Wallstreet video: Nobody can predict the moment of revolution

Nobody Can Predict The Moment Of Revolution from ivarad on Vimeo.

A spotlight on Wall Street greed

Doug Singsen and Will Russell report from New York City on Occupy Wall Street.

From Socialist Worker US

September 28, 2011

New York police on a rampage against demonstrators from Occupy Wall Street (Brennan Cavanaugh)

DAILY PROTESTS and an ongoing park occupation in the financial district of New York City are gaining growing national attention as an expression of anger against Wall Street greed--and now the brutality of police against demonstrators, after the NYPD savagely attacked a march from the encampment to Union Square on September 24.

The hundreds of people who have participated in Occupy Wall Street since it began September 17 are protesting economic inequality and the power wielded by banks and big corporations in U.S. society. The occupiers say they represent the 99 percent of society that is fed up with the massive wealth and corruption of the top 1 percent.

The initial demonstration drew some 500 people to Bowling Green Park, site of the famous Charging Bull sculpture that is a famous symbol of Wall Street. Organizers had hoped for thousands to turn out, but activists continued with their aim of establishing an encampment--it was set up in nearby Zuccotti Park.

The protesters renamed the park Liberty Plaza in homage to Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo--the symbol of this year's Egyptian revolution. In a stroke of happenstance, it turned out Liberty Plaza was actually the original name of Zuccotti Park.

The number of regular participants began to build over the week that followed, but interest turned intense after the September 24 police attack on marchers from the encampment.

More than 1,000 activists had started the Saturday with a march on Wall Street, before turning around and heading north, peacefully marching more than two miles to reach Union Square. There, they were met by a massive police resistance.

125th Anniversary of Haymarket Affair Celebrates Origin of May Day

By David Moberg

An illustrator's version of the bomb that triggered the "Haymarket affair," aka the Haymarket massacre of 1886.

Chicago in 1886 was the most advanced, cutting-edge capitalist city in the world. Industrialization, commodification, and mechanization on an unprecedented scale transformed the raw materials of the newly opened West in far more efficient ways than anyone had previously imagined.

But this new economic machine transformed workers—mainly European immigrants but also once-independent farmers and mechanics—into proletarian drudges working brutally long days. When the economy took one of its frequent dives, as it had not long before, employers slashed wages and crushed workers’ organizations.

Why We Revolt

When and how does the moment come when people stop believing in the power that has ruled them? When and how do ordinary people discover their own power?

by Rebecca Solnit

Yes! Magazine

A protester in Cairo during the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak.

Photo by Kodak Afga

Revolution is as unpredictable as an earthquake and as beautiful as spring. Its coming is always a surprise, but its nature should not be.

Revolution is a phase, a mood, like spring, and just as spring has its buds and showers, so revolution has its ebullience, its bravery, its hope, and its solidarity. Some of these things pass. The women of Cairo do not move as freely in public as they did during those few precious weeks when the old rules were suspended and everything was different. But the old Egypt is gone and Egyptians’ sense of themselves—and our sense of them—is forever changed.

No revolution vanishes without effect. The Prague Spring of 1968 was brutally crushed, but 21 years later when a second wave of revolution liberated Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubcek, who had been the reformist Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, returned to give heart to the people from a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square: "The government is telling us that the street is not the place for things to be solved, but I say the street was and is the place. The voice of the street must be heard."

But when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?

 

"We're being told that we need to sacrifice, while those people have never sacrificed."

KRISTINE MATTIS, Graduate Student, Activist with Teaching Assistants' Association, Madison: "It seems clear to everyone now that this is a bigger struggle than just a struggle for the unions. It's a struggle against those of the corporate and elite who have been paying fewer and fewer taxes and who caused the entire economic breakdown on Wall Street, a struggle between the rest of us who are being forced to pay for it and being forced to take losses in our wages, losses in our health-care benefits, losses in our pensions because of that. It was sort of a small battle against the budget repair bill, and now it's really just a war of the working people against the people they see as the real group who has not done their fair share of dealing with the economic hardships that we're all facing. We're being told that we need to sacrifice, while those people have never sacrificed. And I think it has to do with just all of us having come together and discussing this issue and probably talking to one another rather than listening to the mainstream media and realizing more broadly where these problems emanate--from where they emanate and what are the true solutions."

Michael Moore: "America Is NOT Broke"

by Michael Moore

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

Chris Hedges: 'US Wars to Continue Until its Economy Busts'

A Futures Commission to forecast what the world's rich will do

In conclusion to his article Ruling on Behalf of Wall Street's "Super Rich": The Financial End Time has Arrived, US left-wing professor Michael Hudson writes:

What we need is a Futures Commission to forecast just what will the rich do with the victory they have won. As administered by President Obama and his designated appointees Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke, their policy is financially and fiscally unsustainable. Providing tax incentives for debt leveraging – for most of the population to go into debt to the rich, whose taxes are all but abolished – is shrinking the economy. This will lead to even deeper financial crises, employer defaults and fiscal insolvency at the state, local and federal levels. Future presidents will call for new bailouts, using a strategy much like going to military war. A financial war requires an emergency to rush through Congress, as occurred in 2008-09. Mr. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Mr. Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.

The unsustainability of the US economy that Hudson writes about is leading many people, including Socialist Worker, to the conclusion that capitalism is entering its end time, however long that might last. The global response of socialists must be to lead a broad mass challenge to neo-liberalism right now and plan ahead for a seismic shift to a post-capitalist world.

To find out more about these ideas read Grant Morgan's compelling essay ‘BEWARE! THE END IS NIGH - Why global capitalism is tipping towards collapse, and how we can act for a decent future’.

How Obama got from hope to hopeless

In the U.S. Barack Obama’s Democratic party have suffered a big defeat in the mid-term elections, loosing control of the House of Representatives.

Alan Maass from the US Socialist Worker newspaper argues that when Obama swept to victory two years ago, the Democrats were handed a golden opportunity to transform U.S. politics for years to come—and they blew it.

President Obama during a meeting with Cabinet members (Pete Souza)

BARACK OBAMA thinks you really ought to be more patient.

“It took time to free the slaves,” he said in a speech at the end of September. “It took time for women to get the vote. It took time for workers to get the right to organize.”

Well...he’s certainly right about that. The struggles of the past that changed the world didn’t happen overnight.

But Obama wasn’t just making an observation about history. This was his excuse for how little the Democrats have done to meet the expectations of their supporters—they need more time.

The real question is: More time for what? The Democrats haven’t moved at even a snail’s pace on so many of the issues that motivated millions of people to support them in 2008—keeping people under threat of foreclosure in their homes, creating good-paying jobs, reducing the staggering inequality between rich and poor, reversing the shrill intolerance of the Christian Right, ending America’s wars and occupations around the globe.

Hillary Clinton comes bearing poisoned chalice for NZ

By Murray Horton

CAFCA 

As if 2,000 earthquakes haven’t been enough punishment for Christchurch, now we’re going to have Hillary Clinton visiting us (and Wellington) this week.

A major focus for her NZ visit  will be the negotiations which are well underway for the US and a number of other countries to join an expanded Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (currently comprising NZ, Chile, Brunei, and Singapore, and known as the P4 Agreement), with 2011 as the target to seal the deal. This will be used as the backdoor means to secure a US/NZ Free Trade Agreement.

The postwar war in Iraq

Eric Ruder explains what we should – and shouldn’t – expect from the “end of combat operations” in Iraq proclaimed by the Obama administration.

from Socialist Worker US

“WE WON. It’s over, America. We brought democracy to Iraq.” Those were the words of a soldier from the 4th Stryker Brigade, supposedly among the last U.S. combat troops to leave Iraq, two weeks ahead of President Barack Obama's August 31 deadline for withdrawal.

This is a watershed moment for Iraq. But not because the U.S. occupation is over or any of the other reasons put forward by the mainstream media.

Taking action outside Fort Hood

Cindy Beringer reports from Texas on an antiwar action outside Fort Hood.
from Socialist Worker US

Protesters organized by Iraq Veterans Against War march outside Fort Hood in July 

(photo Madeleine Dubus)

 
WHEN THE buses carrying the first group of soldiers of the 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment (ACR) stealthily approached the gates of Fort Hood in Texas, the protesters waiting outside had already won a victory.

Members of the regiment have seen some of the worst fighting of the war in Iraq over the course of multiple deployments. At least 50 soldiers have physical and mental diagnoses that should prohibit their return to military duty, and many others probably have not sought treatment. And yet, the buses were there in order to deploy these soldiers again.

A protest campaign against the 3rd ACR's redeployment had already brought unwelcome attention to the military's lack of concern for its soldiers.

On August 22, activists and supporters were at it again. They gathered at Fort Hood in Killeen to be a part of a direct action against the redeployment of the first group of soldiers.

New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina

By Jonathan Neale

Socialist Worker UK

They call it “the storm” here, like there never was any other storm—but also like you don’t say the other word, just in case.

On 29 August 2005—five years ago this Sunday—Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The storm surge burst through the levees, flooding the city.

Five years on, I’m seeing how resilient the city is. The New Orleans Saints won the Superbowl this year. People still have that painted all over the cars. It’s how they know they came back.

The first game of the season is the week after the anniversary, and there’s going to be a huge party.
But the shadow of the hurricane still hangs over the city.

In working class neighbourhoods many houses are still boarded up—because people moved to Houston or elsewhere during the storm. They needed to get jobs, and have no guarantee of employment should they return.

Katrina wasn’t the worst climate change disaster ever, or even in the last few years. But it happened in the US, and it changed the face of American politics.

David Rovics tour of New Zealand starts tonight

Radical singer song-writer David Rovics is back in Aotearoa again, playing the first gig of his tour in Christchurch tonight.

UNITYblog interviewed David last time he was here, a year ago.

Full tour details below.

The crisis of the American working class

From Lenin’s Tomb

Obama and the Democrats are in trouble. Barring some unforeseeable development on a par with Katrina in terms of scale, the GOP is going to romp the mid-terms on a much reduced turn-out. The capitalist media will say that this is because of the Tea Party 'movement', or because the president moved too far to the left in a centre-right nation. Left-wing anger, and the disillusionment of working class constituencies previously supportive of Obama, will be ignored.

Obama's dual constituency in the 2008 election comprised the majority of the working class, and the dominant fraction of big capital, particularly the finance, insurance and real estate industries (the rentiers in other words) who gave Obama $37.5m toward his campaign. In the 2010 mid-term Congressional elections, the signs are that much of the working class component of that electoral coalition will fail to mobilise for the Democrats. This has already been foreshadowed in the Massachusetts by-election, where the core working class vote collapsed - and, of course, the media blamed it on Obama's excessive radicalism over healthcare, despite Massachusetts favouring socialised medicine by a wider margin than most states.

US trapped in depression

The US workforce shrank by 652,000 in June, one of the sharpest contractions ever. The rate of hourly earnings fell 0.1pc. Wages are flirting with deflation. 

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
From The Telegraph UK
July 04, 2010

“The economy is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession,” said Robert Reich, former US labour secretary. “All the booster rockets for getting us beyond it are failing.”

“Home sales are down. Retail sales are down. Factory orders in May suffered their biggest tumble since March of last year. So what are we doing about it? Less than nothing,” he said.

California is tightening faster than Greece. State workers have seen a 14pc fall in earnings this year due to forced furloughs. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is cutting pay for 200,000 state workers to the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour to cover his $19bn (£15bn) deficit.

Can Illinois be far behind? The state has a deficit of $12bn and is $5bn in arrears to schools, nursing homes, child care centres, and prisons. “It is getting worse every single day,” said state comptroller Daniel Hynes. “We are not paying bills for absolutely essential services. That is obscene.”

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.

Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.

The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.

The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s.

“Legions of individuals have been left with stale skills, and little prospect of finding meaningful work, and benefits that are being exhausted. By our math the crop of people who are unemployed but not receiving a check amounts to 9.2m.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill are filibustering a bill to extend the dole for up to 1.2m jobless facing an imminent cut-off. Dean Heller from Vermont called them “hobos”. This really is starting to feel like 1932.

Washington’s fiscal stimulus is draining away. It peaked in the first quarter, yet even then the economy eked out a growth rate of just 2.7pc. This compares with 5.1pc, 9.3pc, 8.1pc and 8.5pc in the four quarters coming off recession in the early 1980s.

The housing market is already crumbling as government props are pulled away. The expiry of homebuyers’ tax credit led to a 30pc fall in the number of buyers signing contracts in May. “It is cataclysmic,” said David Bloom from HSBC.

Federal tax rises are automatically baked into the pie. The Congressional Budget Office said fiscal policy will swing from
a net +2pc of GDP to -2pc by late 2011. The states and counties may have to cut as much as $180bn.

Investors are starting to chew over the awful possibility that America’s recovery will stall just as Asia hits the buffers. China’s manufacturing index has been falling since January, with a downward lurch in June to 50.4, just above the break-even line of 50. Momentum seems to be flagging everywhere, whether in Australian building permits, Turkish exports, or Japanese industrial output.

On Friday, Jacques Cailloux from RBS put out a “double-dip alert” for Europe. “The risk is rising fast. Absent an effective policy intervention to tackle the debt crisis on the periphery over coming months, the European economy will double dip in 2011,” he said.

It is obvious what that policy should be for Europe, America, and Japan. If budgets are to shrink in an orderly fashion over several years – as they must, to avoid sovereign debt spirals – then central banks will have to cushion the blow keeping monetary policy ultra-loose for as long it takes.

The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. “It’s appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario,” said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed. His colleague Kevin Warsh said the pros and cons of purchasing more bonds should be subject to “strict scrutiny”, a comment I took as confirmation that the Fed Board is arguing internally about QE2.

Perhaps naively, I still think central banks have the tools to head off disaster. The question is whether they will do so fast enough, or even whether they wish to resist the chorus of 1930s liquidation taking charge of the debate. Last week the Bank for International Settlements called for combined fiscal and monetary tightening, lending its great authority to the forces of debt-deflation and mass unemployment. If even the BIS has lost the plot, God help us.

10,000 US workers protest on Wall Street

Auckland wasn’t the only city to see big protests last week, on Thursday 10,000 trade unionists and grassroots activists marched on wall street, in what Russia’s RT News described as, “The largest anti-Wall Street rally since the credit crunch has taken place in New York. Thousands of workers and trade union leaders marched in anger over lost jobs and ruined lives, demanding answers from the source of the trouble – the banks.”



Hat tip Credit Writedonws

More coverage from Democracy Now:

US health reform: A cause for celebration?

Alan Maass examines the claims made about the Barak Obama’s health care legislation.
From US Socialist Worker

Barack Obama signs health care legislation in front of Democratic lawmakers in the East Room of the White House (Lawrence Jackson)

LAST SUNDAY night (March 21) around 10 p.m., I was finishing up the next day’s edition of SocialistWorker.org when my e-mail inbox started filling up like a casino slot machine finally paying off.



The subject lines all had the same theme: “Historic legislation...” “Monumental effort...” “Accomplishment on a scale with Social Security...” “Salute this landmark achievement...”


The House had finally voted in favor of health care legislation, passed by the Senate and supported by the White House, and now liberal organizations were celebrating a long-delayed triumph on the issue that dominated the first year of the Obama presidency. Every pro-Democratic and progressive list-serve I’m on came alive.



Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!



Barack Obama e-mailed to thank me for my tireless efforts and for not listening to the people who said it couldn’t be done. His adviser David Plouffe even invited me to co-sign “this historic legislation.” On the BarackObama.com Web site, though—not actually in the East Room of the White House.



The enthusiasm extended beyond elected officials. “The health care reform bill passed by Congress and signed into law today by President Barack Obama is progressive reform at its finest—conceptually farsighted in design and pragmatically far reaching in scope,” wrote John Podesta of the liberal Center for American Progress.



Also weighing in were groups and figures who previously had criticized the legislation—people who protested the exclusion of voices advocating single-payer health care from the discussion; who warned that a bill without at least a strong “public option” for the uninsured was a disaster in the making; who opposed the so-called “Cadillac tax” on employer-provided insurance plans with halfway decent coverage.



One surprise came from Michael Moore, director of the excellent documentary Sicko about the health care crisis in the U.S. and a bitter opponent of both Republican smears of reform and Democratic concessions to the health care industry.

Michael Moore says US Healthcare Bill ‘A Victory for Capitalism’

 This is a long interview by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman and Sharif Abdel Kouddous with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore.

In the first half Moore talks about he thing’s Obama’s healthcare bill is ‘A Victory for Capitalism’.

It’s worth watching after the break though, because in the second half, Moore moves on to his disillusionment with Obama, while also attacking Ralph Nader (who has run several times as an anti-corporate Presidential candidate against the Republicans and Democrats).

He then goes on to outline his own “grassroots” strategy whereby left wing activists “take over” local Democrat Party branches and try to transform it into a party that will put power into the hands of working people...

I can’t even think of the best way to express how misguided that idea is, but then Moore himself wasn’t sounding too hopeful.

Obama's Democrats are failing

By Lance Selfa www.socialistworker.org

The Democrats’ failures to help ease the pain of the jobs crisis or promote real health care “reform” have created a political vacuum that the Republicans are trying to fill.

IN TWO consecutive national elections, in 2006 and 2008, voters handed the Democratic Party landslide victories. When Barack Obama took the oath of office for the presidency a little over one year ago, the Democrats held the strongest governing majority that either major party had had since the 1970s. One year later, in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s victory in a special Senate election in Massachusetts on January 19, the Democratic Party is reeling.

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