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The Occupy Wall Street prepaid Visa debit card is incredibly ambitious & an incredible waste of time
10.03.2013
11:15 am
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the Occupy Card
 
A descendent of Occupy Wall Street, the Occupy Money Cooperative, recently popped back up on the radar to launch their latest project, the Occupy Card. They say that soon, instead of keeping your money in a big, evil, economy-ruining bank, you’ll be able to put your money into an Occupy-approved cooperative, and have your own Occupy card!

What that means is a little foggy.

At the height of Occupy, there was a big “Move Your Money” campaign, wherein participants would open an account at a credit union or cooperative—institutions that aren’t legally allowed to engage in stuff like sub-prime mortgages, predatory lending, or toxic assets. The idea was to boycott the banks, and a lot of folks did it, since credit unions and cooperatives are everywhere, and most have all the features of a modern bank, with checking, loans, debit cards, etc.

So why choose the Occupy Money Cooperative? Well, I’m not really sure. Here’s a quote from their website’s FAQ:

The Occupy Money Cooperative, Inc. is a cooperative that will offer access to low cost financial services. We will not take deposits or offer loans, or other such services offered by banks. The Occupy Card will be offered through a bank, and so will be FDIC insured.

While banks are FDIC insured, credit unions and cooperatives are insured with the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund (NCUSIF), which is just as safe and secure, but overseen by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). So what you have with the Occupy Money Cooperative is an institution that does not take deposits or offer loans, does work through a bank, and somehow insists upon its own inherently ethical nature. It’s none of the convenience, with (potentially) all of the chicanery, and they’re asking for donations.

The Occupy Card is intended to be a prepaid card for people too disenfranchised to even open a checking account. Many current prepaid cards are giant scams, with some charging a $5 monthly fee, $5 to reload, $15 to dispute a transaction, and even a $1.95 fee for inactivity. Of course, there are prepaid cards that aren’t such a swindle, and since the Occupy Card will still charge ATM fees for withdrawals and inquiries, what advantage does it really have? Why on earth would they launch an autonomous project with so many cooperatives and credit unions that can take deposits and offer loans already around? Many credit unions already offer prepaid cards, so why not work with existing institutions instead of creating an inferior one from scratch?

The legacy of Occupy Wall Street is a bit hard to pin down. In some countries it inspired anti-austerity actions, or at least invigorated the movements already on the ground. In the US, it’s a bit of a scatter-shot. While it can be argued that Occupy “changed the conversation,” the truth is that it was powered by a populist fervor that lost steam pretty quickly, due to both external and internal problems. Some autonomous groups like Occupy Our Homes still do amazing anti-foreclosure activism, and Occupy Sandy was a life-saver after the tropical storm ravaged the East Coast, but the massive presence of a mobilized populist movement is sorely missed.

A lot of folks are angry because they feel the Occupy Card “cheapens” the spirit of the movement. I’m just sad that it seems like such a waste of time.
 

 
Via The New York Times

Posted by Amber Frost
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10.03.2013
11:15 am
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Progressive Hunter: How Glenn Beck’s chalkboard caused Byron Williams to lose his mind

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Byron Williams prison mug shot.
 
“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” - Byron Williams

Chilling, must-read article from Media Matters about the toxic influence paranoid wingnuts like Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck have on gullible, unstable—and potentially violent—people:

Byron Williams, a 45-year-old ex-felon, exploded onto the national stage in the early morning hours of July 18.

According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.

When the smoke cleared, Williams surrendered; the ballistic body armor he was wearing had saved his life. Miraculously, only two of the 10 CHP officers involved in the shootout were injured.

In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”

Fifteen years after militia-movement-inspired bombers killed 168 people in the Oklahoma City federal building, right-wing domestic terror plots are a fact of life in America. Since 2008, violent extremists—many of whom subscribe to the hate speech and conspiratorial fantasies of the conservative media—have murdered churchgoers in Knoxville, police officers in Pittsburgh, and an abortion provider in Wichita.

Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a “sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.”

In a 2009 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the anti-government militia movement—which had risen to prominence during the Clinton administration and faded away during the Bush years—has returned. According to the SPLC, the anti-government resurgence has been buttressed by paranoid rhetoric from public officials like Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media figures like Fox News’ Glenn Beck.

Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—including threatening to destroy her California home—because he was “upset with her passing the health care law.” His mother told a local news station that he “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,” adding, “I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he—that’s where he comes from.”

Read “Progressive Hunter”: Jailhouse Confession: How the right-wing media and Glenn Beck’s chalkboard drove Byron Williams to plot assassination (Media Matters)
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.11.2010
10:45 am
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