the more i read, the more i want to make sure i remember what it is about and not get lost, the reasons behind its happening. why it is.

something about the glass steagall act and the gramm leach bliley act
something about the "warren buffet" tax
something about what to do about the crazy high cost of health care...i still think some kind of single payer thing sounds good (here is one link i have posted before)
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-faq

another thing just came to mind... about corporations and personhood i remember hearing about...i really don't understand quite what that means...but i am under the impression that i should! (meaning, i am under the impression it is a matter of concern) i think i remember ceashel (for one) mentioning corporations and personhood?

anyway, to name a few...

thanks for all the articles! i haven't watched the video clip yet, but i will.

Heads up with file sharing: some party(ies) seeing the large uptick in OWS-related file sharing have put viruses on some sites that will down load onclick. Set off my AVG last night. Keep on truckin' but the usual cautions...

An OWS-related file set off my Trend-Micro alarm this morning ---- Thanks for the heads-up!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... g-20111025

Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating
POSTED: October 25, 9:26 AM ET

A protestor's sign expresses the sentiment of the Occupy Wall Street movement at a Occupy Wall Street protest in London. I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"

"Well, I heard they're trying to decide what bank to put their money in," he said, munching on hors d'oeuvres. "It's just kind of ironic."

Oh, Christ, I thought. He’s saying the protesters are hypocrites because they’re using banks. I sighed.

"Listen," I said, "where else are you going to put three hundred thousand dollars? A shopping bag?"

"Well," he said, "it's just, their protests are all about... You know..."

"Dude," I said. "These people aren't protesting money. They're not protesting banking. They're protesting corruption on Wall Street."

"Whatever," he said, shrugging.

These nutty criticisms of the protests are spreading like cancer. Earlier that same day, I'd taped a TV segment on CNN with Will Cain from the National Review, and we got into an argument on the air. Cain and I agreed about a lot of the problems on Wall Street, but when it came to the protesters, we disagreed on one big thing.

Cain said he believed that the protesters are driven by envy of the rich.

"I find the one thing [the protesters] have in common revolves around the human emotions of envy and entitlement," he said. "What you have is more than what I have, and I'm not happy with my situation."

Cain seems like a nice enough guy, but I nearly blew my stack when I heard this. When you take into consideration all the theft and fraud and market manipulation and other evil shit Wall Street bankers have been guilty of in the last ten-fifteen years, you have to have balls like church bells to trot out a propaganda line that says the protesters are just jealous of their hard-earned money.

Think about it: there have always been rich and poor people in America, so if this is about jealousy, why the protests now? The idea that masses of people suddenly discovered a deep-seated animus/envy toward the rich – after keeping it strategically hidden for decades – is crazy.

Where was all that class hatred in the Reagan years, when openly dumping on the poor became fashionable? Where was it in the last two decades, when unions disappeared and CEO pay relative to median incomes started to triple and quadruple?

The answer is, it was never there. If anything, just the opposite has been true. Americans for the most part love the rich, even the obnoxious rich. And in recent years, the harder things got, the more we've obsessed over the wealth dream. As unemployment skyrocketed, people tuned in in droves to gawk at Evrémonde-heiresses like Paris Hilton, or watch bullies like Donald Trump fire people on TV.

Moreover, the worse the economy got, the more being a millionaire or a billionaire somehow became a qualification for high office, as people flocked to voting booths to support politicians with names like Bloomberg and Rockefeller and Corzine, names that to voters symbolized success and expertise at a time when few people seemed to have answers. At last count, there were 245 millionaires in congress, including 66 in the Senate.

And we hate the rich? Come on. Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

In this country, we cheer for people who hit their own home runs – not shortcut-chasing juicers like Bonds and McGwire, Blankfein and Dimon.

That's why it's so obnoxious when people say the protesters are just sore losers who are jealous of these smart guys in suits who beat them at the game of life. This isn't disappointment at having lost. It's anger because those other guys didn't really win. And people now want the score overturned.

All weekend I was thinking about this “jealousy” question, and I just kept coming back to all the different ways the game is rigged. People aren't jealous and they don’t want privileges. They just want a level playing field, and they want Wall Street to give up its cheat codes, things like:

FREE MONEY. Ordinary people have to borrow their money at market rates. Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon get billions of dollars for free, from the Federal Reserve. They borrow at zero and lend the same money back to the government at two or three percent, a valuable public service otherwise known as "standing in the middle and taking a gigantic cut when the government decides to lend money to itself."

Or the banks borrow billions at zero and lend mortgages to us at four percent, or credit cards at twenty or twenty-five percent. This is essentially an official government license to be rich, handed out at the expense of prudent ordinary citizens, who now no longer receive much interest on their CDs or other saved income. It is virtually impossible to not make money in banking when you have unlimited access to free money, especially when the government keeps buying its own cash back from you at market rates.

Your average chimpanzee couldn't fuck up that business plan, which makes it all the more incredible that most of the too-big-to-fail banks are nonetheless still functionally insolvent, and dependent upon bailouts and phony accounting to stay above water. Where do the protesters go to sign up for their interest-free billion-dollar loans?

CREDIT AMNESTY. If you or I miss a $7 payment on a Gap card or, heaven forbid, a mortgage payment, you can forget about the great computer in the sky ever overlooking your mistake. But serial financial fuckups like Citigroup and Bank of America overextended themselves by the hundreds of billions and pumped trillions of dollars of deadly leverage into the system -- and got rewarded with things like the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, an FDIC plan that allowed irresponsible banks to borrow against the government's credit rating.

This is equivalent to a trust fund teenager who trashes six consecutive off-campus apartments and gets rewarded by having Daddy co-sign his next lease. The banks needed programs like TLGP because without them, the market rightly would have started charging more to lend to these idiots. Apparently, though, we can’t trust the free market when it comes to Bank of America, Goldman, Sachs, Citigroup, etc.

In a larger sense, the TBTF banks all have the implicit guarantee of the federal government, so investors know it's relatively safe to lend to them -- which means it's now cheaper for them to borrow money than it is for, say, a responsible regional bank that didn't jack its debt-to-equity levels above 35-1 before the crash and didn't dabble in toxic mortgages. In other words, the TBTF banks got better credit for being less responsible. Click on freecreditscore.com to see if you got the same deal.

STUPIDITY INSURANCE. Defenders of the banks like to talk a lot about how we shouldn't feel sorry for people who've been foreclosed upon, because it's their own fault for borrowing more than they can pay back, buying more house than they can afford, etc. And critics of OWS have assailed protesters for complaining about things like foreclosure by claiming these folks want “something for nothing.”

This is ironic because, as one of the Rolling Stone editors put it last week, “something for nothing is Wall Street’s official policy." In fact, getting bailed out for bad investment decisions has been de rigeur on Wall Street not just since 2008, but for decades.

Time after time, when big banks screw up and make irresponsible bets that blow up in their faces, they've scored bailouts. It doesn't matter whether it was the Mexican currency bailout of 1994 (when the state bailed out speculators who gambled on the peso) or the IMF/World Bank bailout of Russia in 1998 (a bailout of speculators in the "emerging markets") or the Long-Term Capital Management Bailout of the same year (in which the rescue of investors in a harebrained hedge-fund trading scheme was deemed a matter of international urgency by the Federal Reserve), Wall Street has long grown accustomed to getting bailed out for its mistakes.

The 2008 crash, of course, birthed a whole generation of new bailout schemes. Banks placed billions in bets with AIG and should have lost their shirts when the firm went under -- AIG went under, after all, in large part because of all the huge mortgage bets the banks laid with the firm -- but instead got the state to pony up $180 billion or so to rescue the banks from their own bad decisions.

This sort of thing seems to happen every time the banks do something dumb with their money. Just recently, the French and Belgian authorities cooked up a massive bailout of the French bank Dexia, whose biggest trading partners included, surprise, surprise, Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Here's how the New York Times explained the bailout:

To limit damage from Dexia’s collapse, the bailout fashioned by the French and Belgian governments may make these banks and other creditors whole — that is, paid in full for potentially tens of billions of euros they are owed. This would enable Dexia’s creditors and trading partners to avoid losses they might otherwise suffer...

When was the last time the government stepped into help you "avoid losses you might otherwise suffer?" But that's the reality we live in. When Joe Homeowner bought too much house, essentially betting that home prices would go up, and losing his bet when they dropped, he was an irresponsible putz who shouldn’t whine about being put on the street.

But when banks bet billions on a firm like AIG that was heavily invested in mortgages, they were making the same bet that Joe Homeowner made, leaving themselves hugely exposed to a sudden drop in home prices. But instead of being asked to "suck it in and cope" when that bet failed, the banks instead went straight to Washington for a bailout -- and got it.

UNGRADUATED TAXES. I've already gone off on this more than once, but it bears repeating. Bankers on Wall Street pay lower tax rates than most car mechanics. When Warren Buffet released his tax information, we learned that with taxable income of $39 million, he paid $6.9 million in taxes last year, a tax rate of about 17.4%.

Most of Buffet’s income, it seems, was taxed as either "carried interest" (i.e. hedge-fund income) or long-term capital gains, both of which carry 15% tax rates, half of what many of the Zucotti park protesters will pay.

As for the banks, as companies, we've all heard the stories. Goldman, Sachs in 2008 – this was the same year the bank reported $2.9 billion in profits, and paid out over $10 billion in compensation -- paid just $14 million in taxes, a 1% tax rate.

Bank of America last year paid not a single dollar in taxes -- in fact, it received a "tax credit" of $1 billion. There are a slew of troubled companies that will not be paying taxes for years, including Citigroup and CIT.

When GM bought the finance company AmeriCredit, it was able to marry its long-term losses to AmeriCredit's revenue stream, creating a tax windfall worth as much as $5 billion. So even though AmeriCredit is expected to post earnings of $8-$12 billion in the next decade or so, it likely won't pay any taxes during that time, because its revenue will be offset by GM's losses.

Thank God our government decided to pledge $50 billion of your tax dollars to a rescue of General Motors! You just paid for one of the world's biggest tax breaks.

And last but not least, there is:

GET OUT OF JAIL FREE. One thing we can still be proud of is that America hasn't yet managed to achieve the highest incarceration rate in history -- that honor still goes to the Soviets in the Stalin/Gulag era. But we do still have about 2.3 million people in jail in America.

Virtually all 2.3 million of those prisoners come from "the 99%." Here is the number of bankers who have gone to jail for crimes related to the financial crisis: 0.

Millions of people have been foreclosed upon in the last three years. In most all of those foreclosures, a regional law enforcement office -- typically a sheriff's office -- was awarded fees by the court as part of the foreclosure settlement, settlements which of course were often rubber-stamped by a judge despite mountains of perjurious robosigned evidence.

That means that every single time a bank kicked someone out of his home, a local police department got a cut. Local sheriff's offices also get cuts of almost all credit card judgments, and other bank settlements. If you're wondering how it is that so many regional police departments have the money for fancy new vehicles and SWAT teams and other accoutrements, this is one of your answers.

What this amounts to is the banks having, as allies, a massive armed police force who are always on call, ready to help them evict homeowners and safeguard the repossession of property. But just see what happens when you try to call the police to prevent an improper foreclosure. Then, suddenly, the police will not get involved. It will be a "civil matter" and they won't intervene.

The point being: if you miss a few home payments, you have a very high likelihood of colliding with a police officer in the near future. But if you defraud a pair of European banks out of a billion dollars -- that's a billion, with a b -- you will never be arrested, never see a policeman, never see the inside of a jail cell.

Your settlement will be worked out not with armed police, but with regulators in suits who used to work for your company or one like it. And you'll have, defending you, a former head of that regulator's agency. In the end, a fine will be paid to the government, but it won't come out of your pocket personally; it will be paid by your company's shareholders. And there will be no admission of criminal wrongdoing.

The Abacus case, in which Goldman helped a hedge fund guy named John Paulson beat a pair of European banks for a billion dollars, tells you everything you need to know about the difference between our two criminal justice systems. The settlement was $550 million -- just over half of the damage.

Can anyone imagine a common thief being caught by police and sentenced to pay back half of what he took? Just one low-ranking individual in that case was charged (case pending), and no individual had to reach into his pocket to help cover the fine. The settlement Goldman paid to to the government was about 1/24th of what Goldman received from the government just in the AIG bailout. And that was the toughest "punishment" the government dished out to a bank in the wake of 2008.

The point being: we have a massive police force in America that outside of lower Manhattan prosecutes crime and imprisons citizens with record-setting, factory-level efficiency, eclipsing the incarceration rates of most of history's more notorious police states and communist countries.

But the bankers on Wall Street don't live in that heavily-policed country. There are maybe 1000 SEC agents policing that sector of the economy, plus a handful of FBI agents. There are nearly that many police officers stationed around the polite crowd at Zucotti park.

These inequities are what drive the OWS protests. People don't want handouts. It's not a class uprising and they don't want civil war -- they want just the opposite. They want everyone to live in the same country, and live by the same rules. It's amazing that some people think that that's asking a lot.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... a-20111028

Another Weapon for OWS: Pull Your Money Out of BofA
POSTED: October 28, 11:15 AM ET

My good friend Nomi Prins has a great new piece out that I just caught on Zero Hedge, chronicling 10 reasons why depositors should pull out of Bank of America.

Obviously Goldman, Sachs has become the great symbol of investment banking corruption, and other companies like AIG and Countrywide have become poster children for problems with businesses like insurance and mortgage-lending. But when it comes to commercial banking, Bank of America is as bad as it gets.

The markets, of course, have lately come to agree, as B of A has lately been downgraded again to just above junk status. The only reason the bank is not rated even lower than that is that it is Too Big To Fail. The whole world knows that if Bank of America implodes – whether because of the vast number of fraud suits it faces for mortgage securitization practices, or because of the time bomb of toxic assets on its balance sheets – the U.S. government will probably step in to one degree or another and save it.

The government’s patronage of the bank was never clearer than in recent weeks, when B of A quietly decided to move trillions of dollars (trillions, not billions) in risky Merrill Lynch derivatives contracts off Merrill’s books and onto the books of the parent/retail arm, Bank of America.

This decision was done at the behest of counterparties to those transactions, who wanted those contracts placed under the aegis of Bank of America, whose deposits are insured by the FDIC. The move was made, according to reports, so that Bank of America could avoid posting $3.3 billion in collateral to satisfy the company’s creditors. In other words, Bank of America just got You the Taxpayer to co-sign as much as $53 trillion worth of dicey derivative contracts.

The FDIC wasn’t pleased by the move, but the Fed apparently encouraged it. Bloomberg, citing people with “direct knowledge” of the deals, reported that,

The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

So the primary regulator of the banking industry is encouraging a functionally insolvent megabank to respond to a credit downgrade by pushing its most explosively risky holdings onto the laps of the taxpayer. This is lunacy…. Remember that story about the Chinese man who had a world-record 33-pound tumor removed from his face? This would be like treating that patient by removing the tumor and surgically attaching it to the face of a new patient, in this case the U.S. taxpayer.

A series of lawmakers on the Hill, including most notably Sherrod Brown, Carl Levin, and Bernie Sanders, are trying to figure out if there’s any way to stop this transaction, but of course there is not. Upstate NY congressman Maurice Hinchey put it best. "What Bank of America is doing is perfectly legal – and that's the problem,” he said.

This is exactly why the Glass-Steagall Act needs to be reinstated: without a separation of Investment Banks and Commercial Banks, what we end up getting is taxpayer-guaranteed gambling. Instead of encouraging prudence and savings by insuring deposits in commercial banks, the FDIC is now being turned into a vehicle for socializing speculative losses.

So our government is not only no longer encouraging fiscal conservatism, it is doing exactly the opposite, i.e. encouraging speculation and risk-taking. That this is happening in the fever of the OWS movement, and at a time when top politicians from Barack Obama on down are paying lip service to public complaints against Wall Street, should tell you everything you need to know about whether or not we can expect this government to voluntarily enact real changes, and stop making the taxpayer eat Wall Street’s pain.

Anyway, Nomi’s list goes a long way toward explaining why Bank of America is the last company on earth whose $53 trillion derivatives portfolio we should be insuring. A sample of her top ten:

7. Bank of America got the most AIG money of the big depositor banks. By virtue of having acquired Merrill Lynch's AIG-related portfolio, B of A got to keep approximately $12 billion worth of federal AIG backing, too. It also received more government subsidies than any other mega-bank except Citigroup ...

In terms of overall federal subsidies (including TARP), Bank of America was second only to Citigroup ($230 billion compared to $415 billion). None of that got in the way of former B of A CEO Ken Lewis' personal take, a $63 million retirement plan, in addition to the $63 million he scored during the three years before his departure.

If you’re a Bank of America customer, Nomi is right: find another bank. Try a local credit union. Keeping your money in this TBTF behemoth is very unsafe sex.

Incidentally, this kind of suggestion might prove a real help to OWS. One definite tactic that Occupy Wall Street can adopt, going forward, is educating people about the perfidy of certain financial institutions and convincing people to do what they did back in the days of apartheid, which is disinvest. If everyone were to start pulling their money out of the worst-offending banks, that would have a profound effect on the markets and may function as a great short-cut to political change.

Bank of America is a great place to start. All the TBTF banks suck equally, but as George Orwell would say, some banks are more equal than others. Withdrawals would be a great way for people to answer the Fed's decision to put depositors on the hook for Merrill Lynch's bad bets.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... z1cNAROVYg

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/bl ... t-20111018

Why Rush Limbaugh Is Freaking Out About Occupy Wall Street
POSTED: October 18, 10:54 AM ET

Got a flurry of emails yesterday after the inimitable Rush Limbaugh lumped me and Dylan Ratigan in with the behind-the-scenes power structure. Apparently Rush got hold of Breitbart’s story about the email list and decided to run with it:


Journalists have been advising the protesters – emails have been found. Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC and some guy named Matt Taibbi… Dylan Ratigan and Matt Taibbi are sending emails back and forth with organizers , telling them how to position their demands, how they can improve their coverage.

Here Rush paused before making his Sherlock Holmesian deduction from these facts:

This whole thing is a construct of the media-Democrat complex, industrial complex…

I nearly fell over laughing when I heard this. What the fuck is the Media-Democrat-Industrial Complex? Has Rush been reading Noam Chomsky books on the side? Calling any group that includes me and Glenn Greenwald an “industrial complex” is extremely high-concept comedy. We should have t-shirts made...

(Also, I love the phrase “emails have been found.” Actually, it was more like “a sleazy cyber-provocateur and amateur FBI informant stole the emails.” But who’s quibbling?)

Anyway, if you listen to the whole Rush segment, you can hear frustration and croaking, bullfroggish anxiety in his voice at the fact of so many different politicians capitulating, at least verbally, to OWS. He’s sensing that politicians are seeing danger in the “99%” concept, and he's expressing dismay that everyone from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama is now trying hard to position himself as not being in the 1%.

This isn't evidence that mainstream politicians are caving to the movement, of course, but what it does show is that those same politicians are endorsing OWS rhetoric, and by extension tacitly admitting the basic truth of the great-many-versus-very-few protest narrative.

Rush chalks this up to a media deception, a mirage of TV images and “media-Democrat-industrial complex” manipulations designed to con the country into believing in the existence of a mass movement.

The reality, of course, is that people like Rush, Romney and Obama are all becoming cognizant of the deep frustrations that exist across the political spectrum and are growing desperate to prevent the powder keg from blowing completely – hence the intense effort to describe OWS as a top-down manipulation.

Of course the notion that this is all a media fabrication is ludicrous. Dylan Ratigan didn’t invent four million people in foreclosure, he didn’t invent ten trillion dollars in bailouts, and he didn’t invent Wall Street’s $160 billion bonus pool the year after the crash of its own creation.

People out there do not need media figures to tell them how fucked things are, or how pissed they should be that the same bankers who caused the crash are now enjoying state-supported bonuses in the billions, while everyone else gets squeezed. As someone who has been covering this stuff for three years, I can say with confidence that people across the country don’t need a push to be angry. They’re already there, and have been there for years. Rush should go hang out outside a foreclosure court in his home state of Florida for a few hours, if he wants to see where the rising heat under these protests is coming from.

Anyway, the hysterical responses from the Rushes of the world are just more signs that these protests are working. I never thought I’d see it, but some of the dukes and earls high up in America’s Great Tower of Bullshit are starting to blink a little bit. They seem genuinely freaked out that OWS doesn’t have leaders or a single set of demands, which in addition to being very encouraging is quite funny.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a- ... 65375.html

Joseph A. Palermo.Associate Professor of American History, California State University, Sacramento
Occupy Wall Street: 'Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?'
Posted: 10/29/11 05:53 PM ET

When MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently asked the journalist and commentator Frank Rich on her show if he believed the "physical manifestation of discontent" was imperative to the Occupy Wall Street movement's cause, Rich replied that it was "not always that important" since the movement was polling well among Americans.

I disagree. The ideas that inform the direction of the movement arise from the actions of the movement itself, (not from pundits or armchair commentators no matter how sympathetic). It is the activism in the streets that is the most important thing. Bringing together people, occupying public space, holding General Assembly meetings, conversing with, and learning from each other, those are the true sources of the sea change in attitudes we're seeing.

The organic connection of thought and action will evolve on its own terms. Opinion polls, even those that indicate widespread support for the OWS movement, are tertiary at best, epiphenomena at worst.

OWS, so long as the direct action of street demonstrations prevails and continues, is at this moment growing into something that none of us can see at this time. It's all about the future. And it is this mobilization of ideas and activism focused on the future that gives OWS its strength and ties it closely to the aspirations of the Arab Spring and the social movements that are now building in Europe.

OWS has clearly taken the bankers and their political servants in Washington and in the corporate media by surprise. Tangible effects of the movement can already be seen in the authorities in Oakland backing off from their repression. Even the big banks are rethinking their latest gouging of their "customers" in the form of added fees. It's beginning to sink in to the skulls of our corporate overlords that tear gas and rubber bullets, even thugs on horses or camels, cannot slow the movement's momentum.

Obama did us a favor by showing us definitively that the Democratic Party is useless in a time of real crisis (even when controlling both chambers of Congress). It's just as beholden to the interests of the top 1 percent as the Republican Party (save the Republicans' retrograde culture war baggage).

The OWS movement that has spread to over a thousand cities and includes growing numbers of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans among its ranks cannot be brushed off with the usual devices we've grown accustomed to from the corporate media. Labeling the protesters "socialists" doesn't mean anything since the big banks got their fat federal bailout. Calling them "anti-capitalist" is also a joke since they're not critiquing "capitalism" but a form of corporate domination over our nation's politics and governing institutions and over our most important policy choices affecting everything from energy to education, health care to housing, trade to "security," the environment to civil rights.

There's something happening out there where almost everyone you meet can tell you a horror story about how the big banks have mistreated them or a friend or family member. From the shoe store clerk at the mall to the nurse or teacher, even police officers and firefighters, are all catching on to the scam that Wall Street and its servants among Democratic and Republican politicians have perpetrated against us. If an honest opinion poll were taken today, disgust with Wall Street would not be 65 or even 75 percent but closer to 100 percent. You can feel it out there. Few people have internalized the crisis to the point of blaming the victims (even though you hear that point of view coming from all facets of the corporate media). Out in the real world people are showing a spirit that hasn't been around since the 1930s; a genuine feeling of solidarity like we're all in it together and to hell with the elites that stand in our way. The illegitimacy of a rigged economic system is beginning to sink in.

Back in the early 1930s Americans widely picked up on the song: "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime." The management of Republican-backed radio networks even told DJs to lay low on the song, and in some cases tried to ban it from the airwaves. The songwriter, E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, explained it this way:

The prevailing greeting at the time [1930], on every block you passed... was "Can you spare a dime?" "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" finally hit on every block, on every street. I thought that could be a beautiful title if I could only work it out by telling people, through the song, it isn't just a man asking for a dime. This is a man who says: I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the drum. Why the hell should I be standing in a breadline now? What happened to all this wealth I created?
The Occupy Wall Street movement echoes the spirit of solidarity and questioning of the status quo that Yip Harburg captured back in 1931. What's happening in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere where the OWS movement has taken hold is the beginning of a new ethos. We don't know where it is heading or how it will play out, but we have an interesting few years ahead of us.

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,

When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;

Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,

Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,

Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,

And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.

Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

My note: So if not Obama in '12, then who. I don't want to suffer even further at the hands of the gop. Is it silly to dream of real change, as in gutting the entire current system, and throwing them all out. Can it be done without a violent revolution? Will more people be harmed or helped?

I'm a yellow dog democrat. It looks like Obama right now to me...

Not to say that I couldn't be swayed, but it would have to be something real special.

Another song and video for the people cold in their tents refusing to give in. You are beautiful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQzv0ZyK0to

Occupy the World (The Circle)

We can occupy the world
And fill it with our love
We can raise our voices to the skies
And praise the stars above
We can beat the drums in darkness
Or let the lanterns shine
The world we have is big enough
We’re occupied by love

The circles grow with every hand
Added to our cause
The men who run this sacred land
Have broken all its laws
Our fists are raised for justice
Our common cause is strong
Our messages on cardboard
Our truth is in this song

Don’t let the lies distract our eyes
We see the simple truth
Everyone can hear the drums
Of the sacrifice of youth
The monsters in the canyon walls
Are only cowards in the halls
And while the wind is bitter cold
We hold this ground ‘cause we all know

Hold the line! Hold the line!
Link arms and plant your feet
Their smoky greed may win this day
But not the day delete
When the people see the violent way
They make their children run
The good awake from slumber
To join us here as one

len bullard
oct 29 2011

Thanks Len, I really like it!

Well done Len.

Here is a Paul Simon song that sums up the feelings this movement raises in me...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE3kKUEY5WU

American Tune

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I’m all right, I’m all right
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
And I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
(updated lyrics)
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another protest day
occupying with the rest
I'm occupying with the rest
© 1973 Words and Music by Paul Simon

Thanks guys. African percussion and banjo are sorta serendipity. I started trying to play the thing and the banjo was the closest axe to hand. The drums? Jon Taplin wrote some snark about the drum circles and I thought, hey this is a drum generation. We were a guitar generation and we became competitive and exclusive. We know how that went. They are inclusive. So when I dropped off lunch for son, Daniel, who was running sound at the local international festival (is that an oxymoron?) and I was watching the hindu dancers, I started hearing the hook in my head. Songwriting is mostly learning how to listen to the songs the universe is singing to all the time. That's my best/worst advice for songwriters: listen. And then write that down.

Good choice, DRR. Looks like the financial world is melting anyway with today's news of the leverage failures and the Greek PM firing his military chiefs while announcing a national refererendum. We may be looking into the void in a fog with crazies at the helm. Might be a good time to start bartering with the farmers and garage mechanics because we're turning into Cuba.

The whole country has turned into Alabama. The message from OWS seems simple enough: make sense and do right before doing well. Justice and a kind word. Mostly, we all want the thing to make sense again. We've seen forty years of nonsense. Enough.

I'm just glad to see people waking up and standing up. It's a beautiful thing.

Some really neat song lyrics there. And the Paul Simon ones too.