Watch Your Back Occupiers--The Dark Side Is Infiltrating

The mayor of Atlanta has stated that there was a guy with an assault weapon walking around the protest site and he did not feel it was safe for the public to have such a person doing that. Yet, it is legal in the state of Georgia to allow for the open carrying of weapons and assault rifles. This is their law, yet the mayor did not like the fact that a person protesting was carrying such a weapon and obeying the law. I guess, looking scary is a crime in Atlanta.

Hey Mayor--is it or is it NOT permitted to carry? It is YOUR law.

Who was this guy, anyway? Did the police question him? Was he an insider from the police, or the FBI, or the CIA? Was he from Homeland Security? Was he a plant from the Dark Side of the State House?
Sabotage and infiltration of groups is a way they do it.

What we have now is a push from the Wall Street elite pulling the strings of their political hacks running local and state governments to stop the Occupy movement.

They are afraid of the momentum. Currently, 33% are in favor with the protesters. In a month or two or three, it might grow to 50%. This cannot be stopped now.

The movement is growing. The energy is building. The support is mounting.

We have more and more working people stepping out onto the street in support.

The corporate and financial Wall Street elite who have corrupted the system, stolen the taxpayer's wealth from under their mattresses and bank accounts and retirement funds are upset that their golden apple cart is being tipped over.

Barack Obama has morphed into Warren G. Harding, a president who supported the corrupters. Obama has his head in the sand, his mouth is glued shut, and keeps his hands in his pockets. He is a disgrace. He should be vocal about the police brutality, the wounding of Americans who are protesting against the corruption and theft of our wealth, along with the transfer of our wealth worldwide to various foreign banks and financial institutions as America falls into decay and the unemployment figures grow; and, that being poor and low income has turned into a death sentence because not everyone has access to health care.

Obama is more about having Jeffery Immelt, from GE, raise cash for his re-election campaign.

Obama needs to step down from his office and allow other Democrats run against the GOPers, whose agenda is even scarier than what has gone on to-date.

We need regime change!!!! And, Mr. Magic Underpants Mitt Romney is NOT the change we need!!!

(http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com)

Income Inequality Is the Achilles Heel in the GOP Strategy to Demonize Occupy Wall Street

(The GOP continues to believe that the 1% are more important than the 99%. They believe in giving permission for the 1% to continue to steal the nation's wealth, to steal the wealth away from the 99% and to do as they please when it comes to buying political influence. THIS IS THE GOP. The GOP still does not understand that 33% of all Americans stand behind the Occupy Movement. The anger toward the corporate Wall Street elite thieves and their foot soldiers in the Congress--the GOP---continues to mount. Rick Perry is a fool and is not afraid to show it! Wealth inequality is a big issue here.)

From Huffington Post by Mitchell Bard 10-26-11

"I don't care about it."

That is what Rick Perry said in the New York Timeswhen John Harwood told him his tax plan would increase income inequality. Give Perry credit for his honesty. After all, he just articulated out loud what is the accepted dogma of the modern Tea Party-owned Republican party, which is completely dedicated to protecting the wealthy and corporations on the backs of the (rapidly shrinking) middle class, by way of a religious adherence to far-right free market principles.

But there is a danger to Republicans adopting a "Let them eat cake" approach. By dismissing income equality as a key issue, the GOP is headed for a trip wire the party doesn't seem to see coming.

We see it in their approach to Occupy Wall Street. The GOP strategy seems to be that if they can dismiss the protesters as a bunch of crazies (or "human debris," as the always vile Rush Limbaugh put it), then Americans won't notice the issues underlying the protest.

In the short term, the Republican strategy will probably work. By highlighting the elements that look and sound the most out of the mainstream, average Americans won't be able to relate to the protesters and will be wary of being grouped with them.

But what the Republicans are missing is that the anger underneath the Occupy Wall Street protests isn't limited to the dedicated individuals sleeping in a Lower Manhattan park.

So long as the GOP can frame Occupy Wall Street as an attack on the rich or an attack on capitalism, its appeal will be limited. No matter how tough things are with the U.S. economy, Americans don't hate rich people. On the contrary, they aspire to be rich people.

But the middle class can't become wealthy if the government is, through action and inaction, helping the rich get richer while keeping the middle class down, as it has done for the last 30 years (something Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson demonstrate in "Winner-Take-All Politics").

And Americans have no use for unfairness. They want there to be a correlation between hard work and success. For the financial executives who caused the 2008 financial crisis, there wasn't even a correlation between success and success. Wall Street bankers made billions of dollars for recklessly devising and selling financial instruments they knew were junk, resulting in a near financial collapse that required a government bailout from the Bush administration.

The resulting recession and economic stagnation hit the middle class hard while leaving the wealthiest Americans untouched and corporations flush with cash. (Paul Krugman provided a great recap earlier this month of the abuses that led to the financial crisis.)

The bottom line is that income inequality has been skyrocketing since Ronald Reagan took office (and accelerated under George W. Bush) behind policies (like massive unpaid-for tax cuts for the wealthy) that had the effect of redistributing income from the middle class upward.

Mother Jones recently compiled some staggering statistics on income inequality:

• Between 2007 and 2009 (pre- and post-financial crisis), Wall Street profits rose 720 percent while American's home equity plummeted 35 percent, all while the unemployment rate went up 102 percent.
• The average income of the top 1 percent has nearly quadrupled since 1980, but the top 20 percent showed only modest growth while the bottom 80 percent flatlined during that period. As a result, the top 1 percent's share of income has exploded by nearly 120 percent since 1980, while the top 20 percent went up a bit and the bottom 80 percent lost its share of income. Put another way, if income growth was equal during the period, the top one percent would have made597,241 less per household (totaling673 billion), while the bottom 90 percent would have made more (between3,733 and10,100 per household, depending on where the family fell in the percentile list).
• Even as the top 1 percent made out like bandits over the last 30 years, they actually bore less of the tax burden. Between 1992 and 2007, the 400 taxpayers with the highest incomes experienced a 392 percent increase in income but saw their average tax rate go down 37 percent.
• As of 2007, the top 1 percent of Americans in wealth controlled 34.6 percent of America's net worth. The top 10 percent controlled a whopping 73 percent of the country's wealth. And these figures came before the housing bubble burst, hitting the middle and working classes especially hard.

The AP recently did a study that found that the recovery from the 2008 recession has been the most unequalof any recovery since the 1930s. The money did not find its way to the middle class. The percentage of the economy made up of workers' pay and benefits hit an all-time low, all while corporate profits surged, as did CEO compensation. And the stock market recovery put money in the pockets of the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, even as the middle class continued to struggle and lose ground. In fact, the New York Timesran a front page story today noting how there has been a 53 percent increase in poverty in the suburbs since 2000, with the bulk of that coming after the 2008 financial crisis.

The key to why the Republicans are miscalculating in dismissing income inequality lies in a telling piece of data Mother Jones provides: The actual distribution of income in the United States is far more unbalanced than Americans think it is, and, as importantly, far, far above what they think it should be.

The Republicans want to claim that the Democrats are engaging in class warfare by trying to let the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but the Republicans have been waging a class war on behalf of the top ten percent against everyone else for the last 30 years.

It's not about hating on the rich. Nobody begrudges entrepreneurs and hard-working visionaries like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet their successes. No, the anger underneath Occupy Wall Street is about fairness. And income inequality fostered by government policy is not fair.

As unemployment continues to remain high, the economic situation remains murky, and Americans start to see the redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, anger will intensify. And when the anger moves from more easily dismissible protesters in Lower Manhattan to a larger swath of the American citizenry, comments like Perry's "I don't care about that" will not be received well.

The participants in Occupy Wall Street may not look like Middle America, and they may not have a polished plan to rectify the problems they are seeking to publicize, but that doesn't make the anger they are expressing less real. More importantly, that anger is shared by more Americans than would make the GOP comfortable.

So Republicans should ridicule Occupy Wall Street at their own risk. They may be able to belittle the protesters, but they can't hide income inequality from the American people.

 

Follow Mitchell Bard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MitchellBard

From Counterpunch.org

How to Turn Up the Heat on Democrats

Occupy Obama

by JOHN STAUBER 10-21-23-11

President Barack Obama is no longer running unchallenged in all the major primary states, thanks to activists in Iowa who are focusing their Occupy Wall Street activism onto the headquarters of the Obama for President campaign office this Saturday, October 22,  in Des Moines.

The “Occupy Obama” event is being organized in part  by veteran rabble rouser Hugh Espey and his highly effective Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a grassroots force that has been fighting for economic and social justice since the 1970s.  CCI members are already participating in Occupy Wall Street actions in nine Iowa towns.  Occupy Obama seems a logical next step to escalate the movement further into national view and create the potential for debate and organizing within the Iowa presidential caucuses in January.

Espey criticized Obama by name in a Des Moines Register guest editorial of October 6, 2011 announcing CCI’s support for Occupy Wall Street actions in Iowa.  “Our political leaders are too busy asking big banks and Wall Street corporations for campaign contributions to push the ‘put people first’ policies that this nation needs,” he wrote.  CCI will march on Obama’s campaign headquarters in Des Moines on Saturday.  This Occupy Obama action could catch fire nationally, especially given the frustration widely voiced that not one prominent Democrat is willing to oppose Obama in the Democratic Party’s primary races.  Occupy Obama could partly fill that void.  “We’ll deliver a simple, powerful message to Obama staffers, and do a speak-out as well.  We want regular folks telling the Obama staffers what they think.  We want Obama to understand that the 99% demand action from him to put communities before corporations and people before profits,” says CCI.

Obama’s social and economic justice rhetoric, and his opposition to the war in Iraq, won him the 2008 Democratic nomination and the presidency.  Millions of independents, young and ethnically diverse voters found him a compelling agent for the “Change” and “Hope” he extolled as a mantra.  But the failure of Obama’s policies to adhere to his campaign rhetoric should not really be surprising.   Candidate Obama in 2008 beat every other Democrat in collecting the most campaign contributions from the wealthiest funders of the Democratic Party, the 1% as opposed to the 99%, aka Wall Street.  He has announced his goal for 2012 of raising one billion dollars which again will require the firm support of the very wealthiest Democratic Party interests.

President Obama has been a huge disappointment on issues across the board, yet he was running unchallenged in the primaries until CCI announced its Occupy Obama action.  Don’t be surprised if this Des Moines event is the start of a successful nation-wide Occupy Obama movement.  In Iowa an Occupy Obama movement has real potential because it could choose to become a player in the Iowa caucuses in a way that is much more than symbolic.  Occupy Obama activists could show up at the caucus meetings in January, for instance, and organize support for an Uncommitted slate of  Occupy Obama convention activists.  These Uncommitted delegates could provide a critical voice on the floor of the Obama convention in the summer of 2012.

Some Obama supporters and interest groups have advocated using the Occupy Wall Street cause to help elect Obama and other Democrats, coopting the movement.  However, an Occupy Obama movement could turn that scenario on its head.  A growing Occupy Obama movement could directly confront the failures of the Democratic Party to represent most people.

If Occupy Obama takes off, 2012 might feel a bit like 1968.  Back then the Guns And Butter policies of Lyndon Johnson were destroying not just Vietnam, where millions eventually died, but also killing Johnson’s own domestic social programs, his Great Society reforms.  The rapidly growing anti-war movement in 1968 rallied behind two Democratic Party primary challengers, Senators Gene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy.  It forced the resignation of Johnson, but the bosses of the Democratic Party handed the nomination to Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon.

While an Occupy Obama movement would be very unlikely to prevent his renomination, it could make him and his Party’s shortcomings a front and center issue.  It could ignite a  Democratic Party reform movement, as 1968 did, leading to some take back of the corporate Democratic Party by grassroots activists.  It could also lead to the support and emergence of other parties more representative of the people, as opposed to helping Wall Street and giant corporations.

2012′s interwoven crises of failing empire, economic desperation, corporate corruption, corporate control of government and bought elections, might have created a political turning point if the Occupy movement can keep upping the ante and building its numbers.  Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement could well be firing a shot heard round the nation, if an Occupy Obama movement emerges to pressure the Democrats, utilizing the 2012 election to pursue this goal.  Occupy Obama 2012 may be coming soon to an Obama Campaign or Democratic Party office near you!

JOHN STAUBER is the co-author of six books including Iraq: Weapons of Mass Deception and The Best War Ever. His anti-war activism began in high school in the 1960s opposing the war in Vietnam. The opinions in this article are his alone. His email address is: john.stauber@gmail.com