Cities spending millions to shut down Occupy while ignoring homeless

Priorities, priorities. Huffington Post:

As cities around the country have swept Occupy Wall Street camps from their plazas and parks in recent weeks, a number of mayors and city officials have argued that by providing shelter to the homeless, the camps are endangering the public and even the homeless themselves.

Yet in many of those cities, services for the homeless are severely underfunded. The cities have spent millions of dollars to police and evict the protesters, but they've been shutting down shelters and enacting laws to prohibit homeless from sleeping overnight in public.

In Oakland, Atlanta, Denver and Portland, Ore., there are at least two homeless people for every open bed in the shelter system, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Salt Lake City, Utah, and Chapel Hill, N.C. -- two other cities that have evicted protesters from their encampments -- things are better but far from ideal. In Chapel Hill, according to the HUD study, there are 121 beds for 135 homeless people, and in Salt Lake City, 1,627 for 1,968.

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Arab League sanctions against Syria

During the debate on sanctions against South Africa, Repulicans would lecture opponents of apartheid on the futility of sanctions against South Africa one minute and then declare the need to maintain sanctions against Cuba and Iran the next.

The Republicans had it wrong then and are still wrong today. For the regime under embargo, sanctions provide much of the political benefits of war at much lower cost. Castro and Khamenei have both kept themselves in power by blaming their own economic failures on the sanctions imposed by the 'imperialists'.

Sanctions were effective against South Africa for the same reason they were ineffctive against Iran and Cuba: South Africa saw itself as a Western country. Sanctions hurt psychologically because they represented a visible rejection of their policies by the countries those they regarded as their peers.

And so the sanctions imposed on Syria by the Arab League are likely to have far more effect than any sanctions that the West might impose. Assad is not the worst brute in the region, but he is the weakest of the remaining brutes and thus an appropriate target.

I did however receive a strong dose of dejavu reading the following in the Tehran Times:

The Arab League’s suspension of Syria amid increasing Western pressure, Egyptian junta’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, Bahrain’s excessive use of force against its own people, and Yemeni regime’s massacre of its citizens have once again underlined the prevailing double standards in the world.

What follows is exactly the sort of drivel that pours from our own right wingers. A reminder if one was needed that the likes of Ahmedinejad, Khamenei and co are really no different from the likes of Bush, Cheney, McCain and co. They are small minded people driven by fear and hate. The only thing that distinguishes one group of rightists from another is who they hate. Read the rest of this post...

More strange stories related to Strauss-Kahn case

Putting aside whether one likes DSK politics or would vote for him or whether he's a decent person or not, the latest reporting does suggest there was a lot more happening than many cared to admit. Even now, political enemies are dismissing the news. Having worked in hotels myself for years, I always wondered about the electronic evidence that had to exist. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/26/dominique-strauss-kahn-hotel-maid.

The most unusual evidence described by Epstein is a security video of the hotel's engineer, Brian Yearwood, and an unidentified man apparently celebrating the day's events. Earlier, Yearwood had been communicating with John Sheehan, a security expert at Accor, which owns Sofitel, and whose boss, René-Georges Querry, once worked with a man now in intelligence for Sarkozy.

The unidentified man with Yearwood had been spotted previously on hotel security cameras accompanying Diallo to the hotel's security office after the alleged attack. The video shows the men near the area where Diallo is recounting her story and, less than two minutes after police have been called, they seem to congratulate each other. "The two men high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes. They are then shown standing by the service door … apparently waiting for the police to arrive," Epstein writes.

Epstein meticulously pieces together the movements of hotel staff and Strauss-Kahn by examining the electronic records left by their room keys and phones. These show Diallo entered the room between 12.06 and 12.07pm. At 12.13pm, Strauss-Kahn called his daughter about having lunch. During those six or seven minutes, Diallo said she was brutally sexually attacked and dragged around the room.

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Black Friday sales up 7%

It's an early report and these numbers often change after updates, but it's a good sign for retailers. Whether Americans should really be spending much more is a question, but it certainly doesn't hurt the economy in the near term.

The holiday shopping season got off to a strong start on Black Friday, with retail sales up 7 percent over last year, according to the most recent survey. Now stores just have to keep buyers coming back without the promise of door-buster savings.

Buyers spent $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls, up nearly $1 billion from last year, according to a Saturday report from ShopperTrak. It was the largest amount ever spent on the day that marks the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the biggest year-over-year increase since 2007. Chicago-based ShopperTrak gathers data from 25,000 outlets across the U.S., including individual stores and shopping centers.

The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. broke its Black Friday record for shoppers, thanks to a decision to open at midnight for the first time. Around 210,000 visitors came to the mall on Friday, up from 200,000 last year, according to mall spokeswoman Bridget Jewell.

Meanwhile, NBC has an update on the annual Black Friday violence. Is there a link between the violence and the bad economy or is it just a normal Black Friday? Read the rest of this post...

Study: Americans to shift $185 billion out of large banks in 2012

There's very little reason why anyone should stay with the large banks. The hard reality is, they could care less about customers who either can't propose a multi-billion dollar deal or keep at least tens of millions in their bank. Their customer service reflects how little they care about their customer base and the only thing they will listen to is losing these kind of amounts. This is from a few days ago, bit still interesting. Time:

A lot of Americans are ticked off at their banks, and a new survey puts some numbers to that sentiment. Consulting firm cg42 says big bank customers will collectively withdraw $185 billion in deposited funds in 2012, and a total of $399 billion is “in jeopardy,” meaning that customers are considering making a switch to another banking institution.

“It should hopefully elicit a re-examination of their offerings, customer service and operating policies,” says Stephen Beck, cg42 founder and managing partner. The study took a look at the 10 biggest banks in the country and measured what it terms areas of “vulnerability,” such as how frequently customers get annoyed with their bank and how often they vent on social media forums like Facebook.

The four biggest banks — Chase, Bank of America, Citibank and Wells Fargo — stand to lose the lion’s share of that $185 billion. According to the survey, they’re on track to lose $135 billion in customer deposits if they can’t find a way to woo new customers and keep existing ones from defecting.

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Weekend Thoughts: "We are the 99.9%"

Though this is a Weekend Thoughts piece, it starts with the headline quote, taken from a recent Paul Krugman column.

The quote is exactly right. It's Paul Krugman's writing, but it could have been authored by any number of people (for example, the guy who wrote Who Rules America). Krugman:

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

I agree completely — "We are the 99%" is a great slogan. And it avoids that problem people on the left have with giving exact (easily forgotten) numbers. (The difference between left and right re numbers, in my view, goes something like this. "It cost $417,000" vs "It cost almost a half billion dollars.") "We are the bottom 99.5% just wouldn't cut it."

But in this case, the best slogan obscures a powerful fact:

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Krugman's right that it's a war between the Top 0.1% and the rest of us. (You have to get to the top 0.5% just to stop working for a living. At the lower half of the top 1%, you're just a wealthy enabler, one of the well-paid who oversee the running of the gears and wheels of empire, for example, an upper-end doctor, lawyer, or corporate manager.)

"Who are the 0.1 percent?" Krugman asks.

Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Now before you go thinking of CEOs as "working for a living," give thought to what they actually do. The function of a corporation is to operate as efficiently as possible and pass all new wealth into the CEO-level mahogany suites. That's not working for a living, that's owning a gold mine and cashing its checks. The top accounting people, they works for a living, and the CEO pays them. The CEO, however, works for himself, and collects the corporate skim, which in this case is as much of the profits as he can pocket.

(Think I'm kidding? Corporations are controlled by their Boards of Directors. In Dino Days (before the 1970s), boards were controlled by shareholders; thus shareholders could be said to own corporations. Today, boards are controlled by the CEO class operating as a group, sitting on each other's boards, and especially each other's compensation committees. That makes them owners in fact.

It's the perfect scam, collecting the wealth of all of the engines of commerce. Near the bottom of his article, Krugman makes the same point.)

I'm not going to be as prescriptive as the Professor. He says, simply enough, that the Top 0.1% should pay more in taxes. Yes, as far as it goes, but the system is rotten from the core — that they don't pay their share is the effect, not the cause. What's the cause? The mega-wealthy (and the mega-mega-wealthy at their heart) have power surpassing their dreams, and with that power, they have taken us beyond the rule of law.

Click here, and look at the chart. The last two dots are the income of the top 0.5% and 0.1% of taxpayers. Can you imagine where the dots for 0.01% and 0.001% would be? (Hint: Near your ceiling.) It's power that gives them that wealth.

So yes, Krugman is right; it's the 99.9% against the rest, the Top 0.1%. Believe me, many in the lower half of the top 1% are very sympathetic to the Occupy Movement; Krugman, who still works for a living, is one.

But let's not take our eyes off the real ball. This is what an investment advisor to the super-rich has to say about the Top 0.1%:

[E]ntry into the top 0.5% and, particularly, the top 0.1% is usually the result of some association with the financial industry and its creations. I find it questionable as to whether the majority in this group actually adds value or simply diverts value from the US economy and business into its pockets and the pockets of the uber-wealthy who hire them. They are, of course, doing nothing illegal.

It's all about the skim. You can't get at it from just the 1% level; it has to be given to you by the real thieves above.

Yes, we should stay with the "99%" slogan — it has great power and pull. But the real theft (perfectly legal as always) starts at 0.1%. These are the top predators, the only group for whom everyone else is prey.

You have to take away their power to take away their money. Mostly this happens in a messy, uncontrolled revolution.

Better the controlled one that the Occupy Movement has started. If I were Occupy, I'd start thinking about next stages. (I hear Jamie Dimon has a New York address. Wonder what imperial storm troopers round that joint would look like.) And next stages after that.

The only power we have is to clog the wheels. But if we do, and persist in doing, the machine will certainly stop.

Or morph into something even the willfully blind can't ignore.

Take away their power and their money will soon follow.

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Bo Diddly - Roadrunner

We finally made it to the concert last night at Ste. Chapelle and wow, it was fantastic. I hadn't been to the 11th century chapel in years so forgot how great the acoustics are. It was a packed house and the musicians were really on fire. Great time.

Since I couldn't motivate myself to head out west to Versailles today, I think that I have to do it today. My ride along the Marne was cool, but nice. The winter riding faces were all out there yesterday. It's never that much fun to cycle in the winter but the paths are always empty, which is nice. Read the rest of this post...

NATO now blames Pakistan for starting fight

Oh please. At this point, nobody really wants to hear about who started the fight. It's like listening to a bunch of five year old kids argue about "he hit me, no he hit me first." Regardless, it comes back to the same question over where this never-ending war is going. From an outsiders perspective, it looks like it's war for the sake of war. The Guardian:

An attack by Nato aircraft on Pakistani troops that allegedly killed as many as 28 soldiers and looks set to further poison relations between the US and Pakistan was an act of self-defence, a senior western official has claimed.

According to the Kabul-based official, a joint US-Afghan force operating in the mountainous Afghan frontier province of Kunar was the first to come under attack in the early hours of Saturday morning, forcing them to return fire.

The high death toll from an incident between two supposed allies suggests Nato helicopters and jets strafed Pakistani positions with heavy weapons.

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