October 14, 2011 archive

WWL Radio #126 Occupation Endgame



Join Diane Gee on WWL Radio Friday, October 14th at 6pm EDT!



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PhotobucketOccupy Wall Street is again our topic tonight, as I assume it will be for a very long time as long as the Independent Journalists are still able to report freely.

Two very important questions remain.

The first is about how it will fail – for the odds are stacked very highly against the Populace saving themselves from a deeply entrenched and now global Oligarchy. Will it be through violence, being co-opted, being handed austerity and thrown a few bones? Or will they create violence and blame the resistance in order to turn the population against the Occupation, rewarding little Orwellian finger-pointers?

The second is about how it will succeed – for against all odds, we are the many and we could easily regain power if the will to do so is true. Is highly regulated capitalism what we must settle for, perhaps isolationist America-first selfishness, or will we truly break free into sane socialism?

These are the days we have been waiting for my friends. It has begun.

The call in number is 646-929-1264 to join the conversation!

Tip: In order to comment in the show’s companion chat, you must create a BTR account, its free and only takes seconds. I read chat while on air, so make yourself heard.

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Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

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This Week In The Dream Antilles

   

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When I arrived in late afternoon, La Bahia was asleep.  I tiptoed up to her. She was only partially covered by the white and grey cotton blanket, frequently used, often washed and very soft. I could see her bare back as it rose and fell with her breath. I watched her sleep.  I listened to her breathing. I did not wake her.

As I think about this and try to write it down, I know that this is what love feels like when it is raining.

This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Sometimes, like now, it isn’t actually a digest of essays posted in the past week at The Dream Antilles.  It is something else.

Occupy Wall Street Friday 10.14.11


Global Revolution October 15th

find your square & OCCUPY!

More Insanity: Corporate Tax Holiday Backed By Blue Dogs

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Everyone one of these Democrats should lose the support of the DCCC and be primaried.

Blue Dogs backing corporate tax holiday

House Blue Dogs are on board with a temporary corporate tax holiday they argue will boost economic growth.

The group joined a growing bipartisan chorus pressing the congressional deficit-reduction committee to give U.S. multinational corporations a tax break in exchange for investing at home.

[]

The Blue Dog Coalition is backing a bipartisan bill sponsored by Reps. Jim Matheson (D-Utah) and Kevin Brady (R-Texas) that would remove a barrier keeping upwards of $1.4 trillion in American private-sector money overseas, which is similar to a Senate bill introduced last week by Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

I have no idea what experts they are citing the article doesn’t say. I do know the history if the last time this was done in 2004 when they gave 92% of the money to themselves. Nor did the law which stated the money could not be used to raise dividends or to repurchase shares, stop them.:

There is no evidence that companies that took advantage of the tax break – which enabled them to bring home, or repatriate, overseas profits while paying a tax rate far below the normal rate – used the money as Congress expected.

“Repatriations did not lead to an increase in domestic investment, employment or R.& D., even for the firms that lobbied for the tax holiday stating these intentions,” concluded the study by three economists, including a former official of the Bush administration who took part in the discussions leading to enactment of the plan in 2004.

The study, titled “Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: The Unintended Consequences of the Homeland Investment Act,” was released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was written by Dhammika Dharmapala, a law professor at the University of Illinois; C. Fritz Foley, an associate professor of finance at Harvard Business School; and Kristin J. Forbes, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was a member of the president’s council of economic advisers from 2003 to 2005.

“The restrictions on how the money will be spent seem to have been completely ineffective,” Ms. Forbes said in an interview this week.

“Dell was a great example,” she added, referring to Dell Computer. “They lobbied very hard for the tax holiday. They said part of the money would be brought back to build a new plant in Winston-Salem, N.C. They did bring back $4 billion, and spent $100 million on the plant, which they admitted would have been built anyway. About two months after that, they used $2 billion for a share buyback.”

The give away also cost the country more than 500,000 jobs:

Following a tax holiday on repatriated foreign earnings in 2004, 58 corporations that benefitted from the holiday slashed a total of nearly 600,000 jobs. These 58 giant corporations accounted for nearly 70 percent of the total repatriated funds and collectively saved an estimated $64 billion from what they otherwise would have owed in taxes.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation this current clamor by for a tax holiday by the multinational corporations that barely pay any taxes now, would cost the US $80 billion and would do nothing to reduce the deficit and wouldn’t protect or create jobs:

Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who is a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee, yesterday circulated an estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation pegging the cost of a repatriation bill at $78.7 billion. An unsuccessful effort to create a similar holiday in 2009 would have cost the U.S. government about $30 billion over a decade in forgone revenue.

“This means we will have to borrow more from foreign creditors or shift a greater burden to American small businesses and families,” Doggett said. Congressional estimators projected that companies would repatriate about $700 billion if offered a 5.25 percent rate, compared with $300 billion during the tax holiday enacted in 2004.

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Democrats also maintain that the bill does too little to protect jobs at companies that repatriate overseas funds. They have pointed to such examples as Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ), which returned $14.5 billion to the U.S. at a low rate in 2004 and cut its workforce by 14,500 employees in 2005.

Primary these idiots

Cartnoon

Bunny Hugged

Service Interruptions

A little Meta housekeeping.

Our 2 sites, The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma, have been experiencing service interruptions, some of them extended and inconvenient.  Last month Soapblox updated our software and shifted our hosting to Amazon cloud servers.  A few temporary glitches are only to be expected.

TheMomCat and I are aware of these problems, as are the technical support people at Soapblox.  Edger is acting as a contact person for us and several other sites he supports which we think has the benefit of not flooding inboxes with too many duplicate messages.

On a personal note I experienced a hard crash on my main computer and have been unable to access my customary environment for the last few weeks.  I hope my level of obnoxiousness has not suffered materially.

I have arrived at what I think is a reasonable hardware solution and over the next few days I’ll be trying to get that functional.  I may decide to bore you with the details at some point because I think the process has been instructive and may benefit readers who are considering similar situations.

As always, thank you for your indulgence.

Morning #OWS Update

Occupy Wall Street Stays in Park

By Aaron Rutkoff, The Wall Street Journal

October 14, 2011, 6:57 AM ET

The real-estate company that owns the small park at the center of the Occupy Wall Street movement has postponed a planned cleaning of the site, a New York City deputy mayor announced early Friday morning.

The decision by Brookfield Office Properties Inc. to delay its planned cleaning of Zuccotti Park means that the protesters who have been living at the site for nearly a month will not be forced to depart and remove the tarps, beds and other items accumulated during the ongoing demonstration.

Wall Street sit-in goes global Saturday

Reuters

Fri Oct 14, 2011 6:52am EDT

For an October revolution, dress warm.

That’s the word going out – politely – on the Web to rally street protests on Saturday around the globe from New Zealand to Alaska via London, Frankfurt, Washington and, of course, New York, where the past month’s Occupy Wall Street movement has inspired a worldwide yell of anger at banks and financiers.



Italian police are preparing for tens of thousands to march in Rome against austerity measures planned by the beleaguered government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Yet in crisis-ravaged Athens, where big protests have seen violence at times of late, a sense of fatigue and futility may limit numbers on Saturday. In Madrid, where thousands of young “indignados”, or “angry ones”, camped out for weeks, many also feel the movement has run out of steam since the summer.

Germans, where sympathy for southern Europe’s debt troubles is patchy, the financial centre of Frankfurt, and the European Central Bank in particular, is expected to be a focus of marches calling by the Spanish-inspired Real Democracy Now movement.

NYC official says cleanup of protest site has been postponed; demonstrators consider new march

By Associated Press

Updated: Friday, October 14, 7:15 AM

NEW YORK – The cleanup of a plaza in lower Manhattan where protesters have been camped out for a month was postponed early Friday, sending cheers up from a crowd that had feared the effort was merely a pretext to evict them.

Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said the owners of the private park, Brookfield Office Properties, had put off the cleaning. Supporters of the protesters had started streaming into the park in the morning darkness before the planned cleaning, forming a crowd of several hundred chanting people.

“I’ll believe it when we’re able to stay here,” said protester Peter Hogness, 56, a union employee from Brooklyn. “One thing we have learned from this is that we need to rely on ourselves and not on promises from elected officials.”

Nobel Prize-Winning Former President Of Poland To Visit Occupy Wall Street

By Christopher Robbins, Gothamist

October 12, 2011 4:14 PM

Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning former president of Poland, will show his support of Occupy Wall Street by paying Zuccotti Park a visit. “How could I not respond,” Walesa said, “The thousands of people gathered near Wall Street are worried about the fate of their future, the fate of their country. This is something I understand.”

4 live streams courtesy of Elliott @ Firedog Lake below.

On This Day In History October 14

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

October 14 is the 287th day of the year (288th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 78 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1947, U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager (born February 13, 1923) is a retired major general in the United States Air Force and noted test pilot. He was the first pilot to travel faster than sound (1947). Originally retiring as a brigadier general, Yeager was promoted to major general on the Air Force’s retired list 20 years later for his military achievements.

His career began in World War II as a private in the United States Army Air Forces. After serving as an aircraft mechanic, in September 1942 he entered enlisted pilot training and upon graduation was promoted to the rank of flight officer (the World War II USAAF equivalent to warrant officer) and became a P-51 Mustang fighter pilot. After the war he became a test pilot of many kinds of aircraft and rocket planes. Yeager was the first man to break the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental Bell X-1 at Mach 1 at an altitude of 13,700 m (45,000 ft). . . .

Yeager remained in the Air Force after the war, becoming a test pilot at Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base) and eventually being selected to fly the rocket-powered Bell X-1 in a NACA program to research high-speed flight, after Bell Aircraft test pilot “Slick” Goodlin demanded $150,000 to break the sound “barrier.”  Such was the difficulty in this task that the answer to many of the inherent challenges were along the lines of “Yeager better have paid-up insurance.” Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, flying the experimental X-1 at Mach  1 at an altitude of 45,000 feet (13,700 m). Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, he broke two ribs while riding a horse. He was so afraid of being removed from the mission that he went to a veterinarian in a nearby town for treatment and told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley about it.

On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the airplane’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch of the airplane. Yeager’s flight recorded Mach 1.07, however, he was quick to point out that the public paid attention to whole numbers and that the next milestone would be exceeding Mach 2. Yeager’s X-1 is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.

The Evolution (sic) will not be Sanitized!

The Evolution (sic) will not be sanitized.

At any rate, not now, not today!

Maybe the Bloomer just had one too many Napolean brandies after his dinner at Cipriani’s and couldn’t be bothered until tomorrow or some other day in future…

I really don’t know, but the news just came through…

We #OWS stayed the course for today!

What more can we ask?

Plenty.  But now to the soft Zephyrs, and see you manana!

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

–Jim Morrison



Smiles

Late Night Karaoke

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