“If you owe the bank $1000, you’re at the mercy of the bank, if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 the bank is at your mercy.”

A few weeks back, I attended an extraordinary event in New York organized by my longtime friend Douglas Rushkoff called “Contact.” It was a fascinating symposium about fighting corporate influence online and how to affect societal change using social media tools (more or less). The object of the day was to tease out four projects from the participants (a mix of 300 activists, tech entrepreneurs, intellectuals and media types) which could be practically realized, not just “pie in the sky” stuff. Four finalists got $10,000 awards from Pepsi to assist in concretizing these ideas.

At first, the conference, which took place at a stunning former synagogue on the Lower East Side known as The Angel Orensanz Center, got off to a bumpy start. Whenever someone would raise their hand and say something too fuzzy like “I’d like to start an online forum for people to discuss social issues” this got back a politely, yet dismissive “Uh, what, specifically, do you mean by that?” response from Rushkoff, who led the sessions. His firm conceptual herding caused a rapid focusing of the group mind into projects that had not just viability—and utility, of course—but that could actually be manifested within days or weeks.

There were a lot of worthy, even brilliant, ideas kicked around that day, but the first one that really caused me to take notice was when one of the participants stood up and said he’d like to create an online tool to facilitate and organize a mass debt strike against the banks and the government. There was an immediate “x factor” that this notion tapped into (my guess is that Occupy Wall Street was supported by 100% of the room) and “Kick-Stopper,” as the project was dubbed, became one of the four finalists.

When the conference broke down into smaller discussion groups—I was one of the judges of who would get the Pepsi cash—I silently observed the debt strike enthusiasts’ conversation with interest. I was somewhat less enamored of the concept when Thomas Gokey, an adjunct professor at Syracuse University who proposed the idea, said that maybe the money owed to the banks could be held in escrow accounts, eventually getting paid to the banks, but only after they’d agreed to certain demands and reforms. To some of the people seated on pillows in the venue’s balcony, this seemed like a reasonable approach, but at least half the group groaned and expressed the more punk rock sentiment of “fuck the banks, they’ll get NONE of it” which seemed like a much better position to take, to my mind.

Stiffing the fuckers is something they’ll understand…

I’m not sure where they got with it in the end with the escrow vs. the fuck the banks question, but Kick-Stopper, as I mentioned, was one of the four finalists and you can follow the progress they are making here. Sarah Jaffe, who was at the Contact event, wrote about the debt strike concept at length at AlterNet:

“I wanted to do this project because I kept having the same basic conversation with everyone at Zuccotti and everywhere else,” Gokey told me. “When I talk to people about what we could do that would really compel Congress and Wall Street to meet our demands or really alter the current system, we inevitably start discussing what non-cooperation with our own oppression would look like. What does it mean to stop cooperating with the banks? What we inevitably end up describing is some variation of a debt strike, simply ending our own participation in a system that exploits us.”

—snip—

“The problem is that a debt-strike will take a lot of coordination to make it work,” Thomas Gokey points out, “It can’t just be one person who is willing to risk their financial life, it only works when there are millions of people who are willing to take that risk together, and they are only going to take that risk if they can feel confident that everyone else has got their back.”

That in part is what Gokey hoped to solve by bringing the debt strike idea to ContactCon, but it’s not the only one. Lerner points out that the debt strike also needs targets, demands and an answer to the question, “Who pays?”

“There should be debt forgiveness, but these guys—the student loan profiteers—should eat it, not the government and taxpayers,” he points out. “The banks should pay because they destroyed the economy, they sucked 18-year-olds into predatory loans they are stuck with for life.”

Hear, hear! Imagine the indignity of graduating from college with $100,000 of student loan debt nipping at your heels and today’s nearly non-existent job prospects. It’s absurd.

I’m not an expert in this sort of thing, but apparently you can’t charge off student loans in bankruptcy, they’ll just attach your wages, so a collective action to withhold student loan payments (and credit card debt) at a time when half the country is skint could gather critical mass rather quickly, I’d imagine. Everyone else got a bail-out, why shouldn’t you?

My prediction: You’re going to be hearing the term “debt strike” used a lot in the coming months.

(For the record, I have not a single cent of student loan debt. I didn’t go to college and I have no skin in this game. Education should be free for anyone who wants to learn and better themselves.)

Debtor’s Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks? (AlterNet)

 
A must see. Simple, clear, to the point:

The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.

 
Thank you Glen E. Friedman of New York City!

 
Comedian Joe Rogan rants with some serious observations on what’s going down.

“Is this fuckin’ Chicago in the sixties? What the fuck is this?”

Audio excerpt from The Joe Rogan Experience podcast put to some appropriate visuals.
 

 
A guest editorial from our super smart pal, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog.

There are really only three ways to cripple Wall Street’s democracy-killing concentration of wealth and power: take our money out of Wall Street and the TBTF banks, eliminate private money from elections and abolish Wall Street’s dealer, the Federal Reserve.

3. Abolish Wall Street’s dealer, pusher and protector, the Federal Reserve.

My reasoning is very simple:

Everything else people want to see happen cannot happen if:

1) Wall Street and the SDI (systemically dangerous institutions) a.k.a. too big to fail banks, control most Americans’ financial assets and debts

2) The Federal Reserve exists to enable and protect the SDI’s wealth and power via Primary Dealers, the discount window and other pusher/dealer mechanisms

3) Wall Street and the other SDIs can use the billions of dollars they skim from our accounts, IRAs, 401Ks and pensions to buy political influence and protection from regulation and competition.

Therefore these are the necessary foundations of any real change.

As long as Wall Street and the other SDIs control much of the nation’s financial markets, assets and debts, and the Federal Reserve exists to protect and enable their predation and parasitic skimming, they will have the means to reap billions in profits which can then be funneled into our cash-corrupted political system of for-sale toadies and apparatchiks.

The only real leverage we have is our money and our compliance. Leaving our money in Wall Street and the Too Big to fail banks enables their dominance. Leaving our money in checking accounts, money market funds, savings accounts and brokerage accounts, and then using credit and debit cards issued by the SDIs, is to remain deeply complicit in their dominance.

This concept is now entering the cultural dialog, for example this recent entry on Zero Hedge: Want To Defeat The Banks? Stop Participating In The System!

Frequent Of Two Minds contributor Harun I. summed the argument up even more forcefully:

I applaud this movement only if people are coming to the recognition that, collectively, we as a nation have been wrong and now need to move in a different direction. We must now engage in discussing how best to do so.
However, I remain skeptical. Why are the TBTF banks still operating? From fraud to extortion to money laundering for drug cartels, the list of crimes against humanity is quite clear and long. Exactly what does it take before people will stop doing business with demonstrably corrupt entities?

And now there is a General Strike scheduled. I am all for it. But understand that our government will borrow the shortfall and nothing meaningful other than an increase in public debt will occur.

However, if you want to see an instantaneous and dramatic effect, every person close every account they have with all the TBTF banks and their subsidiaries on the same day.

Immediately or almost immediately they would have to be taken into receivership, their assets marked to market and sold off. The End.

Why destroy the TBTF banks? Most of them are Primary Dealers. The Fed then comes under pressure as it becomes the only lender of resort.

Then, once we have gotten their attention we tackle monetary reform, lobbying, and term limit in Congress and the Supreme Court.

It is time for government to “fear the people”. Rest assured that if government does not fear the people, nothing will change.

As for the Supreme Court’s legalist worship of the Corporate State: I believe this court will be remembered by history as the court which veered close enough to Corporate-State fascism to give it a big wet kiss. Corporate “rights” of personhood? No problem, you got it! The “right” to fund unlimited campaign contributions? No problem, you got it!

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini

We might profitably ask how the Founding Fathers would have responded to calls that the U.S. Constitution should contain a clause granting the East India Company the same rights of personhood as U.S. citizens, and then further granting it the unlimited right to buy political favors as a function of “free speech.”

One wonders how any of the Revolutionary War veterans among the Founding Fathers might have responded to such toadying claptrap. Yet this is precisely what the corporate toadies in the flowing black robes claim is “defended” by the U.S. Constitution.

A close reading of the Constitution reveals no amendments or clauses granting private corporations personhood, or granting them the right to inject unlimited sums of money to sway elections. If we turn to the Federalist Papers, we find fear of a “tyranny of the minority”—and what is a private corporation but an extreme minority bent on purchasing a limited but oppressive, exploitative and parasitical tyranny?

The legalist lackeys on the Supreme Court have hidden far too long behind the reputation of the Court—a reputation punctured by history, we might note—as a forum of disinterested legal debate. Rather, the court is nothing but another collection of imperfect human beings who are easily swayed by the tenor of the times and the ideological agendas of the wealthy and powerful. (“These are not the campaign reforms you’re looking for. Move along.”)

Given that we have a court that worships Corporate-State fascism slicked over with a thin veneer of democracy for public relations purposes—every single attempt to limit corporate campaign contributions has been struck down by the court—then our only choice as a people is to ban all private money contributions and institute a system of 100% publicly financed elections. Yes, it’s imperfect, and yes, it’s messy and costly, but nowhere near as corrupting and costly to liberty as the Corporate-State fascism we now endure.

Libertarians may be aghast at this option, but we have been reduced by the legalist lackeys in the Supreme Court to this choice: either we continue to be ruled by the corrupting corporate-State nexis of unlimited corporate/private Elites funding of elections, or we go with public financing. Thanks to the Supreme Court, there is no other choice.

As a lagniappe thought: one of the primary concerns of many “OWS/we are the 99” supporters is rising income disparity. That is a legitimate concern in any nation claiming to be a democracy with a free-market economy. Yet a close examination of the roots of income disparity and rising poverty leads straight to the Federal Reserve.

Winners And Losers: The New Economy (Zero Hedge)

What Mr. Gross and Mr. Frank and many others don’t see is that it is the creation of fiat money that destroys wealth and misdirects the investment of capital into less productive assets. That is, monetary inflation destroys capital (wealth). The reason why the production of goods and services do not bear higher yields than financial assets is that the production of goods and services suffers from a lack of real capital. Remember that real capital comes only from the saved profits of production and from the savings of workers from wages earned in production.

You obviously cannot print wealth, but if you try that fiat money distorts the entire economy by directing investment to things which appear to appreciate but what is really happening is that the dollar is depreciating. As a result, fiat money and real capital are invested in financial assets because they appear to have greater yields than returns from the production of goods. Prices rise (price inflation) and it creates the inevitable boom which always busts. The fall out is that we are stuck with things people don’t want (in the present re/depression it is housing). And we fall for it every time.

Allow me to simplify the argument:

1. The Federal Reserve has financialized the economy as an intrinsic expression of its reason for being.

2. Financialization necessarily creates systemically rising income disparity.

I think that’s all we need to understand to grasp the utmost importance of abolishing the Federal Reserve, a private banking monopoly created and protected by our Congress. Limiting Wall Street and the TBTF banks is structurally impossible as long as the Federal Reserve exists.

Written by Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from Of Two Minds.

 
Zennie Abraham, a blogger at Veterans Today, has lived in Oakland since 1974 and believes that the crowd estimate of the Occupy Oakland General Strike provided by Oakland police is way off. Abraham claims the crowd was much closer to 100,000 than the official count of 7000.

You can’t take a snapshot of an event like this, because of its time length; you have to think of it as a dynamic. In any population there are births, deaths, in-migration, and out-migration. For the Occupy Oakland General Strike, there were no births, thankfully no deaths, but a lot of in-migration and out-migration.

What was so amazing about the size of the crowd both inside the plaza and just outside of it, then marching to the Port of Oakland, was that it did not decrease in size; it increased. And that was with some people leaving it, and others coming in from BART and from around Oakland via foot or other parts of the Bay by car.

For that to happen all day long and considering the capacity of the plaza and the crowds outside of it points to 100,000 people. I’ve never seen anything like that in the entire history of this city.

And that is why it must be said that much of the media should be drawn and quartered for the most irresponsible coverage I’ve ever seen. Many outlets just waited for something bad to happen, or looked for it. But there were so many people more having a great time, that whatever happened was far away from downtown Oakland.

The Whole Foods Oakland Facility is on 27th and Harrison and outside of downtown Oakland, and a good mile away from City Hall Plaza. But to the media eye, the vandalism that happened there made headlines. Let’s just get this out of the way: it should not have happened, but that’s no excuse to get the whole story wrong.

The video below is all the proof anyone would need that the official numbers were way, way off, but 100,000? Oakland’s population is around 300,000, even accounting for the folks who came in from the rest of the Bay area (population 4.5 million) to march, that’s still probably too high a number to be realistic. Still, I’m willing to go along with a tally that’s several times higher than what the Oakland police—and the mainstream media—told us.

What’s important to remember as you watch the size of these marching masses, is that less than two months have passed since Occupy Wall Street began. It’s only going to get more interesting from here on out.
 

 
Above, a bird’s eye view of a static crowd of 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl posted by redditter BdotTS.
 

 
Via reddit

Take your money out of the Evil Empire today! Image via @SKYENICOLAS

Today is Bank Transfer Day, the day to take your money (should you still be lucky enough to have any), transfer it to a credit union, close down your accounts with the big banks and starve them of the oxygen they need to survive: YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEY.

Not everyone can be in Zuccotti Park, but YOU CAN DO THIS!

It’s Saturday. Do you honestly have something better to do than fucking over the big banks? I didn’t think so…

DailyKos blogger frustrated1 told a tale of closing his or her bank accounts, along with her sister under the title “The bank said ‘You’ll Be Back.’” I encourage any of you who are doing this today to post your own first person stories in the comments.

One thing I should probably mention is that my sister is a very successful medical doctor.  She makes a ton of money.  She also had a ton of money in each of these banks.  She decided to close these accounts out of solidarity with OWS protesters.  

At Wells Fargo, my sister walked up to the teller and politely asked to close her account.  The teller said, “No problem.”  She pulled up her account and saw the balance and told her that due to the amount she had to speak with the branch manager.  The branch manager came out.  He was probably 30 years old and was very arrogant.  He asked my sister why she wanted to close her account and my sister told him she thought Wells Fargo was part of the problem with the economy.  He went thru some talking points about why she shouldn’t move her money, but my sister didn’t back down.  When he asked her where she was going she told him that she would be banking at the North Carolina State Employees Credit Union.  She isn’t a state employee, but anyone can join if you are related to a state employee.  It turns out her husband is.  Anyway, the bankster told her “You’ll be back.  Credit unions can’t provide the services you need.”  We’ll see about that.  She withdrew over $200k from Wells Fargo.

Next we went to Bank of America.  I closed my last account with hardly any questions asked.  Of course, I had taken most of my money out so there wasn’t much left to take.  My sister on the other hand had a large balance in multiple accounts.  They actually refused to cut her a check for the full amounts.  They only gave her 1/3 of her money and told her she’d have to come back to withdraw the rest.  They claimed they were only allowed to make checks for a certain amount, and that they had no authority to cut additional checks on the same day.  Stupid BofA.   She had her check in hand and politely told off the branch manager when he told her she had to come back another day or two to withdraw the rest.  

At BofA, we weren’t the only ones closing accounts.  There was a line of people.  Most had small accounts because they weren’t even being challenged, but she actually had to wait in line to speak with a branch manager.

At SunTrust, the branch manager went off his rocker.  He just kept asking her “is there anything I can do or anything I can say to change your mind?”  He asked probably twenty times.  He even offered to have the market executive meet with her and hear out her concerns. She told him she wasn’t interested.  He really looked nervous about it.  

We then took the deposits we had to NCSECU.  The people there were busy.  There were 5 people in front of us in the line to open an account.  When my sister got to the front she learned that the credit union actually has a trust company and wealth management services. Neither of us knew that.  She is now considering moving her Merrill Lynch (owned by BofA) accounts to the credit union as well.  She’s been with her financial advisor for 15 years, so that’s the biggest reason she hesitates. 

Here’s a link to some helpful Bank Transfer Day resources at AlterNet and Move Your Money

How do I move my money out of a big bank? (Mother Jones)

 
There is an absolutely GENIUS FUNNY missive regarding “what to do” about Occupy Wall Street from one of the “morans” at Tea Party Nation that’s getting passed around this morning and it’s a fuckin’ doozy of dumb, a blizzard of idiocy and slightly more than a soupçon of BALLS TO THE WALL, AGGRESSIVE IGNORANCE. But what did anyone expect? (Even if you had the lowest expectations wait until you get to the “rape camps” section).

It’s a classic in its own demented way. This post was also apparently emailed to members of the Tea Party Nation yesterday and posted on Reddit by postirony. This is good shit. Savor it. Oh and by the way, the TPN poster goes under the nom de plume of “Jane Galt.” Just thought I’d throw that out there, it’s an amusing detail. Here’s an excerpt:

On GBTV this past Monday, Glenn Beck and his guests were discussing Occupy Wall Street ( Which has gone global, as a general socialist-globalist occupation movement now. ), and one of them said that the only way to stop socialism from taking over a country at a point like this, is just to have the police shut them down - break up their demonstrations and riots.

And I was thinking about this. We all have the right to free speech, which anyone can do at any time. We all have the right to petition the government for “redress of grievances”, which anyone can do at any time. And we all have the right to hold a rally, like the Tea Party movement has done on several occasions, though we were totally ignored by this socialist administration and most of the Congress, and even lied about, smeared and called names by the Marxists, as they continue to borrow, spend and tax this country into an eventual Great Collapse.

And meanwhile the Fed continues to devalue our paper and digital currency by constantly expanding the money supply and “loaning” ( more accurately “giving it away”, because so many in the EU can’t reasonably ever be expected to repay it! ) it out all over the world!

(How many of you have noticed a general climate of depression (malaise), especially in the business world, after the August 2nd deadline passed and it became clear that they had no intention of taking any serious steps to correct this, and balance the budget now - not in “10 years or 20 years”, which is meaningless?)

But I digress…

What they don’t have the right to do, and Glenn’s guest was right about this, is to stage - not a demonstration or rally, but an occupation, meant to “bring down” our relatively free market system, capitalism and our individual rights along with it. ( “Capitalism” is, after all, simply the right to own your life and property. )

They don’t have a right to trash things and make parts of these cities uninhabitable in the process. This is an insurrection and these are the kinds of dangerous mobs that led to socialist/communist collapses in eastern bloc countries during the rise of the Soviet Union, and the people in those countries never knew what hit them, until it was too late!

So yes, these people have said their piece, they’ve held rallies and demonstrated, but an Occupation should not be tolerated and they should now be “read the riot act” by the police, and be told to disperse and leave! And if they refuse, the police should force them to disperse!

Update 11-4-11: When I wrote the above blog, I was a little behind on my GBTV. On Tuesday, Glenn Beck reported ( with several video news clips! ) that these “Occupy” Marxist globalist insurrectionists are in fact running their occupied areas as rape camps!

Women, as well as even one man, have been raped, and they’re preventing it from being reported, “for the good of the revolution” and “for the collective good”, which of course outweighs the rights of the individuals being raped and the laws that say that felony crimes must be reported!  These crimes would absolutely not be tolerated if the right were doing them, especially the Tea Party movement! Yes, these camps should be shut down, and they should be shut down now and these Marxist revolutionary insurrections should be dispersed immediately!

Rape camps? Wait a minute, “rape camps”?

Yes. Rape camps.

It’s all they’ve got. Bless their pointed little heads.

 
With today being the first day that recall petitions can be filed in Wisconsin against officials who were elected in November 2010—like say extremely unpopular Republican Governor Scott Walker—we’re happy to report that the first paperwork has indeed been filed with state elections officials to get this sleazy son of a bitch out of office.

WI’s Government Accountability Board confirmed that the request was filed Friday, the first possible date to file a recall petition. Now it’s up to the unions and Democrats in WI to gather 540,000 in the next 60 days to force the recall election. Walker is able to engage in unlimited fundraising now that this initial petition has been filed. The game is on.

The first petition to recall Walker was filed by David Brandt of Muskego in Waukesha County. It’s suspected by some WI Democrats that Mr. Brandt is a Walker supporter who filed the petition today so that Walker’s fundraising could begin immediately. Whether that’s true or not hasn’t been determined, but apparently Brandt gave Walker’s campaign $50 in 2010. It doesn’t rule out that he came to loathe Walker like many others in the state (and nation!) came to loathe this stupid-faced scumbag.

But who cares anyway? It’s not exactly like Walker has the wind at his back or anything, so why wait even one more day? The Republicans are on the run in WI and they are very well-aware of it, too, so why not just get down to the business of ending Scott Walker’s political career ASAP?

GOP efforts to hamstring recall efforts with a plan that would require each recall petition to be notarized were defeated earlier this week and so was a motion to have recall elections take place under a new legislative map favoring the GOP.  The Republican efforts to hinder the recall efforts have been moot.

With the threat of these procedural roadblocks now behind them, Wisconsin Democrats plan to file separate recall petitions against Scott Walker and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch soon.

Contribute to the WI Democrats efforts to get this union-busting bastard out of office.

Below, hapless Reichwing goofball Scott Walker gets a “mic check” in Chicago:
 

The face of an idiot.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was heckled for six solid minutes this morning by fifty Occupy Chicago supporters in front of an audience of 300 people at a breakfast appearance.

When they were finished harassing the hapless, soon-to-be-former WI Republican governor, the protesters left the event at Chicago’s Union League Club.

Around fifty people chanted things like “Union busting. It’s disgusting” and “We are the 99 percent.”

After the protesters left, politically tone-deaf, about-to-be-recalled-from-office Walker said, “The bottom line is, no matter how loud you shout, the facts are the facts. The facts are that our reforms have worked and continue to work in the state of Wisconsin.”

Look into his beady little eyes. Even Walker’s eyes look like they’re sweating. This is a man terrified on one hand, and yet in deep, deep denial on the other. As the Firesign Theatre once said: “A stiff idiot is the worst kind.”
 

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker heckled at Chicago’s Union League Club from WBEZ on Vimeo.

 
Last night at the start of an Elizabeth Warren campaign meeting in Brockton, MA, some sad, scared little man on the wrong side of history expressed his support for the Tea party and called Warren a “socialist whore.”

Via Huffington Post:

After the event, Warren reflected on the man’s outburst, which she said was her first such encounter. “I actually felt sorry for the guy. I really genuinely did. He’s been out of work now for a year and a half. And bless his heart, I mean, he thought somehow it would help to come here and yell names,” she told HuffPost.

The assault stuck with Warren, and she continued to think about it throughout the night. Hours later, she she said she wasn’t upset with the man himself, but rather with those who attempt to channel his anger in a malevolent direction. “I was thinking more about the heckler. I’m not angry with him, but he didn’t come up with the idea that his biggest problem was Occupy Wall Street. There’s someone else pre-packaging that poison—and that’s who makes me angry,” she said.

Did you get to the end where he tries to dramatically storm out and the door is locked? Bless his pointed little head!