An Associated Press report today about the latest stirrings of the Occupy movement indicates that this Summer is going to be a hot one indeed, for both Republicans and Democrats alike.

A group of protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement plans to elect 876 “delegates” from around the country and hold a national “general assembly” in Philadelphia over the Fourth of July as part of ongoing protests over corporate excess and economic inequality.The group, dubbed the 99% Declaration Working Group, said Wednesday delegates would be selected during a secure online election in early June from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories.

In a nod to their First Amendment rights, delegates will meet in Philadelphia to draft and ratify a “petition for a redress of grievances,” convening during the week of July 2 and holding a news conference in front of Independence Hall on the Fourth of July.

Any U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident who is 18 years of age or older may run as a nonpartisan candidate for delegate, according to Michael S. Pollok, an attorney who advised Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last year and co-founded the working group.

“We feel it’s appropriate to go back to what our founding fathers did and have another petition congress,” Pollok said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We feel that following the footsteps of our founding fathers is the right way to go.”

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and cited King George III’s failure to redress the grievances listed in colonial petitions as a reason to declare independence.

Interesting that the OWS iconography is now dovetailing with the Tea party movement in a congruence that I can’t decide seems forced or organic. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. In Bill Moyers’ fascinating interview with former Ronald Reagan economic adviser Bruce Bartlett, Bartlett expressed his prediction that a lot of former Tea partiers might come to decide that the OWS aims were more in tune with their actual beliefs.

One man and one woman will be elected from each of the 435 congressional voting districts, according to Pollok, and they will meet in Philadelphia to deliberate, draft and ratify a “redress of grievances.” One delegate will also be elected to represent each of the U.S. territories.

Organizers won’t take a position on what grievances should be included, Pollok said, but they will likely include issues like getting money out of politics, dealing with the foreclosure crisis and helping students handle loan debt.

Details of the conference are still being worked out, Pollok said, but organizers have paid for a venue in Philadelphia. Pollok would not identify the venue, but said it was “a major state-of-the art facility.” Pollok said the group planned to pay for the conference through donations.

Once the petition is completed, Pollok said, the protesters will deliver copies to the White House, members of Congress and the Supreme Court. They will demand that Congress takes action in the first 100 days of taking office next year. If sufficient action isn’t taken, Pollok said, the delegates will go back to their districts and try to recruit their own candidates for office.

Being able to hold this event right before the parties throw their respective conventions was a stroke of scheduling luck for the movement. Hopefully the media will be all over this—it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be under any circumstances—and the politicians will be forced to respond.

The Republicans are beyond being a lost cause, but the Democrats can be pushed to the left (it’s what happened before the New Deal). It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

I think there’s a misconception that this was going to be a predictable election cycle. Whereas the outcome (more Obama, not that this is necessarily a “good” thing, it just is) seems like a foregone covclusion, that there will be extremely high drama until then is starting to look like an inevitability. Bring it on.
 

 
In a Mother Jones piece that is starting to gain traction across the liberal blogsphere today, Josh Harkinson writes about the Occupy the SEC group that includes “financial insiders with the education and regulatory vocabulary to challenge high-powered lobbyists at their own game.”

Yesterday, a group affiliated with Occupy Wall Street submitted an astounding comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Point by point, it methodically challenges the arguments of finance industry lobbyists who want to water down last year’s historic Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. The lobbyists have been using the law’s official public comment period to try to kneecap the reforms, and given how arcane financial regulation can be, they might get away with it. But Occupy the SEC is fighting fire with fire, and in so doing, defying stereotypes of the Occupy movement.

The financial industry is trying desperately to wriggle out of the controls that Dodd-Frank imposed on them. Occupy the SEC, a very, very smart bunch of current and former financial industry executives weigh in with critiques and suggestions concerning the government’s implementation of the “Volcker Rule” that limits the kind of derivative packaging that caused the financial meltdown. Since the meltdown, Goldman Sachs has been trying to get their little grubby hands back on the money faucet.  They’re spending Romney-type money on lobbyists, including hiring Barney Frank’s former staffer that got the reforms passed to help overturn those very reforms!

The most common complaint about the Occupy movement is that it does not present a clear and coherent position.

This 324-page letter blows that contention sky-high.

“Occupy the SEC is a group of concerned citizens, activists, and financial professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry. Together, we make up a vast array of specialists, including traders, quantitative analysts, compliance officers, and technology and risk analysts. Like much of the 99%, we have bank deposits and retirement accounts that are in need of protection through vigorous enforcement of the Volcker Rule. Our experiences working inside the financial industry have informed our answers to the questions proposed, making us well-suited to understand and anticipate how the proposed implementation, should it stand, will affect us and the rest of the general public.

The United States aspires to democracy, but no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power…”

That last sentence should be the first line of the Declaration of Independence 2.0

Here’s the best mainstream overview, from TIME. If you read between the lines—and the wipe off its condescension—the truth appears… which is that the fuckers at Goldman Sachs and the champagne drinking overlords on Wall Street are being countered by experienced folks who know the financial industry grimoire inside and out.

Meet the Financial Wizards Working With Occupy Wall Street (Mother Jones)

 
I’ve raved here before about the great new Bill Moyers show on PBS and encourage DM readers not to miss it. Last week’s episode with Reagan administration economic adviser and former Treasury department official,  Bruce Bartlett, and attorney/activist/pundit Heather McGhee, the Washington, DC director of liberal think-tank Demos, knocked the ball out of the park again. I’m a week late on this, but better late than never…

The way the show aired had the Heather McGhee interview first, and the Bruce Bartlett interview second, but I’d suggest watching them in the reverse order because so much of what Bartlett talks about is “diagnostic” and much of what McGhee discusses is “prescriptive.” That there is approximately a 30-year spread in their respective ages provides an additional, unspoken context. The widescreen generational perspective here is simply priceless. You WILL be smarter after you watch these interviews, I guarantees it.

First Bruce Bartlett: In recent years, Bruce Bartlett has been a harsh, harsh critic of the economic policies of George W. Bush and the Tea party’s know-nothingness (he’s not much a fan of the Democrats, either, I should add). In recent months he’s been in the news for calling Texas Governor Rick Perry an “an idiot” on CNN, adding “and I don’t think anybody would disagree with that.”

In this interview, Bartlett, who began his Washington career first working for Congressman Ron Paul and then Jack Kemp, and who was an extremely influential figure in the “supply-side” economics debate, lets it fuckin’ rip, but in a very measured, dignified, highly informed manner. He’s not just an economist, he’s an historian as well. And he’s worked at the top levels of two Republican administrations. Here, Bartlett flat out calls “bullshit” on what’s going on now. It’s nothing short of amazing to hear someone say the things Bartlett says in this interview on American television.

The times they are a (still) changin’. What would a Tea party Republican make of the things Bartlett talks about here?!?!? I would imagine that it would cause their brains to spark, sputter & smoke!

Bill Moyers talks with conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, who wrote “the bible” for the Reagan Revolution, worked on domestic policy for the Reagan White House, and served as a top treasury official under the first President Bush. Now he’s a heretic in the conservative circles where he once was a star.  Bartlett argues that right-wing tax policies—pushed in part by Grover Norquist and Tea Party activists—are destroying the country’s economic foundation.

Heather McGhee interview still to come in separate post.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Why Conservative and Liberals See the World Differently

A soldier stands guard in front of “chemical reactors” used in the manufacturing of the meth confiscated in yesterday’s bust. Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Mexico.
 
15 tons of pure methamphetamine worth $4 billion were seized yesterday at a ranch outside of Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

The superlabs in Mexico are operating on a scale that is mindboggling. This haul alone was enough meth to get 13 million people wired to the gills.

The size of the Jalisco bust stunned Steve Preisler, an industrial chemist who wrote the book “Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture” and is sometimes called the father of modern meth-making.

“I have never seen quantity in that range,” Preisler wrote. But he added: “The amounts of precursors they were importing would produce multi-tons of product.”

Preisler was referring to the dramatic increase in seizures in Mexico of chemicals used to make methamphetamine, usually imported from countries such as China.

In December alone, Mexican authorities seized 675 tons of a key precursor chemical, methylamine, that can yield its weight in uncut meth. All of the shipments were headed for Guatemala, where the Sinaloa cartel is also active. Officials in Guatemala, meanwhile, seized 7,847 barrels of precursors in 2011, equivalent to about 1,600 tons.”

Guadalajara is the capital of the western state of Jalisco and has until recently been spared the horrible violence that plague other areas of Mexico. But in the past few years drug-related murders in Jalisco are an epidemic, with more than half of them in Guadalajara. Six gangs are fighting for control of Jalisco: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG, for its initials in Spanish), the Resistance, the Caballeros Templarios, the Familia Michoacana, and the Beltran Leyva Organization.

Guadalajara, the vibrant cultural and economic heart of Mexico, is under assault and the “Pearl of the West” could literally be destroyed in the drug turf wars. With an economy built on the tech industry, Guadalajara is rapidly losing ground to China in the tech wars while China is the source for most of the methylamine that is used in the Mexican meth labs. As above ground industry falters and fades, business goes underground. This is what happens when crime does pay. Diabolical.

My gums are receding and turning black just looking at this photo. This is to Breaking Bad what the Titanic is to the rubber ducky in my bathtub.
 

 
As is pointed out in the video below, the drug cartels are ramping up the production of meth because of the crackdown on marijuana farming in Mexico, which is another strong argument for the decriminalization of marijuana. What’s healthier, an economy built on primitive and toxic forms of meth production or one built on the ecologically sound and scientific cultivation of marijuana? And unlike computer chips and hard drives, China won’t be competitive in the ganja trade. Let China have the silicon, we’ll take the sativa.

The best way to get the motherfucking gangsters out of the picture is to legalize all drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine. Make it pure, make it available like alcohol and make it affordable. I know the notion of providing legal over-the-counter pharmaceutical quality meth for adults sounds potentially dicey but could things really get any worse? By making methamphetamine legal, we eliminate the gangster trade. By making it clinically pure, we eliminate the toxic bathtub variety flooding the drug marketplace and significantly minimize the health risks. What do you think? Can society handle a culture of meth heads who buy pure crystal at the Tweak Boutique at Walgreens?
 

 
Eric Hobsbawm, the prominent British Marxist historian was on BBC Newsnight earlier this month discussing the “pathological degeneration” of the Capitalist system. The eminent, 94-year-old best-selling author recently published a new book How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism.

It’s difficult to imagine a conversation like this appearing on American television, but that is what YouTube is for, isn’t it?
 

 
Via Adbusters

 
Adbusters magazine, the original impetus behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, has issued a new invitation for a month-long direct action and occupation this May in the Windy City. Looks like this one could be quite a party, too:

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

Below, footage of the confrontation between Chicago police and protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago:
 

 
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Chicago”:
 

 
While the Occupy Movement energy seems to have dissipated in many cities, Oakland is keeping it alive. Yesterday a demonstration turned nasty.

In the video below, the cops seem to be enjoying themselves as they point their guns in the direction of the protesters. As the rifle-toting bulls laugh themselves silly, I wonder if they really have any idea as to who they are protecting and from what? These images remind me of the People’s Park demonstrations of 1969. I see the same arrogance and ignorance in the faces of the cops I saw four decades ago. And the kids on the streets protesting are as idealistic and determined as the cops are clueless. The only difference this time around is the movement will not be stopped.

Oakland Local reports:

Occupy Oakland organizers envisioned this weekend as a “move-in day” which would allow them to rechristen the controversial movement by occupying a vacant building and turning it into a “social center.” Flyers distributed Saturday at a noontime rally at Frank Ogawa (aka Oscar Grant) Plaza announced an ambitious schedule of musical performances, arts & crafts, workshops on foreclosure defense, gender dynamics, and bike repair, forums, and a film festival.

The Oakland Police Department, however, had other plans. As a crowd estimated at around 1,000 people marched Eastward from the Plaza, toward Laney College, more than 50 police officers in riot gear began to trail them from the rear. One woman was arrested when she fell behind police lines, and officers pushed an elderly man to the ground, though he was not arrested.

As the crowd massed at Laney and crossed a wooden bridge, more officers converged from other sides, blocking exits to city streets. Several tense stand-offs ensued, although the tension was broken somewhat by the humorous sight of a man sitting in a chair telling the police he wanted to revise the chant from “F—-the police” to “F—- police brutality.”

The march continued on to East 10th, where more police were sighted, then up 12th Street, near Fallon, close to the location of the move-in target, the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center. A ring of riot police, some wielding shotguns, others with batons, guarded the facility. After a protestor moved a fence, police deployed tear gas into the crowd, then declared unlawful assembly.

After several tense minutes, the marchers moved West on 12th, then South on Oak Street. Another showdown ensued in front of the Oakland Museum. A line of police stood at 10th Street, and marchers with homemade shields began to advance on them. Before they could get close, however, OPD let off a fusillade of CS canisters, flash-bang grenades, and beanbag pellets into the crowd. The wind blew most of the tear gas back into the police line, but the demonstration of firepower proved effective, and the crowd retreated.

A cat-and-mouse-game then ensured for the next hour, as police slowly pushed the marchers back to the Plaza. There were several arrests as police advanced, but very few instances of violence and few if any acts of aggression against police. Unlike other Occupy Oakland marches, there were no projectiles or liquids thrown at police. By 4 p.m., the march, still several hundred strong, had returned to Ogawa Plaza, awaiting further actions.

Earlier in the day, organizer Adam Jordan outlined the vision of what Occupy Oakland had hoped to accomplish. “The move-in day is hypothetically and hopefully going to be a multi-use center with free school workshops, free food, free meals, and a meeting place to have for Oakland, for the people, by the people. We see the need to help other people. Going through the system has not been working for a lot of people.”

Occupy Oakland’s positive aspects, Jordan said, were often not looked at “because of the rhetoric from City Hall.” The movement, he said, was here “to make it better for everybody.”`

Moreover, he said, the movement is worldwide. “If anyone has an Internet connection, they’ll realize they now have an Occupy Nigeria, an Occupy Taiwan, and Occupy London, an Occupy Netherlands.I met a guy from Occupy Edmonton…this is a world movement. You think it might go away here, it’ll come back like a weed, because it’s everywhere.”

This footage just uploaded to YouTube by brettnchls captures just one skirmish on a day when there were many. At the 2:05 mark someone appears to be injured and protesters are calling out for a medic. If anyone thinks tear gas cannisters, smoke bombs, flash bang grenades or rubber bullets are relatively harmless, try getting hit by one in the face.
 

 
Although by the conclusion of this noteworthy Newsweek article George Soros predicts that America “will pass a very severe test and actually strengthen the institution,” he sounds a tad less optimistic in the rest of the piece. Soros, who has a new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States coming out next month. seems quite worried about the world economy in the short term. As his career in finance has proven, the guy’s gut instinct is legendary, so maybe his warnings are worth taking seriously…

Sitting in his 33rd-floor corner office high above Seventh Avenue in New York, preparing for his trip to Davos, he is more concerned with surviving than staying rich. “At times like these, survival is the most important thing,” he says, peering through his owlish glasses and brushing wisps of gray hair off his forehead. He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros’s warning is based as much on his own extraordinary personal history as on his gut instinct for market booms and busts. “I did survive a personally much more threatening situation, so it is emotional, as well as rational,” he acknowledges. Soros was just 13 when Nazi soldiers invaded and occupied his native Hungary in March 1944. In only eight weeks, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were deported, many to Auschwitz. He saw bodies of Jews, and the Christians who helped them, swinging from lampposts, their skulls crushed. He survived, thanks to his father, Tivadar, who managed to secure false identities for his family. Later, he watched as Russian forces ousted the Nazis and a new totalitarian ideology, communism, replaced fascism. As life got tougher during the postwar Soviet occupation, Soros managed to emigrate, first to London, then to New York.

Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.” To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.” Still, Soros believes the West is struggling to cope with the consequences of evil in the financial world just as former Eastern bloc countries struggled with it politically. Is he really saying that the financial whizzes behind our economic meltdown were not just wrong, but evil? “That’s correct.” Take that, Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs boss who told The Sunday Times of London at the height of the financial crisis that bankers “do God’s work.”

Soros has publicly sided with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and has derided the bailouts and wealth disparity in this country:

Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

Read the rest of:
George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War (Newsweek)

Bono ‘Twat’ t-shirt by publicgriefjunkie

I really dislike Bono. Not for the usual reasons - he’s not cool, he’s not sexy, he’s not funny, etc - no, it’s none of those. Well, it’s a little of those…  No, this excellent article from today’s Independent newspaper by James Bloodworth, should go some way towards explaining why I, and a fairly large chunk of the population of Ireland, hate this guy:

Another type among the super-rich, however – some would say the dominant type – is the wealthy individual who very publically gives generously with one hand while ruthlessly seeking to minimise what they pay in tax with the other. The moralising hypocrite, you might call this lot.

Perhaps the most well-known figure in this mould is Bono, the lead singer of U2. As well as being the frontman of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, Bono fancies himself as something of an anti-poverty activist, and can often be heard urging people to give generously to a number of causes. Bono has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times for his charity work.

In 2006, however, on the back of the massive Live 8 concert the year before – which U2 played a large part in organising and which was supposed to “make poverty history” – Bono’s band moved part of their tax liability from Ireland to the Netherlands. The move came after Ireland scrapped tax breaks that allowed musicians and artists to avoid paying taxes on royalties. When asked about the decision, U2’s lead guitarist David Evans, aka “The Edge”, said that of course the band were trying to be tax-efficient, because “who doesn’t want to be tax-efficient?”

The answer, at a guess, would be those who spend a great deal of time moralising about the world’s poor. Away from the self-congratulatory press conferences where Bono smugly demanded we send our money to the dispossessed, U2 were simultaneously cutting the feet from under their own government’s ability to help the world’s most desperate people– the same people Bono was proclaiming such grave concern for.

This makes for a great read - it’s not all about Bono, mind you, some of it’s about Princess Di - and you can read it all here.

Thanks to Helén Thomas!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
’U Pay Your Tax 2’

 
“School Pride” tee-shirt by Phil Jones available for men and women at the Threadless website.
 

 
(via Super Punch)