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"Corporate chain retailers homogenize communities, taking what was once local money and transforming..."

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:48:02 -0500

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Corporate chain retailers homogenize communities, taking what was once local money and transforming it into corporate revenue. Supporting locally owned businesses does not only preserve communities—it makes the difference between local economic growth and fueling corporate greed.

For every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 remains in the local economy. If this money is spent at a big-box mart or chain store, only $14 remains while the rest is redistributed at corporate headquarters. This works because local businesses typically follow what has become known as the “local multiplier effect”—instead of outsourcing labor and redirecting profits to the corporate machine, local business owners invest in local labor and keep their profits in the local economy.

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- Beyond the Banks: 3 More Ways to Move Your Money Away from Corporations | | AlterNet

"Imagine how much harder the last three years would have been without the safeguards erected over the..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:41:06 -0500

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Imagine how much harder the last three years would have been without the safeguards erected over the past 80 years, in many cases with bipartisan support. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance are the broadest, but there are also the programs specifically targeted toward low-income Americans: the earned income tax credit, community health centers, school lunch programs, and food stamps, to name a few.

These policies have two things in common. They’ve historically enjoyed high levels of support, not just from the Democratic Party, but from Republicans as well. And today’s GOP plans to dismantle or seriously weaken all of them, setting back almost a century of progress.

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- Compassionate Conservatism? 4 Popular Safety-Net Programs Tea Party Republicans Have Turned Against in the Age of Obama | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet

"According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:20:05 -0500

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a higher percentage of Americans is living in extreme poverty than they have ever measured before. In 2010, we were told that the economy was recovering, but the truth is that the number of the “very poor” soared to heights never seen previously. Back in 1993 and back in 2009, the rate of extreme poverty was just over 6 percent, and that represented the worst numbers on record. But in 2010, the rate of extreme poverty hit a whopping 6.7 percent. That means that one out of every 15 Americans is now considered to be “very poor”. For many people, this is all very confusing because their guts are telling them that things are getting worse and yet the mainstream media keeps telling them that everything is just fine. Hopefully this article will help people realize that the plight of the poorest of the poor continues to deteriorate all across the United States. In addition, hopefully this article will inspire many of you to lend a hand to those that are truly in need.”

- Extreme Poverty Is Now at Record Levels — 19 Statistics About the Poor That Will Absolutely Astound You | | AlterNet

"The pressure from Occupy Wall Street on the big banks, combined with organizing efforts from many..."

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:38:45 -0500

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The pressure from Occupy Wall Street on the big banks, combined with organizing efforts from many progressive groups, including New Bottom Line, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Rebuild the Dream, put some significant force behind the actions this weekend. Several people who moved their money shared their experiences with me.

“Once I started getting involved in Occupy Wall Street, I became much more conscious of my corporate consumption. I realized that some of the financial choices I had made without thinking — without even realizing they were choices — were, in fact, pro-neoliberal political decisions. Then I decided it was time to reverse some of those decisions,” Ned Resnikoff, a graduate student in CUNY’s Labor Studies department, told me.

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- Move Your Money Day a Success; Over $50 Million Withdrawn From Big Banks | | AlterNet

"The New Bottom Line reports that in California alone there are 2,107,984 mortgages underwater. Many..."

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:41:05 -0500

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The New Bottom Line reports that in California alone there are 2,107,984 mortgages underwater. Many of those drowning in debt and in danger of losing their homes are our union members. When our building trades leaders say that 40% of their members are on the bench they are talking about the 40% of their members most likely to face foreclosure. The link can be graphically made between unemployment and foreclosure by using our hiring halls for mortgage workshops and mobilizing centers for home defense. The dispatcher announces to the hall: “If you do not go out on a job you go out to a home defense”

Recently in San Pedro I sat in on a meeting between ACCE and the leadership of our powerful longshore Local 13 whose members work the Ports of LA and Long Beach. Many of our members are not getting their hours and are underwater. ACCE offered to do a mortgage workshop and home defense seminar at the union hall. That will lead to education and inevitably action on the streets. One of our Local 13 members already joined ACCE because they worked with him to save his house. The “job tape” which tells our members in a recording about the prospect for work on the coming shifts can also announce the latest home defense in the area.

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- OWS and Unions: How to Defend People About to Lose Their Homes | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet

"“That’s one of the things, debt really does tie the 99 percent together. Everyone who is under..."

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:21:05 -0500

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“That’s one of the things, debt really does tie the 99 percent together. Everyone who is under the 99 percentile saw a debt runup in the 2000s,” Mike Konczal, finance blogger and fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, told me. “You can talk about ‘the richest 1 percent makes this much money,’ but part of what they’re making is debt. Their wealth is a claim on everyone else’s future income.”

That debt was for many years a substitute for wages in the pockets of many Americans. As incomes stagnated or even shrank, credit cards and home equity filled the gap—until the housing bubble popped, leaving millions underwater on their mortgages, owing more than their homes were worth, and unable to get more credit cards or even make the minimum payments on the ones they had.

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- Debtor’s Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks? | | AlterNet

"There’s no doubt that this economy is especially grim for young people. Unemployment among..."

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 07:20:18 -0500

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There’s no doubt that this economy is especially grim for young people. Unemployment among young adults continues to hover around 18 percent, and a report by the Federal Reserve found that full-time undergraduate students are borrowing 63 percent more for school than they did a decade ago. (Outstanding student-loan debt broke the trillion-dollar mark for the first time this year.) Young people have few prospects for decent jobs. This bleak situation is clearly a driving factor behind the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement; studies suggest that the “occupiers” skew young, don’t have a lot of income and suffer from a much higher rate of unemployment than the country as a whole.

The Pew study’s main finding is that, “in 2009, households headed by adults ages 65 and older possessed 42% more median net worth (assets minus debt)” than they did in 1984, but that trend was reversed in younger households. In 2009, “households headed by adults younger than 35 had 68% less wealth than households of their same-aged counterparts had in 1984.”

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- Pew Report on Young-Old Wealth Gap is Misleading and Divisive; Could Fuel Intergenerational Class War | Economy | AlterNet

"You really have to start with the money. The labor side has raised more than $30 million. It has..."

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:21:05 -0500

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You really have to start with the money. The labor side has raised more than $30 million. It has momentum going for so long because it had to start by collecting signatures to put the issue on the ballot to begin with. To get those signatures, it had to really amass a wide network of volunteers. Many of those volunteers stayed on once it was on the ballot and time to campaign for repeal of the bill itself. With that money and volunteer base and momentum, the labor coalition has been able to set up an expansive network of field offices and operations and has really focused on direct voter contact for months: door knocking, lots of phone banks, et cetera. The media face of its campaign has by and large been firefighters, police officers and teachers.

There’s a stark contrast between how the two sides are running their campaigns. We Are Ohio, the labor group, is sticking to public workers and not using the traditional tactic of having politicians out front. The primary pitchman for the pro-Issue 2 side is the governor, John Kasich. He’s been crisscrossing the state and has been the featured speaker at seemingly dozens of traditional political rallies

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- 5 Things You Should Know About Tuesday’s Vote on Ohio’s Anti-Union Bill (Labor’s Winning) | | AlterNet

Don’t mess with teachers and firefighters—and also, look what happens when you put the police on the side of working people.

"A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the..."

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:10:35 -0500

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A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%.

Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3% of the population, or 47 million people — one in six Americans — were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

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- The Moral Force of OWS is Tackling the Devastating War on the Poor | | AlterNet

Frances Fox Piven on Occupy Wall Street.

"I interviewed one of Olsen’s friends, Aaron Hinde, also an Iraq War veteran. He was at Occupy San..."

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:40:05 -0400

“I interviewed one of Olsen’s friends, Aaron Hinde, also an Iraq War veteran. He was at Occupy San Francisco when he started getting a series of frenzied tweets about a vet down in Oakland. Hinde raced to the hospital to see his friend. He later told me a little about him: “Scott came to San Francisco about three months ago from Wisconsin, where he actually participated in the holding of the State Capitol over there. Scott’s probably one of the warmest, kindest guys I know. He’s just one of those people who always has a smile on his face and never has anything negative to say. … And he believed in the Occupy movement, because it’s very obvious what’s happening in this country, especially to us veterans. We’ve had our eyes opened by serving and going to war overseas. So, there’s a small contingency of us out here, and we’re all very motivated and dedicated.””

- “We’ve Had Our Eyes Opened … ” Veterans Joining the 99% Movement | | AlterNet

"At last count, Steven Katz owed $80,000 on his six credit cards, and he has no intention of paying..."

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:22:06 -0400

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At last count, Steven Katz owed $80,000 on his six credit cards, and he has no intention of paying any of it off. In fact, he’d like to show you how to be like him—a “credit terrorist” in open revolt against the banking system.

Debtorboards.com (“Sue Your Creditor and Win!”), a five-year-old online forum where he’s collected countless tricks and tactics for evading and repelling persistent creditors. He’s written how-tos on shielding your assets from seizure, luring collection agencies into expensive lawsuits, and frustrating private investigators looking for debtors on the run. He’s even infiltrated the bill collectors’ forums, where he’s been tagged a “credit jihadist” and his site’s been called a “credit terrorist training camp,” a label he embraces. “Debtorboards is one of the biggest and most successful temper tantrums ever,” the 59-year-old Katz boasts. The site has more than 10,000 members—double what it had in 2009.

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- 50 Ways to Leave Your Banker: What Happened When One Man Just Refused to Pay $80,000 in Credit Card Debt | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet

"Nurses from around the world will rally in four cities today, November 3, with one demand: A..."

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 09:07:30 -0400

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Nurses from around the world will rally in four cities today, November 3, with one demand: A financial transaction tax to discourage speculation and fund economic recovery.

In San Francisco, they’ll march from a Federal Reserve Bank to Wells Fargo headquarters. In Los Angeles, they’ll march from Occupy LA to U.S. Bank. In Washington D.C., they’ll march on the Treasury Department, then lobby Congress. And in Cannes, France, nurses from four continents will rally at the G-20 Summit, which is hosting the leaders of major world economies — including transaction tax holdout Barack Obama.

Today’s actions are spearheaded by National Nurses United, the largest American nurses’ union, with backing from the AFL-CIO, Oxfam, the World Wildlife Fund, and two international union federations: Public Services International and the International Trade Union Confederation. The FTT is expected to be a major topic of discussion at the G-20 summit, having gained the support of German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy — both influential conservative heads of state. In the United States, the 170,000-member NNU has been pushing for the tax for months; its campaign has included June demonstrations outside the Chamber of Commerce and the New York Stock exchange and a national “Tax Wall Street” day of action September 1.

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- ‘Tax Timmy’s Friends’: Nurses Follow Obama to France Demanding He Tax Geithner’s Wall Street Cronies | | AlterNet

"The response of the country’s financial elites to the protests in Liberty Plaza and around the..."

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:00:05 -0400

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The response of the country’s financial elites to the protests in Liberty Plaza and around the country seem not all that different from the police and security guards nervously watching outside the Goldman office. They don’t want to overreact and show that the actions are working, but they clearly wish they had a way to shut them down.

It’s been over a month since New York’s financial district found a mini-society growing in one of its parks, a month of impromptu marches, organized bank withdrawals, teach-ins, arrests, and creative actions of all kinds. But aside from the snarled “Get a job!” from angry be-suited passersby, how have the financial elites who are the target of the protests reacted?

Are the occupiers, for lack of a better phrase, getting inside their heads?

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- Biometric Door Locks and Bulletproof Windows: How Occupy Wall Street Is Scaring the Heck out of the 1% | | AlterNet

"The strike, said activist Louise Michel at an October 31 press conference, was spurred “by a need to..."

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:40:05 -0400

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The strike, said activist Louise Michel at an October 31 press conference, was spurred “by a need to end police attacks on our communities, to defend our schools and libraries against closures, and against this economic system.” The occupiers, Michel continued, called for “a day of action in which the circulation of capital is blockaded, students walk out of their schools and people stage various occupations” around the city. The activists vowed to protest any businesses that keep their doors open during the strike.

They also planned to shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the United States and the scene of violent clashes between labor activists and police during the 2003 anti-war protests.

With only five short days to organize a city-wide action, the logistics appeared daunting. Since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, unions have been legally barred from officially participating in strikes “in support of other workers” – general strikes have been effectively illegal since then. (Interestingly, the last general strike in the U.S. occurred in Oakland, California, in 1946. Its epicenter, on the corner of Broadway and Telegraph, was just blocks away from Occupy Oakland’s current “camp” in front of City Hall.) But in those five days, an enormous amount of momentum has built up behind the action. SEIU, UAW, the Alameda Labor Council – an umbrella group representing over 100 local unions – and several other locals, including two area teachers’ unions, endorsed the strike, coming as close to officially participating in the event as legally possible.

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- Occupy Oakland Attempts to Shut Down City with America’s First General Strike in 65 Years | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet

"I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the..."

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:01:41 -0400

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I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s, although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that we’re going to get out of it, even among unemployed people. It’ll get better. There was a militant labor movement organizing, CIO was organizing. It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are very frightening to the business world. You could see it in the business press at the time. A sit-down strike was just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. Also, the New Deal legislations were beginning to come under popular pressure. There was just a sense that somehow we’re going to get out of it.

It’s quite different now. Now there’s kind of a pervasive sense of hopeless, or, I think, despair. I think it’s quite new in American history and it has an objective basis. In the 1930s unemployed “working people” could anticipate realistically that the jobs are going to come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today — and the unemployment level in manufacturing today is approximately like the Depression — if current tendencies persist, then those jobs aren’t going to come back. The change took place in the ’70s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying reasons, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Bernard, who has done a lot of work on it, is a falling rate of profit. That, with other factors, led to major changes in the economy — a reversal of the 700 years of progress towards industrialization and development. We turned to a process of deindustrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued, but overseas (it’s very profitable, but no good for the workforce). Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise, producing things people need, to financial manipulation. Financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

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- Noam Chomsky Speaks to Occupy: If We Want a Chance at a Decent Future, the Movement Here and Around the World Must Grow | | AlterNet

"Here’s where we are in the course of human events right now: 14 million Americans are jobless and..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:20:06 -0400

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Here’s where we are in the course of human events right now: 14 million Americans are jobless and millions more are underemployed. Those still working have seen wages fall after 30 years of stagnation. The 1 Percent of top wage earners could buy and sell the rest of us without so much as a low balance warning on their checking account apps. The tenth-of-1 Percent earns millions more every year in barely taxed capital gains and derivatives while everyone else struggles to pay down trillions of dollars of debt. Massive, growing income inequality is now belatedly acknowledged by political and media elites, but many of them seem befuddled as to its cause and importance.

It is our belief that many of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous bust unscathed. The 1 Percent is insulated from the negative effects of its disastrous policies by its paid representatives in government. The elite 1 Percent ensures the slavish loyalty of its political handmaidens by flooding their campaign coffers with money squeezed from the 99 Percent as deposits, fees and interest.

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- A New Declaration of Independence: 10 Ideas for Taking America Back from the 1% | | AlterNet

"It actually hadn’t become clear to me how much the discourse had shifted until I taught urban..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:00:06 -0400

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It actually hadn’t become clear to me how much the discourse had shifted until I taught urban poverty and inequality this past week to my Anthropology 101 students at Baruch College. I have taught urban poverty and inequality every year for the past 3 years and every year have similar debates in my class: when I start the section off by asking them why people are poor the first response I usually get from students is that, simply put, people are lazy and they don’t want to work. I see my job then to be to explain the structural causes of poverty and that simply saying, “People are lazy and don’t want to work” is actually a really problematic way of thinking. Explaining all of this has been so much work in my classes that usually I dread the week on poverty and inequality because it is a week where I am tired.

But last week when I asked my students this question the first response I got in my classes was that “People can’t find jobs” and the next one was, “There is a huge wealth gap” and the the third was that, “We have an economic system that needs poor people”. I was shocked. I have never gotten responses like this before. And then I found myself explaining to my students that it was because of all these reasons that I am anti-capitalist. I felt like I was coming out to them, exposing myself in a way that I haven’t before. And they listened, they were interested, they thought I was being crazy and idealistic but they cared and it felt really good to have these debates with them. I left teaching that evening feeling energized by our discussions.

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- Occupy Wall Street is Transforming its Participants, Our Country, and Democracy | | AlterNet

"The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the..."

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:50:15 -0400

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The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

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- How the Austerity Class Rules Washington | | AlterNet

"“If our goal is not to offend anyone,” Lerner told me, echoing a point he makes in his..."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:20:05 -0400

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“If our goal is not to offend anyone,” Lerner told me, echoing a point he makes in his essay, “we might as well not do anything at all.”

I agree with one of his central points here: The more labor is seen as a narrow special interest group, representing the small pools of workers who have union contracts, the more its power will continue to decline. It will be left fighting defensive battles to hold on to the remaining vestiges of the New Deal, even as these are successively whittled away.

In order to change this, labor needs to address the issues that are of central concern to working people in this country, even if those issues fall outside the workplace. This means taking on the big banks, fighting foreclosures, pushing for public investment in our neighborhoods, reversing efforts to strip the state of revenue so that we can pay for essential social services.

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- What Role for Labor in the Progressive Uprising? A Conversation With Labor Strategist Stephen Lerner | Activism & Vision | AlterNet

"Those were heady years, as heady, I have no doubt, as this moment is for you. But that doesn’t mean..."

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:05:06 -0400

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Those were heady years, as heady, I have no doubt, as this moment is for you. But that doesn’t mean our moments were the same. Not by a long shot. Here’s one major difference: like so many of the young of that distant era, I was surfing the crest of a wave of American wealth and wellbeing. We never thought about, but also never doubted, that if this moment ended, there would be perfectly normal jobs — good ones — awaiting us, should we want them. It never crossed our minds that we couldn’t land on our feet in America, if we cared to.

In that sense, while we certainly talked about putting everything on the line, we didn’t; in truth, economically speaking, we couldn’t. Although you, the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other encampments around the country, are a heterogeneous crew, many of you, I know, graduated from college in recent years.

Most of you were ushered off those leafy campuses (or their urban equivalents) with due pomp and ceremony, and plenty of what passes for inspiration. I’m ready to bet, though, that in those ceremonies no one bothered to mention that you (and your parents) had essentially been conned, snookered out of tens of thousands of dollars on the implicit promise that such an “education” would usher you into a profession or at least a world of decent jobs.

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- “I Wanted Something Productive to Do”: Creating Space for Books and Learning at Occupy Wall Street | | AlterNet