By The Beachwood Occupation Affairs Desk
What democracy does and does not look like.
1. “The largest banks are larger than they were when Obama took office and are nearing the level of profits they were making before the depths of the financial crisis in 2008, according to government data,” the Washington Post reports.
“Wall Street firms – independent companies and the securities-trading arms of banks – are doing even better. They earned more in the first 2 1/2 years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.”
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“There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street,” said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. “That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened.”
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Jamie Dimon, former Chicagoan who is now the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on Occupy protesters: “They’re right.”
2. Gerald Celente.
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3. Chicago’s budget for the 1%.
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4. Chicago police confiscate Occupy Chicago’s bottled water.
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5. JBTV Occupies Chicago.
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6. From the vault:
“Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been battling the banks the last few weeks in an effort to get 60 votes lined up for bankruptcy reform. He’s losing.
“On Monday night in an interview with a radio host back home, he came to a stark conclusion: the banks own the Senate.
“And the banks – hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created – are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
7. “As more than 1,500 supporters of the Occupy Chicago movement prepared to march through the Loop recently, Willie J. R. Fleming, a neighborhood organizer from the South Side, grabbed a bullhorn and wedged his way to the head of the mostly white crowd,” the New York Times reports.
Mr. Fleming, who was followed by a group of blacks and Latinos that he said he had brought “from the ‘hood,” raised the bullhorn into the mild late-October night and shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”
“I made sure we were up there,” he said, “because I wanted the media to see that people of color were represented in the march and the movement. I wanted to remove the tools of division.”
For Mr. Fleming, co-founder of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Occupy movement is “heaven sent,” partly because it has done something he and many of his black, white, Asian and Latino colleagues in the city’s grass-roots organizing community have struggled to do over the years: focus public attention on poverty and rising economic inequality.
8. “Is the Obama campaign’s plan for Occupy Chicago to just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist?” Joe Macare writes in In These Times. “That seems remarkably naive.
“Then again, having attended General Assemblies and marches and spoken to members of the movement (full disclosure: my partner is on the Press Committee, and at this point I feel I’m edging towards being as much a participant as an observer), I can say with some authority that attempting to co-opt this particular local iteration of the movement isn’t going to work.
“Occupy Chicago is highly aware and on the look-out for attempts to bring them into the fold, and fiercely resistant. Some (but not all) within the movement might welcome support from local, quote-unquote progressive Democrats like Representative Jan Schakowsky, but the presidential re-election campaign? It’s not going to happen.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on November 7, 2011