Occupy ROTH Army

[FORD]

Occupy Windsor to stand in solidarity with Occupy Detroit movement

October 21, 2011. 11:14 am

Occupy movements on both sides of the border will join forces Saturday in support of global change.

Protesters will gather around 1 p.m. on each side of the river to display banners in fellowship. It is unknown at this time what message the banners will carry.

Garnet Smuczer, a spokesman for Occupy Windsor, said the two cities have been hit by the crash of the auto-sector and by coming together they will find solutions to help the working people.

At this point the movement has not declared specific demands or a solution to what they call the “consequences of concentrating wealth to one percent of the population.”

A music and arts festival will follow at Occupy Windsor’s encampment in the park in front of City Hall. The group will also launch a clothing drive and will be accepting donations.

[Blaze]

Photo credit: Rich Nacin

[Dr. Love]

#OccupyMarines are Preparing to Occupy America Nationwide
October 21, 2011By Anomaly100

United States Marine Corps. Sergeant Shamar Thomas in a spectacular moment defended the protesters of Occupy Wall Street while staring into the faces of thirty NYPD officers, and now countless other Marines have organized in an amazing show of solidarity.

Sgt. Thomas’ gallant actions in standing up for American citizens being brutalized by the police were shown in a video which has gone viral with almost 2 million views. Marines have joined forces with #OccupyMarines in solidarity with the movement not just in New York, but nationwide:

“OccupyMARINES Are Currently Assessing The Current Situation To Ascertain What Is Currently Needed To Support OWS America. We Are Humbled At The Substantial Support OWS America Has Provided And Ask That Everyone Continue As You All Do While We Implement Organization Nationwide. As We All Know, ‘Occupy’ Groups Are Being Established Even Now And Would Like To See This Trend Continue.”

Their website OccupyMarines.org presents a post centering on continuing the Occupy movement throughout the upcoming winter. In their call for “Non-Active ‘Occupy’ Military Supporters Only” they’re organizing a dress code in order to identify their branch affiliation.

Instead of ostracizing the police, the Marines are attempting to reach out to them much like Sgt. Thomas did.

#OrganizeMarines states, “Security forces/police should be seen as potential recruits to our cause and message, not as adversaries. Ultimately, they are accountable to the people.”

During Sgt. Thomas’ bold speech, the police presence became suddenly solemn hanging on his every word. Perhaps the presence of Marines will awaken the Police force which has been overwhelming the protests.

Presenting their group and the Occupiers as a peaceful movement, no matter what, including verbal attacks and/or propaganda brought forth from those opposing the protest they state, “Defensive strategies never win. Do not respond to verbal attacks or hostile propaganda from Nay-Sayers by using the language of the opponent. Reframe.”

Meet Iraq veteran Alex E. Limkin:

“I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against enemies both foreign, and domestic.”

Veteran Alex Limkin said:

“There is nothing more central to a free and democratic people than the right to dissent, the right to disagree, the right to stand up in the town square and be heard… I feel quite sure that in standing in solidarity with the peaceful Occupy Wall Street movement, I am doing no less than upholding my oath as an American soldier.”

Sgt. Shamar Thomas was the catalyst in this movie-like scenario with our inactive military standing with the protesters side by side.

These Marines’ actions are the definition of patriotism – not donning flagpins or waving Old Betsy — actions speak Red, White and Blue louder than feigning patriotism by displays which are born from a strong partisan stance.

Naysayers stand back, the Marines are coming.

#OccupyMarines, we are humbled.

http://www.politicususa.com/en/occupy-marines-nationwide

I dunno what to think about this

[Dr. Love]

There are also reports in Dallas that the police are directing homeless people to the local OWS protest sites.

[Dr. Love]

[Dr. Love]

Bank of America trying to saddle the government with more bad debt, and the Fed is facilitating to the tune of 75 trillion dollars.

[Dr. Love]

[Dr. Love]

[Dr. Love]

[Dr. Love]

Information in the Internet Age

[Dr. Love]

[Blaze]

http://www.politicususa.com/en/occup...nes-nationwide

I dunno what to think about this

I have stated clearly that LEO's, judicial employees, government workers and even corporate employees are indeed part of the culling of corruption and greed. There are some people who really love real estate, the thought of a cool property turns them on. There are people that truly love banking the honor that was supposed to come with the responcibility. These people would like their honorable and noble professions back. I can go on and on with examples, but nevertheless, most people would like to have honor in their lives. People really do believe in heaven and the naughtiness that has been going on does weigh on their souls.

We must help them help us. In every corruption case that I have work, I have always found those certain people just trying to manage the best they can, because they just don't know how to or are waiting for help. My favorite quote that is standard, surly someone must know. Often times they do not realize they are indeed that someone.

There are also reports in Dallas that the police are directing homeless people to the local OWS protest sites.

That is OK.And? While on my tour of my sector, I encounter homeless. I told them that it was going to get busy, but did not sway them to leave. Homeless are sometimes a special challenge, But much of the homeless are now a days are damned for their luck.

Information in the Internet Age

This is a big issue and one that I think is not being addressed. Sabu is beating his drums saying do not molest the media because he indeed is a media octopus.

[FORD]

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world

19 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist Magazine issue 2835.



AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

[FORD]

Notice that in that list of the top 50 corporations, you have one company (#50) that produces toxic Chinese crap and another (#15) that sells toxic Chinese crap.

The other 48 produce absolutely nothing, and basically shuffle money around from one to the other.

This is exactly what's wrong with this world.

[Nickdfresh]

'Occupy' protesters find allies in ranks of the wealthy
'Tax me, I’m good for it,' some in the richest 1 percent say in support of the protest

By Miranda Leitsinger Reporter
msnbc.com
updated 10/21/2011 5:59:53 AM ET

The “Occupy Wall Street” protesters — also known as the “99 percent” — have struck a chord with at least a few members of an unexpected audience: America’s rich and privileged.

United under the banner “We are the 1 percent: We stand with the 99 percent,” a band of entrepreneurs, trust fund babies, professionals and inheritors has taken to the web to share their abhorrence of corporate greed and support for tax code changes that would see them pay a higher share of their considerable wealth.

Among other things, they’re posting their stories on a Tumblr page created by Wealth for the Common Good and Resource Generation, two groups dedicated to working for "fair taxation and just wealth distribution."

Some are probably not actually in the top 1 percent wealthwise — calculated at earning a yearly salary of more than $506,000, according toThe Wall Street Journal— but all are certainly well off and supportive of reforms that would narrow the widening gap between America's elite and poorest citizens.

Farhad A. Ebrahimi, 33, who shares his inherited wealth through a charity that he founded, says he attends the Occupy Boston protest every day. He has donated tents, helped with organizing, raised funds and written for the protesters' blog. He said that his inheritance put him squarely in the top 1 percent, plus he makes enough on investment income every year to be in the highest tax bracket. But he lives what he calls a “Spartan” life compared to other members of his family.

At the protest, he often wears a homemade T-shirt that reads: “I’m a member of the 1 percent and I fully support the 99 percent” on the front, and, “Tax me, I’m good for it,” on the back.

Why are you at Occupy Boston?

“I think my taxes are at a historical low … and also, I think that the ability for someone like me who has financial privilege to influence our government is at an all-time high. I’ve never been comfortable with those ideas. They’ve always seemed like to me things that should change and to ... play a role in the movement and to try to advocate around those issues was just a tremendous opportunity.”

What specific changes would you like to see?

“The big picture for me personally is any sort of restructuring, any demands that can be met that make our tax code more progressive. So campaign finance reform in general would be another one, to make the ability for money — whether it’s personal or corporate — to play a role in politics, anything that diminishes that would be on my list of goals to see out of this movement.”

What kind of role can 1 percenters play in a movement of the 99 percent?

“Participating in any way that does not directly involve my privilege. … And I think one of the things I find very compelling about the occupation (movements) is that by practicing direct democracy through the general assemblies every day, we’re essentially trying to practice what we preach and trying to make decisions as a group, where various kinds of privilege don’t have the sort of outside influence that they have in society as a whole.”

“... I think for me it’s very important to be visible and it’s very important that everybody there be comfortable with the idea of somebody like me being there. So far I’ve received nothing but positive feedback for being sort of honest and transparent about that.”

Burke Stansbury, a 35-year-old communications specialist for nonprofit groups, has been loosely involved with the protests in Washington, D.C. (known as Occupy K St), donating homemade food, tarps and money. He inherited a little more than $1 million and stands to inherit more. He doesn't believe he officially qualifies to be in the top 1 percent, but says he grew up with all the advantages of being wealthy.

Why did you get involved with the 'Occupy' protests?

"I think it’s a beautiful movement of people that really gets at the heart of what's wrong with our country right now in terms of the really obscene level of inequality that exists and the institutions that have sort of influenced that."

What would you like changed?

"A lot of us have honed in on the tax code piece as something that’s tangible, that can be changed and we have a kind of unique role in speaking out on, as people in the 1 percent. So certainly I feel really strongly that people with wealth, high income people, should be taxed at higher levels and not just in terms of income tax but in terms of the ... capital gains tax as well."

You said you worked with your parents to start a foundation and have given money to nonprofits and grassroots groups. Can't the wealthiest Americans make a difference that way?

"It's all well and good that we maybe have family foundations for giving away a lot of money ourselves to good causes, but that’s not enough, like that isn't going to change the big problems, the really extreme inequality that exists. … It has to come from the government, it has to be a sort-of involuntary ... redistribution of wealth because the few altruistic wealthy people giving (away) their money isn't going to do it."

Were other protesters aware of your status?

"I don’t go around telling everyone, 'I'm a millionaire.' But I'm also pretty and fairly open about it if it comes up. A lot of people have signs, you know, targeting the 1 percent, oftentimes really angry messages. ... I don’t think people would like jump up and attack me, but I think I would just want to be able to like really talk through it with them and explain what that means to me and have that conversation."

"... I think it’s a great opportunity to kind of bridge that class divide and it’s going to hopefully lead to great things in terms of building a bigger movement.”

What role do you think the 1 percenters can play here in this movement?

"We can bring this message that like there is still collective humanity in those that have more wealth, too. Many of us actually want to see the same kind of change that the people that are down on ... 'Occupy Wall Street' everyday, want to see."