Occupy: Hot Chicks and The Empire Strikes Back

Politics for Joe
October 15, 2011
By: Hubert O’Hearn
For: Lake Superior News

Equally to my delight and relief, the Occupy Movement is no longer operating within a Cone of Silence. A quick Google search of ‘Occupy Together’, the catch-all name for the activities associated with the activism emerging from the original Occupy Wall Street, sprang out a pretty impressive 209,000,000 results. Indeed, it is now worldwide. A quick list of countries and/or cities with Occupations either on-going or planned:

United States of America (50+ cities)
Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, Thunder Bay)
New Zealand (Wellington, Christchurch)
Germany (Frankfurt)
Italy (Rome, Milan)
Spain (Madrid, Barcelona)
South Korea (Seoul)
Australia (Sydney, Melbourne)

… and on and on

And yes, a news result on Google peaked my curiousity. Searching ‘hot chicks of Occupy Wall Street’ displays (good grief!) 29,800,000 results!

However, just to put life in perspective: ‘hot chicks of the Tea Party’ also yields 21,600,000 results; although ‘hot chicks of the Republican Party’ only coughs up a relatively paltry 1,810,000. And just to finish this off - the Democrats have even less - 1,660,000. So the obvious lesson for males with lecherous intent is avoid your precinct caucus and grab a tent instead.

You're supposed to be looking at THE SIGN!

The point of all this (besides undoubtedly popping this column to the top of SEO searches) is that Occupy is now creating its own weather. It has momentum, growth and the single most important factor for a social movement: coolness. It’s new, it’s hot, and now it’s sexy.

Now that can be both a strength and a weakness. People who wander out to an Occupy event just to ‘see what all the shouting’s about’ yield numbers, which is good; and a lack of true believer commitment, which can be very bad. For the first time I worry about violent acts. Random thugs who sneak into an Occupation hoping to do a smash-and-grab under cover of a large crowd are now a real possibility. They are the same thugs who do the same thing when a big city team wins a major sports championship. So, I worry.

The greater worry though is what the Power, the 1% will do in response. Clearly the suffocation response has not worked. Big Media has been hauled out to cover the events. Any remaining credibility would be lost if the Occupation was ignored. Furthermore, the sniffy dismissals of, ‘they have no agenda’ have been dealt with and have turned into a boomerang. People are now bringing more agenda items: student debt, renewable energy, labour rights, etc. etc. I don’t think I’m exaggerating one bit when I say that the entire field of public policy has been put into play - it’s not just bringing back Glass-Steagall (the American banking regulations Act that has been dismantled over the past 30 years) any more.

So what has been offered up in response is...Herman Cain? It’s not that Cain has a snowball’s chance of being either President or even the Republican Presidential nominee. I’m on the record as saying if Cain is the Republican nominee, I will jump out of a cake, slowly strip to the sounds of Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’ and stick a burning sparkler between my butt cheeks - all of this at your worst enemy’s next birthday party. Trust me, you wouldn’t wish that on your friends.

But Cain is a distraction. ‘Hey! Look over here! Black guy with EZ tax plans!’ And Big Media have turned their heads in his direction.

His 9-9-9 plan is an idiot’s dream. A 9% flat tax on individual income, 9% on corporate income and a 9% sales tax. Oh please spare me. Lowering corporate taxes to 9% while raising the price of toilet paper 9% is an Idiot’s Guide to Economic Idiots.

The second response in the U.S. has been the 53% movement. Supposedly 47% of the people in the U.S. pay no income tax. This is supposed to enrage the middle class. It well should, but not for the reasons the 53% founders want. There are over 46 million people in the U.S. living in poverty. That makes a pretty good chunk of that 47%. Once again, a possible boomerang effect.

Two more parts to come in this series. Next time out, we start to look at the next step - how to build on this momentum and create real change.

Be seeing you.

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The Occupy Movement Part Two: The Armies of the Day

Politics for Joe:
The Occupy Movement, Part Two
The Armies of the Day
12 October 2011
By: Hubert O’Hearn
For: Lake Superior News


I looked something up before writing this, the second of a five part series on the Occupy Movement that was the genius idea of a group of Canadians at AdBusters, came to birth on Wall Street and now is busily reproducing in parks, city squares and financial centres in the great cities of the world. Is it a revolution? Of course it is. Now before one starts imagining scenes of guerrilla warfare and screaming widows bearing slaughtered children, I remind you that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was also a revolution and Darwin never fired a shot. So far, so peaceful, so good.

It all brings back childhood memories, of the last time thousands took to the streets and occupied buildings, city squares and the like. Not the Big Media one-time million man marches or vast prayer meetings or outdoor town halls - those are as instantaneous and instantaneously forgettable as any year’s Super Bowl. (Go ahead, name me any five plays from any individual Super Bowl. You can name one or two, but five? Exactly.) No, we’re talking about the sustained effort here - the long campaign that stretches across vast terrains of time and space, emergent from mist and ending in sunlight.

The last one of those was, dear God how time flies when we’d prefer it to walk, between 40 and 50 years ago. That long campaign was the one against the Vietnam War, which began with the distribution of the Port Huron Statement, written mostly by Tom Hayden, in New York’s Gramercy Park. (What is it with movements and New York parks anyway?) It ended with U.S. diplomats scrambling onto helicopters that landed on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.

That movement began as a student protest. Students had the most to lose in Vietnam, as they were right in the demographic sweet spot for drafting into the Army. All successful movements have to expand from their base and into other classes, ages and the professions. Which brings me to the piece of writing I looked up before starting this column.

Besides being one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th Century, Norman Mailer was an interesting character within his own life. He was a vain and violent soft-hearted liberal. Many of those adjectives don’t work easily together, and that’s exactly what made Mailer interesting. In 1967 and 1968, he wrote a series of pieces for Esquire magazine that were collected into The Armies of the Night. Mailer covered the protests, the demonstrations, the politics at the height of that movement. Brilliant stuff, as it would be when a great novelist turns his eyes and imagination to reporting.

Anyway, one evening Mailer was called upon to address a group preparing for a march on the Pentagon. Here is a portion of what he said and wrote. It ends with a naughty word. I apologize if either Mailer or I offend.

“We are gathered here” - shades of Lincoln in hippieland - “to make a move on Saturday to invest the Pentagon and halt and slow down its workings, and this will be at once a symbolic act and a real act” - he was roaring - “for real heads may possibly get hurt, and soldiers will be there to hold us back, and some of us may be arrested” - how, wondered the wise voice at the rear of this roaring voice, could one ever leave Washington now without going to jail? - “some blood conceivably will be shed. If I were the man in the government responsible for controlling this March, I would not know what to do.” Sonorously - “I would not wish to arrest too many or hurt anyone for fear the repercussions in the world would be too large for my bureaucrat’s heart to bear - it’s so full of shit.”

If the parallel lines aren’t obvious, the reader has no perspective. Perhaps the key phrase is, “I would not know what to do.” That seems to apply to both sides of the Occupy Movement. Big Media - by which I mean the New York Times, CNN’s ephemeral to the point of translucence Erin Burnett, and the major American and Canadian TV networks - spent the first two weeks since Occupy Wall Street began on September 17th telling readers and viewers that the Occupiers had “no agenda.” Then on October 5th, Keith Olbermann on Current TV’s Countdown read the first collective statement (http://current.com/shows/countdown/videos/special-comment-keith-reads-first-collective-statement-of-occupy-wall-street) of the Occupiers and there went that argument out the window.

I invite you to either listen to the statement or read the transcript on the Countdown site, but for those whose time is limited, here are the highlights:
1) corporations have taken self-interest over justice
2) the workplace has become corrupted through discrimination and outsourcing
3) the farming system has been undermined through monopolization
4) money has corrupted politics
5) economic policies have led to catastrophe
6) environmental cover-ups
7) the judiciary has been unduly influenced in granting corporations the same rights
as individuals

There is much more to it than that. Ultimately, if one were to breathe deep and pick one word to describe the entire statement, or indeed the movement as a whole, it would be Equality. Perhaps Balance might be better, but Equality has a nice legal ring to it. As pictures do speak a thousand words (and as I wrote that I realized I was close to a thousand words already), here is a map of the world showing economic balances country by country. Full credit to The Atlantic for putting this together:






What the map shows is what is known as the GINI coefficient. Put in layman’s terms, a country with a coefficient of .00 would have a perfect economic distribution: 80% of the people would control 80% of the economy, 10% would control 10% and so forth. The highest imbalance is .50. As you can see there are some countries whose imbalance is even greater that .50. Much like quarterback ratings it is possible to be more perfect (or imperfect in this case) than perfection. And so it is that certain African republics, including South Africa, have people with absolute no economic power whatsoever which takes them right off the charts, so to speak.

The U.S. is at a coefficient of .45, perilously close to that ultimate imbalance of .50. China, with absolutely no democracy and workers turning 12 hour shifts for tiny wages so that you, dear consumer, can get a nice deal on home furnishings, is at .415. Yes, Communist China is in better balance than the United States of America. As is Russia. As is Canada.

As is Canada? So what are we so upset about? Why are we planning to Occupy Toronto and other cities on October 15th? Our pale green splotch of a .30-.35 coefficient puts us in line with most of Western Europe, although not quite as green as Scandinavia. Two credible reasons:

1) We know a trend when we see one. Although Canadian banking regulations have defended us from the widespread debt crisis that set off the Wall Street bailouts, there is a strong perception that economically things are not going as well as they should. The Canadian Occupy movement is more to prepare for the future rather than repair the present.
2) The non-financial issues of the environment, justice and privacy are more likely to come to the forefront here. One hastens to mention that all of these do have economic impact and a huge impact at that, but the coefficient of issues is likely to parallel the GINI coefficient.

In any event, I have asked friends who will be at Occupy Toronto to report back to me on what is said and what is distributed. Because God knows I don’t trust our networks and newspapers to do it for me.

Part Three will be out in two days time. At that time I want to look at the “I do not know what to do”  issue from the side of the 1%. What is the specific threat to power, and how is the 1% responding? Please send me any comments you have or questions you want answered.

Be seeing you.

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Occupy Your City - Analysis and History

Politics for Joe:
October 10, 2011
By: Hubert O’Hearn


As always, I refrain from writing about politics until I actually have something to say that will be informative and if we’re both lucky, entertaining. For that reason I had no worthwhile comments to make on the provincial election just passed in Ontario. Early on I perceived it as mediocrities in a quest for complacency and nothing happened to shake me from that opinion. Enough said.

Now what is interesting is the whole Occupy Your City movement that is generating and spreading from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration that began in New York on September 17th. That is a topic a man can sink his teeth into. As the major media coverage has been sketchy and patronizing at best, it will be worth both our whiles to look deeper into the phenomenon with the ultimate question considered: What’s in it for You?

PART ONE: What’s It All About?

Background - The Bailout

First, a bit of background. In 2008/2009 the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street were in crisis: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, the insurer AIG among them. We’ll use the catch-all term Banks for ease of description. Because of the dubious mortgage and hedge fund practices invented by the Banks, consumer lending in the U.S. was drying up, foreclosures were accelerating, and the conclusion reached was that the U.S. Government needed to bail out the Banks. Primarily through loans from the Federal Reserve, the U.S. and its taxpayers are currently on the hook for $4.6 trillion.

That’s four point six trillion dollars. Trillion. When Steve Jobs died last week his estimated fortune was worth $7 billion. The bailout has added up to Steve Jobs times 6500.

The entire Canadian federal Government is estimated to spend $270 billion this year - on everything. The bailout has added up to Canada times 16.

Barack Obama’s proposed budget for 2011 that indirectly led to the stand-off over spending limits in September was $3.6 trillion. (all figures from the Congressional Budget Office) The bailout is bigger than the combined cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Medicare, Medicaid, repairs to roads, schools and bridges, agriculture subsidies, NASA, national parks etc. combined. the bailout is bigger than that.

The projected U.S. deficit for 2011 is estimated to come in at $1.8 trillion. The bailout package is 2.5 times bigger than that deficit.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. This was a bloody big bailout.

Ultimately, the bailout was a strategy. Here is a problem, let’s try something. Massive spending can work. It has won a couple of World Wars,and more scam.e peacefully paid for the Louisiana and Alaska Purchases. All those things have worked out pretty well, particularly since Sarah Palin chose to not clog the airwaves by running for President. So did the Bank bailout do what it was intended to do? Did it free up consumer credit? Did it improve the overall economic situation?

The Trail of the Money

Well, not to be judgmental or anything, but the answer has to be No. Following the trail of the money is like following the cards in a street corner Three Card Monte scam. How the U.S. got to $4.6 trillion is fascinating to observe. Initially, during the final months of the Bush administration, there was a total of $700 billion in low-interest loans to the Banks with no timeline for repayment. That was the start.

I’ll be describing to you what ‘toxic assets’ are in a moment, but for now, let’s just say that those were the money-losing assets on the books of the Banks that were eating up credit and putting the Banks in crisis. Under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008, the U.S. Government took these assets in return for the $700 billion. But what does the Federal government do with a bunch of foreclosed mortgages?

Why, it sells them back to the Banks and the families of their executives! According to the research done by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, the wives of two Morgan Stanley executives were given a $220 million loan by the Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) to buy assets that the Fed had taken from Morgan Stanley in return for its share of the bailout.

If this is arm’s length, the arms are the length of a centipede’s legs. The Fed essentially said, ‘We’ll give you money to replace the stuff that’s dragging you down and once we fix it we’ll give you money to take it back, and you won’t have to pay any of that back until you, you know, want to.’

That’s just one example. Many, many others get the bailout up to $4.6 trillion. Money chasing money.

What’s a Toxic Asset?

There were several reasons for the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the truly crucial ones was the action of the Banks in confusing Investment and Commercial lending. What’s the difference?

Commercial lending is what you probably think of when you think of a Bank. You want to buy something that someone else has - let’s say a car. Dealer has car, you want car, you need money to give to car dealer. You go to bank. Bank lends you money to give to dealer. The asset of the car is security for the loan, as is the interest rate set at a level to pay for the bank building and salaries, plus the risk of you smashing up the car and not re-paying the loan. That is commercial lending made simple.

Investment lending is when a Bank like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs underwrites a financial instrument and sells it to the public. I sense this is making your head hurt. Let me make that as simple as the commercial lending example.

You’re the car dealer. You want to expand your business which means you need LOTS of money. So you decide to offer shares in your dealership. You haven’t got a clue how to do that, so you turn to the Investment Bank. The Bank says, ‘Groovy, we think your company - about to become a corporation - is worth $1 million. We’ll give you the $1 million, chop the business up inti shares and sell them to the public. You have your million. You can expand. If the public pays more than that million when we put the stuff on sale (the Initial Public Offering or IPO), we make money. Everybody’s happy!’

All well and good, until the Commercial end and the Investment end start having sex with one another. (Yes, this is the hot part. Boom chicka wow wow) In the example of the car dealer wanting to expand, besides the Bank and the buyer/shareholder you have a third party - the car dealer. Remember what the role of the Bank is:

It assesses the value of the business
It underwrites and sells based on that value

Now, you’re a good and honest person. But if you’re selling anything from yard sale junk up to your summer home, are you going to offer it for the lowest price you think you might get or somewhere up around the high end? Don’t answer that, you don’t need to. The guy wandering up to your yard sale folding table and looking at that old ‘More Than a Feeling’ LP by Boston is thinking, ‘That’s worth $2.’ You have it marked for $5 - he walks away. The potential buyer has a sense of the value of scratchy old records. The buyer has some experiential knowledge of the value of the item being sold.

But what if you, the buyer, doesn’t know that value? Then you need an expert you trust to tell you what that value is.

Helloooooo sucker.

When the Banks, in the 1920s, started to make their own securities in the form of bonds and sold them to the public the cards really started to fly in that Three Card Monte game. Here’s a short play:

Mr. Gullible: I’d like to buy something that will make me money.
Mr. Commercial Bank: I’ll sell you this bond.
Mr. Gullible: Why should I buy that bond?
Mr. Commercial Bank: Because it’s worth a lot of money.
Mr. Gullible: Who says?
Mr. Commercial Bank: (puts on a hat saying Investment Bank) I do.
Mr. Gullible: But you’re Mr. Commercial Bank who’s selling me this.
Mr. Commercial, er, Investment Bank: No I’m not! I’m my twin brother and I am entirely objective!
Mr. Gullible: You don’t sell dead parrots by any chance do you?

Sorry for the punchline but as I’ve often said, the funnier you get the more people take you seriously.

The true metaphor is that of Fox in charge of the Chicken Coop; and I might add that a close reading of George Orwell’s Animal Farm would be beneficial in understanding the current situation. Granted, Orwell was specifically writing about the Soviet Union, but the parallel with an elite seizing power for its own uses under the guise of freedom will keep you up at night. Perhaps it is best read with a hot mug of Ovaltine at hand.

One can ignore the niceties of the Investment Bank being ‘technically’ separated from the Commercial Bank within the same financial institution. In actuality the left hand actually does know what the right hand is doing. So here are the three cards of that Monte game I’ve alluded to:

Card One: The Commercial Bank makes a loan in the form of a mortgage to a home buyer. A home realistically priced at $300,000 in terms of neighbourhood comparables is mortgaged for $400,000. The home buyer is told that the market will go up! up! up!, the rate of interest is set initially low, and as the Bank tells the buyer he can afford the mortgage, then why not? A bit of extra cash is a nice thing to have after all, so sign here.

Card Two: The Investment Bank then takes that $400,000 loan off the books of the Commercial Bank (remember, these are but two arms of the same body) and turns it and a wheelbarrow full of other loans into what are called derivatives. These are shares, for want of a better word, that can be bought and sold like stocks and bonds. But each derivative is not composed of each individual mortgage. Rather, 100, or 1000, or 10000 mortgages are sliced up and divided and stirred like muffin mix into trays of derivatives.

Card Three: A citizen looking for a retirement investment then goes to the Commercial Bank and asks for advice. The Commercial Bank says, ‘Buy this derivative!’ If the citizen happens to ask what the derivative is worth and what its growth potential is, the Commercial Bank shows that citizen the approved and researched numbers compiled by...the Investment Bank. Sign here.

A quote for you, from a book called The Hellhound of Wall Street by Michael Perino:


'Pecora asked Mitchell about the management fund – the bonus pool at the bank – and what it was designed to do. Mitchell was more than happy to explain; indeed, he seemed eager to demonstrate how clever he had been to devise it. The securities affiliate wasn't really a commercial bank, he informed Pecora, it was an investment bank and it “selected its executives men who would normally be of the type to hold partnerships in private banking and investment companies.” Those private partnerships were “extremely lucrative,” and for City Bank to compete with them it had to offer the executives of its affiliate “some share in the profits that they should make.”'









That was in 1933, and the testimony quoted was from the waning days of a lame-duck, Republican dominated Senate Committee investigating the widespread collapse of the U.S. Banking system.  The ‘Mitchell’ referred to above was Charles Mitchell, then the Chairman of what we know today as Citibank. Pecora was Ferdinand Pecora, a tough little Italian prosecutor hired by the Senate Banking Committee - again, these were Republicans in the majority - who in ten days of hearings not only exposed the Three Card Monte banking, but caused Mitchell to resign and various other Banking executives to go trotting off to prison. The securities that the Banks had created and sold to a gullible public were rotten; the executives had taken a princely cut off the top, and even under the fairly primitive regulations of that time, the whole deal was as illegal as holding up a liquor store. Those regulations were quickly tightened up as part of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt with Investment Banking to be kept separate from Commercial Banking.

And so matters stayed in balance and stability until the Reagan and Clinton Administrations started to deregulate. The names of the economic advisers might be familiar to you: Alan Greenspan (former head of the Federal Reserve which cut those juicy loan cheques), Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, and Timothy Geitner. The latter three were the guts of Barack Obama’s first economic team. The saints and sinners do not divide along party lines.

Which is why hundreds and thousands of people are camping in a park adjacent to Wall Street. They don’t trust politics any more. They don’t trust Banks any more. They want what they once had - a New Deal.

This is as good a place to sign off on Part One as any. In Part Two we will look at the actual economic situation today and at the reforms being proposed by the Occupy Your City forces.

Be seeing you.

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