If 9 percent of Ben Bernanke’s friends were unemployed, I bet his hair would be on fire. If 9 percent of Richard Fischer’s friends were unemployed, he wouldn’t be criticizing Bernanke from the right. But they’re not.
Key decision-makers throughout the economy are oddly insulated from the misery afflicting young people and huge swathes of the working class.
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=pre_occupied
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/do-we-still-need-daylight-saving-time
Only a minority of the world’s population uses DST because Asia and Africa generally do not observe it 
Senator Kerry has an editorial in the Milford Daily News about the bill he just filed along with Senators Brown and Whitehouse to establish the John H. Chafee Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park.
The Blackstone River Valley is the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. Its currents powered Slater Mill, the nation’s first water-powered cotton-textile factory, inspiring a farm-to-factory revolution that took root in New England and spread across the continent, transforming America into the industrial giant of the world. And it’s a place where people still cherish living in the company-built houses their ancestors lived in a century ago.
But these iconic sites are more than just our history – they’re a centerpiece of the region’s economic future if we make smart decisions today.
Red more: Milford Daily News
http://15october.net/
as of 3:16 PM post: 951 cities; 82 countries
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich*, and Democratic (‘WEIRD’)
(one of the glories of the interweb – you just never know what you might find in a search)
*with the caveat: ‘rich’ i’ll accept as a relative term
Just keep reminding yourself: a mere three years after the financial industry nearly destroyed the planet, Wall Street is bigger and more profitable than ever while a tenth of the rest of us remain mired in unemployment.
Even after nearly destroying the planet, virtually nothing has changed. That’s the outrage, not a few folks with funny costumes or wacky slogans. Always keep in mind whose side you’re on.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/keep-asking-yourself-one-question-whose-side-am-i
The Tea Party started out as a populist movement of people angry about government overspending – specifically when it came to bailing out the banks. It intentionally stayed away from the so-called “God, Gays and Guns” social issues and in so doing got very popular, very fast. It is an agenda that most Americans can agree on, even if they don’t agree about what the government is overspending on. People who bitterly disagree on whether to cut defense or entitlements will hug each other as soon as you mention bailouts.
Although the Occupy Wall Street website is drenched in liberal-speak (”resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions”)[*], the key sentence is this:
The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.
Icing the Tea Party
That’s damn close to where the Tea Party started out, although it has morphed into something far more interested in God, Gays and Guns than anything else. At least according to Karl Denninger, the ex-CEO and now financial blogger widely thought of as the Party’s co-founder. This is how he described the group past and present when he resigned from it:
Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than the Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with the Republican Party’s own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the ****ing money!
So far the Occupy Wall Streeters and Original Tea Partiers have had little to say to each other.
. . .
If they ever figure out that their economic interests are more important than any cultural differences, look out.
courtesy of Alain Sherter at BNET.com
The NYT and other major media outlets are equally baffled, characterizing the movement as rudderless or downright loony. Even Mother Jones, the lefty pub named after a famous 19th century labor organizer, sniffs at what it describes as the demonstrators’ feckless “posturing.”
. . .
Does our media, its fingers pressed as ever to the country’s pulse, really need such testimonies to draw a link between the harm inflicted on the U.S. economy by large financial firms, by the torrent of corporate dollars into our politics, and the economic fate of millions of Americans? Dumb question. Of course they don’t. Journalists (and even the odd financial pundit) understand such connections all too well. News Corp. (NWS), the company that made the Tea Party, has assigned an entire TV network to exploiting such public outrage.
Do you think this commenter believes the Tea Party is is a populist movement? or is it just the Wall St Occupation that’s not populist. Wonder how ‘he’ defines ‘populist’?
doesn’t seem to be using this definition: ‘believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people’ (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/populist)
RE: RE: RE: Why ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Critics Are More Clueless Than the Protesters
@Alain Sherter
What seems obvious to fringe-hanging lunatics who actually sympathize with the few hundred ill-educated marchers who arrived in their week old laundry, assaulted police, and engaged in civil disobedience for its own sake, many of them having no idea what unifying theme even brought them together with their cohorts, is not always obvious to those looking in from the realm of reality/sanity. So perhaps you could help this clearly-enormous populist revolution articulate what exactly it means to “restrain corporate power”. Most often it means “trampling individual rights”, “confiscating wealth”, “destroying industry” and other policies that are generally unpalatable to the sane population, which is precisely why these “populist movements” refuse to articulate them.
ackbar!
09/29/2011 12:07 AM
The New York Times this morning has an important article titled New State Rules Raising Hurdles at Voting Booth. It focuses on a study being released today by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, which came up with the total of possibly 5 million voters finding it more difficult to vote. As one can read in the executive summary at the website for the report:
These new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. This wave of changes may sharply tilt the political terrain for the 2012 election. Based on the Brennan Center’s analysis of the 19 laws and two executive actions that passed in 14 states, it is clear that:* These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
* The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
* Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/27/us-ryan-healthcare-tax-breaks-idUSTRE78Q5NV20110927
(Reuters) – U.S. employer healthcare tax breaks would be replaced with refundable tax credits for individuals under a proposal offered on Tuesday by House of Representatives Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan.
. . .
Eliminating healthcare tax breaks for business would likely encourage most companies to drop their employer-sponsored plans. That was an argument Republicans used against Obama’s healthcare overhaul.
But Ryan said his plan would put patients more in control of their healthcare and go a long way toward reining in soaring healthcare costs.
“By putting the power into the hands of individuals, we can let competition work in healthcare just as it does everywhere else,” Ryan said.
. . .
The new proposal is likely to revive the political controversy surrounding Ryan’s proposal to phase out government-run Medicare and give subsidies to the elderly to purchase coverage from private insurers.
Ryan’s earlier plan to privatize Medicare, a popular healthcare program for the elderly, contributed to Democrats scoring an upset victory in a special House election this year in a traditionally Republican district in New York.
A similar proposal to end tax breaks for employer-sponsored healthcare hurt Senator John McCain’s 2008 run for president against Obama.
