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by Nordic » Fri Nov 11, 2011 1:48 pm
by Wombaticus Rex » Fri Nov 11, 2011 4:15 pm
by Jeff » Fri Nov 11, 2011 11:37 pm
by Allegro » Sat Nov 12, 2011 12:20 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Nov 12, 2011 12:45 am
Terrence Duffy recently hosted his 4th Annual Global Financial Leadership Conference on October 24th-26th in Naples, Florida. It's exactly what it sounds like: a gathering for high rollers, media figures and tech execs to organize and strategize. The keynote speaker this year was George W. Bush, but of course, Duffy's also gotten Clinton before that. High finance is something Democrats and Republicans are both happy to support: Bipartisan Consensus.
Days after the Global Financial Leadership Conference, though, Terry Duffy was right back at work doing what he does best: carving a bigger profit margin out of anything smaller and slower than the financial conglomerate he represents. For the past few weeks, he's been focusing his efforts on the state of Illinois. We do not appreciate that.
10/27/2011: Rich Miller reports the "Corporate Tax Break Bidding War" is heating up in Springfield, Illinois...
"The CME says it pays 6 percent of all Illinois corporate income taxes, making it the state’s largest taxpayer. The company also claims that the recent income tax increase cost it an extra $50 million a year. Its executive chairman, Terry Duffy, has repeatedly warned that he’s furious about his company’s tax burden and is seriously contemplating a move to a more favorable location."
Terry Duffy has insisted that he is not bluffing about moving to another state, and this is true. The act he has been putting on here in Springfield is more accurately described as horseshit. Although it is true the CME has 2300+ employees who will be utterly unwilling to trade the Chicago high life for the cultural wastelands of Indiana, their actual trading floor makes up only a small percentage of their earnings. CME is fundamentally virtual, yet strangely enough, that's exactly why Terry Duffy can't go anywhere.
That's the Spread Networks Dark Pipeline: a fiber optic connection for High-Frequency Trading (HFT) algorithms to communicate with New York in 13.33 milliseconds. That, along with their political connections and market manipulation, is the real source of their massive profit margins. So despite doing business anywhere in the world 24 hours a day, Terry Duffy remains unable to actually move his to another state - no matter how "lucrative" their offers of tax breaks and free rents may be.
Standing before the Illinois Senate, Duffy backpedaled: "We're not threatening anybody. We like Chicago. We love Illinois. We want to remain a big part of it." Less than 20 feet outside the door to Senate chambers, though, and he was already back on a different set of talking points: "I would not be going through all this effort if we did not have a commitment to stay here...I simply would have gone to another state, accepted very lucrative proposals and moved our firm."
"A tax break for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange? The notion would be comical if it weren't so sad. CME took a stunning 54 percent of its $8 billion revenue as clear profit. That's a higher percentage than any of the top 100 companies in the country!" - Patrick Bucheit
"CME gave Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel the single largest contribution to his mayoral campaign, $200,000, before state campaign finance rules changed to prohibit such largesse. Still, to demonstrate how large a donation it was, CME has given House Speaker Michael Madigan about $245,000 since late 1994, according to a Tribune analysis of data that goes back to that year. CBOE, the other financial exchange that would benefit from the tax breaks, has given about $90,000 to Madigan during that period." - Chicago Tribune
by Jeff » Sat Nov 12, 2011 11:06 am
by Laodicean » Sat Nov 12, 2011 2:29 pm
Pax Occupata
by Randall Amster
Decades ago, on the eve of a period of widespread societal upheaval, Bob Dylan famously intoned that “the order is rapidly fading.” For a time, this appeared to be so: around the world people were in the streets, revolution was in the air, and structures of oppression were being openly contested. The headiness of those days brought many advances and opened up significant space for later movements to operate, yet in the final analysis somehow it all delivered us into even higher degrees of wealth stratification and greater consolidation of power. The order had flickered, but not quite faded, and in the end reasserted itself stronger than before.
Today we stand poised at a not-dissimilar crossroads. While perhaps no one has yet penned a Dylan-esque anthem of the movement -- although stalwarts such as David Rovics and Emma’s Revolution have dropped some poignant opening stanzas -- a mass chorus of voices is drawing lines in the sand literally everywhere: public spaces, workplaces, shipping ports, shopping malls, community centers, corporate banks, schoolrooms, boardrooms, and more. The Occupy Movement has transcended the narrow confines of Zuccotti Park, and in doing so has seemingly asserted itself wherever the forces of elitism and subjugation rear their heads. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without demand,” and whatever else transpires in the days ahead it can at least be said that the movement has reminded us all of this basic tenet.
Still, critics continue to ask, “where is your list of demands?” as if such can be reduced to movement letterhead in bullet-point fashion. To be sure, some concrete demands have been advanced, largely in the economic and political spheres and triggered by the exigencies of the Great Recession. But on some level, most everyone understands that this bill of particulars is just the surface of the movement, and that its essence really draws down to the core workings of the system itself. Adjusting debit card rates or mollifying student loan debts may bring some minor relief, but it has the feel of rearranging a couple of deck chairs, whereas many Occupiers are more urgently clamoring en masse for the dismantling of the Titanic itself.
At root, multitudes are demanding no less than a re-visioning of our political and economic relationships, and likewise of our collective human relationship with the larger environment. The time for single-issue tinkering is winding down, as the ecological and social fabric of our lives similarly degrades. After generations of living mainly as cogs in a mechanistic Moloch -- at times being reasonably well-compensated for the sacrifice of our mere freedoms and human dignity -- many people are experiencing new bonds of exchange, camaraderie, and community. There is a growing sense of engaged optimism in this moment of healthy rebellion.
And it is healthy, in contrast with the dead-end dispiritedness of corporate capitalism, in which everything and everyone are little more than raw materials for the robber barons’ assembly lines. This archaic and apocalyptic system of production and reproduction is sick at its very core, revealing a form of mass insanity masking as progress, and leaving illness and misery in its wake just beneath the shiny veneer of development. At the height of colonialism, blankets with smallpox were presented as “gifts” to unwitting natives, and in many ways this has become the central operating premise of the entire enterprise, a living metaphor for environmental despoliation and the ensuing political economy of toxification.
No more. The pox must be cast out, by necessity, if any part of the organism is to survive at this point. What began as a movement to occupy a symbolic place -- the plexus of financial machinations -- quickly became a call to occupy everything, and has further expanded to include the earth itself as a living participant in the calculus. Now, as the teeth of abject repression are bared in Oakland and elsewhere, a critical juncture is being reached in which the politics of practicality are slowly being supplanted by the poetics of possibility. People who have tasted freedom can no longer be kept conveniently in prisons, even if their cages are designed to appear like comfortable condominiums.
The technicians of empire thus stand stripped of their authoritarian mystique, increasingly so as they resort to heavy-handed tactics against peaceful people, including even those who have served in their infantries. A crisis of legitimacy is in the offing, as counter-institutions steadily replace those that run counter to even the pretense of democracy and equity. Hegemony yields to autonomy, corporatism to communitarianism, and warfare to welfare. There will be no placating the people by piecemeal legislation or token redistribution at this juncture; it is the reins of power themselves that are being demanded, and not merely the spoils.
But are the power elite quaking in their jack-boots? Are the walls of Babylon actually crumbling? This time, is the order really fading? Others have tried mightily before and come up short of changing the underlying paradigm, but there is a qualitative difference in evidence today: horizontal integration. Vertical structures, such as capitalism’s pervasive pyramid schemes, are inherently vulnerable to vicissitudes in the base -- whereas horizontal systems, such as those being forged in occupations everywhere, are inherently unbreakable since there is no a prior of power apart from every single piece of the whole. This is, in fact, how healthy organisms function, and further reflects how nature itself is organized at both the microscopic and macroscopic levels.
To a system of death and destruction, we interpose one of life and liberation. Consumption is remediated by creation; plutocracy by democracy; exploitation by participation. This is not merely a movement, but is in practice more akin to a global health care plan -- and this time, we will get universal (or at least earthly) coverage, with the only mandate being the basic imperative that is embedded in the undeniable interconnectedness of our existence. No legislation is needed, only the laws of nature; no medication, just dedication; no co-payments, merely co-creators. We are going to get well, all of us together and the habitat itself, and in the process we will work to wipe aside the sickly stain of the colonizer’s history.
Power may not abdicate, but it does change its garb at times. The Empire’s cloak of imperial majesty is threadbare, and a new wind is chilling its inner workings to the marrow. We neocolonial beneficiaries have infected others, and ourselves as well, with everything from acne and austerity to zoster and zero-sum thinking, and now it has come to pass that the global organism itself is essentially on life support. This is the reality that must eventually be confronted, both in terms of ecology and political economy: the externalities of disease and despair cannot be indefinitely outsourced. The only genuine form of wellbeing is one that injects itself everywhere, coursing through the veins of society at all levels and in every locale within the system.
Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana -- all made claims to establishing a “relative peace” within their ambit. But these forms of peace were imposed at the point of a bayonet or the nosecone of a warhead. They were all poisonous peaces, ultimately self-defeating enterprises of subjugation in which the masters could not escape their own systems of enslavement. Today, we are aiming for something more like Pax Populi, a form of peace made by and for people, not nations or corporations. In order to accomplish this, the ailing empire du jour must be supplanted by a constellation of healthy communities, interlinked by virtue of desire rather than dictate. This is the ambitious horizon of the burgeoning movement in all of its manifestations: Pax Occupata.
Instead of a singular Dylan for the movement, there are poets cropping up everywhere and providing the soundtrack of this era in real time. Indeed, this is as it should be: everyone’s a bard, and all the world’s a stage. The curtain is finally closing on the old order, and a new paradigm of peace is being hewn from the colossus.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sat Nov 12, 2011 2:46 pm
For an organization whose rhetoric casually claims “unity,” and which absurdly considers itself to be a mouthpiece for 99 percent of America, it is devastating that division and infighting increasingly mar OWS’s New York City franchise. The kibbutz has fractured. Walking around the site yesterday, it was clear that “one world” has become many. There are now palpable borders within the commune, and battle lines have been drawn.
The “original” protesters resent the “hangers-on” and the latecomers, as early fans of a rock band might hate those who discover their heroes only after they have become popular. As always, the hard-liners despise the reformers and those who would “compromise with capitalism,” and the anarchists predictably reject all such labels entirely. Meanwhile, an unfathomably asinine dispute rages over whether the movement should seek to represent the “100 percent” or the “99 percent,” with few taking the time to consider whether it actually does either. The homeless, much praised on placards and flyers, have clearly proven themselves useful only in the abstract, and have become a rather less attractive proposition now that they have joined the fray, bringing with them something of a crime wave.
Likewise, there is growing consternation over the group’s finances. The more than $500,000 that OWS has raised from supporters is in the hands of a shady eight-person finance committee, which is made up of “non-occupiers” who have a right of veto on proposals before they get to the General Assembly and are, thus, “becoming like the banks we are protesting.” Most of the money, the gripe goes, is “just sitting there doing nothing,” and “our ideas are not being listened to.” Worse still, some of this outrageous fortune has found its way into Amalgamated Bank, which has the temerity to deal with billionaires. To spend or not to spend, that is the question! It seems clear now that, however noble the protesters might consider themselves, and however unorthodox the community they have established, there will always be slings and arrows to suffer.
Then there is crime. Even as Zuccotti Park has become a sea of troubles, it has been regarded as unsporting to bring up its obnoxious elements, as if to report on the dark side is to tar all associates unfairly with the same brush. But the unpleasant are demonstrably in attendance, and are no longer necessarily in the minority. I asked a “press representative,” named Justin, how many of those in the park he considered to be genuinely part of his movement, and was surprised to hear him say “less than 50 percent.” Such a confession makes the “we are the 99 percent” chant seem somewhat comical. But then, it always has been. The idea that the camp represented something new by bringing a diverse group of people together was always solipsistic. Surely, I would ask, that is what America does? What is this country if not a grouping of different people who disagree, and who work out their differences through common institutions?
by Nordic » Sat Nov 12, 2011 3:43 pm
by Jeff » Sat Nov 12, 2011 4:20 pm
by Jeff » Sat Nov 12, 2011 7:07 pm
by ninakat » Sun Nov 13, 2011 1:31 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Nov 13, 2011 10:15 am
So far, Occupy has thrived as a prototype rather than a program: an open-source laboratory for activism. What follows is a collection of research notes on how #Occupy collectives have evolved media teams, with a special focus on the original group in Zuccotti Park, NYC. Apologies to the authors pilfered here, but no repentance...after all, this is for Science.
by Jeff » Sun Nov 13, 2011 10:35 am
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