As I said in a recent talk the International Energy Agency’s plan to avoid climate catastrophe depends in part on increasing the use of atomic energy by over 70%. The latest news from Japan should give pause, though. The New York Times talks about the scale of cleanup being talked about for Fukushima after the radiation disaster following the tsunami.
“To judge the huge scale of what Japan is contemplating, consider that experts say residents can return home safely only after thousands of buildings are scrubbed of radioactive particles and much of the topsoil from an area the size of Connecticut is replaced. Even forested mountains will probably need to be decontaminated, which might necessitate clear-cutting and literally scraping them clean”
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Nov. 30. A couple of years ago we started talked about the crushing burdens placed on students once they graduate because of the huge loans they have to take to get their college education. Some are calling this “debt bondage”. Now we hear on Democracy Now that there’s a fightback, a plan for a debt strike. The idea is that once one million debtors make a pledge, the one million would refuse to make their loan payments!
The spokesperson for the campaign is Pamela Brown, a Ph.D student in Sociology at The New School. They’re calling it the “Occupy Student Debt Campaign” Pledge of Refusal. Here’s the website.
Remember this all comes about because higher education isn’t free (as it is in many European countries.) Before anyone starts with explaining why college in the U.S.A. isn’t free remember at one time elementary and secondary education weren’t free either. It had to be fought for.
There is some effort to go after mortgage companies for fraud for suckering people into sub-prime loans. What about colleges? All kinds of glittering job and career promises are made by colleges in their catalogs and websites, but after four years you end up without a job and oweing a huge debt. Should we stick a few college presidents in jail for fraud?
BTW if you need to read student debt horror stories there’s a site called “Occupy Student Debt“. Don’t know if it has any relation to Pamela Brown’s effort.
Nov. 29. Just had a chance to read Steve Early’s fine piece of November 15 ” A Lesson for Labor From Occupy Wall Street”. It’s similar is some ways to a point I made here in March in a post “I Am Not Middle Class”
It praises the Occupy Wall Street approach, the 1% vs. the 99% as opposed to the whiny “defend the middle class” slogan that Democratic party geniuses have taught to most U.S. labor leaders.
It quotes Professor Michael Zweig who reminds us that class is not how much money you make. He says “the real basis of social class lies in the varying amounts of power people have at work and in the larger society”
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It’s funny, it’s blood boiling and it’s a radical attack on the Wall Street Crap Game.
Even if you saw it before, come at 10 a.m. on Dec. 7 in the New Haven Main Library on 133 Elm Street (Program Room in basement) and watch it with some folks from Occupy New Haven.
Discussion led by Stanley Heller of Economic Uprising.
Free admission with some complimentary hard boiled eggs and other working class food. 
video of talk by Stanley Heller at Billings Forge, Hartford, CT as part of a panel “The Road to Economic Justice – The Way Forward” 11/19/2011
Occupy Wall Street evicted, Target workers made to work at midnight, Supercommittee ready to slash government spending and social benefits.
What can we do right now?
First off we can join the 50,000 who are telling Target to cancel its demand that its workers start work at midnight on the day after Thanksgiving, thus ruining their holiday. They are actually forced to start work at 11 p.m. on Thanksgiving!!
There’s an online campaign at change.org to tell Target to “Save Thanksgiving”. Over 145,000 people have signed it. Here’s the link. We can do more. We can picket Target stores over the next week. Stand on the sidewalk near the stores with signs.
And there’s more
There’s been a campaign for a number of years to counter the “Black Friday” shopping madness with a “Buy Nothing” day. The idea to break with consumerism and the frenzy on that day (remember a couple of years ago workers were crushed to death at a store in New York state when the doors first opened.) and to start lowering of useless and wasteful gift giving. Here’s the Ad Busters link to Buy Nothing.
But there’s a bigger reason. If you read our last post you see the we have five years to make “drastic” changes before we get locked into drastic global warming: massive flooding, extreme weather and spread of tropical diseases.
It’s coming, “Buy Nothing Day”. 100% Off Because You Buy Nothing. Save Your Species!
Five years until humanity’s mad carbon-burning carnival brings about “irreversible” change. That’s the conclusion of the International Energy Agency. Despite all the lip service about working toward a “green” world, carbon-dioxide emissions in 2010 grew by an ‘almost unprecedented’ 5.3% according to the IEA. The news should have been a page 1 story everywhere. The Wall Street Journal ran it under a feature story about dogs being raised for food.
We have five years to take measure that would stop the rise in global temperature at 2 degrees. If that’s not met temperatures will make the world a lot hotter. The result will not “merely” be a rise in seal levels and flooding of coastal cities, but more of the crazy weather extremes we’ve been seeing like massive flooding in Pakistan, terrible heat in Moscow and Texas and “once in a hundred year storms” in New Orleans and New England.
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As Scott Olsen lies in an induced coma in Oakland after having been shot by police after they drove out Occupy Oakland protesters the media talks about “clashes”. Here it is in the San Francisco Chronicle story.
This is what corporate editors want in their news stories, but it is a lie. There was no “clash”, no battle. In Oakland the police attacked people in Oscar Grant Square with scores of tear gas shells and what they call bean bag guns. Protesters didn’t fight back. At most they had some barricades and they tried to stand their ground.
Olsen is an Iraq War veteran. You can give money to his medical costs by clicking here.
Oct. 24. Bloomberg News says companies are planning less hiring than any time since early 2010. “29 percent of companies said they would increase hiring, down from 43 percent in July, while 59 percent reported they plan no change in staff, a 10-point jump. Twelve percent projected a decline in payrolls, up from 8 percent in the previous NABE survey”
The President’s job creation plan has hit a brick wall in Congress both in its full version and the “rehire teachers and cops” mini-plan. By the end of the year most of the Federal stimulus for companies to hire will expire. And of course the Supercommittee is slated to come up with a trillion in budget cuts next month.
But stocks are up. Wall Street thinks Europe can get through its debt crisis (that is it thinks it can get the Greek government to strangle Greek wages and benefits and do the same in Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc.)
Oct. 24. So says Eliza Giannakaromi, who was marching with municipal employees in this week’s general strike. “It is happening at every level of society”, said Stelios Georgiou, a refuse collector who was holding a banner that said: “We want to kick out this government.” He used to earn €1,200 ($1,671) a month and now gets €700 ($974). “They should go after the tax evaders and not us.”
Strikes are frequent. Garbage hasn’t been collected in ten days resulting in stinking mounds all over Athens.
Of course the corporate media want you to believe the Greeks lived like kings causing their own problems, but the real story is the Greek 1% lived like kings and caused the country’s downfall. The upper classes paid almost no taxes. Marshall Auerback of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute writes, ” The top 20 per cent of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis.” Greek banks and companies borrowed heavily in Bush years just like Ireland and a bunch of other financial “tigers”. All are now reduced to kittens
A half million people have looked at this British video
Oct. 13 If you think the rich pay too much and working people pay too little the 9-9-9 tax is the plan for you. Right now the bottom 40% (nearly half of all US taxpayers) pay no federal income tax and may even get money back. Under the 9-9-9 plan they would pay 9% of their wages in income tax and pay a new 9% federal sales tax on all their purchases. They would also continue to pay state or local taxes on sales, income and property.
For the rich their top tax bracket would go down from 35% to 9%. (They’d also pay the new sales tax).
And the rich would take all the money they got out of this and open up businesses and put people to work. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
Sure they would!
By the way 9-9-9, in German is “Nein-Nein-Nein” which means, “No-No-No”.
,
How about a 2-2-2 plan? We take the $2 trillion the corporations have been keeping in cash, invest the $2 trillion in U.S. government industries and go out and hire 2 million workers.
What can we say about the top 1%? Interesting article in the Washington Post. In the country overall their average income is $517,000. This compares to $50,000 to for the average American household.
In New York City the top 1% earn an average of $3.5 million a year.
Now that’s just income. As is well known ownership of property and wealth is even more cockeyed. Average wealth for the top 1% is $13.9 million. “The wealthiest 1 percent held an average of 225 times the wealth of the average median household in 2009.”
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Oct. 6 The news today that there’s been 150,000 more jobs created in the last two months may cover up some ugly facts. The number of long term unemployed (over six months) is over 6 million and it went up 208,000.
Also, since 2008 there’s been 538,000 government jobs lost according to the Washington Post. This is nuts. It’s the exact opposite of what should be happening. During the Great Depression the government put an extra 11 million on government payrolls. It helped bring the rate of people without work from a ghastly 25% down to a terrible 16% (which went lower as factories started hiring for World War II).
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by Stanley Heller
Oct. 4. I can agree with Occupy Wall Street people who are suspicious of making demands on Wall St., ideas for “reform” or “change” that in the end won’t amount to a hill of beans. In fact the whole purpose of this website is come up with something completely new.
But as we dive into a another recession we do need to propose demands that can ease things a bit in the here and now and help map out ways to abolish the Capitalist Casino.
Some Possible Slogans:
Ten Million Green Jobs Now
Slash College and Mortgage Debt
Tax Every Stock Market Trade
Worker Majorities on Boards of Directors
Screw Market Chaos – Plan Out the Necessities
Join a Union – Build Democracy and Power at the Workplace
and
Down with the Possible – Keep Your Feet Firmly Planted in the Clouds
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Sept. 30 Bloomberg News says an “army” of lobbyists is going through Congress to convince it to pass a “tax holiday” that would encourage corporations to bring $1 trillion back to the U.S. American companies have “$1.375 trillion in profits overseas on which they have paid no federal income tax”
The current tax law (joke?) says they pay nothing until they bring the money back into the US. Then they pay 35% minus a credit for what they pay to foreign countries. So they don’t bring the money back and blackmail the country till they get a “holiday”, a deal where they bring the money back and pay a very small tax rate. This happened last in 2004.
The corporate lobbyists dazzle Congress with tales of how much money will come back to the US which will be used to make oodles of jobs. What they don’t say is that in 2004 the money came home, went into a few pockets and was mostly used by companies to buy back their stock to make prices rise.
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The New York Times finally discovered Occupy Wall St and sent Gina Bellafante down to ridicule it. She wrote an insulting piece on the ongoing action on the 23rd, calling it “fractured and airy”. She sniffed at its lack of militancy and lack of unity of ideas. She decided “Occupy” was a mere few hundred people, almost all from out-of-town and fading away. Through her interviews and descriptions she presented the “occupiers” as silly, dimwits or cranks.
Yet the article appeared a day after 1,000 angry Troy Davis mourners went from Union Square to Liberty (Zuccotti) Park, joined with hundreds there and all marched into Wall St! The day after the article appeared police thought enough of their activity on the 24th in Lower Manhattan to arrest over 100, and liberally douse people with pepper spray.
If Gina really thinks only a few hundred are involved she can see the videos on youtube posted by strugglevideomedia (one is which linked to a little lower on this page).
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Sept 25. Occupy Wall Street has been at Liberty(Zuccotti) Park in Manhattan for over a week now. Stanley Heller speaks to activist Sandra Nurse.
see a youtube of Stan Heller’s remarks at the Sept. 17 Occupy Wall St. demo
