MASSIVE Occupations Happening NOW!

[Failed]

At nearly every store in town, in my state, and across the country there are massive amounts of people occupying. The sidewalks are completely blocked, there are tents, stoves, chairs, tables, I've even seen campers. The police must be incredibly intimidated by this rapid uprising, because they are just driving by and not pepper spraying or beating these occupiers. There hasn't even been one report of an arrest.

Be careful if you go out!

[Caligari]

good one.


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[$5 submissions]

[candyflip]

I will be attending #occupytoysrusrochester in about 45 minutes.

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

ADG

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

SAN FRANCISCO ? Most Americans spent Thanksgiving snug inside homes with families and football.

Others used the holiday to give thanks alongside strangers at outdoor Occupy encampments, serving turkey or donating their time in solidarity with the anti-Wall Street movement that has gripped a nation consumed by economic despair.

In San Francisco, hundreds of campers at Justin Herman Plaza in the heart of the financial district prepared turkey dinners that were handed out by volunteers, church charities and supporters of the movement against social and economic inequality.

Across the bay in Oakland, where protesters and police previously clashed when an Occupy encampment was broken up, occupiers enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast outside City Hall with music and activist speakers, including Clyde Bellecourt, co-founder of the Minnesota-based American Indian Movement.

And in New York, Occupy organizers distributed Thanksgiving meals at Zuccotti Park, where the protest movement began on Sept. 17 before spreading nationwide. Protesters were evicted from the park on Nov. 15.

?So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community,? said Megan Hayes, a chef and organizer with the Occupy Wall Street Kitchen in New York. ?We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that ? community.?

She said some 3,000 meals were distributed.

The movement was triggered by the high rate of unemployment and foreclosures, as well as the growing perception that big banks and corporations are not paying their fair share of taxes, yet are taking in huge bonuses while most Americans have seen their incomes drop.

In New York, restaurants and individual donors had prepared more than 3,000 meals for the traditional Thanksgiving feast, said Haywood Carey, 28, of Chapel Hill, N.C., who was serving meals. He said the celebration was a sign of Americans? shared values.

?The things that divide are much less than the things that bind us together,? Carey said, as the crowd ate to the old spiritual anthem, ?Let it Shine? by a guitarist and a bongo player.

In Las Vegas, Occupy organizer Sebring Frehner said protesters had a potluck Thanksgiving meal at their campsite near the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He said he was happy to skip the traditional meal at home.

?Instead of hunkering down with five or six close individuals in your home, people you probably see all of the time anyway, you are celebrating Thanksgiving with many different families ? kind of like the original Thanksgiving,? Frehner said.

ADG

[Failed]

Originally Posted by AsianDivaGirlsWebDude

ADG

All fine examples of the intelligent, educated, professional people occupying to make this country a better place for all citizens.

[icymelon]

I managed to avoid todays occupation

[Barry-xlovecam]

A woman shopper pepper sprayed her fellow shoppers at a WalMart in Los Angeles ...

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

In what seems to be a burgeoning Black Friday tradition, reports of violence erupted throughout the country.

Authorities in Los Angeles say that 20 people suffered minor injuries at a local Walmart when a woman used pepper spray on them to get to the front of the line when the store opened Thursday evening.

Police in Fayetteville, N.C. are hunting for two suspects after gunfire went off early Friday in the Cross Creek Mall.

At a Walmart in upstate New York, a man was arrested after two women were injured in a fight that broke out.

In Phoenix, television station KSAZ reported that a grandfather was roughed up by police after he put a game in his waistband to free up his hands to lift his grandson above the crowd. He was slammed to the ground by cops, who likely assumed that he was shoplifting.

...and in other news...

?We are the 99 percent? is a great slogan.

It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent?s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent ? the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite?s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn?t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite?s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 ? and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs?

Well, aside from shouts of ?class warfare!? whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are ?job creators? ? that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.

After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.

But, you say, the rich pay taxes! Indeed, they do. And they could ? and should, from the point of view of the 99.9 percent ? be paying substantially more in taxes, not offered even more tax breaks, despite the alleged budget crisis, because of the wonderful things they supposedly do.

Still, don?t some of the very rich get that way by producing innovations that are worth far more to the world than the income they receive? Sure, but if you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it?s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone?s income and his economic contribution.

Executive pay, which has skyrocketed over the past generation, is famously set by boards of directors appointed by the very people whose pay they determine; poorly performing C.E.O.?s still get lavish paychecks, and even failed and fired executives often receive millions as they go out the door.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. As the Bank of England?s director for financial stability recently put it, seemingly high returns before the crisis simply reflected increased risk-taking ? risk that was mostly borne not by the wheeler-dealers themselves but either by naïve investors or by taxpayers, who ended up holding the bag when it all went wrong. And as he waspishly noted, ?If risk-making were a value-adding activity, Russian roulette players would contribute disproportionately to global welfare.?

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about ?job creators? and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

Happy shopping consumers...

ADG

[MishaOLS]

The world needs change, no doubt about it.
The way this system is set now cannot last long as it is designed on repression, manipulation and violence of all kinds. It could increase only to that extend people tolerated it and those days are globally over. Country by country this global injustice will fail and it will be our generation who wil be granted the privilege to build more human, more nonviolent, more peaceful society where the human being will be the central value and all the people will have access to the basic needs that will allow them to use their potential to its fullest!

"Be the change you wish to see in the world"!
M.K.Gandhi