It makes sense they’d refuse the Wall Street protestors; Burger King was once owned by the original Home of the Whopper, Goldman Sachs (they sold it to 3G Capital in 2010), and they treat their employees abysmally (see video below from Brave New Films). Meanwhile, McDonald’s and neighborhood places are allowing the OWS to use their bathrooms (and are making a tidy profit from selling them food and drink). Good for them. Let’s make this a nationwide boycott of Burger King until they side with the 99 percent and treat their workers better.
Deregulation enacted by Republicans and conservative Democrats, and an unprecedented Supreme Court decision allowing corporations the free speech the Founders intended only for flesh-and-blood human beings, led to the majority of Americans steadily sinking economically, as the nation’s wealth flowed to the top. Here are some simple demands to reverse this lethal course, along with a few suggestions of my own following the highlighted portion.
“The demands are pretty damned easy to summarize:
— Reinstate Glass-Steagall
— Audit the FED
— Reverse Citizens United (via Constitutional Amendment)
— Overhaul the tax code for the mega-rich (1%) and corporations”
— “#OWS: Take this video VIRAL, NOW!” Daily Kos, Oct. 9, 2011.
Here are my suggestions:
— End the corporate charter of any corporation that repeatedly or recklessly does harm to their customers or the environment.
— Revamp the rules regarding the appointment of boards of directors to corporations, making shareholder meetings more convenient to attend, or hold them online, and streamline voting procedures so that shareholders can more easily vote on the compensation packages of top executives and who will serve on the corporate board.
— End the practice of buying stock ‘on margin.’ (In other words, you must prove you have the money to pay for any stock you are buying.)
— Stricter enforcement of SEC regulations.
— Tax companies that outsource jobs or other assets overseas at a rate that will remove the profit in doing so.
— Tax offshored assets at the same rate domestic profits are taxed.
— Hold top executives responsible for a corporation’s criminal acts in the same way an individual American would be held responsible. (Example: If an executive approves a heart drug that his company’s internal studies say induces heart attacks, he or she would be as criminally liable as an individual who knowingly provided another person with a drug that caused a heart attack.)
— No corporation that sells equipment or electronics to the government will retain the right to secret proprietary codes or other information on their products.
— Finally, of course, we have to ban corporations from lobbying our government officials and limit the money spent in our elections.
But these suggestions are only a start; perhaps we should rethink the whole concept of the corporation as an entity for doing business as they have now become Too Big to Fail behemoths that threaten our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and our form of government, and many continue to exist only through taxpayer bailouts. As Ambrose Bierce put it more than a hundred years ago: “Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” It’s time we brought back responsibility to the marketplace.
Watch the video:
Here’s a simplified version of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Economic Bill of Rights, proposed in 1944, which, if enacted, would solve a great many of our problems:
I used to like O’Rourke in his ‘Republican Reptile’ days, but today he’s just become an embarrassingly unfunny drudge who cracks lame jokes based on addled conservative propaganda demeaning liberals that were moldly when William F. Buckley was young. O’Rourke should know better, but now he’s hunched down in his comfy upper-middle-class Republican easy chair, lionized by the Big Apple illiterati as a humorist on par with Mark Twain, and hubristically content that his every mental passing of gas constitutes an emission of hilarious wisdom. Sad. On Bill Maher’s HBO show recently, former and future Dem. Rep. Alan Grayson gives him a slapback on his pitiful attempts at humor at the expense of the OWS.
The right-wingers who work behind the scenes running sleaze for the GOP and Wall Street corporratists, after trying to ignore the Occupy Wall Street movement, are now nervous at its roaring success and doing their best to co-opt and discredit OWS by putting up ‘false-front’ sites similar in name to the legitimate OWS sites. The legitimate sites are OccupyWallSt.org, OccupyTogether.org and We Are The 99 Percent. All others are right-wing sock puppets trying to deceive the public. Please spread the word.
The OWS movement is growing by leaps and bounds — 200 US cities so far and a projected 1,000 by the end of October.
Oh, shut the fuck up, mainstream media. You know exactly what the Occupy Wall Street (and dozens of other places) protests are demanding. Everybody knows, even dunderheads who pretend not to. They are demanding what every truly great social movement has ever demanded: the right to have a say, to have power in a nation where the majority of people are disempowered. Yeah, you can narrow those into a list of specific goals, as the General Assembly at Zuccotti Park are attempting or as others from the protests or even some in the media have laid out, but so what?
They all come down to the same thing, the same thing: power, specifically of the economic sort. The United States government has allowed corporations, whether its oil companies, banks, pharmaceuticals, or whatever, to have the power in the nation under the lie that their rising profits are the key to economic salvation. Now, after decades of corporate-friendly policies, mostly to the detriment of the individual worker, the lie has been made plain. If the Tea Party had not been racist and gun-toting and stupid and easily manipulated from the start, it would have had the same message.
That message can be distilled to a simple, plaintive, two-word cry to our elected representatives: “Do something.” We have watched as program after program has been watered down or blocked by the Republicans (and some of their Democratic lapdogs) in Congress. The hope of the Obama administration was that he would do those things that need to get done. Seeing him have to kowtow to special interests (by his own doing) or bow to thuggish GOP demands has been devastating to the movement he started, especially when he was so fucking clear in his 2008 campaign about what needed to happen in America. Perhaps, then, to make it more clear, the message can be: Do the obvious shit that you know has to be done.
He was probably referring to civil rights, but it still applies today as we watch the nonviolent Occupy Wall Street protests in cities all over the country, which are basically about civil rights — in this case, economic civil rights. Real change is inevitable and OWS is the spark that’s bringing it about.
In keeping with the ‘change’ theme of the last few days, here’s Playing For Change — various artists from around the world — covering Ben E. King’s 1961 hit, “Stand By Me”:
They did after 1964 when Bob released this song, with Americans taking to the streets to end the Vietnam debacle and the draft, and usher in civil rights and women’s rights, just as they are taking to the streets today demanding economic justice as the Occupy Wall Street movement expands. In the mid-’60s, the majority of Americans supported the war, the draft and dismissed the protest marchers as a bunch of radicals, peaceniks, pinkos and rabble-rousers. In six years, that had all changed and America agreed with the protestors. This time around it’s easier, as most of the country is feeling the pain from rewarding FDR’s ‘economic royalists’ at the expense of the rest of us and already are on the side of those marching in the streets. As it says in John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The ‘All Street’ marchers around the country are bringing the truth, and the freedom that follows, to a nation dying from a lack of both.
“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.” — Victor Hugo
I’ve long thought it was odd that the most tender and vulnerable part of a man’s body, the one part that, when struck, brings him to his knees in an instant, would be used to indicate ‘toughness.’ The idea of walking around with ‘big swinging balls’ doesn’t sound very comfortable either (elderly men complain about the condition regularly), and owning a pair of ‘brass balls’ sounds about as appealing as having a mouthful of glass teeth, aside from the fact that solid metal testicles would permanently end your reproductive capabilities and no doubt shrink ‘Little Elvis’ to microscopic size as they get annoyingly cold in the winter. Here, actress Betty White puts her own (painless) ‘twist’ on the subject:
