Patriotism that loves our country, our land, and our planet
Well, we now have more information about the foolish but well-meaning action by Occupy Wall Street at that Citibank branch in New York. And there’s nothing in the latest revelations that changes the conclusion: Citibank could have chosen to shrug its collective shoulders and get on with business, but instead elected to have a bunch of kids arrested, and thereby bought itself a billion dollars worth of negative publicity.
Politico has a story up about how unhappy big-money donors on Wall Street are with President Obama. He’s taking the side of the smelly Occupy Wall Streeters and saying mean things about his nice, responsible banker friends! They may just close their checkbooks and stay home, or worse, give all their money to Mitt.
But as I read the article, it struck me that Politico had totally missed the real story here – that these whiney Wallstreeters had purchased themselves a government for a spectacularly tiny sum.
On Saturday night in Times Square, Iraq veteran Sgt Shamar Thomas made an impression on New York Police, in an impassioned plea for reason and calm that deflected the angry violence they were bringing to bear on the Occupy Wall Street protesters who had surged through Times Square. “There is no honor in this” Today, Sgt. [...]
What is free speech? According to the Supreme Court, money that corporations spend to influence elections is free speech, and cannot be limited. But it seems a lot of our officials think it’s perfectly OK to place limits on free speech when it comes to the 99 percent.
And last time I checked, city ordinances don’t trump the Constitution.
…Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there…
I was in kindergarten when Jerry Brown was elected governor the first time around, and I grew up enjoying the legacy he left for California’s coast and ocean when he signed the California Coastal Act into law. The Coastal Act states that “the permanent protection of the state’s natural and scenic resources is a paramount concern to present and future residents of the state and nation.” True 35 years ago and just as true today.
Just as a horrific accident in finance is about to happen, a ready-made revolutionary mob is conveniently parked outside the pilot-houses of the world’s great money vessels, so as to receive the crews directly into their open arms after the smash up.
President Obama could have changed the outcome if he had actually believed in change. He could have told his attorney general to enforce the securities law. He could have replaced the zombies at the SEC and told the new ones to apply all existing regulations.
Before last year’s election, he could have used his legislative majorities to repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and reinstate the Glass-Steagall act. He could have initiated the process of deconstructing the giant banks back into their separate functions – so that banking once again worked as a utility rather than a launching pad for colossal frauds and swindles. Not only did he fail to do any of these things, he didn’t even talk about it, or try.
By now just about everyone in the country must know that 23 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were arrested Saturday in Manhattan when they attempted to close their Citibank accounts. Their crime: they talked about it too much.
What you probably don’t know is: on the same morning a similar group went to a Chase bank branch and engaged in a similar action. You don’t know this because, unlike at Citibank, the Chase manager just rolled with it. No arrests, no police, and it was all over in a few minutes.
So while the demonstrators made some poor choices, Citibank made some EXTREMELY poor choices.
As of right now, public officials are vastly more intimidated by the power of Wall Street than by the power of the people, and so they do the bidding of the former group, rather than the latter.
The über-goal of Occupy Wall Street is to empower people to intimidate government officials even more than the ownership class does. If that can be achieved, then the movement will succeed merely by surviving. Wall Street, after all, hasn’t got a list of demands that it makes one protest at a time; it exerts constant, unyielding pressure on the engines of power and arranges to continue to bully policymakers in perpetuity. If the Occupy movement expands and persists, it can conceivably arrange to bully policymakers even more fiercely. That would result in the achievement of real democracy, and all of the policy goals that implies.
When you’ve seen your soldiers die protecting a fuel convoy, you know that the need for clean energy and efficiency is real, urgent, and transcends political squabbling.
Last week four high-ranking officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines spoke out in support of a clean energy future for America. They all see our dependence on oil as a growing threat to our nation security.
“The military knows climate change is happening and that our current energy posture is a growing threat to national security,” write the generals and Admiral McGinn. “Clean energy is a solution we must pursue.”
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