Shut Down The Ports Dec. 12, Occupy Production December 5th, 2011 Announcement of the port shutdown on west coast Dec. 12, all up and down the coast in solidarity with the Dockworkers Union. I have been following this for a while, and it is the most important choke point in the capitalist system that is vulnerable to group action. Freeways are another point, but the ports are even more essential. If we can shut down the ports, even for a day, it shows the controllers that we are serious. If we can do this, then we have a chance to expand to more than one day, to other industries, it would be wonderful if we could shut down the defense industry, or agribusiness, and so on until we get to the point where capitalism simply cannot function. If the hacker brigades go full swing with a shutdown of the Stock Exchanges computers, they will have to surrender, or at least negotiate with us as a body.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqncu3wlEI This is a classic Anarcho-syndicalist view of how to make the revolution work, and certainly this is the goal. >From ZNet Occupy Production By Richard D. Wolff Source: Mr Zine Saturday, December 03, 2011 As the Occupy movement keeps developing, it seeks solutions for the economic and political dysfunctions it exposes and opposes. For many, the capitalist economic system itself is the basic problem. They want change to another system, but not to the traditional socialist alternative (e.g., USSR or China). That system too seems to require basic change. The common solution these activists propose is to change both systems' production arrangements from the ground up. Every enterprise should be democratized. Workers should occupy their enterprise by collectively functioning as its board of directors. That would abolish the capitalist exploitative system (employer versus employee) much as our historical predecessors abolished the parallel exploitative systems of slavery (master versus slave) and feudalism (lord versus serf). In workers' self-directed enterprises, those who do the work also design and direct it and dispose of its profits: no exploitation of workers by others. Workers participate equally in making all enterprise decisions. The old capitalist elite the major corporate shareholders and the boards of directors they choose would no longer decide what, how, and where to produce and how to use enterprise profits. Instead, workers in partnership with residential communities interdependent with their enterprises would make all those decisions democratically. Only then could we avoid repeating yet again the capitalist cycle: (1) economic boom bursting into crisis, followed by (2) mass movements for social welfare reforms and economic regulations, followed by (3) capitalists using their profits to undo achieved reforms and regulations, followed by (1) again, the next capitalist boom, bust, and crisis. US capitalism since the crash of 1929 displays this 3-step cycle. In democratized enterprises, the workers who most need and benefit from reforms would dispose of the profits of enterprise. No separate class of employers would exist and use enterprise profits to undo the reforms and regulations workers achieved. Quite the contrary, self-directing workers would pay taxes only if the state secures those reforms and regulations. Democratized enterprises would not permit the inequalities of income and wealth (and therefore of power and cultural access) now typical across the capitalist world. Actually existing socialist systems, past and present, also need enterprise democratization. Those systems' socialization of productive property plus central planning (versus capitalism's private property and markets) left far too much unbalanced power centralized in the state. In addition, reforms (guaranteed employment and basic welfare, far less inequality of income and wealth, etc.) won by socialist revolutions proved insecure. Private enterprises and markets eventually returned and erased many of those reforms. Traditional socialism's problems flow also from its undemocratic organization of production. Workers in socialized state enterprises were not self-directed; they did not collectively decide what, how, and where to produce nor what to do with the profits. Instead, state officials decided what, how, and where to produce and how to dispose of profits. If socialist enterprises were democratized, the state would then depend for its revenue on collectively self-directed workers. That would institutionalize real, concrete control from below to balance state power from above. Workers' self-directed enterprises are a solution grounded in the histories of both capitalism and socialism. Establishing workers' self-directed enterprises completes what past democratic revolutions began in moving societies beyond monarchies and autocracies. Democratizing production can finally take democracy beyond being merely an electoral ritual that facilitates rule by the 1% over the 99%. Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He is the author of New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006) among many other publications. Check out Richard D. Wolff's documentary film on the current economic crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, atwww.capitalismhitsthefan.com. Visit Wolff's Web site atwww.rdwolff.com, and order a copy of his new book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It. His weekly radio program, "Economic Update," broadcasts on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York City every Saturday at noon for an hour; it can also be heard live and in podcast archive on wbai.org. This article also appears in the Occupy Harvard Crimson. Tags: Occupy Production, Shut Down Ports Posted in Gnosis:, History, Politics | Edit | No Comments » Police State News November 30th, 2011 The powers that be, the oppressor man, the ruling class, where ever it may be and whenever. It is what it is and exists on all levels, including internally in each of us. We can't tear it out, we have to simply flush it out. That means watching what we eat. When we are digesting a big meal of media garbage, we have to be careful not to let the brainwash get in and twist our minds around, at least not too much. You have to figure out the angles and play it smart. Naomi got it a little wrong, but her intentions were in the right place, she is just anticipating things a little. - Why Naomi Wolf got it wrong In the US, political repression - such as the crackdown on Occupy protests - doesn't require top-down coordination. Corey Robin Last Modified: 29 Nov 2011 16:23 On Friday, Naomi Wolf made the attention-grabbing accusation in the Guardian that federal officials were involved in, indeed ordered, the violent crackdowns against Occupy Wall Street protesters that we've been seeing across the country these past few weeks. Congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] to authorise mayors to order their police forces - pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS - to make war on peaceful citizens. The next day, Joshua Holland debunked Wolf's claims on Alternet. I don't have much to add to Holland's critique. Wolf gets many of her facts wrong, and Holland shows it. The problem, though, is bigger than that: The reason Wolf gets her facts wrong is that she's got her theory wrong. And while many were quick to jump off her conspiracy bandwagon once Holland pointed out its flaws, I suspect that one of the reasons they were so quick to jump on it in the first place is that they subscribe to her theory. In-depth coverage of the global movement We still don't have nearly all the who-what-when-where-why-and-how of the crackdowns - and there's certainly nothing wrong with raising questions, pursuing leads, and investigating claims regarding the involvement of the feds - but the quickness and ease with which Wolf reached for the top-down conspiratorial national government story, well in advance of the facts we know, provides us with a teachable moment of how many tend to think about political repression in the United States, and how we might think about it instead. Like many critics of state coercion in the United States, Wolf seems to assume that political repression requires or entails national coordination and centralised direction from the feds. This fits with a larger tradition in the United States that sees centralised and national power as the handmaiden of tyranny, and local power as its antidote. Throughout much of the twentieth century, that was the argument of conservatives, who opposed federal involvement in such "local" matters as Jim Crow. But since the 1980s, that position has steadily migrated to the left as well. Whatever its political provenance, however, the problem with that position - as I argued in this piece in the Boston Review in 2005, and in a much longer piece in the Missouri Law Review [pdf] - is that it's wrong. >From the battles over abolition to the labor wars at the turn of the last >century; from the Red Squads of the twentieth-century police departments to >the struggles over Jim Crow; state repression in the US has often been >decentralised, displaying that very same can-do spirit of local initiative >that has been celebrated by everyone from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert >Putnam. Though Tocqueville and Putnam were talking, of course, about things >like creating churches and buildings roads, the fact is: If the locals can >build a church or a road on their own, they can also get rid of dissenters on >their own, too, no? Even where there has been coordination and involvement from above, as in the epic cases of the Red Scare, McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, or now the War on Terror, what's been most striking is how local police and officials have managed to manipulate that federal involvement to their own ends. As I wrote in the Boston Review: What history demonstrates is that police officers often use their powers, with or without federal prompting, as instruments of larger political purpose. The danger of cooperation between federal agencies and local police is not that the former will conscript the latter into repressive programs the latter would not otherwise pursue, but that it allows the police to apply the legitimising gloss of national security to their own pet projects of repression. During the McCarthy era, for example, southern politicians and law-enforcement officers used the language of anti-communism to outlaw the NAACP and to arrest and indict civil-rights leaders for sedition. In the Denver case already mentioned, the police used the rubric of domestic security to keep track of not only the groups cited above but also a local organization working against police brutality in the city. This past summer, during the Republican Party convention in New York City, the NYPD preemptively arrested more than 1,500 protesters - some of them obstreperous, virtually all of them nonviolent - as well as innocent bystanders. How did the mayor justify the arrest and prolonged detainment of these individuals? By drawing parallels, according to The New York Times, "between verbally abusive demonstrators and the Sept. 11 terrorists." If all politics is local in the United States, as former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill reminded us, it stands to reason that a good deal of the political repression is as well. It's hard for Americans to be clear about this, and probably harder for non-Americans, especially Europeans, who were among Wolf's readers in the Guardian, and have very different traditions and policies in their countries. As my friend and colleague Alex Vitale - a professor at Brooklyn College and one of the country's leading experts on policing practices - reminded me: The US is somewhat unique in how decentralised it is in terms of both policing and politics. In much of Europe you're dealing with national police forces and national political parties that have real influence over local mayors - neither of which is true in the US. Local police in the US will take resources from the center and at times advice and even some coordination, but they are generally loath to give up any real autonomy. And they are quite capable of coming up with their own harebrained initiatives based on primarily very local politics. Much of the Oakland crackdown came in the wake of pressure from local business improvement associations that had little to do with national politics. It's not surprising that, faced with the crackdown on Occupy protests, Wolf would immediately turn to a theory of national, centralised repression. It's part of our national DNA, on the left and the right, to assume that tyranny works that way. We've inherited a theory that holds, in the approving words of the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, that "liberty and localism work together". Nothing, as Holland so ably if inadvertently demonstrates in his demolition of Wolf, could be further from the truth. Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. He received his PhD from Yale and his A.B. from Princeton. You can read Corey's blog here and follow him on Twitter @CoreyRobin. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/ 20111129151234836584.html Tags: Police State News Posted in Gnosis:, History, Politics | Edit | No Comments » Judge Blocks Sweetheart Settlement & A Few Alternatives November 30th, 2011 Judge kicks butt. Stockholders you have a friend in Judge Jed S Rakoff. Finally the top 5 percent have someone representing them, in their struggle for a fair shake from the evil Wall Street crowd and the bend over S.E.C. The rest of us will find this to be pretty much a yawner. What would the rest of us be excited about? Well perhaps if the banks and government lowered mortgage rates to the market rate and wrote off the rest of the value of the house as a bad bet in an economic bubble that they helped create and certainly were aware of. That would be a good one for starters. Next perhaps the government should institute a national minimum income for all citizens, national free medical care and guaranteed housing for all citizens. How would they afford that? Well a 50% tax on incomes over 1 million would be a start. Next a Social Security tax on all income, and not just the first $135,000. Then a tax on unearned income of 50% after the first $100,000 would be nice. Cut defense by 50%. A transaction tax on all stock market transactions of say .5%would be a decent start there. A relocation tax on businesses of the equivalent of one year's gross income before taxes would be useful. Or even better simply outlaw relocations without a vote of the community and workers in which the company exists. While we are at it add a German style workers councils on the board of directors of every company with over 50 employees. Now we are talking about reforms that will make a difference. http://www.mistieurope.com/pdf//MIS/GSI_German%20Works%20Council%20Approval_whitepaper_UK.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_model http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/emire/GERMANY/WORKSCOUNCIL-DE.htm Or even better might be workers co-ops, and get rid of the corporate bosses. Even the Pope is in favor of a more humane economy. http://www.justpeace.org/mondragon.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NORmQ8zaL1c Instead we, the vast majority of the people, will get nothing and a few stockholders near the powerful will get a few crumbs. Judge Blocks Citigroup Settlement With S.E.C. By EDWARD WYATT Published: November 28, 2011 WASHINGTON Taking a broad swipe at the Securities and Exchange Commission's practice of allowing companies to settle cases without admitting that they had done anything wrong, a federal judge on Monday rejected a $285 million settlement between Citigroup and the agency. The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, said that he could not determine whether the agency's settlement with Citigroup was "fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest," as required by law, because the agency had claimed, but had not proved, that Citigroup committed fraud. As it has in recent cases involving Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, UBS and others, the agency proposed to settle the case by levying a fine on Citigroup and allowing it to neither admit nor deny the agency's findings. Such settlements require approval by a federal judge. While other judges are not obligated to follow Judge Rakoff's opinion, the 15-page ruling could severely undermine the agency's enforcement efforts if it eventually blocks the agency from settling cases in which the defendant does not admit the charges. The agency contends that it must settle most of the cases it brings because it does not have the money or the staff to battle deep-pocketed Wall Street firms in court. Wall Street firms will rarely admit wrongdoing, the agency says, because that can be used against them in investor lawsuits. The agency in particular, Judge Rakoff argued, "has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges." But it is difficult to tell what the agency is getting from this settlement "other than a quick headline." Even a $285 million settlement, he said, "is pocket change to any entity as large as Citigroup," and often viewed by Wall Street firms "as a cost of doing business." According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Citigroup stuffed a $1 billion mortgage fund that it sold to investors in 2007 with securities that it believed would fail so that it could bet against its customers and profit when values declined. The fraud, the agency said, was in Citigroup's falsely telling investors that an independent party was choosing the portfolio's investments. Citigroup made $160 million from the deal and investors lost $700 million. Judge Rakoff said the agency settlement policy "hallowed by history, but not by reason" creates substantial potential for abuse because "it asks the court to employ its power and assert its authority when it does not know the facts." That undermines the constitutional separation of powers, he said, by asking the judiciary to rubber-stamp the executive branch's interpretation of the law. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/business/judge-rejects-sec-accord-with-citi.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2 ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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