From Washingtonsblog.com

From Washingtonsblog:

Libertarians Support Wall Street Protest to End the Fed

Ron Paul says that the Wall Street protests are legitimate, and that they are really protesting against the Federal Reserve.

One of the protest organizers tells me that a large proportion of the protesters are Ron Paul supporters. Most of them believe that ending the Federal Reserve is the most important step to restore our country’s prosperity. See this, this and this.

Remember, even the Wall Street Journal has called for the Fed to be broken up.

As I have extensively documented, the Fed is largely responsible for the economic crisis, and has failed to meet a single one of its stated mandates (let alone its implied ones).

The Fed has been enabler-in-chief for the corruption rampant on Wall Street.

And as I noted Tuesday:

Some very well-known economists also support ending the Fed.

For example, Milton Friedman said:

This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System… and that the severity of each of the major contractions — 1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities…

Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank…

To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.

Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard also would like to end the Fed:

Given this dismal monetary and banking situation, given a 39:1 pyramiding of checkable deposits and currency on top of gold, given a Fed unchecked and out of control, given a world of fiat moneys, how can we possibly return to a sound noninflationary market money? The objectives, after the discussion in this work, should be clear: (a) to return to a gold standard, a commodity standard unhampered by government intervention; (b) to abolish the Federal Reserve System and return to a system of free and competitive banking; (c) to separate the government from money; and (d) either to enforce 100 percent reserve banking on the commercial banks, or at least to arrive at a system where any bank, at the slightest hint of nonpayment of its demand liabilities, is forced quickly into bankruptcy and liquidation. While the outlawing of fractional reserve as fraud would be preferable if it could be enforced, the problems of enforcement, especially where banks can continually innovate in forms of credit, make free banking an attractive alternative.

Congressmen Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich have introduced bills to abolish the Fed.

And as I noted last week, most Americans want the Fed ended or at least reined in:

At least 75% of the American people want a full audit of the Fed, and most were against reconfirming Bernanke.

Indeed, as Bloomberg noted last December:

A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s independent central bank, saying the U.S. Federal Reserve should either be brought under tighter political control or abolished outright, a poll shows.

***

Americans across the political spectrum say the Fed shouldn’t retain its current structure of independence. Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo.

As I have extensively documented, the Fed is largely responsible for the economic crisis, and has failed to meet a single one of its stated mandates (let alone its implied ones).

Indeed, the Founding Fathers despised the British central bank, and said that the right to create their own credit and currency was one of the core battles in the Revolutionary War.

Obama Is Not the Answer

Libertarians also point out that – while the Obama campaign and Democratic National Committee are trying to hijack the Wall Street protests – they have been part of the problem, not part of the solution.

They point out that Obama has appointed Wall Street insiders to all of his key economic posts, andaccepted more money from Goldman Sachs and the other big Wall Street banks than anyone else (andis still raking it in). As such, despite his populist rhetoric, he’s with Wall Street, not the protesters. Indeed, he is Wall Street.

They point out that Obama has continued the process of turning the U.S. into a banana republic, and whether you call it communism, fascism or crony capitalism, Obama has been at least as bad as Bush.

They point out that Obama has been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone who thinks high levels of unemployment are good.

They point out that Obama has been more brutal than Bush and has destroyed our liberties even fasterthan Bush.

For these reasons, libertarians correctly state that re-electing Obama is not the answer. And they note that Ron Paul’s consistent, decades-long positions are much closer to the American peoples’ demandsthan Obama’s.

Postscript: I voted for Obama. But anyone who still thinks Obama will save us is high.

On the other hand, libertarians have been out of power for a long time. Neoliberals and Neoconservatives – two masks on a single face of corruption – have been in the driver’s seat for decades. Libertarians should welcome the protests as a chance to challenge the status quo, to promote liberty and to end the Fed – the chief enabler of corruption in our country today.

Folks dismissing the Occupy protests as being Obama propaganda or left-wing haven’t yet learned the facts, are blaming the fact that the mainstream Democratic party is trying to infiltrate the movement on the protesters, or are letting Fox, Drudge or other mainstream news sources blow a sub-set of the overall protests out of proportion. See this, this and this. Indeed, as the Associated Press notes, the protesters are fed up with BOTH mainstream parties.

Posted in Politics / World News | 7 Comments

OFFICIAL List of Occupy Wall Street Protest Demands

Posted on October 6, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

OFFICIAL List of Demands from Wall Street Protest

Here is the official list of demands:

We – the 99% – DEMAND …

1.

2.

!!!

No Official Demands

If you can’t see the list, you’re not alone.

Contrary to widespread myth, there is not an official list.

When Fox Nation reports on an official list, they’re wrong.

When brilliant and dedicated activists point to official lists, they’re mistaken.

When people call OccupyWallSt.org the official site for the protests and cite various lists there as official (there were over 1,000 different proposed lists at last count), they are incorrect . That website itself states:

OccupyWallSt.org is the unofficial de facto online resource for the ongoing protests happening on Wall Street. We are an affinity group committed to doing technical support work for resistance movements. We are not affiliated with Adbusters, anonymous or any other organization.

And when people say that the protest is made up of all Democrats, liberals, hippies, communists, libertarians, fascists or conservatives, they are wrong. See this, this and this.

As I noted last week:

High-level economists support the protests, so don’t write them off as being uninformed or without goals or focus. The mainstream media should “play dumb” … everyone knows what “We’re the 99%” means, and that the failure of the richest 1% to follow the rule of law or the wishes of the American people, and their corruption and manipulation of the economic and political system are some of the core structural problems which must be changed.

Posted in Politics / World News | 4 Comments

SPREADING LIKE WILDFIRE

Posted on October 6, 2011 by WashingtonsBlog

By Jim Quinn, who writes at The Burning Platform.

Sorry MSM, but your storyline of communists, socialists, unions, and Obama supporters being the force behind the Occupy Movement is nothing but bullshit. All you old farts on this blog who think the Millenials aren’t worth spit, are about to get a rude awakening. This Fourth Turning is starting to take shape. [Note from Washington's Blog: "The Fourth Turning" is a book on the cycles of history, endorsed by such a diverse group as Newt Gingrich on the right and Al Gore on the left. "Millenials" is, basically, a group of young people within a certain age range.] A generational war is coming. The Millenials are not dumb. They can see they’ve been screwed by the older generations. They didn’t create this debt. They didn’t make promises that can’t be kept. They didn’t build an unsustainable military empire. But they are the ones being stuck with the debt and no jobs. They have a right to be pissed off. The future is still cloudy, but I think I see conflict and chaos coming to a city near you.

College Sympathizers Of Occupy Wall Street Walk Out Of Class In Support

Earlier today, students from at least 100 college campuses around the country walked out of class in a show of solidarity and support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

While the Occupy Wall Street movement has yet to present a coherent agenda or message, the college students who marched today in support of it were clear about their concerns. They banded together to make their voices heard, many citing the rising amount of student loan debt and the increasing cost of college, in addition to a dearth of decent jobs for recent graduates.

“With budget cuts and tuition increases, students’ voices are demanding to be heard,” said Conor Tomás Reed, 30, a participant in today’s walkout. Reed teaches at the City University of New York and is also a student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It’s a collective roar, and students are beyond disgusted and fed up. The time is especially ripe for this kind of mobilization.”

Today marked a significant day for the movement as a whole, both for its organization and coordination among college campuses and for its ability to mobilize supporters across not just a city, but an entire nation.

In New York, Reed walked out of his graduate school class at 3:45 p.m. to join his fellow classmates in a caravan to downtown Manhattan. Once in Foley Square, they planned to march in solidarity with the thousands of other protesters headed towards Liberty Plaza.

“It’s a fever. It’s really spreading like a fever,” said Reed, who was also among the more than 700 individuals arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge during the Occupy Wall Street protests last Saturday. He compared today’s student walkouts with the lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s.

While getting college students to skip class doesn’t necessarily qualify as a radical act of political engagement, Shamus Khan, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, sees a larger, possibly more unifying force at work in today’s walkouts.

“There’s this broad sense of alienation among this generation, both in terms of how they’re going to get jobs and where the direction of the nation is headed,” said Khan. “There’s this generational collective anxiety of where they belong in the world and where the world is headed. They don’t feel secure in the world they’re about to inherit.”

The collective anxiety has yielded collective action. In New York, while student organizers at CUNY and SUNY had originally planned the walkout for Wednesday afternoon, word quickly spread to other schools and to other cities.

By Sunday night, the New York-led student walkout had gained national traction, as Occupy Colleges, a Los Angeles-based grassroots group, aimed to get as many colleges on board as possible.

Occupy College’s Facebook page announced a countrywide student walkout at noon, local time. It read: “Do not go to school. Go fight for yours and everybody else’s rights. The time is now to join our fellow 99 percent!” By Wednesday morning, 75 schools had registered; by the end of the day, dozens of pictures of student-led walkouts littered their Facebook wall.

On the West Coast, Occupy Colleges includes student representation from UCLA, California State University at Bakersfield, California State University at Northridge and College of the Canyons. An ill-timed rainstorm apparently got in the way of afternoon organizing in southern California. According to Natalia, one of the facilitators at Occupy Colleges who declined the use of her last name, a planned walkout at the University of California, Los Angeles, campus was also limited due to the weather.

Despite the rain, Natalia reported a small walkout at Santa Monica City College, in addition to a larger student-led protest at the University of California, Berkeley.

Back in the east, James Searle, 26, a Ph.D at the University of Albany, reported that about 450 students assembled at a lunchtime rally to air their grievances, mostly related to the recent hike in tuition.

Afterward, the group made its way towards University Hall, where the school’s administration is located. While police initially barred their entry, Searle said that about 200 students finally made their way through the doors to participate in a general assembly outside the president’s office.

Elsewhere, David Michael Ball, a 20-year-old freshman at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, organized his school’s walkout. As the clock struck 12, he and 41 other classmates gathered in a common area at the center of campus, where they read speeches, aired the demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters and then spent another hour addressing the issues they faced as students, namely, the cost of tuition, student loans and the minimum wage.

“It was empowering to finally feel like we were doing something that mattered for the world,” said Ball, who hopes the student-led branch of the movement continues to gain traction.

In Boston, Bryan MacCormack, a senior at Northeastern University, has been involved in campus activist groups since he took a class two years ago called “Global Markets and Local Cultures.” He learned about the Occupy Wall Street movement soon after the first calls to action went out, and says he was initially unsure that anything would come of it. Over the past few weeks, as the movement gathered steam, he says he slowly came around.

On Monday, he received an email from another campus activist, Kate Pipa, who said she had learned through Facebook and other social media of a movement called Occupy Colleges. “We started a Facebook group and called a meeting that night,” said MacCormack.

Early Wednesday afternoon, MacCormack and about 100 other students gathered by a flagpole on Northeastern’s campus and took turns delivering short speeches from a low granite wall engraved with the names of school benefactors, speaking in a style familiar to anyone who has spent time at the Occupy protests, with the crowd repeating and amplifying each of the speaker’s sentences.

One after another, the speakers explained why they counted themselves among the “99 percent” of Americans who don’t control the bulk of the country’s wealth. For the most part, they focused on issues of concern to college students: worries about their future, and in particular anxiety about repaying loans and their mounting student debts.

Alyssa Castiglia, a senior, described herself as “a typical Northeastern student” who studied hard and got good grades but struggled to pay tuition. “My parents can’t afford for me to go to school,” she said. “When I graduate, I’m going to have $125,000 in loans, which is $1,500 a month. I ask you, how I am supposed to live off that? I am the 99 percent, and it isn’t fair that someone who works hard can’t succeed.”

Back in New York, Jason Farbman, a 33-year-old graduate student at New York University, planned on airing his complaints loud and clear.

“There’s this generalized anger that students are finally allowed to express,” said Farbman, who planned on meeting up with fellow NYU and New School students in Washington Square Park after walking out of class. “Every student in school right now is looking at the prospect of zero employment, insane debts to go to school, and entering into a workforce with no jobs. These are kids from every walk of life who are doing exactly what they’ve been told to do in order to succeed and realizing that it’s all a bunch of bullshit.”