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Awake the State - Florida →
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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!]
(via motherjones)
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Bill Nighy’s banker puts the “Robin Hood Tax” proposal in perspective. Take note, occupiers.
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Get the Money Out of Politics! Sign the petition! →
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Rick Scott has no clue on macroeconomics →
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A million $ spent on suppressing Free Speech while closing 5 schools for budget short-falls →
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CBO Calls out the 1% →
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Read this article NOW - "Mitt Romney and the 1% Economy" →
From New York Magazine:
The political genuflection to businessmen is so gauzy and generic that praise for a candidate’s private-sector acumen can often sound phony. But Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency. “Whatever you think of his politics, you have to give him credit,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. “He came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses.”
The protests going on at Zuccotti Park now have raised the question of whether that transition was worth it. What emerged from that long decade of change was a system that is more productive, nimble, and efficient than the one it replaced; it is also less equal, less stable, and more brutal. These evolutions were not inevitable. They were the result, in part, of particular innovations developed by a few businessmen beginning a quarter century ago. Now one of them has a good chance of becoming president.
(via motherjones)
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New Congressional Budget Office data confirms what we’ve been saying for a while: There’s an income inequality gap, and it’s growing.
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All the latest here.
