The Revolution Started Without Me: Occupying Wall Street
[Occupy Wall Street is] a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty byproducts of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater….
— Ginia Bellafante, NY Times 9/23/11
In the summer of 1968 I had finished my freshman year in high school. By chance, I journeyed to San Francisco with some older fellow students, checked the scene at Haight-Ashbury, partied with the cast of Hair and ended up on the beach in Big Sur talking philosophy. I was offered a hit off a joint but declined.
Later that year a friend and I hitched to a New Year’s concert at the Fillmore West. As Cold Blood, Boz Skaggs and the Voices of East Harlem marked the hours to midnight, joints passed freely among the audience. This time I accepted though my friend declined.
I had come to understand that marijuana was far more than a recreational drug. It was a sacrament to the
Corporate Wrongdoing and the Neutralizing of Society
Most corporate wrongdoing is not criminal but all of it is unethical. It is not criminal because our corporatized government has made it legal through legislative (e.g. loophole porous laws), administrative (e.g., reckless deregulation and war making), and judicial (e.g., corporate personhood) accommodations.
Being legal, of course, does not make the wrongdoing less consequential. Just the opposite is true, especially when undertaken hand in hand with government, as is the case since the end of WWII with endless covert and overt militarism that has killed countless human beings and devastated countries, not for the sake of protecting and spreading democracy but for the sake of the corpocracy. Our own society has suffered immensely as well. It is because of the corpocracy that among industrialized nations America ranks lowest on all important
QE: Quantitative Easing or Questionable Economics?
We all know QE stands for Quantitative Easing; a better description would be Questionable Economics.
The Bank of England has just announced QE2, where £75bn is being electronically created and pumped into the banks. This is in addition to QE1, the £200bn injected in 2009 in exchange for mainly government bonds.
The more I read about this system of finance, the more convinced I become that this is a racket that enriches the banks and endangers the real economy, with many economists arguing that it makes the current dire economic situation worse.
The aim of the Bank of England is to enable the banks to lend to small businesses and entrepreneurs to create