ow I wish that people would stop saying ridiculous trash such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already accomplished its goals. That is just plain wrong. It has allowed itself to be pushed around and made an absolute patsy. It has now failed miserably. The one overarching goal was simply to occupy and make life difficult for the 1%. And for everyone who joyfully pays tribute to the 1%. Falling all over themselves, to bow, indeed, to prostrate themselves, before their masters, those who adore and worship the Lords of Greed, have utterly erased their lives and their true happiness.
And for their part, the 1% has decided to reassert their absolute control over the world. As long as Karl Rove, Rupert Murdoch, The Kock Brothers, Mitch McConnell, Baron Phip de Rothschild and the rest of the sorry lot of psychopaths who are so possessed of greed that for them it feels like the normal way for a human being to be. It is not for nothing that the Middle Age Roman Church classified Greed as a DEADLY sin. Greed kills everything it touches--- including the soul. The clues are all around. Read, for example, the story of King Midas. The story has survived because it has enough Truth in it that we must keep it as a warning. Of course, you won't discover that your soul is missing until you die and that event may come sooner than you think.
Sorry, fat cats, but you may have those shit cakes you call wealth and treasure, but you lose your soul in the bargain. Goethe was a genius into human nature, and when he wrote was right. and the parable of the modern man, known as Faust. I am not saying that you will go to Hell, but I am not saying NO, either.
Like the story of King Midas. breathes, the world will be in peril.
ust a taste of the kind of lies which Karl Rove, the Sigheil, Hitler, guy of the Republican Party, and his super mendacious, "Crossroads Foundation", delights in. Any idiot knows there is scarcely a word of truth in this load of steaming you-know-what. It isn't worth anybody's time to address a single word of it. One look at Rove's horrific childhood will tell you why he is the bad seed of the far Right.
A suicide mother,
a father who abandoned his family
and the list goes nauseatingly on.
Those who are filled with Rove's brand of hatred will love it. Fortunately, they are few in number.◘
I would be willing to bet some serious doughnuts that the agents provocateurs in the Occupy Oakland movement are not merely plainclothes police this time, but stooges hired by the banks. It is so very obviously a false flag operation. And unfortunately it was bound to happen anyway.
ou can argue all over the place about what the issues are; the best way to solve our economic problems; fix the infrastructure; who is right and who is wrong; and how the government ought to be run. But if you are talking about pure logic, and reason, from a human perspective, and how we should operate in a compassionate way as a culture, that's where we run into big trouble.
One needs to understand that the neo-conservatives despise the notion of The common good. Mere mention of the common good and a Republican begins to snarl, or adopt either a dismissive attitude; or else become belligerent, saying, "What do you mean," they said, "by this thing you call common good?"
Never mind that the concept has been around from the beginning of Western Civilization and that a single moment of reflection shows that without a strong sense of the common good we would fail, utterly, as a civilization. Republicans are in love with Ayn Rand's fantasy novel, "Atlas shrugged". And Ms. Rand was no lover of the common good. The Common Good has far too many collectivist overtones for her. And for the Republicans who, by the way, are incapable of critical thinking. A self evident fact since if they could think they would not for another minute be Republicans in the first place. They would find Atlas Shrugged to be the insufferable rant that it is. And Mitch McConnell, for example, would be lost without Frank Luntz to tell him what nasty little phrase of the day, to say that will scare the most number of conservatives. Take the phrase, "Job Killing". That has the ring of Frank Luntz. Another is Tax Relief.
Pure Frankie boy.
But the problem for Republicans is that they are far more collectivist than Progressives. The Republican party whip has very little problem keeping his people marching, like The Borg, in lockstep. My own dark suspicion is that because of parental abuse, physical and/or emotional, they were molded into their authoritarian mindset.
Once one understands the profile, the rest falls into place.
♦
Republicans hate the Occupy Wall Street movement and its people for several reasons which they cannot and will not articulate. Most of the reasons proffered are totally bogus.
The list of reasons is long, predictable, and trivial:
The protesters are dirty, unwashed.
They are merely envious of "successful" people like banksters and overpaid insurance execs.
They the protesters are nothing but hippies who sleep in tents and where exactly do such people go to the bathroom?
The Occupy movement in the parks is totally inconvenient for everyone. They are messing up the parks the conservatives or real people don't ever go to, but someday they might want to, and these people making a mess of everything.
"And furthermore, by God, I always lived within my means. I never had any debt. And all these people being foreclosed on should only blame themselves."
They, the conservatives, claim to be so rational and reasonable that their way is truly and objectively the best way: a free market unencumbered by any governmental limitations at all.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has less of a problem with that view, than that they have seen the crime and injury to the rest of us which such policy inevitably engenders. Men, and women, obviously, left to their own devices, without limitations, anywhere near a large pile of money, tend to gravitate to criminal behavior. And I don't mean simply showing the underbelly of their unfettered greed.
Research shows how otherwise upstanding people will go wrong if allowed for any length of time near a lot of money. That answers a lot of questions about the Too Big to Fail banksters. And the big thing we need to remember about the Big Bad Banksters is that rather than repent their crimes in a responsible way, they seek to make their crimes into not-crimes, retroactively, by buying our Congress and our DOJ. What they are doing, in fact, is compounding their crimes.
If you haven't read the novel or seen the movie, Lord of the Flies, you might do yourself a favor and and rent the movie; but first, read the book; get it from the public library or, at this point, buy it for a few bucks second hand.
The story is an allegory of how humans act when the grown ups are not around. The young boys and the book is all about a small group of boys who survive a plane crash, during a nuclear world war, and land on a small uninhabited island. The boys revert to an uncivilized authoritarian law of the jungle mode. Piggy, fat, weak, asthmatic, dependent on his thick lenses glasses, and very intelligent, the symbol of the intellectual, is killed by the other boys. The voice of reason, and law and order, which Piggy represented cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian culture. The boys situation continues to deteriorate until the grown ups show up at last to rescue them.
Do persons charged with responsibility under criminal or tort law fail to recognize the wrongfulness of their actions and beliefs because of cognitive dissonance? Does ego bordering on hubris, work in such a way that cognitive dissonance prevents them absolutely from seeing the wrongfulness of their actions?
The question almost answers itself. The answer is yes. The egoistic blindness regarding a sense of right and wrong is so strong in even the most responsible of persons that it produces a susceptibility to the spell it casts on the unconscious mindset.■
Now that the power elite has seen that America is awakening. They are now alert to this threat which the Occupy Movement represents. Expect big trouble from the police. Not just in Oakland. Everywhere. Tragic about the weather.■
Do not doubt that a small committed group of people can change the world. It is, in fact, the only thing that ever has changed the world.
Margaret Mead
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he Oregonian's Saturday editorial, Point Made, Occupy Portland, is a perfect example of far right fear and trembling. No doubt police violence is on the way despite Mayor Sam Adams courageous stand against the loud and obnoxious Tea Partiers' insistence that he use force to disband the protesters' encampment. And they want it NOW! This tells us 2 things.
One, Those far right wing extremists are really terrified of the Occupy movement. OWS brings the TP right to face with reality. It threatens to tear the veil of illusion they wear over their eyes in their hatred of Truth. And...
Two that the Mayor is a humane, reasonable, man of honor who does not respond to the badgering of his enemies. I watched a clip on KATU in which the reporter badgered the mayor to the point where he was disrespectful. Adams gave him clear answers but the man refused to accept them. And kept at it. Myself I would have clipped the asshole in the face and hope that I'd broken some bones. But a mayor can't do that.
Bravo, Your Honor!
Bravissimo!
Whether the far right wishes to acknowledge it or not, and one can be certain that they don't, the Oakland police department, as well as the Atlanta Police, and the Chicago police department, have lost the moral imperative. This innocuous sounding phrase, this moral imperative, is the central foundation of what Kant called the Categorical Imperative, the ultimate morality, of any culture at any time, any where, as Kant showed in his milestone of philosophical writings, The Critique of Pure Reason, (that's the one where Kant's mentor, the professor who was overseeing the writing of his dissertation, after 2 weeks returned his manuscript, wherein he found on page 16, a red line drawn across the page; and under that was written, "This is as far as I can read. I think I am going insane.")
That one.
(If you have ever skimmed the pages of The Critique Of Pure Reason then you know that Kant dismantles reality, creating his own neo-linguistic argument that existence itself is void of properties. Then he puts it back together again, not merely as it is, but by creating the Categorical Imperative, as it ought to be, if we are to have a civilization at all. Otherwise, we are back to the jungle.)
When you have lost the moral imperative, you have lost the argument, the contest, the battle, the war; everything. That is how Gandhi defeated the British. The Brits finally could not bear to gaze upon their own moral failure; but finally, had to come face to face with the fact that they, the greatest rulers of the most glorious empire since Rome, were morally unfit to rule what they deemed a backward people. At least in their eyes, India was inhabited by a people fit only to serve the Whitehall officers and their wives.
So it is with this moment in History.
The police and the oligarchs with them, have lost the moral imperative. So it appears that the aggressors are the losers not the "unwashed" hippies.
Even if somehow the protesters had stepped over the line of their First Amendment Rights, which guarantees the right to peaceably assemble the cops are still thugs. They used ordnance, weaponry on unarmed citizens. That's as immoral as it gets.
Even if the protesters had stepped over the imaginary line, the police department's violent assault on unarmed citizens transformed the cops work, in a heartbeat, from being protectors of the peace--- to criminal thuggery. No ideology on earth can support such baldfaced thuggery. This is the law of the jungle so well beloved by the Tea Party folks. Of course, the Mad Tea Party people, seem always to be in need of a reflection of their own hatred. So now they have an object to hate: namely, the horribly inconvenient and "unwashed" dissidents who are peacefully gathered to inspire and encourage a change of heart, which would signal an awakening of the Wall Street banksters who have consistently stolen taxpayer money and homes from the poor and middle class.
But this is not new. The cops act with impunity because they know one thing: the media, and the general public will forget it within days. So brutality and murder is easily tolerated in America as long as the perp wears a navy blue uniform and sports a metal badge. Don't believe me? Take a look at the footage of police beating up the unarmed demonstrators of the 1920s and 30s. These were people peacefully protesting the corporate bosses' actions to destroy unions. We see the same thing in an earlier time when Women protested for the right to vote. The media portrayed such women as immoral, subversive and traitorous. They handcuffed and jailed the women. And worse. Some were wounded and some were killed.
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In their rebuttal to the unarmed protesters, the OWS people in NYC and across the globe (more than 2000 Occupy camps,) the far right is whining that the oligarchy is being unfairly attacked, demonized by losers who are merely envious of the oligarch's success in accumulating their riches. Whew! That sort of thinking, if you can call it so, is so breathtakingly simplistic, one blushes for them. Such an argument is disingenuous; and smacks of a staggering intellectual dishonesty that begs one to wonder at the dismal level of intelligence of those who spout this sort of drivel. It's as if they did not get it--- that the Bush administration and the eight years of Republican total control of Congress, every move of which was dictated by the corporations and banksters through their lobbyists--- removed protections designed to protect the public from unethical exploitation by corporate interests.
The Republican Party in exercising their ideology, at last unencumbered by federal law, virtually burned the house down. Instead of a country which moved forward as a result, we saw instead the loss of tens of millions of homes to fraudulent foreclosure, banksters who offered triple A rated bundles of liars loans then turned around and bet on the failure of that product, and made billions as the product turned to dust in the hands of their Main Street clients; not to mention the bail out of failed corporations, with taxpayer dollars. And last, but far from least, the trillions of dollars given as a gift to the banks in a benevolent under the table, backroom style by the Federal Reserve. And all of this, ALL OF IT, was done on the backs of the poor.
Corporations privatizing profit and socializing losses. Business as usual in this climate of crony capitalism has become a criminal enterprise. Business as usual must stop.
It is proof positive that crony capitalism does not and can not work with out regular gifts from government; i.e. Main Street. It is a fact that the far right, those who love to quote from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, wherein he promises that the Free Market will bestow happiness on all due to the magic invisible hand which will guide all enterprise surely, that they, not a one of them, have actually read the entire work. After describing the benefits of Free Markets, Smith then warns that it can only work when all citizens are equal. You won't hear that phrase fall from the lips of a far right-winger.
My fondest hope and wish is that the good folks of the Occupy Wall Street movement will not go home until at least the Banksters responsible for the mess in which America now finds itself, go to jail for a long, long, time.
If I were less respectful of the moral imperative, and possessed of a deeply religious nature, as a result of being brought up in the Catholic Church, I would demand that such people be flayed alive and then burnt at the stake.
Unfortunately, this police violence did not begin in a vacuum. Violent reprisals against the OWS people began with the Federal Government. How dare the 99% talk back to their betters? They must be put down, contained. And to this end the Feds offered a $15, 000 grant to police departments around the country which had but one stipulation. Disband and dismantle the movement with violence. But some refused to play patty cake.
The District Attorney in Syracuse, NY, showed himself to be a man, or, as is said in Yiddish, a mensch. (I had a Jewish room mate for years. His mother was a second generation yenta. After six years I spoke Yiddish as fluently as they did.)
Back to our Syracuse DA. Bless him! In a stunning act of absolute integrity, he returned a $15 million dollar grant the Federal government had offered the city. It seems that, very quietly, the Feds are offering that much money in taxpayer dollars to cities where there is an Occupy movement.
There's just one little catch.
The Federal Agency which is so generously spreading this manna throughout America, stipulates that whichever city accepts the money, that city's police department must use violence to dismantle the protesters camps.
hings are beginning to get out of hand. Police in Oakland dressed to the teeth in riot gear have elected to subdue peaceful protesters. To this end they've made the next move in the overture to the WAR ON AMERICANS.
Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments. But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.
The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens. More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached. One can only applaud such integrity. And condemn the corruption of Oakland.
In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.
Do they really want us to believe that Bernie Madoff was the only person on Wall Street engaged in fraud?
Just how stupid do they imagine the public is? Well, granted there's an awful lot of cows and sheep out there.
But ultimately we must see to it that no one is above the law. Goldman Sachs is looking mighty like a target ripe for a grand jury.
Where this really began is with the Republican infestation of both the White House and the Congress during the Bush years. But then Obama came to office and, first thing, denied the U.S. Attorney General's office the authority to prosecute Rove, Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfy, and so on. He also prevented the CIA torturers from being prosecuted. Sociopaths who were all too eager to torture their fellow man.
Interesting to me, is the fact that not all police departments have taken the bait, namely the $15 million grants which the feds have offered to other police departments. But apparently greed got the better of the corrupt Oakland officials.
The one stipulation which went with the grant is that the feds want the police to employ brutality in dealing with their fellow citizens. More than one police department has returned or refused the grant as long as such conditions are attached. One can only applaud such integrity. And condemn the corruption of Oakland.
In other words the fascist feds have come out of the woodwork at last and identified themselves as traitors.
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We can see plainly the cowardice of the police in the above video clip. And cowardice is all it is. It's outrageous that they would wear heavy riot gear and use lethal weaponry on unarmed and peaceful demonstrators. But when the Tea Baggin' Partiers showed up with their loaded guns, that was just fine with the police. No problem.
And to those same police I would leave this word of warning: you messed with the wrong guy when you severely injured an ex-Iraqi G.I. That was not only cruel and craven but it was a tactical error for your side that will have real consequences. You just helped to engage another few million citizens in the cause of the Occupy Wall Street movement. To the officials who ordered this appalling violation of Americans doing their Constitutional imperative: Your days of corruption, bribery, fraud, and masturbatory fantasies of Police State triumph are coming to an end. If not with the Wall Street protests then it will take another less peaceful revolution. And it will be you against your fellow American. And if the police lose, and they will, there will be reprisals. That is guaranteed. You will wish you lived in Russia.
ow I wish that people would stop saying ridiculous trash such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already accomplished its goals. That is just plain wrong. It has allowed itself to be pushed around and made an absolute patsy. It has now failed miserably. The one overarching goal was simply to occupy and make life difficult for the 1%. And for everyone who joyfully pays tribute to the 1%. Falling all over themselves, to bow, indeed, to prostrate themselves, before their masters, those who adore and worship the Lords of Greed, have utterly erased their lives and their true happiness. 
ou can argue all over the place about what the issues are; the best way to solve our economic problems; fix the infrastructure; who is right and who is wrong; and how the government ought to be run. But if you are talking about pure logic, and reason,
he Oregonian's Saturday editorial, Point Made, Occupy Portland, is a perfect example of far right fear and trembling. No doubt police violence is on the way despite Mayor Sam Adams courageous stand against the loud and obnoxious Tea Partiers' insistence that he use force to disband the protesters' encampment. And they want it NOW! This tells us 2 things. 
hings are beginning to get out of hand. Police in Oakland dressed to the teeth in riot gear have elected to subdue peaceful protesters. To this end they've made the next move in the overture to the WAR ON AMERICANS.