Corporate Takeover Boosts Wall Street's Prison Profits, Inflates Slavery Class

Prisoners - America’s New Cash Crop

By Cynthia Johnston

A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt

At the 2011 dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, many speakers, including President Obama, quoted from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which King eloquently spoke out for freedom and justice. Yet almost fifty years later King’s son, Martin Luther King III, says his father’s dream has not been realized, that America has “lost its soul,” in part by “having more people of color in prison than in college.”

He is not wrong. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in the last decade nearly one in three African-American men aged 20-29 was under criminal-justice supervision, while more than two out of five had been incarcerated.

'Occupy' Forces Even Mainliners to Decry 'Crony Capitalism'

Mainstream money people are 'coming out' by slamming corporate welfare and the Wall Street anarchists who clamor for privatizing profits while quietly looting the Treasury as their collosal losses are socialized. 

Published Oct. 26, 2011

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NEW YORK TIMES 

Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public.

The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.

To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.

Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed

Friday 28 October 2011

by: Robert Scheer, Truthdig [3] | Op-Ed

It is class warfare.

It was not begun, however, by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly. Rather, this war was sparked by the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.

Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that's after payment of the taxes that the super-rich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.

With 2,000 Video Cameras, Wall Street Firms Use Big Brother's Tax-Paid Tech to Spy on Protesters

By Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152875/wall_street_firms_spy_on_protesters_in_tax-funded_center

The following article is original to CounterPunch.

Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.

According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”

'Carpetbagger, Go Home'

Redneck Party and Williamson Countians Decry Wisconsin Governor's Fund-raising Trip to Franklin, TN
 

FRANKLIN, TN---It won't be a Civil War reenactment, but the appearance of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at a Republican fund-raiser on Tuesday will be met with a peaceful protest from Williamson County residents and the Southern-based Redneck Party, workers' advocates who will trek to Franklin to act in solidarity with Wisconsin teachers and workers.

Walker, whose 2010 election was bankrolled by Tea Party funder David Koch and other extreme, neo-conservative special interests, will be raising money in Franklin for his recall election.  The following day, Walker will be in Iowa for a fund-raiser; so his journey south to get money from the locals and then scurry back northward with his bounty mimics the Northern carpetbaggers, who came south after the Civil War to meddle in politics and exploit Southern states. 

Walker will be the keynote speaker at the Williamson County Republican Party annual Reagan Day Dinner at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday Oct. 25 at Embassy Suites in Cool Springs.

Scott Walker, Stay Home!!!

While the Rest of the World is Protesting Wall Street Corruption of Politics and the Corporate Takeover of Everything, Leave it to Our Williamson County Republicans to Do the Most Inappropriate Thing at the Worst Possible Time---Scotty Walker's Coming to Town!

Walker, Stay Home!

No politician in America symbolizes the war on the middle class and Wall Street's corruption of democracy more than Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. 

At a time when Americans at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Nashville and around the country are rising up against how corporate money and special interests dominate politics and crush "We, the people," Scotty Walker's coming to town.

Why the Wall Street Elite Are in Trouble

Monday 10 October 2011

by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed      

  

Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag.

She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.

The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them.

Declaration of Occupation: New York City

Posted on September 30, 2011 by NYCGA

This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011

Translations: French, Slovak, Spanish, German, Italian

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As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.


As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power.

We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.