At the Drive In

I’ve put this off long enough.  I’ve enjoyed the fruits and sweetness of a brief entanglement with bliss and despair long enough.  It is time that I get down to business, call a spade a spade and then pick up my spade and put it to its intended use.  I am done with my creature comforts and of protecting what has yet to be taken, as if what has already been taken has not been egregious enough.

Perhaps I should qualify the comforts I enjoy today, at the edge of this springboard, by mentioning where this journey began for me.

Jew or Genital?

A Story in Three Pieces

By Volaar

 I should have suspected that the future would not be anything like it had been promised to us in 1977.  During a compulsory sex education course one of our football coaches had the indubitable privilege of referring to our nether regions as, “gentiles.” 

Over half of US banking assets held by 5 banks

By Al Lewis
Dow Jones Newswires

We have finally reached the point in our financial history where even bankers hate bankers.

Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issued its 2011 annual report with a 34-page essay, “Why We Must End Too Big To Fail—Now.” The report stops short of calling our nation’s largest banks terrorists, but it does dub them “a clear and present danger to the U.S. economy.”

Rioting Across America – The Great Depression

The US in the 1930s:

Unpaid Student Loans Top $1 Trillion

By Cryptogon

This whole student loan apocalypse is another confetti currency bubble scam. There are many parallels to the housing bubble, except, of course, that people can’t live inside those useless degrees obtained with borrowed money that can never be repaid.

The availability of the loans is driving ludicrous tuition increases, just like the funny money mortgages inflated the real estate market.

The Coming Derivatives Crisis That Could Destroy the Entire Global Financial System

By The Economic Collapse

Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino.  The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.

The word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard.  A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made.  Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Who Are the Top 1%?

Dr. Eowyn
Fellowship of the Minds

“Those who don’t know the game or are assets and manipulators of  the game will want to ‘endorse’ people and organisations they say they support  in cleaning up America – but they will be the very people and groups that are  systematically destroying America.” –David Icke, October 16, 2011

The movement that began as Occupy Wall Street in New York has spread to other cities across America as well as countries.  In Italy, the Occupiers instigated a riot in Rome, torching cars and smashing windows, which required armed police to be brought in.

In the name of equity, the Occupiers say they are the 99% opposed to the top 1%, the filthy rich. So who are America’s Top 1%?

99% to Bankers: We’ve Got the Guillotine!

By Keiser Report

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, talk about Marie Antoinette’s last words on a banner at the Chicago Board of Trade, and much more.

Our Overripe Moment

By Robert C. Koehler

“The Future is calling and has some serious concerns. Please pick up.”

It’s a Sunday afternoon, fivish, the sun is sinking and a chill is in the air. Ah, Chicago, vibrant with culture, crime and capital, but sort of dead at this hour of the ebbing weekend. I’m downtown and I’m not sure if the future is calling, but my heart is pounding as I walk west on Jackson to LaSalle, in the shadow of the great edifices of capitalism.

At 230 South LaSalle, in front of the Federal Reserve Bank, about a hundred people are gathered in informal clusters. Signs abound, some in people’s hands, others propped against the curb or a wall: “Trillions are missing from the Department of Defense.” “Wall Street needs adult supervision.” “I am Troy Davis.” “Sick and tired and denied all benefits. I am the 99%.” Written in orange chalk on the sidewalk: “If Iceland can let banks fail so can we.”

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City

By New York City General Assembly

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011:

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

The ‘People’s Microphone’

By Pablo Ouziel
The Peoples Voice

With the current ‘Audacity of Hope’ entering its terminal phase, Americans engaged in social movement activity are finally catching up with their brothers and sisters in other parts of the World.  What took a long time to flourish – despite the numerous calls from academics and activists from within the United States and from outside of its shores – has finally erupted into what is rapidly becoming the turning point in the relationship between people and markets (and people and government), at the heart of America’s unstable empire.

Wall street is now occupied and global indignation against plutocratic rule has reached its climax, it has come face to face with its source.

Occupy Wall Street: Macing Protesters, Chris Hedges and Michael Moore

Olbermann interviews Michael Moore who says, “I think there needs to be a multi-pronged approach” urging civil disobedience locally as well as nationally, and refusing to move out under a foreclosure notice since no one owns your mortgage any more.  “The banks lost them,” he says, when they bundled them into their little Ponzie schemes.

DOJ Ignores Kickbacks to Banks from Mortgage Insurers

More Proof of DoJ Lack of Interest in Enforcing the Law: The Case of the Kickback-Demanding Banks

By Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism

In this world of rampant banking miscreance, it may seem hard to get worked up about $6 billion in impermissible kickbacks. But this is a case of a clear-cut legal violation, with the particulars sent to the Department of Justice by the HUD Inspector General’s office on a silver platter. And one of the alleged big bad actors was the ever-sanctimonious Wells Fargo.

American Banker has a detailed write-up of a kickback scheme between major banks who were mortgage originators, in particular Wells, Citigroup, Countrywide, and SunTrust and mortgage insurers.

Capitalism Is the Crisis (Full Movie)

By Capitalism Is the Crisis.net

Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity examines the ideological roots of the “austerity” agenda and proposes revolutionary paths out of the current crisis. The film features original interviews with Chris Hedges, Derrick Jensen, Michael Hardt, Peter Gelderloos, Leo Panitch, David McNally, Richard J.F. Day, Imre Szeman, Wayne Price, and many more!

As America’s Economy Collapses, ‘New Normal’ Police State Takes Shape

By Tom Burghardt
Pacific Free Press

Forget your rights.

As corporate overlords position themselves to seize what little remains of a tattered social net (adieu Medicare and Medicaid! Social Security? Au revoir!), the Obama administration is moving at break-neck speed to expand police state programs first stood-up by the Bush government.

Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery

By Naomi Klein
The Nation

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

Why London exploded last night (Plus videos)

How new media, old media and rampant unemployment combined to stoke the worst riots Britain has seen in years

BY Michael Goldfarb
Global Post

LONDON, United Kingdom — I knew we were in for a rough night here in Stoke Newington in the London Borough of Hackney when my wife called me at 5 p.m. from Sainsbury’s, our local supermarket, to say she was in a lock down. They were shuttering the place and the police were telling her trouble had already started outside the Hackney Town Hall. The cops told her to go home and stay off the streets.

I took her call as I was walking into the local library to return a book. Inside, the librarians were watching a BBC live feed on their computers of action a mile and a half away. One of the librarians explained he lived over there.

Who would trust Standard and Poor’s?

By Michael Collins

Standard and Poor’s finally did it.  They downgraded the credit rating of the United States from AAA to AA+.  There are serious questions about the reliability of S&P.  The White House pointed out that there is a $2 trillion error in the calculations used for the downgrade.  Ths is of interest since the two other agencies failed to change the AAA status of the US. (See S&P downgrades U.S.)

Charge It

By Laughnmatter

New Jersey Tent City: Desperate victims of US war spending, bankster bailouts

Destitute: Charlie Errickson, 54, sat eating his lunch outside his shelter as he struggles to survive. Ocean County is trying to shut the makeshift city down.

By Daily Mail Reporter

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression these are the ramshackle homes of the desperate and destitute U.S. families who have set up their own ‘Tent City’ only an hour from Manhattan.

More than 50 homeless people have joined the community within New Jersey’s forests as the economic crisis has wrecked their American dream.

And as politicians in Washington trade blows over their country’s £8.8 trillion debt, the prospect of more souls joining this rag tag group grows by the day.

Building their own tarpaulin tents, Native American teepees and makeshift balsa wood homes, every one of the Tent City residents has lost their job.