OccupyWallStreet Protest Grows to 20,000 ¶ VIDEO Updated

Posted by Oui | Oct 6, 2011 | 8 |

Unions, students join Wall St. protesters

NEW YORK (CBS News) – Unions gave a high-profile boost to the long-running protest against Wall Street and economic inequality, with their members joining thousands of protesters in a lower Manhattan march. Across the country, students at several colleges walked out of classes in solidarity.

People gathered at Foley Square, an area encircled by courthouses and named for “Big Tom” Foley, a former blacksmith’s helper who became a prominent state Democratic leader. From there they marched to Zuccotti Park, the protesters’ unofficial headquarters, where they refueled with snacks and hurriedly painted new signs as the strong scent of burning sage wafted through the plaza.

VIDEO: Wall Street protesters march in New York

Documentary: an intimate snapshot of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement

Police confront barrier-storming protesters

Cain: “Jobless and not rich, blame yourself.”

“Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks,” Cain continued. “If you don’t have a job and you are not rich, blame yourself!”

Cain said the banks were in part to blame with the 2008 financial crisis, but he said, “We’re not in 2008 — we’re in 2011!” The demonstrations “come across more as anti-capitalism,” he added.

The Occupy Wall Street protests,originally organized by the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, started on Sept. 17 with a few dozen demonstrators who tried to pitch tents in front of the New York Stock Exchange. Since then, thousands across the country have joined.

The protesters say they demonstrating against corporate greed and the outsize influence Wall Street has in Washington. While they weren’t started by pro-Obama groups, supporters of the president like labor unions are now joining the demonstrations.

Romney describes anti-Wall Street protests as “class warfare”

THE VILLAGES, Fla. – Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney compared the current anti-Wall Street protests to “class warfare.”

“I think it’s dangerous, this class warfare,” Romney said to an audience of about 50 people in response to a question about the protests over such issues as high unemployment, home foreclosures and the 2008 corporate bailouts.

The “Occupied Wall Street Journal”

The Occupy Wall Street protest group recently published the first edition of its newspaper, a four-page broadsheet called The Occupied Wall Street Journal. Didn’t manage to snag your own copy? No problem. Here’s a PDF file where you can take a look at it.

"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

About The Author

Oui

1904 World Fair -- Meet me at St. Louis!

8 Comments

Oui on October 6, 2011 at 11:52 am
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All Obama needs is de backing of Wall Street, distance himself from Main Street and the recovery of the Jewish Vote. Noam Chomsky rightly refers to Democrats as Republican Lite. In European elections, all incumbents are dumped – see Denmark, Spain, Germany and France in 2012. Are the protesters calling Obama’s bluff?
- Corporations and the Right to Vote
- Obama’s Double Game on Wall Street and Arab Spring
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
- Arthur Gilroy on October 6, 2011 at 6:58 pm
  
  Are the protesters calling Obama’s bluff?
  
  Yes, they are.
  
  Will it work?
  
  It depends on your definition or “work” in that context.
  
  Will is un-(s)elect him?
  
  Could be.
  
  Will the next preznit be “better” if Obama is un-(s)elected?
  
  I doubt it.
  
  But…
  
  We shall see.
  
  Soon enough.
  
  Miracles do happen.
  
  Just not very often.
  
  AG
  - Arthur Gilroy on October 6, 2011 at 7:05 pm
    
    Wall Street protesters fed up with both parties
    
    By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press
    
    NEW YORK (AP) — Their chief target is Wall Street, but many of the demonstrators in New York and across the U.S. are also thoroughly disgusted with Washington, blaming politicians of both parties for policies they say protect corporate America at the expense of the middle class.
    
    “At this point I don’t see any difference between George Bush and Obama. The middle class is a lot worse than when Obama was elected,” said John Penley, an unemployed legal worker from Brooklyn.
    
    —snip—
    
    In Zuccotti Park, the center of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, activists expressed deep frustration with the political gridlock in Washington. While some blamed Republicans for blocking reform, others singled out Obama.
    
    “His message is that he’s sticking to the party line, which is ‘we are taking care of the situation.’ But he’s not proposing any solutions,” said Thorin Caristo, an antiques store owner from Plainfield, Conn.
    
    —snip—
    
    The Associated Press, eh?
    
    Hmmmm…
    
    Miracles do happen…
    
    AG
Oui on October 6, 2011 at 2:22 pm
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Fannie Mae Knew Early of Abuses, Report Says

(NY Times) – Fannie Mae, the mortgage finance giant, learned as early as 2003 of extensive foreclosure abuses among the law firms it had hired to remove troubled borrowers from their homes. But the company did little to correct the firms’ practices, according to a report.

Only after news reports in mid-2010 began to describe the dubious practices, like the routine filing of false pleadings in bankruptcy courts, did Fannie Mae’s overseer start to scrutinize the conduct.

The inspector general said that both Fannie Mae and its regulator appear to have ignored other signs of problems in their foreclosure operations. For example, the Federal Housing Finance Agency did not respond to borrower complaints about improper actions taken by law firms in foreclosures received as early as August 2009, even though foreclosure abuse poses operational and financial risks to Fannie Mae.

The report cited a media report from early 2008 detailing foreclosure abuses by law firms doing work for Fannie Mae.

Nevertheless, a few months later and just before its takeover by the government, Fannie Mae began requiring the banks that serviced its loans to use only those law firms that were in its network. By then, 140 law firms in 31 jurisdictions were in the group. Among the largest firms in the network was the David J. Stern firm in Plantation, Fla., which was handling more than 75,000 foreclosure actions a year before Fannie Mae terminated it because of vast problems with its legal work.

Robo-signing foreclosure mess
- Banks’ Foreclosure ‘Robo-Signers’ Were Hair Stylists, Teens, Walmart Workers: Lawsuit
- Foreclosures Bring Wealth, Rebukes For Florida Lawyer David J. Stern
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Oui on October 6, 2011 at 2:58 pm
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Is mortgage finance due to repeat the sins of the past?

Legalprise, tracks and traces foreclosures, analyzing the substance of the cases rather than just the volume of filings. There are more than 1 million cases in our database, with almost 100 million pieces of supporting public records data.

During the last week of 2007, HomeBanc assigned 1,076 mortgages, in Palm Beach County, Fla., that ended up with Bear-Stearns/EMC. HomeBanc was sold about a week later, at the beginning of 2008. About three months later Bear-Stearns collapsed from the weight of its subprime exposure, leading to the government’s $29 billion subsidized sale of the firm, ushering in the era of bank bailouts.

On Oct. 7, 2009, 592 mortgage assignments were recorded in Palm Beach County, Fla. The usual number of assignments, the median, is 75 a day. Most of these assignments involved mortgages from Financial Freedom Senior Funding Corp., a subsidiary of Indymac Bank. Two days later Financial Freedom/Indymac followed up with 579 assignments.

More recently, as the robo-signing controversy has unfolded, servicers have been assigning mortgages at exceptionally high volume to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This leads to the obvious question: Why is the government bailing out banks and servicers from their toxic mortgages notes first, then making sure they actually own the notes after?

If the market hadn’t been broken, the loans in those high-volume assignments would have been sold for a few cents on the dollar. Buyers could — and presumably would — have renegotiated with borrowers on more sustainable terms.

Families could have remained in their homes. Vulture investors would have made a fortune. Public confidence in the marketplace and the government would have remained high. Increased consumer liquidity from the lower payments would have offset economic damage. Public debt would be lower.
- If nobody owns your mortgage note then you are in luck
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Oui on October 7, 2011 at 12:16 pm
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Why Occupy Wall Street is Becoming the Left’s ‘Tea Party’ Movement

Both President Obama and Vice President Biden expressed solidarity with the groups at separate speeches Thursday.

“What is the core of that protest?” Biden asked at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The core is: The bargain has been breached. The core is the American people do not think the system is fair or on the level. That is the core is what you’re seeing with Wall Street.”

At a White House news conference, President Obama said the Wall Street protest “expresses the frustrations that the American people feel.”

“We had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country, all across Main Street,” Obama said. “And yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this problem in the first place.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Calls Wall St. Protests ‘Growing Mobs’
- An Open Letter to Barack Obama: Do Not Define Occupy Wall Street
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Oui on October 7, 2011 at 5:01 pm
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I’ll buy into this analysis!

Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?

More plausible explanations have been floated for why the rate of job creation seems to have fallen. One is that the federal government made too few investments in the 1980s and ’90s in things like basic R&D, so the pipeline of technological innovation on which new jobs depend began to run dry in the 2000s. Another is that a basic shift in competitiveness has taken place–that countries like India, with educated but relatively low-cost workforces, have become more natural homes for jobs-producing sectors like IT.

Monopolization

Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions–in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007–transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.

It is now widely accepted among scholars that small businesses are responsible for most of the net job creation in the United States. It is also widely agreed that small businesses tend to be more inventive, producing more patents per employee, for example, than do larger firms. Less well established is what role concentration plays in suppressing new business formation and the expansion of existing businesses, along with the jobs and innovation that go with such growth.
- Why Regulations Might Actually Create Jobs
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
Arthur Gilroy on October 7, 2011 at 9:51 pm

“news” once again

Google News is my bible in these non-newsing attempts.

Friday, 10/7/11-9:30 PM, EST:

Mentions of the day’s developments on the Google News homepage?

Zero.

Nada.

None.

Hmmmm…

The thing is growing geometrically.

There was a peak in mainstream reportage after the first pepper spray thing and the following mass arrest (700) on the Brooklyn Bridge…an arrest that looks to me to have been “created” by a time-honored police mousetrapping tactic.

Round ’em up and take ’em in.

And then the word went out.

The mainstream media word.

Dump these motherfuckers!!!

And they are trying to do just that.

They are trying to do it to Ron Paul too.

Disappear the real opposition!!!

The unions are coming in???

Real people!!!???

Stop the presses!!!

Feature our bought and sold allies.

Find us another abducted child story!!!

Some public nudity, maybe?

Anything!!!

Please!!!

Disappear the protest.

That’s an order!!!

Bet on it.

Watch.

AG

OccupyWallStreet Protest Grows to 20,000 ¶ VIDEO Updated

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Oui

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