New: ‘The Morning Crawl’, a wide-ranging RSS feed roundup with an Occupy breakout section. There are 842 stories in today’s crawl. Due to different search modalities, the crawl and digest below may differ in their search results so scan both if you have the time.
http://procesverbal.dyndns-blog.com/NewsFeeds.html
Morning digest
‘Action in the street’ – Occupy Boston invites revelers to pen resolutions
It wasn’t exactly Occupy First Night, but the self-dubbed 99 percenters managed to lay claim to a share of yesterday’s citywide New Year’s celebration. “Action in the street is what we’re all about,” said Ben Janos, an Occupy Boston activist, as he and several protestors handed out “We are the 99%” buttons in Copley Square.
http://tinyurl.com/7las3mt
Boston says goodbye to 2011
But not everyone came to celebrate. The crowd included members of Occupy Boston, the protest group evicted earlier this month from their two-month encampment on Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. A small group stood with a red wagon draped in a miniature canvas tent emblazoned with the message, “You can’t evict an idea.”
“We really want to get the message out that we’re still here,” said Kevin Maley, 27, of South Boston as he handed out “We are the 99%” buttons. “Our objective is to keep the movement going and connect with people.”
Movement Man – Meet Chris Faraone, Occupy reporter for the Boston Phoenix
Over the past few bleary-eyed months, with little concern for health, nutrition, or REM cycles, Faraone has spent almost every waking hour honing his insight into America’s economic counterculture. He has covered Occupy like a one-man swarm: embedding full-time at Boston’s Dewey Square encampment; visiting other movements around the country; juggling feature stories, blog posts, radio spots, and Twitter fights. The recent eviction and dispersal of the Occupy Boston HQ turned into a marathon two-day reporting session interrupted only by a three-hour nap and a French Dip sandwich. “I’ve stayed up twenty-four hours in the past couple of weeks more than I ever have in my life,” he says. “I’m so used to holding my piss at this point that I forget to go.”
ACLU fights Kafkaesque secret Occupy Boston Twitter subpoena
The ACLU of Massachusetts is representing an anonymous Twitter user who has been targetted by an Assistant DA who is trying to build a case related to Occupy Boston; the court and the ADA have sealed the proceedings, so no one — not even some of the ACLU staff working on the case — is allowed to know what is going on:
Occupy movement taking hold in Lexington
Beugekian said he his hoping Lexington residents will rally around his idea of “occupying” the Battle Green. He created the Facebook group “Occupy Lexington Battle Green” and is planning some sort of protest there, adding there is no intention to set up a weeks- or even days-long “occupation.”
http://tinyurl.com/7vyfrv8
Surging Back Into Zuccotti Park, Protesters Clash With Police
More than 500 people associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement gathered in Zuccotti Park on Saturday and, in a return to scenes from earlier in the year, the evening began with the sound of drumming and calls of the now familiar slogan, “We are the 99 percent” – and it ended with torn-down barricades and a scuffle with police officers.
Just after 10:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, officers carried a person out of the park, prompting protesters to follow behind them, shouting “Shame!” The reason the person was escorted away was unclear.
http://tinyurl.com/6qyhoug
99% VERSUS 1%
There was no brutal crackdown by a tyrant, no runaway tanks that mowed down demonstrators , no trigger-happy police firing, and no selfimmolation by any protestor. Even flash mobs require more organization and coordination, so innocuously did the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement begin. And unlike the civil rights and anti-war movements, it wasn’t even all-American to start with.
Just Imagine The Rose Parade Occupied For The People
This year, the Just Imagine themed 123rd Rose Parade takes place on Monday, January 2nd to honor an obscure 1893 tradition. Also this year, in what defines another Rose Parade tradition, in addition to the standard fare of high school and university bands, prancing horses, law enforcement groups, local government and civic organizations, the Just Imagine Rose Parade will be satiated with the ubiquitous (and seemingly mandatory) military and corporations.
. . .
On January 2nd, thanks to the hard work and determination of members of the Occupy Movement, in particular organizer Peter Thottam, the 123rd Rose Parade is permitting viewers to Just Imagine how spectacular our country could be if greed and war disappeared. Lets re-Imagine the missions of the Parade’s “main stage” performers:
Organizers to press on, will ‘Occupy Congress’
While analysts discuss whether the movement will return with the same gusto in 2012, ‘Occupy’ organizers have declared they will not retreat until the injustices they protest are corrected.
“In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to protest in the form of Occupy Wall Street,” said Shane Patrick, a spokesman for the group. “But it’s unlikely that the conditions will change immediately, allowing OWS to fade away overnight.”
Occupy Beijing?
It’s therefore clear that mass social protest has become a permanent feature of the Chinese political system. Although such protest, by itself, won’t dethrone the Communist Party, it does weaken the party’s rule in subtle ways. Trying to maintain control over a restive population is forcing the party to expend ever-more resources on domestic security. Letting such routine protest ? amplified by the Internet and microblogs ? occur makes the party look weak and incompetent. Having tens of millions of disgruntled citizens also means that potential opposition movement can find political allies among China’s down-trodden masses. Worst of all, in a political crisis, these enemies of the regime could all rise in revolt spontaneously.
Summing up 2011: Drowning Homeowners, Soaring Banks, Historic Inequity
More than two years in, this must be considered one of the most lopsided and pathological recoveries–a non-recovery, really–in American history. Here is what does not add up in our economy: even today, no one wants to risk the “moral hazard” of helping the “losers” — the deadbeat mortgage holders who aroused the ire of the libertarian Santelli — in a big way, lest this action undermine the proper working of capitalism. And yet we’ve just spent the last four years pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into helping deadbeat banks (while asking nothing in return), thus also undermining capitalism.
Control Frauds Continue to Maim and Kill
The financial scandal and the Great Recession that it caused have understandably captured the bulk of our attention, but we must not lose sight of the fact that “control frauds” continue to maim and kill enormous numbers of people and damage the environment and society throughout the world. Several examples of these frauds have led to recent press reports. I write to point out that control fraud is the common feature of these scandals. I address four recent manifestations of control fraud: the French manufacturer of defective silicone breast implants, the death of many Fillipinoes in floods made lethal by illegal deforestation, the deaths and devastation caused by illegal seizure and exploitation of mines in the Congo, and the scrap metal dealers who put the profit in the theft of metals in the UK. This first column explains the French breast implant fraud.
Control frauds occur when the persons controlling a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud.
http://tinyurl.com/6pl5de4
Unemployed Portuguese told to ‘just emigrate’
Hounded by the economic crisis that shows no signs of letting up and by political leaders of all stripes, Portugal’s conservative Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho sent out an unprecedented message to his fellow citizens: Emigrate.
A wave of indignation was triggered when Passos Coelho, in the face of the growing unemployment that is hitting young people and educators extremely hard, suggested to teachers on December 18 that as an alternative they could move to Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil or Angola.
The next day, several ministers applauded the prime minister’s remarks, saying his suggestion was a valid solution, especially for teachers. But the governments of Angola and Brazil quickly responded, saying they had no immediate need for teachers.
The Year Dissent Came Back
It’s hard to deny that 2011 should be known as the year that dissent came back with a vengeance to the USA.
The Occupy movement has been the culmination of a year of protest in a country that has not often been comfortable with mass political action. The power of people taking to the streets has been so relentless and undeniable that even the most mainstream and willfully blind media outlets have been unable to ignore it.
http://tinyurl.com/7aud73z
Thomas Frank: How the Right Wing Hijacked Rage Over the Economic Collapse and Swindled America
In his new book, “Pity the Billionaire,” Tom Frank turns his mordant eye on the unlikeliest political development of the Obama presidency: how the crash of 2008 served to strengthen the political right. The deregulation of Wall Street, championed for 30 years by right-wing leaders, had led to an economic catastrophe so frightening that the country elected a liberal Democrat to the presidency. Yet two years later, the most conservative faction of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, had taken effective control of the House of Representatives, the regulation of Wall Street had stalled, and the champions of economic deregulation in Washington had emerged stronger than ever.
http://tinyurl.com/7s8u2nm
Occupiers from Around the Country Descend on Iowa Caucuses
One of the interesting and impressive things about the local movement has how, even as its new occupation continues to stand, it has moved beyond a sole focus on the encampment. With the People’s Caucus, activists taken advantage of the intense once-every-four-years national spotlight shined on the state, hosting a week of teach-ins and nonviolent direct actions focused on Occupy issues, most prominently the need to get corporate money out of politics. In addition to scoring a plethora of press hits in the local media, the actions have made the national nightly news coverage and have produced a multiple stories in outlets such as the New York Times.
http://tinyurl.com/7ndsrg6
Our Economy Has Failed — Until We Admit That, We’re Screwed
If you’re looking for visuals to encapsulate 2011, look no further than the bizarre scene at Di Modica’s bull. Daily, the country’s largest police force mobilizes to protect the idea of American prosperity from an imagined threat, while the actual economy lays gored and gutted by demonstrable and ongoing crimes.
In the immediate, this perversity results from a spectacular failure of political leadership. We traveled a long, winding road to the point at which no-brainers like a modest payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment benefits demand political brinksmanship. People of varying ideologies and partisan affiliations may debate endlessly who’s more at fault, but to do so is to truly miss the forest for the trees. The ugly reality is no leader in either party has yet shown the mettle to rise and meet the enormity of today’s challenges.
http://tinyurl.com/6qpofqu
Krugman: Keynes Was Right
In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash.