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Friday, October 14, 2011
ARTISTS JOIN “OCCUPY WALL STREET” AS UNEMPLOYMENT, ECONOMY WORSEN
This feature originally appeared in the News Features section of the October 7, 2011 edition of the Acoustic Americana Music Guide.
We are reprinting it here in its entirety to enable the many comments we have received to appear with it (as soon as we get them moderated and moved here). We welcome your comment, after you have read the piece and as many comments as you wish to read from others.
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Our # 5 Story (in the October 7 edition)
ARTISTS JOIN “OCCUPY WALL STREET” AS UNEMPLOYMENT, ECONOMY WORSEN
“There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.” - '60s song lyrics.
New Census statistics are out. Brace yourself. 48.5% of all American households now get some kind of government aid. 34% live in a household that gets Food Stamps or some kind of welfare benefit. 14% are on Medicare.
There's more. 46% of households will pay no federal taxes this year, and 45% paid none last year.
Unemployment is officially 14 million, plus six or seven million more who are underemployed and wanting full-time work, plus more we'll get into in a moment. That translates to an official unemployment rate of 9.1%, and up to 12%, depending where you are. But that's not the entire picture. The criteria for reporting unemployment rates only reflects the people who are currently collecting unemployment benefits. That's been the case since the Nixon Administration. BUT – Once your unemployment insurance benefits are exhausted, you are deemed a “discouraged worker” (yep, that's the term they use) and you drop off the map. The system loses the ability to count you for statistical purposes, except in spot updates for the Census.
If you're in that predicament, you're probably descending into deep debt, you certainly don't have a job, but you're not unemployed. It's insane. The actual numbers of people out of work and seeking jobs is really about 31%, or one in five Americans of working-age, plus the 5% (or so) who are underemployed because that's all they can find.
All of the above numbers are worse than they were during the depths of the Great Depression that began in 1929. Mega-billionaire Warren Buffet even called on Congress to raise his tax rates, emphasizing how ludicrously wrong things are, that his secretary paid more taxes last year than he did. He was ridiculed by other fat cats and by corporate-lackey politicians.
We hear more of that '60s song: “Paranoia runs deep...”
Instead of anything pro-active, politicians in Congress are blocking an embarrassingly modest Jobs Bill proposed by the Obama Administration. It's all about contrarian politics and what one financial reporter calls “paralysis and toxicity” in the face of a crisis.
We should be talking about the exact form and structure of a new WPA and a new CCC to re-employ Americans with projects that will give us all a future legacy – like that we inherited from the enduring public works projects of the '30s. We could be building high-speed rail and alternatives to gas-guzzling automobiles and alternatives to polluting coal-fired power plants. We could be leading the world in high tech investment and encouraging math and science education with a vigorous space program, aimed at Mars, instead of pouring money and blood into the sands of Afghanistan. We could be creating jobs so that the 24% of the military enlistees, who go there because there are no other jobs, could find career work in improving our society and rebuilding it for their children's future.
Instead, we are told that a tepid jobs bill is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives, even as we see record profits for companies that took our money to employ people overseas, but not here. We see money being used to make money without creating any jobs or benefits for our society in a time when meaningful, career-track jobs should be our key national priority. We're not building for the future. We're not even doing required maintenance on the gifts we received from our parents and grandparents. We hear politicians rant that government must charge the rich no taxes and make Capital Gains profits off-limits to taxation, altogether. We see bonuses paid to money manipulators who exported America's jobs even as they took bailouts from taxpayers. Rome is burning. They're buying Stradovari violins with our money.
Wall Street, led by Big Oil, continues to post record profits. The rest of us are, at best, being squeezed, at worst, seeing our futures get raped, pillaged and plundered.
That's true from the macro to the micro end of the average American's shrinking economic spectrum. At “Occupy L.A.,” an oversized mock check is held aloft; in the amount of $673 billion, it represents the payment that protestors say is due from Bank of America to the People of California “for destruction” caused by the megabank's mortgage foreclosure and other practices.
Big banks, who enjoyed billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, continue to find ways to screw their customers. Small things are representative of their philosophy and larger practices.
There's Chase Bank, luring new accounts with promises of “no fees, no minimum balances and $100 of the bank's money for you,” and then changing the rules to charge $20 per account per month in fees – after you're trapped there for a year because you accepted their hundred bucks. (Do the math: the fees on one account are $240 a year.)
There's Bank of America, luring you with a no-fee, no-minimum-balance account, then slapping you with $8.95 a month for your account statement, plus $5 a month from then on, if you use your debit card (even once) to buy anything in a store or online. (That totals to $167.40 a year in fees.)
But getting a loan from either of them, to buy a house or start a small business that would be a job creator? Forget it. All that bailout money they took? It's too tight, especially since millions of it went to executive bonuses.
It's all nuts. We amass record levels of consumer debt just trying to hang-on, because record numbers of us are unemployed or underemployed. Instead of us running up debt trying to survive, government could be (gasp) borrowing money – something it could do at record low interest rates – to finance public works projects that would employ our own people.
But nothing gets done, even as our individual consumer debt increases each month to set new record levels while no one gets a job to repay it. Of course, the money manipulators post record profits because they game the system, exploit foreign workers with low pay in dangerous workplaces, and sell the world inferior junk. They pay themselves obscene bonuses as rewards for bringing their corporations record profits based on cutting and exporting jobs, after they merge, over-consolidate, eliminate competition, and erase any pressure to make better products.
They play shell games with the profits of their offshore operations to escape and avoid paying taxes. They get away with it because they own the politicians they buy with campaign contributions in amounts that are now unlimited (since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United). They protect themselves at the expense of everyone else, no matter what happens, even when they're the ones exacerbating it. And many of them flaunt it.
Enter “Occupy Wall Street”
That '60s song is playing: “You better stop, hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's goin' down.”
Is it any wonder that, twenty-one days ago, a movement began to “Occupy Wall Street” in protest of, as the occupiers put it, “the one percent” that are predators on “the 99 percent” of Americans? Indeed, we have literally reached a point where the top one percent makes one-fourth of the income in America. That, too, is a record. Meanwhile, the system has quite literally stopped working for everyone else; income has been flat for decades for all but the super-rich.
This phenomenon – this Occupy Wall Street thing – is something that appears to be a genuine grassroots uprising by a broad cross-section of ordinary people of all ages. It's people who are fed-up with watching the fat cats game the system and prosper at the expense of the rest of us. It's people fed-up with being disillusioned, people disgusted by what they see happening and feel powerless to stop, people who include the long-term unemployed, who are young and middle-aged and old, people who should be at the mid-points of their careers doing jobs that were suddenly exported to China, people who see no one doing anything to improve their prospects, people who are being told to prepare for a time of decline and diminished expectations, people who, consequently, have “had it” to the point of taking to the streets.
They're taking one street in particular – Wall Street, the home base and monolithic symbol of the 21st century's resurrection of the ruthless Robber Barons we thought we'd left in the 19th century, back there on the junk heap of rich elitists who controlled politicians to protect their own tyrannical exploitation of people and resources and capital and the environment.
Suddenly, a growing number of people are asking, “How much is enough,” enough tax breaks, enough record profits for the rich, enough to manipulate and to control for one's own ego and greed? The malcontents are collectively declaring that they have “had enough” of watching their country and their future concentrate wealth into fewer hands at the expense of those who have worked their whole lives for modest returns that are now being denied, and they have simply had enough of being exploited. Even the ersatz populism of the Koch Brothers-funded Tea Party has begun to transcend an agenda that was, early on, spoon-fed to its followers. Somewhere, some manipulator must be holding his breath at the thought that Tea Partiers may have started thinking for themselves and looking out for their own futures.
Generally apolitical members of Middle America's rapidly diminishing middle class, along with disillusioned Democrats and Ron Paul conservatives and hardcore right-wingers, have joined students who face deeper debts from higher tuition and the impossibility of getting all the classes to finish a degree in four years at a campus where cutbacks have occurred, and they've all joined recent graduates who have no job prospects and no hope of paying student loans, and there are the people facing mortgage foreclosure, and those who have lost homes, and those at or near Medicare age, and workers who have seen their benefit packages erode to almost nothing, and the vast ranks of unemployed of all skill levels and levels of education and expertise, and workers who have had their pension funds stolen by money manipulators, and union members fighting legislation that would undo the gains it took a century to achieve, and left-leaning social activists, and veterans of G4 summit protests, and yes, a few genuine radicals and even a handful of bonafide anarchists. It's a crazy quilt that's the real America.
At “Occupy Washington” in the nation's capital, one of the 22 satellite sites spawned by “Occupy Wall Street,” one woman's sign reads, “Lost my job – found an occupation.”
Critics and many watchers in the media opine that it isn't organized enough to be a movement, this conglomeration of refugees of the ninety-nine percent. We answer that it doesn't need to be coherently structured and organized. Native American Indians fought on horseback with each warrior his own general, willing to boldly lead and be led to facilitate taking part, but not willing to be commanded by anyone. The internet analogue shows us countless examples of large numbers buying-in to ideas and movements that have a bare minimum of officious formality. They don't require it. Should we wonder that “Occupy Wall Street” would resonate in our time, without a published manifesto or Statement of Purpose?
Should we wonder, in an age of web forums that allow equal access and participation – without regard to geographic location – that this populist outrage would engage others too far away to join those in New York? Like a viral flash demonstration that won't go away, other communities' financial districts get cloned “occupations” tapping the same discontent, including one that grew during a rainstorm at the diagonally-opposite corner of the country, in L.A.
Is it any wonder that artists are part of this new community that's spreading nationwide to these “occupations”-? Some bring six-strings, others add voices. They sing songs of the uniquely American consciousness, old songs of social justice and labor organizing, new songs of economic justice, songs from the last Great Depression, old and new songs of struggle and overcoming oppression and exploitation, songs of camaraderie of common purpose, songs decrying greed and manipulation and thwarted opportunity, songs of fat cats whose lack of concern rivals the aristocrats' “Let them eat cake” cliche of the French Revolution.
Should we wonder at that? Is it any wonder that it is the artists, as an inevitable part of their own experience of it, who are already writing new anthems and updating lyrics for the old ones, defining the experience and giving it voice and inspiring their fellow “occupiers”-?
In the first week, politicians and even the media were dismissing the Wall Street occupiers as a mob with no coherent agenda. By the second week, TV news was running a clip from the movie, “Network,” with the key line, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!”
The “not-a-movement” movement quickly won supporters and sympathizers over its first weekend, when 70 of its participants were arrested, following the caught-on-camera violence inflicted and indiscriminate hosings with pepper spray or mace inflicted on unresisting people by New York Police officers and one police official. THAT made it news, as numerous media outlets commented with a sense that the NYPD had just erased the residual goodwill it had earned following 9-11. That rhetoric lasted until police and fire unions joined the occupiers, and signs appeared with slogans like “No more cuts to fire, police, and emergency responders.”
The New York protestors – or occupiers – won more hearts and minds by cleverly defeating the nearly unprecedented ban the city had slapped on them, prohibiting their use of bullhorns or mics with electric amplification. The group quickly unified by developing and implementing “The People's Microphone,” wherein everyone within earshot of any recognized speaker simply shouts, in synchronized repetition, whatever the speaker says. It's effective. Everyone hears, as each phrase or sentence is repeated all the way to the far end of the crowd. For ingenuity, doggedness of purpose, and building group cohesion, it's unbeatable.
Give an artist the whole scenario – all of it, starting with what caused it in the first place, the fat cats prospering off everyone else who sees their prospects diminishing, and then the scenes of mishandling by New York officials and attempted suppression of those pointing-out the inequities of worsening economic oppression, then the goofy statements by rich political neophytes who don't get it, like Herman Cain, who asserts it's all orchestrated by the Obama campaign – and expect songs like Bob Dylan wrote during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era.
Not that we expect the fat cats to “get it.” So we'll close with an effort to help them.
MEMO TO THOSE WALLOWING IN WALL STREET BONUSES AND BANK BAILOUT BILLIONS and the taxpayer-subsidized obscene profits of Big Oil in your decadently furnished, hermetically sealed offices: You've lost the battle for hearts and minds. No one (except your fellow greedy elitists in “the one percent”) will be sympathetic to you, because the artists are on to you and they can see the emperor has all the gold, but no clothes. You've had your day in the sun on your gated private beach, with your tax-free yachts and caviar and free rides on your capital gains – your chief sources of income – and tax rates lower than what your secretaries pay. In case you hadn't noticed, the artists are not only on to you, they're telling the truth from a position to attract and inform everyone else. The occupiers will besiege you until you wake up and realize we're all in this together, sharing this fragile planet and all needing essential shares of its resources. And you, the 1%, have no Right of Kings to oppress the rest of us in the 99%.
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THE ABOVE FEATURE originally appeared in the News Features section of the October 7, 2011 edition of the Acoustic Americana Music Guide.
Your comments and responses are invited at tiedtothetracks@hotmail.com
or by replying through the Blogspot edition.
All replies and comments are moderated before they appear, and we currently have QUITE a backlog to get through. Still, YOUR PARTICIPATION is invited, welcomed, and valued, and we WILL get your message posted. Let us know if you want to be iden tified or if you want your email included with your post. Otherwise, our policy is to protect the identities of our readers.
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REPLIES, RESPONSES & COMMENTS … (Most recent appears first, earliest is last)
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[Reply / Response / Comment...]
From Rachel Maddow show. ALL OCCUPIERS need this. An app called “Help I'm Getting Arrested.” You download it to your smartphone and when you get arrested, you open it and it sends a message to everyone you preprogrammed to tell when they hauled you away. I think she said 23,000 downloads so far.
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Want proof that the rich get richer and the rest of us keep getting poorer?
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just released new figures today that shows American's incomes over the past 40 years.
It shows a very modest 1 and 1/3 %-per-year growth of Middle Class incomes, and that is for only 1/5 of the population. (The Middle Class is shrinking.) That income growth wasn't nearly enough to keep pace with inflation.
But the top 1% saw their wealth nearly triple. It went up 275 %.
The poor in America declined markedly, showing an 18 % total increase for the entire 30 year period. That's a 6/10 % per year gain, which was far less than inflation. That group grew larger while falling farther and farther into poverty.
The CBO report also states that the government today is doing LESS than ever before to address income disparity. In fact, a decade of reduced taxes on the rich accelerated the disparity.
It this isn't enough to make the entire 99% join the people occupying Wall Street, then I give up. - Chris C
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The Oakland Police are dumbasses. I can't believe what I saw last night. Iraq War veteran (two tours) Scott Olson was shot by police and is in critical condition with a skull fracture. Occupy Oakland is returning and everyone is learning the lyrics to the old Civil Rights song, 'We Shall Not Be Moved.' I'm afraid, but I'm going. If I get broken bones, I won't be the first. If I get arrested I have Martin Luther King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and quotes from Gandhi in my pocket to read aloud to everyone else in jail (or the hospital). It's time to take a stand.
- Cindy
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News from Occupy Atlanta. The city's mayor had everyone at Occupy Atlanta arrested last night including Georgia State Senator Vincent Fort. Fort says this is “A war on working people.” He also says he will “Go back as often as necessary until the public understands that corporate greed has put us in this mess. I will be with the Occupy Atlanta movement as long as it takes.” Not all politicians are on the corporate dole or carrying the corporate line.
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I can't believe what I'm seeing. Oakland is a police riot.
In New York last week, cops arrested well dressed people inside banks where they went to close their accounts, after walking there from Occupy Wall Street.
New York was cops following dumb orders. In Oakland, the cops are hitting unarmed people with clubs and they seem to be enjoying it.
Both places put police on display and “the whole world is watching” like the chants and signs say.
I have a message for all the cops everywhere with their Robocop gear. You look like the Chinese tanks suppressing the people in Tiananmen Square. Protestors are committed to nonviolence but they are not trained and human endurance can take only so much unjustified abuse.
BTW, the occupy movement is trying to keep police jobs from being cut too, if you didn't know... - Rachel R.
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Watching the cops in Oakland beat up the Occupiers. I hope the next song someone writes is not an update of Neil Young's “Four Dead in Ohio.”
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today's reported stats. 43% of america agrees with the occupy movement. 69% believe republican policies favor the rich. obama may be a big disappointment, but who supports protectors of the elitists instead? (answer: elitists who control big media, like FOX news)
- richard t.
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Heard today, said by Laura Flanders, talk radio host and author of book, “At the Tea Party”: “What is the place of the public in a corporate owned state?”
The fact that such a question must be asked would scare the hell out of the Founding Fathers. - Ed
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Obama says we can't afford to wait for congress to act. We can't afford to wait for HIM to act, either. Where is the kind of IMMEDIATE action we need to put MILLIONS back to work doing things that need to be done, fixing things that are broken RIGHT NOW?! - Ranting Robin
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The cost of college has about tripled on average since I went, and it's more than six times as expensive where I went to school. My kid can't qualify for a student loan based on my income, which is really stupid, because I am now unemployed. The best I can do is tell my kid that half of this year's college grads can't find a job anyway. I can't believe I'm talking to my own kid and minimizing the worth of a college education. I feel like a crappy mom. Things were not supposed to be like this. - Shirley E
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Thanks, Wall Street. Everybody needs to have a purpose in life and yours is to be the ultimate bad example. I don't even know if the “occupiers” are a good example, but they're my good example. BTW, every time the cops harass them (in any of the occupy protests anywhere) I lose respect for the cops as too stupid to see the occupiers are the only ones calling for no cuts to teachers, firemen and COPS! - Ben O
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EJ Dionne, Washington Post writer, says the Occupy movement will likely be like the labor movement was, to the left of FDR, and like civil rights was, to the left of LBJ, but will show up to vote for progressive candidates who are only partway to where they are.
I'm not so sure.
The people (all the people) HATE congress. Many more Democrats are up for reelection in 2012 than Republicans.
We know the Republicans take marching orders from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and there is no way they will give anything the occupy movement wants or that ordinary people need.
But that doesn't mean the occupy movement is in the bag for the Dems. Unless the Democrats DO something that the occupy movement wants to see happen, most occupiers will sit this one out and work for change in other ways.
After all, the unions got started and became powerful with NO politicians doing anything to help them, then they went after the politicians who messed with them. - Liliana
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The Occupy movement needs to change its name to “THE 99% MOVEMENT.” That's what they are and that would attract the most people to see what they are about. Then I could stop saying “they” and start saying “we.” - Sean
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I just got back from Afghanistan and was looking for some music. I was surprised to find your feature on Occupy Wall Street. Thank you for writing it. It did a better job for me, understanding what it's about, than anything I read online before I got home or than anything in today's paper. - Bill
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We don't need the $9.99 pizza guy, we need both Roosevelts: Teddy the Trust-Buster (curiously enough, a Republican) who dethroned the Robber Barons and broke-up the big monopoly corporations, and FDR (the prototype Progressive Democrat) who put hopeless hordes of unemployed back to work quickly, to do worthwhile needed things.
FDR's New Deal had no computers to help do anything, but it organized work forces and did more than has ever been accomplished before or since. Just one thing, they went into the National Parks and built beautiful lodges and architectural jewels that are still there, but are falling apart for lack of maintenance. Duhh! FIX THEM!
Don't we need urgent replacement and upgrades of highways and bridges?
Aren't there levees that need rebuilding before rivers flood in the Great Plains next spring?
After the devastating fires in the San Gabriel Mountains, don't we need new trees planted to prevent soil erosion and new trails built to get in and take care of them so they live and grow?
Obama says things “aren't as shovel ready as we thought.”
WHERE is he looking? Just buy us shovels and pay us when we use them to do something in our communities, Mr. President! Give ME a shovel, a map, seedlings and a paycheck. I'll get started RIGHT NOW! I only need time to pack a sack lunch.
There's debris in storm drains to be shoveled out. Get us shovels and paychecks and trucks to haul it away! There are coastal wetlands that need berms to protect them. Multiply that by everything like it that's obvious and needs to be done RIGHT NOW, and we can all work in the short run while you figure out how to restart FDR's big solutions.
The Republicans say the answer to everything is to cut spending and lay-off teachers and let only big corporations run the economy? What McMansion with illegal alien gardeners and maids do they live in? How effing stupid do they think we are? Duhh! - TJ
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Those [expletive] [expletives] on Wall Street may be getting revealed in a new movie called MARGIN CALL. I don't know for sure because I haven't got enough money this month to go see it. I probably won't have enough next month either. But it does my poor unemployed, broke, but not quite broken, heart good to know that Hollywood is making a margin call that calls them out. I know you censor cussing but it makes me feel good to say EXACTLY what I think of them. [Expletive] thieves! - Carlos
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The only thing wrong with Occupy Wall Street and “Occupy Anyplace Else” is an image problem. It comes across like a homeless encampment. I need to go down there and meet them and find out who they are because I agree with what I've heard them say. Thanks for describing things so well that I realized it. - Luke
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I'm young enough that I haven't been worrying about things like no health care. Then I needed a dentist and had to hock my guitar. Since I didn't have it to play, I started reading. I found your article and that opened my eyes to read more. I've read about a lot I didn't know was happening. It's worse than I thought out there. Now I wonder why we elect people to represent us and they don't do anything except take Wall Street money to run for reelection?
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If you are rich and manipulate the deductions game, then this is class warfare. If you're anybody else, this is self preservation.
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You called Obama's Jobs Bill tepid. I had to look that up. It means halfhearted, lukewarm, unenthusiastic. I think that the President IS enthusiastic about his Jobs Bill, even after it was defeated as a package (it's coming back as a series of newly introduced pieces). That (Obama's enthusiasm for it) is part of the tragedy. We need a whole lot more to get the rest of us enthusiastic. Congress is giving us nothing. The people have no choice but Direct Action.
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We ARE the 99% and the sooner we get together and make the politicians fear us at the ballot box, the sooner they will do something for us, instead of finding more ways to bail out the rich corporate, tax dodging 1%. - Justin
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I am so glad to know that artists are supporting the 'Occupy' occupations. My mother marched with Dr. King and she told me many times how everyone drew strength and courage from singing together and learning songs by listening to others sing them. - Bet
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Occupy Wall Street and its sister occupations have done a remarkable job keeping things non-violent. But they are not anything like a unified group, as you said.
They are a coalition of the dispossessed and the disillusioned. This country is swimming in guns.
Some of the Teabaggers wore holstered sidearms at their rallies two years ago. You point out that some Teabaggers have joined the occupy groups. Cops are at all the demonstrations and have gotten violent against the demonstrators.
If right wing politicians keep flinging dismissive insults at the occupiers and cops keep pushing people around, we could have a bloodbath. People have lost too much and some have hair-triggers on themselves and their emotions. Put all that together and this is very scarey indeed.
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Most artists I know are scrupulously non-political in public. But talk to them about any issue as it relates to people and they're there. I hope a lot of artists read your article and share it on their websites and facebook links.
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The whole OCCUPY thing is not new. It happened in the last Depression and came to a tragic end. Everyone should take a look at this and think about what happened. (It'll be in a big story in New York Magazine in a few days):
Military veterans of World War I OCCUPIED Washington, D.C. where they built an encampment. They couldn't find work any better than anyone else. They had been promised “the bonus,” a payment from the government for their military service that would help them in their old age. But the vets called on Congress because they needed it right away, in the depths of the Depression, to save their homes and farms and just to buy food. Congress rejected them. That brought huge numbers of “Bonus Marchers” who marched on the nation's capital. (They were also called the “Bonus Army.”)
What happened to those occupiers, the Bonus Marchers, was shameful. President Hoover sent the US Army in, under General Douglas MacArthur, to run them out. It was the last action by the US Army's Horse Cavalry and it was as awful as the cavalry at Wounded Knee, plus they used tanks. Veterans and their families, including children, were trampled under charging horses. People died when MacArthur put the torch to the encampment. Unarmed Americans, our military veterans and their families, were shot by the Army.
When newsreels were shown in theaters the following week, the people cheered the Bonus Marchers and booed the US Army and MacArthur. Brutal treatment of peaceful demonstrators always backfires in this country, as it would later with Civil Rights marchers. When FDR was elected President, he quietly got the Bonus Bill through Congress.
This time around, in 2011, there is again a record number of unemployed veterans. Except this time, changing Presidents is not going to make anything better and it could make things a whole lot worse. We need to get the Prez we've got to do much more, and we need to impeach anyone in Congress who blocks everything and offers no better ways.
One other thing I learned. The unemployed who became homeless throughout the Depression built encampments across America, just like the Occupiers now. Wherever they were, they were all called the same thing -- “Hoovervilles” for the Republican President they all saw as caring only about the rich. We should call the occupations “99%villes.” - Irv
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Is everybody who reads Larry's so-called music guide a socialist? I want to keep what I work for and not be forced to give it away to some crybaby who bought more house than they could afford.
I remember a 60 Minutes story on the “Millenials,” a whole generation of crybabies who were raised from 1980 to 2000 and who need to be coddled and spoken softly too and given free lunches at work. They expect too much time off and you can't dare criticize them for being late for work. You people needed to be spanked when you were children throwing tantrums. But you received medals from your soccer moms because everybody got a medal for being “special” whether they could score a goal or not. I'm sick of you people. Where are the country songs about you? Those are the only songs that tell the truth and they should sing one about all of YOU.
Part of the reason jobs get shipped overseas is because people there are willing to WORK. If you're unemployed ask yourself how bad you want to work, really work, like picking lettuce? We won't have an illegal immigrant issue if unemployed Americans get off their ass and pick the fruit and vegetables.
Some jobs go begging because our people are too spoiled to do them. It would be a good lesson in character for a lot of grownup spoiled brats who think the world owes them a living.
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You've written before about how we need to determine priorities. I know you want to see a big space program instead of a big military. I know you've advocated for high speed rail and expanding Amtrak.
I'm finally and begrudgingly ready to accept that some “big” things are necessary because there are so many people in this country and in the world. But only some big things.
I wish we didn't have to have “big” anything, because I believe the quality of life is better without it and I've always thought big was bad, too controlling, too corrupting.
The whole Wall Street thing makes me wonder how long it takes “big” anything to get merged and manipulated by the rich into Too Big To Fail?
Some bog projects that put lots of people to work? OK, but I'd be more comfortable if the big projects built a lot of little things that won't require a big company to manage them.
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A musician friend in California sent me your editorial on Occupy Wall Street. I read it and thought, 'pretty good, but I've seen most of this already.' When I told her that, she wrote back and noted when it was first published in your Musicguide. I Googled other articles from that same day and then I got impressed. You were out front of everybody with this. If I can get your editorials every week without all the listings of concerts, sign me up. (I'm in Boston and the concert stuff isn't something I could use).
[Done. You're signed-up to received the Guide's weekly News Features. Thanks. - Editor]
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I've hated politics since third grade when a group of kids made everybody else feel bad because we we were not in their group. My teacher told me they were “playing politics” and that was all it took to make me hate it. My parents always tried to make me feel bad and shame me into voting by saying I was “neglecting my civic responsibility.” That just made me hate it more. I didn't vote until I felt I had something to vote FOR and it lost. I was in my 30's. I only vote sometimes now.
But something just changed. I see it clearly for the first time. Those kids in third grade were not “playing politics.” They were bullies.
Wall Street is a bunch of bullies. Now I know what I've always really hated is bullies.
I've got some years of political participation to catch up on and I want the bullies to get what's coming to them. That's the best thing I can do for “civic responsibility.” I'll look into the occupation.
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I'm working three jobs now, all part time, and making less than I used to make with one job and I have no benefits now. I went to trade school and it was expensive but it meant I was always supposed to have a skill that would keep me employed. Now I never have a day off. Never. I'm exhausted. Sometimes I don't know how I stay awake long enough to get home. I have a girlfriend I get to see like maybe twice a week. She asked me if I would still be doing this in a year and I can't answer her. If I was old I couldn't do it all. I don't think I would live long enough to get old if I had to keep living like this. Where's my bailout?
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Wall Street got away with it because nobody was looking out for our interests. We all need to be watching them. It pisses me off because that isn't how I want to use my time. But it's my future they're messing with.
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Republicans used to be against big government, and for local government. What happened? Now they're against anything that is a watchdog and they protect anything that's big (I mean BIG) if they or their friends can own it. They're inconsistent--they're against a big jobs program, but how else will all these unemployed people get to work?
They all need to quit playing power games or we should just abolish both parties. Seriously. I've got news for you, political parties, YOU are NOT Too Big To Fail.
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the occupy groups can't stay leaderless. if they try they'll get taken over the way the rich jerks took over the tea party. It matters because if it gets corrupted we will need to start all over to do what I hope the people in those occupy groups are trying to do now.
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I'm not rich but I want to be. If we let all you Socialaists redistribute wealth, nobody can ever be rich no matter how hard they work.
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Remember Elizabeth Warren, the brilliant woman who created the Consumer Protection Agency? It had to be just a White House “office” because the Republicans would not allow her or the agency to go into effect. Search her name at YouTube. Great rant by her on how conservatives don't want any government interference with them doing whatever they want, but as she says, “You took your goods to markets on roads the rest of us paid for and maintain!” - Sally J
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I wasn't going to ever vote again because I am so thoroughly pissed with all the BS. Endless BS. Like that big mountain of real BS you see at the cattle feed lot alongside I-5 when you go up the Central Valley. (Did I learn about that from you?)
Then I started reading about all the ways the Republicans are trying to keep people from voting in different states.
I was talking to my aunt the other night about it and we started taking about the 60s. She is sort of an old hippie chick who gets happy and sad all at the same time when she talks about those olden days.
Then we started talking about Occupy Wall Street. She read me your article on her iPad. I left feeling like we may have another chance at Power to the People. Peace out.
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Hey rich people. Question. How much is enough for you? How much do you need? Sure as hell must be a lot less than you want. Have you talked to anybody else lately? Not at the Country Club, but like at the barber shop? The rest of us are trying to figure out how to make what we need and for most of us, that seems to be about all we believe we can want.
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THAT is too damn long. Surprised I made it through. But I did and I felt like I needed to read it all. That's an accomplishment for me. And you.
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So one day I'm skating at Venice Beach and I see all these crosses. I talk to the people and learn they represent soldiers killed in Iraq. I get on mailing lists. I don't want to be an activist. But I can't seem to just skate with all my free time. In addition to all the crazies, I keep seeing things that get me to stop and ask somebody what it's about, and I get on some mailing list again. Then one of those lists gets me to Occupy Los Angeles (somebody said don't write LA or it looks like Louisiana). Maybe I'm the 1% they all talk about. I am a trust fund baby and I never need to work or worry. But I see too much to be happy that way. Everybody needs to contribute. When they don't we get occupiers. And that is a good thing.
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Pieta Brown has donated a song and all the sale proceeds to Occupy Wall Street. You missed that.
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It could be worse. We could all be in Wisconsin where 53,000 state employees are all losing their health insurance, because Gov. Scott Walker hates government employees. Or Ohio where Gov. John Kasich hates public employees just as much, and wants to take away their bargaining rights when their union contracts are up.
When these people talk about cutting the budget and reducing government spending, that's what they mean. So don't be surprised if your daughter's teacher gets sick and can't come to work because she can't afford a doctor, or a firefighter gets hurt and can't get medical care to put her on the fire truck again, or a policewoman is in a car crash and can't get physical therapy to go back to work.
Every time it happens we have lost someone we spent money to train for their job. That's looking out for taxpayers? - Emily
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YES we need a new WPA and CCC! I had to read up to see what that was and now that I know, I know we need it. Everybody else who doesn't know: WPA is Works Projects Administration, the thing that put lots of people to work doing very fine things during the Depression. CCC is Civilian Conservation Corps and it could do like before and put people to work outdoors helping the environment. - Lisa
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Thanks for a good read and making me wish I wasn't working every minute of my life to keep my family fed. If I could I would be there to Occupy L.A. - Seth
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You go, Larry! Too many of us artists are way too into ourselves and how we can make the money for the recording studio and to cut the record and to go on tour. I am embarrassed when I think about how little I read outside that world. If you had written that about Occupy Wall Street and posted it someplace else, I never would have seen it and it's not likely that I would have read anything else about it. You hooked me because you made it about the part artists have. I should write a song and go there and sing it form them. Except you're supposed to write about what you know, so I should go first, then write it. Okay, you got me.
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I can't believe they keep getting away with it. They are managing, by degrees, to make everything about Obama and his “failures.” Wake up people! Bush and Cheney and their fat cat friends did this to us and now their friends in congress have covered their tracks and stopped anything else from moving. Obama f'd up when he decided not to prosecute the treasonous thieves who profited from his imperialistic wars. If they were behind bars, they would have sent the right message! - PB
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If you've ever heard Joan Baez sing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” you know where this is going. The bosses will hire thugs to “restore order” after they send infiltrators to cause violence and provide provocation for inflicting their violence on the protestors. The fact that the movement hasn't declared a single set of clear demands scares the bosses even more, because whatever manipulations they make with our money might cause something else to be added to the eventual set of demands. The bosses are afraid, and when anyone powerful gets scared, they become very, very dangerous. - Les
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Our dear departed friend Fred Starner would have loved the whole Occupy thing and been there writing songs every day to sing with everyone on his banjo.
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America is supposed to be stronger because of our diversity.
What I'm seeing makes me doubt that.
Obama's enemies seem really racist like “OMG one of THEM is in our WHITE House.”
The anti-immigrant thing is aimed against Mexicans.
TV is filled with commercials for travel sites and financial planning companies that have 10,000 planners. I can't afford to go anywhere and I haven't got any money to invest in anything. These commercials run on news shows that tell us how public opinion polls keep getting stronger in favor of the protestors.
It's starting to look like there are only two kinds of diversity: the haves and the have nots.
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I hope you get around to posting all the comments because you had some very thoughtful ones last time you did an arts / politics story. This one certainly should be bringing plenty more.
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The top 1% are only the top when it comes to income, not ethics or values.
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None of the nobility in the castles of the Middle Ages controlled as much wealth as these thieves. In fact, the thieves back then were the heroes, like Robin Hood, who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. I think I'll buy some green tights.
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Isn't this really about making us all so damn desperate that we will throw our hands up and let them do whatever they want because it might employ us? That means they could abolish all environmental laws and get back to belching poison gas and toxic smoke and poisoning our waterways and our food. There is a lot at stake here.
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The Bible says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.
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There are more music performance shows on tv now than ever and I should be into that. I'm not. I'm too worried about whether any of us who are not rich will have any future, and whether any of us who are artists will need to work for some big corporation to have a career. If so, I don't think I can do that.
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I liked you on the radio and I never knew until recently that you were into all this. I don't know what you would be like on TV but MSNBC still needs a replacement since Keith Olbermann is gone to a cable channel I don't get. - PK
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Isn't there a law that you can't cry “Fire” in a crowded theater? Why hasn't everybody at Fox News been arrested for the alarmist [expletive] and lies they keep telling about Occupy Wall Street?
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This week in The Nation Magazine is a story everyone should read, called How the Austerity Class Rules Washington. Really shows us where we stand, with Occupy and us in the 99% on one side and the corporate owned politicians protecting the new Gilded Age on the other.
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I thought I was probably with the occupy peeps. Now I know I am. Thanks. - Allie
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Later this month is the anniversary of Black Friday, the first time Wall Street crashed, in 1929. Some of them jumped out the windows from high up. Just thinking...
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Thoughtful and thorough piece. Why aren't you writing for the Times? - Gary
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Warren Buffet is a mensch. Is he the only rich guy in this whole country who is? - Steve
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If u r right about who is part of this, the fatcats better be scared, really scared. It's time they got scared. I've been scared long enough, about never getting another real job, about whether I can pay registration and insurance to keep driving my car, about how I can pay rent and utilities every month with winter coming and a high bill for heat. It's about time the rich felt the kind of scared that we live with because of what they've done to us to get richer and richer at our expense.
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I hope the Occupy Wall Street protestors can do to the Democrats what the Tea Party did to the Republicans. The Democrats need to know the people will kick them out if they don't do what we want. The only reason Obama can win again is because the Republicans listen to the 1% and the Democrats MIGHT listen to the 99%. The Tea Party told the R's, if they don't listen, they're gone and now the R's are scared of them. The D's need to figure out fast that if they don't listen to the 99%, they are WAY gone. The ones who will not be gone are the Occupiers. This Occupy thing won't go away as long as people are hurting and the economy is bad. The 1% stole so much and rigged things so much and the economy will stay bad for a long time unless the D's do something BIG and FAST.
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I talked with you once after a concert and you were thinking of moving to another country. I've been thinking about that. Everywhere else has high taxes but people don't go without health care so they are more productive and they seem to be happier. Except Greece, where greed set in and some people took too much and crashed the economy. I've been thinking about that, too, and about this country, and about what makes things go wrong.
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I was so disgusted with Obama that I didn't plan to vote. But the Republicans being protectors of the fat cats pushed me over the edge. Barack, you don't do much and I wish you would yell and get angry about what they've done that hurts the whole country whenever your enemies try to hurt you. But at least you aren't out to screw me over like the Republicans.
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I'm at OCCUPY right now. What u wrote was far more accurate than the treatment we get from big media. Thank you! I'm saying “we” and this is just my third time here! It really is a “we” thing!!
PS - Come down and sing with us!!
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I hate politics. You don't KNOW how much. I always hated it when you went all political with something in the Acoustic Americana Music Guide. But I'm glad you wrote about Occupy Wall Street. I can't ignore this movement. It might be the last chance for us 99%ers to have a future before we're all just underpaid servants to the rich 1%.
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How DARE you!?? Not you. I mean those Wall street crooks. You wrote of artists at the Occupy protest (I wasn't sure if you meant New York or LA) singing songs about “fat cats whose lack of concern rivals the aristocrats' “Let them eat cake” cliche of the French Revolution.”
I want to hear those songs and I know for sure I will enjoy them!
The French got it right twice. First when they overthrew their 1% who were robbing everyone else 200 years ago. Next in 2003 when they told Bush to shove it and wouldn't send their troops to help him invade Iraq. Vive la France! I love France.
Those pro-war/anti France lamebrains who changed French Fries to Freedom Fries are the same ones protecting the fat cats now. Vive la French Fry! Too bad the guillotine has gone out of style, we could slice more than potatoes. Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite! Viva l'occupiers!
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You and Robert Reich are my heroes. You are the ONLY ones who see the way out of this is to bring back the WPA and the CCC. I majored in Economics and American History. This is worse than the Panic of 1906. This is a real Depression, and the only reason anybody can deny it is because a few FDR programs are still with us, like Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children and General Relief. A record number of Americans are now collecting one or more of these. What more do the politicians need to know?
Tomorrow I'm going to check out the Occupy protest. Depending what I find there, they might become my heroes, too.
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I've been unemployed two years. I just read that most employment agencies are forbidden by their client companies to send applicants unless the job seeker already has a job. Is that the kind of “private sector solution” that Romney talks about? What a dope.
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MY job was shipped overseas. It's a Recession when your neighbor loses his job. It's a DEPRESSION when you lose yours.
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Class warfare? Sign me up. I am so totally tired of working for no benefits and watching the rich get richer by making money with OUR money and not contributing ANYTHING.
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I lost my job. I lost my house. I lost my family when my wife divorced me rather than live with an unemployed guy in debt. It wasn't me that started drinking a lot. It was her. Now I worry about her driving with my kids. If I had money I'd hire a lawyer and go for full custody. But how would that work? I'm the guy. I'm supposed to work to support the kids. Right. I'm supposed to be at work all day, not be home with kids to make sure they aren't killed by a drunk driver mother. I can't even support them. I can't support a decent job search. Where's the private sector solution to this? They got their taxes cut to be job creators didn't they? Or where is the government? I'd look overseas for work except for my kids. All that matters to me is my kids.
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You make reference to the French Revolution. That's scary. We all know how that one turned out. If these Occupy yellers and screamers pick a leader, I'm going to call him Robespierre.
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THANK YOU!!! once again u have shown us artists doing what we're supposed to be doing, speaking and singing with the people, and for the people, and confronting the nation's conscience!!!
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I found it odd that you did a feature on Steve Jobs (informative, BTW) just ahead of the revealing one on Occupy Wall Street. Then I saw (I think) that you were making a statement by placing them that way. Steve Jobs was big corporate and all but he was all about making actual things that people would want and could buy. His devices are real. Wall Street has been about confidence schemes and shell games and there is no pea under any of the shells.
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really really well written and explains a lot that we're not getting from tv coverage.
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I'm grabbing my guitar and going down there. I thought they were whack jobs but now I know who they are. They're me.
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Once again you have nailed it. You write long pieces but they're always worth the time it takes to read them. Here's why I wanted to say that. Whenever I read something like this that you write, I can slam the ignorant comments from my Sunday TV football buds. Thanks. I was so tired of one of them who's always talking Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly, the loudmouths one of my other buds calls The Axis of Ego.
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