arizona.  People saw them across America - in Maryland, Tennessee, NY, Ohio, Missouri and more.  These shots from Potomac, Maryland, right outside of DC, are amazing.  I'm, sadly, in San Francisco attending a Netroots Nation board meeting, and it's cloudy here.  The lights hit about an hour ago, but the conditions are right for it to possibly happen again tonight, they say, so keep your eyes on the northern skies. Read the rest of this post...

Goldman Sachs pulls out of fundraiser after learning OWS will be honored

Dumb, but typical, PR move. Big companies have a compulsive need to confirm their worst stereotypes and give field to their harshest critics. Via ThinkProgress:

Earlier this month, the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in New York City held a fundraiser to celebrate its 25th anniversary. It just so happened that this the credit union many of the protesters at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) were using to store funds — and the protest group became an honoree at the dinner. When Goldman Sachs found out that OWS would be at the dinner, it pulled out of the event, along with its $5,000 donation.

Petty pity party of one. Read the rest of this post...

Poll: US companies not hiring, but not much firing either

Not great, but file this under the "it could be a lot worse" category.

The National Association of Business Economics' industry survey found that 59 percent of the 68 respondents saw no change in their employment levels, up from 49 percent in July. That was the highest percentage since January last year.

The survey was conducted between Sept. 20 and Oct. 5.

About 29 percent of businesses expected to increase payrolls, down from 43 percent in July. Three percent planned to lay off workers, up from zero three months ago.

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Mitt Romney & the 1% economy

New York Mag has a cover this week that will have the DNC drooling for days. Beyond the cover, the piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells goes after Romney's wealth and background in as a Master of the Universe.

The ["corporations are people"] incident, in retrospect, did less to peg Romney as a creature of privilege than it did to reveal something deeper. For Romney, the corporation has long been an object of a certain idealism. It is something he has spent much of his adult life—first as a management-strategy consultant, then as CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital—working to perfect, to strip of its inefficiencies until it might function as a perfectly frictionless economic unit.

The piece goes in-depth on Romney's time at Bain. It may well appeal to Republican base voters and financial elites. But at a time where hundreds of city squares around America are being occupied by people objecting to the powerful control big banks have over our political process, it's hard to see this as a real asset to Romney.

Beyond the generic assessment as Romney as a titan of industry, the consulting business Romney helped build at Bain is one that resulted in the outsourcing of countless American jobs. Helping businesses grow may be one thing, but when those businesses (like Staples) put thousands of Mom and Pop stores out of business, it isn't exactly endearing. Peoples' lives were destroyed to build the economy of Mitt Romney's dreams and I'm sure plenty of those people will jump at the opportunity to tell their story to the American people as a strike against Romney.

A sophisticated analysis of wealth in America is taking place right now. Mitt Romney and the 1% are not coming out looking good from this analysis and stories which continue to define Romney by his wealth are likely to be politically devastating, at least in the context of the general election.

Cross-posted from AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field Read the rest of this post...

Consumers shifting money from big banks

Whether this trend will continue is open for debate, but there's certainly a lot of fed up consumers out there. When some called for shifting money a few years ago the movement never materialized but that was also before OWS and before the banks started to raise fees and show gaudy numbers during the recession. It's hard to beat the customer service offered by small credit unions but the hassle factor of changing is not insignificant. Have the too-big-to-fail banks gone too far, finally?

...A growing number of big bank customers, angry about new debit card usage fees, harder-to-avoid checking accounts fees and rising ATM surcharges, are taking their frustrations and their business elsewhere.

"They're coming over in big chunks," said David Glaser, vice president of National Capital Bank, a family run, two-branch community bank in Washington D.C. He estimated that 80 percent of the new accounts opened in the three weeks since news broke about the $5 debit card fees have been opened by customers of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp.

And not all of those switching would even get charged the debit fee. "I had a woman bring me a quarter of a million dollars, Glaser said. "She would not have paid the $5 fee, she just didn't like the idea."

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EU appears headed for another recession

The data coming out of Europe is not good news and the continuing disarray over the Greek crisis is not helping. If only a crisis in Europe wouldn't impact the US.

The Flash Markit Eurozone Services Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) - measuring business activity at thousands of firms from banks to restaurants - fell to 47.2 this month from 48.8 in September, well below a consensus of 48.5 from economists surveyed by Reuters.

The euro zone's manufacturing PMI fell to 47.3 in October, its lowest level since July 2009, with German manufacturing falling for the first time in two years because of a combination of drops in output and new orders and backlogs of work.

The fall in euro zone PMI "reflected steep declines in both the manufacturing and services indices, suggesting that the deterioration in growth prospects reflects developments both at home and abroad," Ben May, European economist at Capital Economist, wrote in a market note.

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Corruption in the NYPD much wider than Occupy Wall Street beatings

Two weeks after the infamous Pepper Spray video went viral, Inspector Anthony Bologna has been punished. Well they took away ten days pay. A criminal investigation is still pending.

This seemed to me to be a rather trivial punishment for the casual use of a weapon that can and does cause deaths. Defending the civil lawsuit brought by the victims of Bologna's attack will cost very considerably more than the $6,000 he will lose in wages. A similar suit brought in San Francisco resulted in a $750,000 settlement for the Plaintiff's legal fees. The NYPD has already paid out up to $30,000 to settle four previous lawsuits involving Bologna and another five are pending.

Just what does a police officer have to do to get fired in the NYPD? Well two recent cases show that you can get suspended indefinitely without pay for not making your arrest quota and then reporting the illegal quota system to internal affairs.

The Schoolcraft lawsuit alleges that Deputy Chief Michael Marino unlawfully maintained a quota system while running the 81st Precinct. His allegations are based on tape recordings Schoolcraft made of supervisors berating him for failing to make his quota. This is not the first time this type of allegation has been made against Marino. In 2006 an arbitrator found that he had run an illegal quota system while commanding the 75th Precinct.

The complaint in the Schoolcraft case makes for shocking reading. It is alleged that the defendants retaliated against Schoolcraft in numerous ways, including getting him committed to a mental institution for 6 days.

But don't think this type of behavior is ignored in the NYPD. Marino was recently transferred to a post on Staten Island. Though it is not clear whether this was due to the Schoolcraft allegations or the fact that Marino was found guilty of illegally receiving steroid drugs for which he received a 30 day suspension and a year's probation.

The story was first broken in 2010 by the Village Voice. This has resulted in two disciplinary investigations against Marino that appear to be ongoing and an investigation into the allegation that serious crimes were downgraded that has completed but the NYPD refuses to release.

Schoolcraft is not the only NYPD officer making this allegation either. A Brooklyn officer, Adil Polanco has a remarkably similar story.

How can anyone take Mayor Bloomberg's claim to be tough on crime seriously when he can't even police his own police force? In both cases the police corruption is alleged to be the direct consequence of Mayor Bloomberg policies. There is no evidence that Bloomberg ordered anyone to commit criminal behavior, all he did was to set criteria for promotion that he must have known would encourage the criminal behavior.
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Owning the World

As the various occupy movements protest the concentration of wealth, a remarkable study has looked, for the first time, at who owns the world's 43060 transnational corporations ("TNCs"). New Scientist has a summary which contains some cautionary words about treating ownership as if it were necessarily a synonym for control but the standout figure is that just 1318 companies represent 20% of global operating revenues and, between them, own companies responsible for producing a further 60%. The top 50 TNCs control just short of 40% of the global network of TNCs. Read the rest of this post...

BofA: another credit rating cut for US ahead

Putting aside (again) the legitimacy of the ratings agencies, this will be a major problem if it does actually happen. The last time this happened, public opinion had not yet been rallying around the OWS movement. People were frustrated, but certainly not nearly as focused on the unfairness of the 1% over the 99%. The public is paying a lot more attention and less interested in accepting the same old, same old from the political class.

If the next round of deficit cutting proposals fails to include a fair system of pain to go around - as opposed to the current model of pain hitting the 99% - then we could see a lot more pressure to change heading into the 2012 elections. The old model no longer works and has to change.

"The credit rating agencies have strongly suggested that further rating cuts are likely if Congress does not come up with a credible long-run plan" to cut the deficit, Merrill's North American economist, Ethan Harris, wrote in the report.

"Hence, we expect at least one credit downgrade in late November or early December when the super committee crashes," he added.

The bipartisan congressional committee formed to address the deficit -- known as the "super committee" -- needs to break an impasse between Republicans and Democrats in order to reach a deal to reduce the U.S. deficit by at least $1.2 trillion by November 23.

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Video: Coldplay, "Paradise"

A wee bit of a take off of Blind Melon's "No Rain," but still cute. And a nice song.

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