OWS preliminary judicial results...,

NYTimes | The Bank of America lawyer laid down a patented rhetorical move heard in courts across America. Your Honor, this Orange County, N.Y., homeowner — a New York City police officer — didn’t make enough money to qualify for a mortgage modification. He didn’t send us the right documents.

He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and so we should be allowed to foreclose.

Justice Catherine M. Bartlett of New York State Supreme Court cut off the lawyer. You, she said, are telling me lies.

“Bank of America got a bailout, and this is an outrage, how this man has been treated,” she said. “Hard-working, middle-class Americans are trying to make it, trying to refinance with your bank.”

Either bank officials show up in person, the justice said, or I’m going to order them “here in handcuffs.”

Rage has acquired a cleansing power. Patience as a virtue is a hard sell at the burnt end of a four-year economic collapse. Zuccotti Park shakes, rattles and rolls; television yakkers chat about inequality; and the federal judge Jed Rakoff all but heckled the Securities and Exchange Commission last week for going easy on Citigroup misbehavior.

Then there is Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, caught in Month 5 of a face-off with the White House. President Obama dearly wants to seal a deal in which the nation’s largest banks toss over a few bales of cash — $20 billion to help with foreclosure relief — and the state attorneys general agree not to pursue sprawling and explosive legal cases against the banks.

The power of a 'people's library'

aljazeera | The "People's Library" was at the heart of the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, and has played a similar role in other large occupations, such as Los Angeles. It is the necessary complement to the actual physical occupation of urban space represented by the OWS movement. Many people might wonder why it's so important for protesters permanently to camp when the reality, especially as the weather turns bad, is that few people are actually doing anything at night besides sleeping.

But the point of the occupation is precisely to reconquer space that has been taken over, either by the state or by private interests - a kind of "eminent domain" of, by and for the people - and create a permanent presence that can engender and nourish the kind of community and solidarity that have so disappeared in the United States in the last forty years. By permanently occupying Zuccottii and other parks, the OWS movement created a space where people could gather, create libraries, share books and ideas, and even meals. Where they could plan for another world that isn't merely possible anymore, but the only hope for the survival of humanity as a civilisation.

The library, which took weeks to establish, reflected the uniqueness and power of the still young 99 per cent movement. "From the very beginning, the OWS encampments were not just gestures of protest thinly focused on making statements about the ills of society, but were efforts to build community where people were knowledgeable and participated in informed dialogue. The libraries, at least in Zuccotti and in Los Angeles, have been central. Here in LA a graduate student made her entire personal library available to occupiers. These libraries have contemporary theory, classical literature, incisive analyses, and all sorts of books that have been marginalised from the mainstream media and culture. But when the history of this period will be written, these are the books that will be remembered."

So much did the "people's library" idea resonate that the OWS library couldn't keep up with all the donations they've received and encouraging people to take books out. The website lists some of the newest arrivals in the days before the raid: Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia, by Savo Heleta, Nuclear Nebraska, by Susan Cragin, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, From the Heat of the Day, by Roy A.K. Heath, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and innumerable other books that were opening the minds of all who passed through OWS and the many peoples' libraries it has fostered across the country.

Minsky continued, "This open philosophy stands in stark opposition to the world of corporate culture. Trashing the library was symbolic of what the combined forces of Bloomberg and the NYPD feel about learning and the society in which we live." (Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg, who claimed full responsibility for the raid's execution, had to know about the library. Yet his "minutely planned raid" - as the New York Times described it - shovelled thousands of books into garbage trucks to be carted away to the nearest sanitation facility).

It also stands in stark contrast to the earlier iterations of the anti-corporate globalisation and anti-war movements, especially when it came to recognising the role of the Middle East in the larger processes of globalisation that were at the heart of the struggles of both movements.

New forms of culture jamming
In fact, I wrote the book I donated to the People's Library, Why They Don't Hate Us, specifically in response the abject failure of the emerging anti-corporate globalisation movement of the late 1990s, and then the anti-war movement that coalesced after September 11, to engage with the Middle East and larger Muslim world's role in the development of globalisation, or with the many scholars of the region who had the expertise and experience to help develop a more effective counter-discourse to both Clintonian neoliberalism and Bush's full metal jacket neoconservatism.

Ironically, Adbusters magazine and the culture jamming movement it helped spawn were at the centre of both the pre-9/11 alter-globalisation movement and the OWS movement today. The problem with the first iteration of culture jamming imagined by the movement was that it was mostly negative, focusing on critiquing or subverting political or advertising messages by "jamming" symbols into them that expose the usually ugly realities beneath the sexy, cool or comfortable veneers (painting a skull and cross bones over the face of a Marlboro Man billboard is a seminal example of this practice).

missing DA tied to sandusky case?

Video - Mystery of vanished Center County District Attorney Ray Gricar

FoxPhilly | The district attorney who didn't prosecute former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky for sex crimes in 1998 went missing in 2005, a fact that is now getting a lot of attention.

Slideshows: Students Destroy Van | Student Protest | Rally At JoePa's Home | Coach Mobbed By Reporters | Suspects Surrender

Ray Gricar was the long-time district attorney of Centre County, the home of Penn State's main campus. He was months from retirement when he simply vanished on his way home to Bellefonte, Pa.

The mystery surrounding Gricar's disappearance in 2005 was the subject of several national TV shows and an effort involving the FBI and state investigators.

The attorney's car was found in Lewisburg, Pa., about 60 miles east of Bellefonte, about 12 hours after he called home. Several months later, his laptop computer and a destroyed hard drive were found.

But no one found Gricar's body.

Bruce Castor knew Gricar well. Castor is currently a Montgomery County Pa. commissioner and a former county district attorney who worked with Gricar.

"I never saw any evidence from Ray that he was showing any favoritism towards Penn State or the hometown or anything like that. He was a by the book guy," Castor said.

Fox 29 has confirmed the FBI has an open file on Gricar but it’s unknown if the case is still active.

But a missing person's poster for Gricar is still on the FBI Web site, even though Gricar was legally declared dead in July 2011.

So what happened to Gricar?

"I am now leaning towards the conclusion that it was foul play by someone who would have a motive to specifically target him," Castor says.

"If somebody really wants to get a prosecutor , they can. Especially in the country like that," Castor added.

Gricar appears in the grand jury presentment in the Jerry Sandusky sex-crimes case as the DA who didn't prosecute Sandusky after a six-week investigation in 1998 in Center County.

Gricar got the case after a boy's mother complained to police after her son showered with Sandusky.

According to the grand jury presentment, Penn State University police were also involved in the 1998 Sandusky case.

Gricar's office was the only local or state agency contacted about an alleged victim of Sandusky, a long-time Paterno assistant who retired in 1999 but continued to run a charity to help at-risk children.

So why didn't Gricar file charges against Sandusky?

thinking outside the genome...,

The Scientist | Not so long ago, the mention of any word with the two syllables “-ō-mics” tacked on the end was usually followed immediately with some response akin to, “Huh?” Today, we’ve gotten to the point where almost no biological phenomenon can escape “omics-ization,” and within the next 25 years, omics will be the biggest, if not the only, game in town. Why? Because we are about to undergo what experts call a phase shift, where a technology drives a fundamental change not just in what is known, but, more importantly, in how we think of ourselves. Put another way: omics is destined to change our patterns of living in ways that only technological revolutions can deliver.

Other technologies have already proven to have similarly deep effects on human culture. Consider the impact of the Internet on commerce, or the influence of GPS systems on travel and navigation. The reach of these technologies extended well beyond the information they generated. They redefined society.

In the last half century, the technology in genomics has provided us with a set of approaches initially as underappreciated as computers were in the early 1970s. “Exotic,” “finicky,” and “geeky” were terms used for mainframe computers that couldn’t even talk with each other. The same transformative technological advances that have turned computers into must-have personal accessories are inevitable for the nascent field of omics. Here are four ways in which omics will reshape the human experience.

can education research be divorced from politics and economics?

AERA-L | ABSTRACT: In response to my post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote (paraphrasing):

"I keep misreading the title 'PhysLrnR' of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is there but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs.""

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement on the PhysLrnR archive page , one of the issues upon which PhysLrnR is intended to focus is "Political Policy and Social Impacts on Physics Education Research and the Teaching of Physics."

If Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system IT CANNOT DIVORCE ITSELF FROM POLITICS AND ECONOMICS - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" [Ravitch (2010, 2011)].
*********************************************

In response to my PhysLrnR post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote:

"I keep misreading the title of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is here but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs."

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement at the top of the CLOSED!:-( PhysLrnR archive page .
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Robertson evidently rejects issue "e" above: POLITICAL POLICY AND SOCIAL IMPACTS ON PER AND THE TEACHING OF PHYSICS" as a legitimate issue of concern for PhysLrnR and (presumably) Physics Education Research. I wonder if he would care to explain his rejection?

In "G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education" [Hake (2011a)], I wrote: "I agree that my post 'G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education' is "somewhat political. But IMHO if Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system it cannot divorce itself from politics and cannot stick only to what Marx (2011) regards as 'teaching and learning' - both teaching and learning are heavily influenced by politics. . . . .[[and economics, see e.g., 'Re: Evaluations Ignore Education Factors,' (Hake, 2011b)]]. . . . . - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education"[Ravitch (2010, 2011)]."

In my opinion, PER's need to take a "systems approach" to physics education, consistent with the eloquent phrasing of Howard & Elisabeth Odum (1981), pointed to by PhysLrnR Bud Nye (2011):

"'Basic scientists,' who define *basic* as 'looking to the parts,' need to learn that putting parts together to understand whole systems is equally basic. The scientist who says that synthesis is 'applied,' as if it were an inferior activity, must ask which is intellectually more difficult and ultimately more basic, reductionism or synthesism. Surely both are necessary, but we have had too little synthesis, and our science curricula in schools have failed to fulfill their promise because of this. The scientist who uses his discipline to learn more and more about less and less must connect his specialty to the real world as an entirety. Anyone who sets boundaries to his field of interest is limiting his capacity to grow. An old discipline has already yielded what it can; now knowledge must be arranged in different ways and given different names...." Howard T. & Elisabeth C. Odum (1981)

Howard Odum is a "systems thinker" as evidenced in e.g., "Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology" [Odum (1994)] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum. For more on "systems thinking" see "Over Two-Hundred Annotated References on Systems Thinking" [Hake (2009)] and "General Systems Theory" [Urner (2011)].

the dark side of science?

The Scientist | Within the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, teams of biologists and engineers are making great strides in understanding the cell and its functioning. (See The Scientist’s recent feature on the topic.) However, there is more that should be discussed than the triumphs. There are also the dark purposes to which science (and synthetic biology in particular) can be put. Worries range from the development of pathogenic bioweapons to the potential contamination of native gene pools in our environment. The question is, are scientists responsible for the potentially negative impacts of their work?

Some have argued that the answer to this question is no—that it is not researchers’ responsibility how science gets used in society. But that is sophistry. Scientists are responsible for both the impacts they intend and some of the impacts they do not intend, if they are readily foreseeable in specific detail. These are the standards to which we are all held as moral agents. If I were to negligently throw a used match into a dry field (merely because I wanted to dispose of it), for example, I would be responsible for the resulting wild fire. In contrast, Einstein was not responsible for the use of his E=mc² equation to build an atomic bomb and its use in wartime, though the scientists at Los Alamos were.

Of course, impacts (whether harmful or beneficial) are not solely scientists’ responsibility—others involved will also bear responsibility for their actions. If scientific knowledge is used in a biological attack, the terrorists are first and foremost responsible for their heinous act. But the researchers who generated the knowledge may be also partly responsible. Consider, for example, the knowledge of how to build a virus like smallpox from the ground up or how to create other pathogenic, tailored organisms—targeted either to humans or the foods on which we depend. If it is readily foreseeable that such knowledge could be used for nefarious purposes, the scientists who introduce such new technological capacities are partially responsible for an attack that could ultimately cause millions of deaths.

Scientists can no longer hope naively that people will only use science for the public good. The world will always have the mentally unbalanced, the delusional, the vicious, and the sociopathic members of society, some of whom will also be intelligent enough to use the results of science. Recognizing this should be part of the everyday backdrop of science, the assessment of its potential, and the desirability of the pursuit of a particular project.

pennsylvanian pederasty and procurement...,

Video - The People Under the Stairs trailer

Eurweb | The case was broken by one of Sandusky’s victims, cited as “Victim Number 1” who reported Sandusky to authorities.

Reports are also leaking out that the eight victims may have been poor inner city black boys.

Edward Wyckoff Williams, a columnist for the Grio, points out that many sex abuse cases in recent years have involved high profile leaders and victims of sexual abuse, who have been young black males.

Within the grand jury’s findings was an incident in 2002, when assistant coach Mike McQueary, the team’s wide receiver coach, witnessed Sandusky allegedly raping a boy, estimated to be about 10 years old, in the shower of Penn State’s locker room.

According to the Washington Post, McQueary told Paterno—and Paterno told athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president for finance Gary Schultz, who, in turn, reported it to university president Graham Spanier. None took allegations to police.

The Pennsylvania Statewide Investigating Grand Jury stated that Sandusky selected the eight boys from the populations served by the Second Mile Foundation.

Poor children became easy prey for Sandusky, who would start with mentoring, then move on to hosting the boys for overnights in the bedroom at his home and then initiate copulation, anal sex, according to the grand jury report.

The report indicates that Sandusky may have raped and molested at least 8 young boys between the ages of 10 and 15 from 1994-2009. He is free on $100,000 bail and is awaiting his first hearing on Dec. 7. He has been charged with 40 counts of abuse, but maintains his innocence, according to his attorney.

If convicted, he would face a maximum punishment of life in prison.

Unbelievably, Sandusky, 67, was twice investigated on charges of sexual assault. Neither investigations resulted in either organization terminating Sandusky’s employment or access to facilities.

Investigators are also looking into rumors that Sandusky may have been procuring at-risk youth for foundation donors. The foundation raises millions of dollars a year from corporate and individual donors in Pennsylvania.

profound and pervasive perpetration in pennsylvania...,

Loop21 | As news unravels around the grand jury report revealing charges against former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for raping and sexually molesting underage boys, some former black Penn State students are now painfully reliving a scandal that occurred at their university ten years ago. In 2000, the year a janitor witnessed a boy younger than 13 (“Victim 8” in a grand jury report) “pinned against a wall” while Sandusky performed oral sex on him, black students and football players on Penn State’s campus began receiving hate mail.

The hate mail sent to black students had nothing to do with Sandusky’s proclivities, but the two incidences shared something in common: both were ultimately covered up by the university, even as both chain of events grew worse. Sandusky went on to molest and possibly rape more boys, according to a grand jury report (Sandusky denies foul play), and hate mail against black students became death threats.

Ultimately, a black man’s dead body was found by police near Penn State as one of the death threats said it would. And some black students had to attend their graduation the following May with bulletproof vests on in fear of their life.

But few know about the death threats because Penn State and Joe Paterno were not willing to allow bad publicity to ruin the university’s image, say some of the black students at the center of the tragic events.

LaKeisha Wolf was president of Penn State’s Black Caucus ten years ago, and she received the lion’s share of life-threatening letters. Today, she watches the news about Sandusky’s rape charges, the firing of Joe Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier, and the student riots that ensued, and it takes her right back to her days dealing with the university.

In fact, Wolf and other concerned black students met with Paterno back in 2001 because of information circulating that black football players, like then-quarterback Rashard Casey, had been receiving death threats. Wolf recalls Paterno as almost emotionless.

coordinated crackdown with presidential plausible deniability?

firedoglake | Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to imply clearly that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

OWS has learned why we call'em "one-time"...,

Video - riot police pull hair, punch, and use truncheons on Berkley students.

zunguzungu | At about 11:30 a.m. yesterday, a police officer told me and about eight other students that, and I quote, “the grass is closed.” We were going to sit under a tree and discuss things, and two police officers were watching us vigilantly to make sure we didn’t suddenly do something violent like try to put up tents. As we moved towards the tree, the first police officer stepped up and informed us that we could not walk from the broad concrete steps of Sproul Hall, where about a hundred people were sitting and talking, and sit on the grassy area just to the north of it. “The grass is closed,” she said.

If you meditate on these words until they become a mantra, you will learn some profound things about how police authority works. What could it possibly mean to declare that “the grass is closed”? Who could have the authority to say so? I had always considered that stretch of grass to be public; I’ve often been among the hundreds of students who eat their lunch there, every day, and 11:30 a.m. is a time of day when it is common to eat lunch. I have had conversations with other students sitting on that very grass, many times. Why was it that I could not do so now? Why had this stretch of grass suddenly become un-public and closed off? No signs said so, and no police tape marked it off. At the far end of that grassy area, in fact, several people were actually sitting on the grass. But those people were sitting there eating lunch. Because we were part of the group which was sitting on the steps of Sproul Hall, clearly, the grass had been declared off limits to us.

To make things more interesting, it immediately transpired that the other police officer had, in fact, already given them permission to sit on the grass. And in an instant, the arbitrariness of the rule was made evident and undeniable. Two different students indignantly asserted that that police officer right there told us we could sit here. When the second officer said nothing to contradict them, when he failed to back her up on the closed-ness of the grass, she wordlessly stepped back, keeping her face expressionless behind her sunglasses. She didn’t apologize or take back what she said. She simply stopped trying to enforce a rule after its utter and complete arbitrariness had been made clear. To put this as simply as possible, she elected not to use force in defense of a rule which had just been shown to have no basis other than the momentary decision of a police officer accustomed to telling people where they can and cannot stand.

As part of my ongoing private project to be less scared of police — because I am scared of police — I said to her, in as level and direct a tone as I could manage, “This is why we don’t trust you.” And she again elected to say nothing. She didn’t have to. The truth of power, in this situation, is that the policy is what the police will use their force to enforce. They don’t have to have a legitimate reason, nor are they embarrassed when it is shown that the “grass is closed” only because someone with authority said so. And the grass only became open because someone with more authority said so. Such people are not to be trusted.

This was a very modest lesson in how power works. On Wednesday, several thousand UC Berkeley students learned a much bigger lesson, but in many ways it was exactly the same lesson: the rule is what the people with the force to enforce it say it is. And it becomes the rule when you either obey it, or when they use their force to make you obey it. Fist tap John.

occupy where: what's in it for black and brown people?

Video - Main St. report Occupy the Hood/Detroit.

BAR | Those that initiated the early occupations in most cities were white. They have re-established the long-lost right of the poor to comngregate in public and express their discontent. If this is not to be a right which only whites enjoy, it's time for us to step up too. There will be race and class tensions, with the increased participation of black and brown people in the occupation movement. But these are growing pains, and necessary. It's time, as Glen Ford has said, to claim our place in the 99% and spell out what that looks like.

Occupation Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?

The answer is plenty, and we need to hurry up and claim it.

The tactic of “occupation” has reclaimed is the right of poor and jobless, even homeless, people to congregate, to assemble and to be discontented in public. That's no small thing, and it's surely not a thing that could have been accomplished if the first occupiers had been young, jobless and black or brown instead of white.

If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.

What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason.

Make no mistake about it, reclaiming the right of the poor, jobless and discontented to peaceably assemble, while politically paralyzing mayors and police forces used to cracking heads and dispersing malcontents is a project only white protesters could have accomplished without police violence and massive arrests. Fist tap Nomad.

you can't evict an idea

aljazeera | Bloomberg News was standing by as its founder Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered his Cossacks in riot gear to “cleanse” Zuccotti Park in the middle of the morning to replace one group of occupiers with another.

No doubt emboldened by earlier evictions in Oakland and Portland, and with a sound truck emitting noise to disorient protestors and add to the chaos, Bloomberg's office was saying, “protesters can return after the park is cleared”.

Until this point, the mayor had gone back and forth with threats to clear the park in the name of preserving public safety, of course, and upholding the wishes of the huge Brookfield Realty group, which owns the “public” park and on whose board Bloomberg's girlfriend sits.

For weeks, the Murdoch press had been baiting Bloomberg as weak and a wuss for not getting tough as they focused on any act of depravity they could find or invent. But now, the park is gone - for now - but the Movement says it will go on.

As the cops and the Sanitation Department dismantled tents and occupied the area, keeping pedestrians out, the Occupy Wall Street media team was issuing a statement that began, ”You can't evict an idea whose time has come”.

The statement continued: “This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The 'us' in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

"Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces - our spaces - and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people - all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99 per cent movement.”

The mayor acted after authorities in Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon evicted occupation activists from camps there. In both cities, activists have seized new parks and areas to use as launching pads for more protests.

a tactical note to OWS from culture jammers HQ...,

AdBusters | Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world's imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn't just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Here are a couple of emerging ideas:

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we've got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare "victory" and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we've come, the comrades we've made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement's three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we've never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Whatever we do, let's keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let's never stop living without dead time.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

occupy foreclosures: the next logical step after park camping ends...,

NewDeal 2.0 | As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the activism model of Project: No One Leaves. It exists in many places, especially in Massachusetts — check out this Springfield version of it — and grows out of activism pioneered by City Life Vida Urbana. It is similar to activism done by the group New Bottom Line and other foreclosure fighters. Here is PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the movement.

The major goal of Project: No One Leaves is to mobilize as many resources as possible to protect those going through foreclosure and keep them in their homes as long as possible in order to give them maximum bargaining power against the banks. For those focused on “weapons of the weak,” this moment — with banks and creditors using state power to conduct massive amounts of foreclosures, thus impoverishing poor neighborhoods through a financialized rationality — is a crucial opportunity for resistance.

nypd begins clearing zuccotti park...,

Video - NYPD midnight raid on Zuccotti park.

NYTimes | Hundreds of New York City police officers began clearing Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters early Tuesday, telling the people there that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” before the morning and that any demonstrator who did not leave would be arrested.

The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!” as officers began moving in and tearing down tents. The protesters rallied around an area known as “the kitchen” near the middle of the park and began building barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.

The officers, who had gathered between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and then rode in vans along Broadway, moved into the one-square-block park shortly after 1 a.m.

As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!” At least a couple of arrests were reported just outside the park, but details were not immediately available.

The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.”

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of the beginning of the encampment, which has spurred similar demonstrations across the country.

the eviction of occupy oakland emboldened mayor bloomberg..,

Video - Police cleared out the Occupiers from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.

koch-blocked; occupy the koch bros...,

Video - Creative agitation and guerilla drive-in against a Koch 1% gala.

crypto-anarchism: occupy movement makes sense to ron paul...,

Video - Ron Paul on OWS at the last GOP debate

RT | While Republican attitudes towards Occupy Wall Street protesters have been largely negative, GOP hopeful Ron Paul aligned himself with those participating in the movement during last night’s televised presidential debate.

­In support of the agenda of the thousands of Americans participating in the Occupy movement, Texas Congressman Ron Paul said Wednesday night, “if you’re going after crony capitalism, I’m all for it.”

According to Paul, crony capitalists are those “that benefit from contract from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.”

“But crony capitalism isn’t when someone makes money and they produce a product,” added the candidate. “That is very important. We need to distinguish the two. And unfortunately I think some people mix that.”

why hustler culture is doomed to fail...,

Video - Morris Berman, Part 1. Why America Failed


Video - Morris Berman, Part 2. Why America Failed

A Redux Request: Hakim Bey on Money

Black Sun Gazette | Peter’s talk was on money, specifically, a long historical view of money viewed through magickal / hieroglyphic lens. Like a lot of people I know and a lot of people I hear, he claims that he saw the whole economic collapse coming about a year ago. This is either an example of 20/20 hindsight on a massive scale or the collapse was that obvious to see coming over the horizen. I tend to believe the latter. Mostly because of something that Mr. Wilson himself said. “An important key to understand reality is economics.” People that tend to understand reality tend to understand economics- at least in the larger strokes. Still, I think it will forever confuse me why people like Mr. Wilson don’t do something with this knowledge. He claims that if he had a million dollars last year he could have twelve millions today. It’s not so much that I doubt the veracity of this claim so much as I lament it staying in the stage of the unverifiable. Money may not be wealth, but it can get you some very useful commodities like cigarettes, guns, food, land, housing, etc.

Mr. Wilson points out that “the Stone Age knows starvation but it does not know poverty.” In other words, there might be a famine, your village might get raided, there might be crop blight, but the village will either thrive together or starve together. The Stone Age knew starvation, but it did not know a parasitic ruling class gorging itself while masses outside starved to death. Money, Mr. Wilson says, begins as Sumerian clay tokens shaped into the tradable commodities (oxen, barrels of wheat, bars of silver, etc.). Records of debt (at usurious interest rates up to 33.3% annually) were kept by (who else?) the scribes and priests of the temples who at that time monopolized the art of writing. This kept not only the peasantry and laboring classes in debt peonage, it also kept the merchant class in thrall to the temple. Peter has considered the anthropological facts about money alongside the more mytho-poetic evidence existing from the time, such as the Babylonian creation myth of the war between Tiamat and Marduk, and the legends of Staghorn and Gilgamesh.

Clay tablets existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Specie, that is coinage, did not. This is an invention of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands. Here we see money gaining a more explicit religious and magickal quality. Gold was plentiful in this area, and is also a malleable metal easy to imprint with both words and images. When temple sacrifices of the local bull cults became so popular that not everyone could get a piece of bull, an ingenius method was reached to give every pilgrim a symbol of involvement in the ritual- the temple token. Rather than a piece of bull, pilgrims were given a small piece of gold with a bull impressed on one face. The two sided coin comes later with an image on one side and a caption on the other. Money becomes qualitatively more magickal with this step, uniting the image and the word into a talismatic object which has a value unrelated to its real value as commodity. It is no longer simply a magickal document recording debt and / or wealth. It is a magickal object whose value comes from belief. As Peter points out: All money is fiat money. Gold has no inherent value. It’s shiny, and makes cool jewelry and all that, but it is not what the anarcho-capitalist types will have you believe, a universal medium of exchange. Sure, it holds value over millenia (particlarly with regard to silver), but there is not reason to use gold more than say, diamonds or uranium or coal or any other commodity in limited supply. Quoth Mr. Wilson: “Money is proof that magick works, it is perhaps the only proof.”

corporations will eat your soul...,

Video - The Corporation documentary trailer

Yurica Report | Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI's most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.

"I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Given that speech, and Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch]. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation's profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you. I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction." (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we're at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it's just its nature.

the occupy movement busies itself in germany..,

Video - Occupy Reichstag thousands march in Germany.

why one-time needs to join OWS, not be swinging on them...,

Market Ticker | I told you so!

U.S. Bancorp was sued by an Oklahoma police pension fund over allegations investors in mortgage bonds were hurt by the bank failing to ensure that securities were backed by loans.

U.S. Bancorp knew mortgage loans underlying the bonds weren’t properly transferred to trusts and caused investors to suffer millions of dollars in losses, Oklahoma Police Pension and Retirement System said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan.

The argument that US Bancorp will probably raise is that their duties were "merely ministerial" and that they're not responsible even if they knew or should have known that the securities were defective.

There has been limited success with this argument too.

The point I've been raising for more than four years stands: Public-service employee pensions are not going to be paid.  Not only were these people sold unicorn-style rates of return which cannot possibly be sustained the losses that were generated by all the scams and frauds are real and will be recognized -- and when they are, you're going to get a truly ugly surprise.

The police and firefighters should be marching with the Occupy folks, not opposing them.

cali police, prison guards, and firefighters in for a reality correction...,

VanityFair | It’s late afternoon when I meet Mayor Chuck Reed in his office at the top of the city-hall tower. The crowd below has just begun to chant. The public employees, as usual, are protesting him. Reed is so used to it that he hardly notices. He’s a former air-force officer and Vietnam-era veteran with an intellectual bent and the clipped manner of a midwestern farmer. He has a master’s degree from Princeton, a law degree from Stanford, and a lifelong interest in public policy. Still, he presents less as the mayor of a big city in California than as a hard-bitten, upstanding sheriff of a small town who doesn’t want any trouble. Elected to the city council in 2000, he became mayor six years later; in 2010 he was re-elected with 77 percent of the vote. He’s a Democrat, but at this point it doesn’t much matter which party he belongs to, or what his ideological leanings are, or for that matter how popular he is with the people of San Jose. He’s got a problem so big that it overwhelms ordinary politics: the city owes so much more money to its employees than it can afford to pay that it could cut its debts in half and still wind up broke. “I did a calculation of cost per public employee,” he says as we settle in. “We’re not as bad as Greece, I don’t think.”

The problem, he explains, pre-dates the most recent financial crisis. “Hell, I was here. I know how it started. It started in the 1990s with the Internet boom. We live near rich people, so we thought we were rich.” San Jose’s budget, like the budget of any city, turns on the pay of public-safety workers: the police and firefighters now eat 75 percent of all discretionary spending. The Internet boom created both great expectations for public employees and tax revenues to meet them. In its negotiations with unions the city was required to submit to binding arbitration, which works for police officers and firefighters just as it does for Major League Baseball players. Each side of any pay dispute makes its best offer, and a putatively neutral judge picks one of them. There is no meeting in the middle: the judge simply rules for one side or the other. Each side thus has an incentive to be reasonable, for the less reasonable they are, the less likely it is that the judge will favor their proposal. The problem with binding arbitration for police officers and firefighters, says Reed, is that the judges are not neutral. “They tend to be labor lawyers who favor the unions,” he says, “and so the city does anything it can to avoid the process.” And what politician wants to spat publicly with police officers and firefighters?

Over the past dec­ade the city of San Jose had repeatedly caved to the demands of its public-safety unions. In practice this meant that when the police or fire department of any neighboring city struck a better deal for itself, it became a fresh argument for improving the pay of San Jose police and fire. The effect was to make the sweetest deal cut by public-safety workers with any city in Northern California the starting point for the next round of negotiations for every other city. The departments also used each other to score debating points. For instance, back in 2002, the San Jose police union cut a three-year deal that raised police officers’ pay by 18 percent over the contract. Soon afterward, the San Jose firefighters cut a better deal for themselves, including a pay raise of more than 23 percent. The police felt robbed and complained mightily until the city council crafted a deal that handed them 5 percent more premium pay in exchange for training to fight terrorists. “We got famous for our anti-terrorist-training pay,” explains one city official. Eventually the anti-terrorist-training premium pay stopped; the police just kept the extra pay, with benefits. “Our police and firefighters will earn more in retirement than they did when they were working,” says Reed. “There used to be an argument that you have to give us money or we can’t afford to live in the city. Now the more you pay them the less likely they are to live in the city, because they can afford to leave. It’s staggering. When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There’s a corruption here. It’s not just a financial corruption. It’s a corruption of the attitude of public service.”

When he was elected to the city council, Reed says, “I hadn’t even thought about pensions. I can’t say I said, ‘Here is my plan.’ I never thought about this stuff. It never came up.” It wasn’t until San Diego flirted with bankruptcy, in 2002, that he wondered about San Jose’s finances. He began to investigate the matter. “That’s when I realized there were big problems,” he says. “That’s when I started paying attention. That’s when I started asking questions: Could it happen here? It’s like the housing bubble and the Internet bubble. There were people around who were writing about it. It’s not that there aren’t people telling us that this is crazy. It’s that you refuse to believe that you are crazy.”

He hands me a chart. It shows that the city’s pension costs when he first became interested in the subject were projected to run $73 million a year. This year they would be $245 million: pension and health-care costs of retired workers now are more than half the budget. In three years’ time pension costs alone would come to $400 million, though “if you were to adjust for real life expectancy it is more like $650 million.” Legally obliged to meet these costs, the city can respond only by cutting elsewhere. As a result, San Jose, once run by 7,450 city workers, was now being run by 5,400 city workers. The city was back to staffing levels of 1988, when it had a quarter of a million fewer residents. The remaining workers had taken a 10 percent pay cut; yet even that was not enough to offset the increase in the city’s pension liability. The city had closed its libraries three days a week. It had cut back servicing its parks. It had refrained from opening a brand-new community center, built before the housing bust, because it couldn’t pay to staff the place. For the first time in history it had laid off police officers and firefighters.

By 2014, Reed had calculated, a city of a million people, the 10th-largest city in the United States, would be serviced by 1,600 public workers. “There is no way to run a city with that level of staffing,” he said. “You start to ask: What is a city? Why do we bother to live together? But that’s just the start.” The problem was going to grow worse until, as he put it, “you get to one.” A single employee to service the entire city, presumably with a focus on paying pensions. “I don’t know how far out you have to go until you get to one,” said Reed, “but it isn’t all that far.” At that point, if not before, the city would be nothing more than a vehicle to pay the retirement costs of its former workers. The only clear solution was if former city workers up and died, soon. But former city workers were, blessedly, living longer than ever.

This wasn’t a hypothetical scary situation, said Reed. “It’s a mathematical inevitability.” In spirit it reminded me of Bernard Madoff’s investment business. Anyone who looked at Madoff’s returns and understood them could see he was running a Ponzi scheme; only one person who had understood them both­ered to blow the whistle, and no one listened to him. (See No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, by Harry Markopolos.)

In his negotiations with the unions, the mayor has gotten nowhere. “I understand the police and firefighters,” he says. “They think, We’re the most important, and everyone else goes [gets fired] first.” The police union recently suggested to the mayor that he close the libraries for the other four days. “We looked into that,” Reed says. “If you close the libraries an extra day you pay for 20 or 30 cops.” Adding 20 more police officers for a year wouldn’t solve anything. The cops who were spared this year would be axed next, in response to the soaring costs of the pensions of city workers who already had retired. On the other side of the inequality is the taxpayer of San Jose, who has no interest in paying more than he already does. “It’s not that we’re insolvent and can’t pay our bills,” says Reed. “It’s about willingness.”

I ask him what the chances are that, in this pinch, he could raise taxes. He holds up a thumb and index finger: zero. He’s recently coined a phrase, he says: “service-level insolvency.” Service-level insolvency means that the expensive community center that has been built and named cannot be opened. It means closing libraries three days a week. It isn’t financial bankruptcy; it’s cultural bankruptcy.

“How on earth did this happen?” I ask him.

“The only way I can explain it,” he says, “is that they got the money because it was there.” But he has another way to explain it, and in a moment he offers it up.

“I think we’ve suffered from a series of mass delusions,” he says.

how do you do I, see you've met my, culture of competency....,

This is not critisism. I am picking up to stimulate myself whilst I look at the screen. I think one needs to level the playing field, if this phrase is too ominous, I'll use another sentence: A level playing field, say a baseball field has laws that I would imagine 99% of the people understand. Unfortunately, getting anywhere near law that the whole playing field, and stadium an analogous statement to represent the world itself understand is shrouded in 'World domination is bad, they try to control us, they are aliens, they are reptiles, they set up 9/11, etc etc etc etc.'

Whilst the East are more likely to believe in Mohammed than the West according to my television, and the West are more likely to believe in Jesus according to my television, for one thing I cannot see the moral ground being comprensible nor integrable, so we are not in a good position to set the Utopia into action as doing so now would still attract anarchy from a distant land who doesn't understand the workings.

For one, I am sure of the Chinese culture so much that they wouldn't disrespect the elderly as we would say that our governments are gentocracy. I am quite certain younger people have as many ridiculous ideas as older people, I would just further the point and note that different social classes will have varying ideas on such a thing as justice, some will say throw the transgressors all in a room, lock them up and throw away the key, cushy jails, four wall jails.

To my more debatable points, I do think that global trade isn't all that great, it sounds great to me sometimes, that I can ship a good 6000 miles away, but I feel sometimes the good would be better suited to serving a local need, rather than across seas and through borders.

Two things I'd like to go on about next to finalise the outro are: Honchos and economic bafflement.

I need honchos in the police and in the army protecting the country. I have to wonder the need of a PM if we already have Minister of Education, foreign policy and so on leading the front in their field. Just a question... Is the PM just a face? What if there were good ministers but a PM sabotaging good work? OK I am not saying the world is massively wrong to me personally, but if we, you, me never face up to the issues that we have, we will never solve them. All I can really close with, is I have some issues about poverty in the UK, the seemingly low interest in self sufficient trade and entrepreneurial spirit. I cannot rely on the government to do everything, I must make wave of change myself too.

it paints the crosshairs on itself...,

NYTimes | WHEN the snowstorm hit a week ago Saturday, Evan Sidel was driving home from the supermarket, having stocked up on soup ingredients, thinking she and her two daughters would have a cozy evening in. But while she was unpacking the groceries, the power went out with an audible bang, said Ms. Sidel, who lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse in Wilton, Conn.

“You could literally hear the transformer exploding,” she said.

Then things went south fast, escalating perilously like the plot of an action movie, or “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in previews. As Ms. Sidel pulled an old land-line telephone out of the closet, one birch tree crashed into the side of her house and another into her front door.

“I called a friend who said, ‘My generator has just kicked in, come on over.’ I got out through the garage, drove over the lawn to the street, and I stayed at my friend’s house until Wednesday,” she recounted. “My girls generator-hopped all over town all week, thrilled to have a different sleepover every night. But another friend of mine has four kids, and she was not so lucky. You can’t generator-hop with a family that size. I have nothing but gratitude for all my generator hosts.”

In another part of town, Christopher Peacock, the high-end kitchen man, was charging a few lights and the refrigerator, along with his family’s computers and cellphones, on a small gasoline-powered manual generator he set out in his driveway, snaking a web of extension cords from the living room.

But Mr. Peacock has well water, and with not enough power for the pump, his family grew not just colder but grubbier as the week progressed. On Wednesday, he; his wife, Jayne; and their 11-year-old son fled to Cape Cod, where they have a summer house.

“School is canceled, so why not?” he said. “It’s like a war zone here. The thing is, I am waiting for, and am in line for, a permanent generator installation. I’ve got one essentially on order, but they’re all back-ordered since Irene. I am definitely feeling some generator envy.”

Mr. Peacock was not alone in this feeling. The back story to the recent biblical weather was the Great Generator Divide. With hundreds of thousands of households without power last week — nearly 800,000 in Connecticut alone — who had a generator (and how big it was) was the second most urgent topic in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Generator envy ran wide and deep as the staccato growl and smoky breath of portable generators defined the haves and the have-nots in many neighborhoods.

In Greenwich, Conn., some chilly residents shivered while their neighbors’ mega-units (the whole-house kind that kick on automatically and emit a sound hardly louder than a cat’s purr) powered not just furnaces, washers and dryers, garage doors and electric gates, “but the mood lighting on their trees,” Leslie McElwreath, a broker at Sotheby’s International Realty there, said wonderingly, impressed by her neighbor’s generator prowess (and his spotlighted trees).

Indeed, in a town like Greenwich, where the accouterments of the high-end houses are super-sized, generator power is now a selling point, as home theaters, heated driveways and wine grottos were in years past, said Robert Bland, the brokerage manager of the Sotheby’s office in Greenwich.

“You can’t even open your garage door or your electric gates if you don’t have a generator,” he said. “And with the weather so unpredictable, it’s become a required amenity.”