Jonathan Franzen Speaks About Occupy Wall Street

Jonathan Franzen on Occupy Wall Street, Obama, Nixon, 

HBO Corrections Series and, yes, Oprah

Ari Melber on October 1, 2011 - 1:43pm ET

Jonathan Franzen is for the Occupy Wall Street protests.  In fact, the celebrated novelist is for just about any action that "revives a conversation about economic disparities, and how utterly shafted the middle class is." In a packed session at the New Yorker Festival on Saturday, Franzen elaborated on his politics, his meeting with President Obama, the accomplishments of Richard Nixon, and, of course, several more literary topics.

Politics loomed throughout the discussion, not only because searing social critiques undergird Franzen's most famous books, "Freedom" and "The Corrections," but also because Franzen's fans take his non-fiction narrative seriously.

Moderator David Remnick, the New Yorker editor-in-chief, asked whether Franzen is disappointed with Obama (he isn't), and while there were audience questions about Patty Berglund ("I wanna talk to you about Patty!," as they say on TV) and even Oprah (Franzen started graciously, but added a dig about having to sit through "four segments on Michael Jackson's secret family" before Oprah interviewed him about "Freedom"), people kept returning to politics.

The Wall Street question, which was first out of the gate, had Franzen channeling Elizabeth Warren. "What Republicans call class warfare," he said, is actually a vital, neglected effort to address economic inequality. When real unemployment is at 16 percent, Franzen observed, people "should raise socialist questions."

There is no outlet for that conversation, however, within the major political parties.

In Franzen's telling, President Obama is caught between the populist desires of a downgraded America, and the interests of his elite financial supporters.  "I knew he was tight with Wall Street," Franzen said, recalling his views of Obama before the 2008 election, "the first time I heard about him was from a banker." Franzen said he still "loves" Obama, though, and it's clear that support endures not despite Obama's liberal shortcomings, but because they were already factored into the picture.  "I got a sense of who [Obama] was," Franzen said, somewhat cryptically. "I knew he would never do anything for the environment," he later added.

These are not just idle observations from a distance.  Franzen apparently has some pull on President Obama, who nabbed an advance copy of "Freedom" and then invited the novelist to meet him at the White House last year.  Asked about that meeting, Franzen said their conversation focused not on fiction, but on Nixon.  "He was our last liberal president," Franzen recalled telling Obama, arguing that Nixon's legislative achievements were more liberal than anything Clinton or Obama could ever do.  Obama laughed, Franzen remembered, and said, yeah, the only problem is that Nixon was crazy.

The other quality Franzen deeply appreciates about Obama is his openness to other people's views and ethics.  In conventional political circles, this has come to be associated with weakness and poor negotiation, but I think Franzen means it more in the idealistic sense of practicing a politics of good faith -- or the Jeffersonian ideal that "not every difference of opinion is a difference of principle."  So Franzen credits Obama for rejecting the (increasingly common) premise "that all the good people share my politics."  Instead, one can acknowledge that there may be perfectly good people who, for example, voted for Rick Santorum, Franzen said, although he volunteered that he'd still "have a hard time being good friends with someone who voted for Santorum."  This came in response to a question from The Nation's Eric Alterman, who said that while he probably shares the author's politics, he wondered how "Freedom" might leave one feeling hopeless.  Beyond Obama's ray of light, Franzen said he genuinely felt the last 10 years of politics were worse than usual, with more rampant lying in public discourse, and admitted to "being a little discouraged." The culture is more driven by technology, he added, which is "all about simulation, as opposed to interaction or discussion." (That complaint draws on a media critique Franzen has made for some time, including a widely discussed lecture and essay this year, "Linking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts").

Finally, in more literary news, Franzen confirmed that he is writing an adaptation of "The Corrections" as a full, four-year television series for HBO.  The flim rights to that book were actually optioned back in 2001, by Scott Rudin, but a full length feature never got off the ground.  It's a little hard to imagine the book, focusing on the grandparents of a Midwestern family, excelling as a movie or series.  Yet as Franzen said on Saturday, mainstream success has made him a less angry and more positive person, and with the right attitude, maybe the book will make for great TV.

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

Occupy wallstreet has spread to Boston

Dana Edwards

, Boston Independent Examiner (read link here.)

October 1, 2011

Occupy Wallstreet has spread to Boston via Occupy Boston.

Currently the protests are taking place outside South Station. They set up camp Friday in front of the federal reserve bank. According to an article by WBUR the protesters want economic reform.  The movement currently is merely congregating the 99% as they call themselves into an organization. Details on a policy agenda are still scarce as the Occupy Boston sprang up just a day ago.

It's apparent that Occupy Wallstreet is becoming a nation wide movement. The purpose of that movement is also known. This movement is very similar in nature to the 911 truth movement, as there are similar players involved. and it's organizing in a similar way. It's not currently set up like the Tea Party, but it does have something in common with the Tea Party in that it is tapping into a national anger towards banks, wallstreet, corporate greed, etc. The Tea Party originally started up in response to the bank bailouts and has been co-opted by the same greedy corporatism that it formed originally against.

Obama Jobs Plan Prevents 2012 Recession in Survey of Economists

(I don't know how to take this report from Bloomberg. 13,000 new jobs for 2013 sounds so bad. Bank Of America has reported that it will cut 10,000 jobs over some time. That number comes to around 260 jobs per state. This figure sounds horrible. Over the next couple of years, it stated below that in each year we will see around 2880 new jobs per year. Now if there are around 10 significant population centers in each of those states, we will see around 280 jobs each year. I don't find that good news or a recovery in progress. )

By Timothy R. Homan (read link here.)

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.

Economists in the survey are less optimistic than Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has cited estimates for a 1.5 percent boost to gross domestic product. Even so, the program may bolster Obama’s re-election prospects by lowering a jobless rate that has stayed near 9 percent or more since April 2009.

The plan “prevents a contraction of the economy in the first quarter” of next year, said John Herrmann, a senior fixed-income strategist at State Street Global Markets LLC in Boston, who participated in the survey. “It leads to more retention of workers than net new hires.”

Some 13,000 jobs would be created in 2013, bringing the total to 288,000 over two years, according to the survey. Employers in the U.S. added 1.26 million workers in the past 12 months, Labor Department data show.

Obama’s plan, announced on Sept. 8, calls for cutting the payroll taxes paid by workers and small businesses while extending unemployment insurance. It also includes an increase in infrastructure spending and more aid for cash-strapped state governments.

‘What Happens?’

“The important thing to consider is: What happens if we don’t do anything?” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, Florida. He said the program “very well could” forestall a recession in early 2012.

“Most of all, it prevents a serious drag on the economy next year” from current programs expiring, said Brown, who estimates the Obama plan would add 0.5 percent to GDP in 2012.

A reduction in government spending, the end of the payroll- tax holiday and an expiration of extended unemployment benefits would cut GDP by 1.7 percent in 2012, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli in New York. Instead, the Obama proposal makes up for that potential loss and may add a net 0.1 percent to the economy, he estimates.

State Aid

Tax cuts account for more than half the dollar value of the Obama plan, which also includes $105 billion in spending for school modernization, transportation projects and rehabilitation of vacant properties, according to a White House fact sheet. The proposal includes $35 billion in direct aid to state and local governments to stem dismissals of educators and emergency personnel.

“Some of this is just extending support that was already in place,” said Julia Coronado, chief economist for North America at BNP Paribas in New York. “The actual jobs programs themselves, I don’t think that they’re a game-changer.”

She estimates the proposal will add 200,000 new workers, while retaining about 300,000 jobs that might otherwise be lost.

Republican lawmakers in Congress have expressed opposition to parts of the White House legislation. House leaders object to Obama’s plan to cut payroll taxes, saying it would lead to an overly large boost in taxes when the temporary break ended.

Tax Burden

In a memo to House Republicans on Sept. 16, House Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor and other leaders detailed several criticisms of the payroll-tax idea. The lawmakers said an added tax burden would result when, under the president’s plan, an extension and expansion of a “holiday” on such taxes for employees and employers would expire in 2013.

Herrmann agreed. “We’re setting ourselves up for a big end to the sugar high in the first half of 2013,” he said.

A majority of Americans don’t believe Obama’s jobs proposal will help lower the unemployment rate, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted Sept. 9-12 by Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, Iowa.

“It’s not really going to have anything more than a marginal impact,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “It’s just maintaining the status quo: extending the payroll-tax cuts and unemployment benefits. The bulk of the money is going to go to firms that would’ve hired anyway.”

Stanley estimated the program would increase payrolls by 50,000 and add 0.25 percent to GDP next year.

Fiscal Policy

While the White House hasn’t given an estimate of how the proposal would affect GDP, Geithner cited the plan Sept. 24 in an address at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Without additional near-term support, “fiscal policy in the U.S. will be overly contractionary and the U.S. economy will likely grow below its potential in 2012,” Geithner said.

He said private economists estimate the proposal could increase real economic growth next year by around “one and a half percentage points and create more than 1 million jobs at a critical moment in the recovery.”

In the Bloomberg survey, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimated the plan would add 1.5 percent to the economy, while Macroeconomic Advisers LLC said 1.3 percent and UniCredit Research, up to 2 percent.

The U.S. economy faces “significant downside risks,” the Federal Reserve said in a statement on Sept. 21 as it announced a plan to shift $400 billion of its Treasury securities holdings into longer-term debt to bring down borrowing costs.

The world’s largest economy grew 3 percent last year before slowing to a 0.4 percent annual pace in the first three months of 2011, followed by 1 percent in the second quarter, according to Commerce Department figures.

The economy will expand 2.2 percent next year, according to a separate Bloomberg survey of economists conducted Sept. 2 to Sept. 7. The same survey said the unemployment rate would average 8.8 percent in 2012.

--With assistance from Alexandre Tanzi and Kristy Scheuble in Washington. Editors: Gail DeGeorge, Christopher Wellisz

To contact the reporter on this story: Timothy R. Homan in Washington at thoman1@bloomberg.net

On Raising Taxes. Check this link out.

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

More On OccupyTogether: A Growing Protest Movement!!

Published on Friday, September 30, 2011 by TruthDig.com

#OccupyTogether: The Best Among Us

by Chris Hedges

There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave.

To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say “I am innocent” is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher. 

Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs.Protesters march past Federal Hall on Wall Street on Monday. The Occupy Wall Street protest is in its second week in New York City as demonstrators speak out against corporate greed and social inequality. (AP / Louis Lanzano)

The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. 

Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children’s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation.

Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St.

© 2011 TruthDig.com

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