laptopactivist-blog-blog

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The U.S. Department of State has designated January 2012 as 21st Century Statecraft month. Twenty-first Century Statecraft complements traditional foreign policy by harnessing and adapting the digital networks and technologies of today’s interconnected world.

The U.S. Department of State...

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Live now @ Occupy Berkeley/Oakland. Eviction threat. 

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Interesting

The corporations that occupy Congress. - David Cay Johnston

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Showing just how out of touch with the American people he is...

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Small farmers in West Africa produce most of the world’s cocoa and sell it at low prices to big companies such as Cadbury and Mars, who transform the beans into chocolate. In the new book Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocao in West Africa, Orla Ryan focuses on Ghana and Côte...

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On October 28, 2011 at 9:15 pm, several hundred of the 99% plus Angela Davis marched from the Critical Refusals conference in West Philly, where she was the keynote speaker, to Occupy Philly base camp (aka City Hall). After a spontaneous march around City Hall, she addressed the crowd, which had grown to an estimated 1,000 people.  This video captures the ecstatic meet-up between those of us waiting at Occupy Philly with those who marched across town to join us, chanting, "This is what a flash mob looks like!" and "We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!"  Angela Davis speaks for about 10 minutes, using the people's mic because our amplification was not strong enough for the crowd. She quotes Audre Lorde, engaging the dialectics of our dynamic force complete with its internal contradictions, and she concludes with the world-echoing call from Oakland: "General Strike! Occupy Everywhere!"

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Occupy Oakland General Assembly votes for General Strike in Oakland on Nov. 2

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That's something!

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First general strike in 65 years. Go Oakland!

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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF OAKLAND FROM THE OAKLAND POLICE OFFICERS’ ASSOCIATION

1 November 2011 – Oakland, Ca.

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.

As your police officers, we are confused.

...

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It's Time for the Solutions: A Big Plan to Fix Economy

In July, the American Dream Movement created an inclusive process to forge a jobs agenda that would put the country back to work without hurting essential programs like Medicare and Medicaid. More than 131,000 people got involved, both online and in person (NOTE: That is nearly three times the number of people who helped craft the Tea Party's famous"Contract from America.") Participants generated more than 20,000 ideas, then rated and ranked them to identify the best ones. The outcome was our 10-point program: the Contract for the American Dream.

The common sense remedies in the Contract are based on the fundamental idea that a functioning U.S. economy requires opportunity for all and responsibility from all. Here are the ten items:

I. Invest in America's Infrastructure - Rebuild our crumbling bridges, dams, levees, ports, water and sewer lines, railways, roads, and public transit. Invest in high-speed Internet and a modern, energy-saving electric grid. These investments will create good jobs and rebuild America.

II. Create 21st Century Energy Jobs - Invest in American businesses that can power our country with innovative technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal systems, hybrid and electric cars, and next-generation batteries. And put Americans to work making our homes and buildings energy efficient. We can create good, green jobs in America, address the climate crisis, and build the clean energy economy.

III. Invest in Public Education - Provide universal access to early childhood education, make school funding equitable, invest in high-quality teachers, and build safe, well-equipped school buildings for our students. This is critical for our future and can create badly needed jobs now.

IV. Offer Medicare for All - Expand Medicare so it's available to all Americans, and reform it to provide even more cost-effective, quality care. The Affordable Care Act is a start, but it's not enough. We can save trillions of dollars by joining every other industrialized country -- paying much less for health care while getting the same or better results.

V. Make Work Pay - Grant all Americans the right to fair minimum and living wages, to organize and collectively bargain, to enjoy equal opportunity, and to earn equal pay for equal work. Corporate assaults on these rights must be outlawed.

VI. Secure Social Security - Keep Social Security sound, and strengthen the retirement, disability, and survivors' protections Americans earn through their hard work. Pay for it by removing the cap on the Social Security tax, so that upper-income people pay into Social Security on all they make, just like the rest of us.

VII. Return to Fairer Tax Rates - End, once and for all, the Bush-era tax giveaways for the rich, which the rest of us -- or our kids -- must pay eventually. Outlaw corporate tax havens and tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. And with millionaires and billionaires taking a growing share of our country's wealth, let's add new tax brackets for those making more than $1 million annually.

VIII. End the Wars and Invest at Home - Bring home our troops. They've done everything asked of them, and it's time to bring them home to good jobs. We're sending $3 billion each week overseas that we should be investing to rebuild America.

IX. Tax Wall Street Speculation - Make Wall Street pay. A tiny fee of a twentieth of 1% on each Wall Street trade could raise tens of billions of dollars annually with little impact on actual investment. This would reduce speculation, "flash trading," and outrageous bankers' bonuses.

X. Strengthen Democracy - Hold clean, fair elections -- where no one's right to vote can be taken away, and where money doesn't buy you your own member of Congress. We must ban anonymous political influence, slam shut the lobbyists' revolving door in D.C., and publicly finance elections. Immigrants who want to join in our democracy deserve a clear path to citizenship. We must stop giving corporations the rights of people when it comes to our elections. And we must ensure our judiciary's respect for the Constitution.

Many elements of the Contract are already under consideration in various forms in Congress, even as we speak. The idea of taxing Wall Street speculation at this moment in history should be a no-brainer. Let's bring all ten points through the political system.

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Oakland’s acting Police Chief, Howard Jordan, that you hear on this video:

 ”You don’t need to have some special skill to be able to infiltrate these groups. If you put people in there from the beginning, I think we’ll be able to gather the information. And maybe direct them to do something that we want them to do.”

Source: Red Green & Blue (http://s.tt/13FK9)

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thedailywhat: Postage Paid Protest of the Day: YouTuber ransackedroom — a San Francisco-based “poet, editor, and marketer” — has come up with a rather ingenious way ordinary people can support the Occupy Wall Street movement without ever leaving their homes. It involves taking the business reply mail envelope that comes with most unsolicited credit card offers, and sending it back to the banks with a message inside that ransacked hopes will help open “a dialogue.” He says: This isn’t really about running up the postage bill on the big banks, although that’s a nice side effect. The real effect of this is to force banks to react to us. If they start getting hundreds and thousands of weird responses to their credit card applications, well they’re going to have to have meetings. They going to have to develop new procedures and every hour banks spend reacting to us is an hour banks don’t spend lobbying Congress on how to screw us. It’s an hour banks don’t spend foreclosing on our houses. So I think that that’s progress. YouTube Comment of Note: “This supports the United States Postal Service also, maybe keeping several thousand postal workers out of the unemployment line. Good idea.” [thanks mike!]

Mother Jones magazine on Tumblr 

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kimyadawson:

Keep Wall Street Occupied.