NYPD forcibly evicts Occupy Wall Street, banning Press

Apparently nothing.

Did you not see my link (posted just today) about the blockade Occupy Oakland ran/is going to run? And apparently is going to happen in other harbors. OWS doesn't seem quite done yet.

I didn't, but it's Occupy Oakland; nobody is going to take them seriously, because they're the violent ones.

...and they're probably not going to stop anything — how can you stop the ships coming in? And are they hitting major hubs like Singapore or Rotterdam?

If they're hitting a Wal-Mart distribution center, that could turn some heads. They've got the Occupy Our Homes tactic that should last them all through the winter - exactly when it's most needed.

Plus, there's this whole thing I linked last page.

Start organizing to affect primaries - for both parties - and they can come back strong in the spring.

The Prospect's take on some of this...

Google "Occupy Our Homes" to learn about ´phase 2´ of this movement. "OWS" is becoming "OOH".

What hashtags are they using? #OOH is not it; #occupyourhomes seems to be accompanied by #occupyhomes and there's also a @occupyourhomes and someone else is suggesting "Occupy Foreclosed Homes"; I know I was trying #occupyforeclosures earlier but that didn't have much action.

Edit: Looks like the most "official" ones (if you can really call it that) are @OccupyOurHomes and #OccupyHomes.

edited 12th Dec '11 5:15:06 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

I did not know that this was happening, at least not en masse. I feel like I should be singing with joy, but I'm in a library, so I'll just imagine I'm singing with joy. Unfortunately, the "joyous" song that popped into my head was 'Epiphany', so I suppose that's lucky...

(If no-one could tell, I was talking about OOH.)

edited 12th Dec '11 5:55:44 PM by JHM

I think the idea behind blocking ports is not so much blocking the ships from coming out (as that would require they rent a whole damn flotilla) but to block the goods the ships bring in from leaving the warehouses and such. Block the goods going out, and the businesses and stores they're designated for can't get those items to sell.

Yeah, except I'm more inclined to agree with Oakland Mayor Jean Quan about the port being a nice source of blue-collar jobs.

@Glenn: I'm not a twitter user so this is a little above my head, but I believe the official web site is http://occupyourhomes.org/ I'ts a little confusing because the address is "your" homes but the name on the page banner says "our" homes.

and the twitter feed is: http://twitter.com/OccupyOurHomes

and the facebook page is: http://www.facebook.com/groups/269514546422585/

@JHM: Oh, go ahead and sing! They can only kick you out once.

edited 12th Dec '11 6:38:47 PM by DeMarquis

You know, I don't see the point of "blockading" anything. Especially not a port where people are just trying to earn money to live on. Trying to go after the "1%" by various means (legal action, politics, etc.) is perfectly alright, but stopping ordinary people from doing their jobs that they are being paid for seems contrary to the spirit behind the Occupy movement.

^ And it just turns more and more people off. A lot of folks will start going "why should I be sympathetic to their aims when they are going after working folks like me?" And they'd be spot on in doubting them.

Granted, this is Wal-Mart we're talking about, so...

Wal-Mart is the largest per capita employer in the country. Not exactly a shining beacon of sticking it to the so called 1% by going after the thousands of workers employed by the company.

There is a subtle but important difference between a company and its workers. Each may be harmed or helped separately by different actions.

I've just come to a realization:

Banks and lenders wrote subprime mortgages they fully expected to fail in part because, since they expected home prices would continue rising, when the homeowners would no longer be able to pay their mortgage payments, they could profit from foreclosing on the homes.

Can anyone confirm or refute this?

edited 12th Dec '11 7:10:09 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Not exactly. But in fact it was worse than that- they made these loans not caring whether they would get paid back or not because the bundled them in such a way that no one could tell how risky any of them were, and then sold them to other bankers as AAA investments.

Wal Mart exploits the fuck out of its employees, so I'm not exactly crying tears over any cuts to their profits. I am iffy on the effects on blockading ports, though. Presumably the people that show up for work on the days these blockades would still get paid for their time, though.

In the subprime mortgage crisis, the problem was that there was a system that rewarded risky behaviour. I'll go a bit deeper.

• Because of the mechanism that I'm going to explain here, banks knew that they could give huge numbers of "subprime" loans and would end up winning even if the debtors failed to pay.

• House prices were on the rise.

• So banks began a practice that was later dubbed "predatory lending," which means that you offer people loans (in this case, mortgages) that are very hard to resist: you say they'll almost certainly be able to pay it back and make a profit (because the price of the house they're buying is gonna go up,) and you offer a low interest rate and basically call your clients and offer them benefits for taking a mortgage and participating in the housing bubble.

• This resulted in a huge expansion of the housing bubble, as people started taking out these practically free (or so it seemed) mortgages that their banks were telling them to take out and buying more and more houses.

• So, how did the banks plan to make money on this? Well, if you take hundreds or thousands of loans like mortgages or government bonds, you can group them together to create a "Collateralised Debt Obligation," or "CDO." They are then bought and sold like a single loan on the market.

• A credit rating agency is a corporation that employs masses of economists whose job it is to look at any item on the market or any financial institution that they're paid to rate, and give it a rating according to its ability to pay its installments and dividends and any other payments it's supposed to be making.

• The problem with credit rating agencies is that they're paid by the customer who usually wants a good rating. So there's an incentive to give good ratings at the expense of your reputation as a reliable credit rating agency because if you do your job well, you get fewer customers.

• Rating a CDO is very difficult because of the large number of different types of loans. So what happened was that credit ratings agencies basically started printing out triple-A ratings to every CDO that they were asked to look at.

• Now, the bank has a huge pile of what people who had looked at them called "junk bonds;" debt obligations grouped into CDOs that were unlikely to ever pay out but that had been given optimal ratings by the rating agencies. It's time to sell.

• At this point, banks started contacting investors to sell their products (the CDOs) which the investors obviously wanted because with a triple-A rating, anything is supposed to be a safe investment. So the CDOs sold very well, encouraging the banks to give out more junk loans and make junk CDOs out of them to sell on after getting them a positive rating. As you can see, at this point there was a bubble on debt obligations!

• This isn't the worst of it, though. Enter something called the Credit Default Swap (CDS.) If there's an item on the market, you can buy an insurance against it. An insurance agency sells you a cheap insurance that mandates the agency to pay you a compensation if the item you insured against fails to pay its dues. The weird thing about these is, you don't have to be the one who own the item against which you're buying insurance (CDS.)

• So the banks have loads and loads of junk CDOs that are based on junk loans that they know are going to fail, get credit rating agencies to give them positive ratings, and then they sell them to their clients as top investments, sure to pay out because if they weren't safe, how could there be a triple-A rating on it? When the client's done buying your junk CDOs, you go to an insurance agency and buy a CDS against the very same CDO you just sold.

• When the housing bubble eventually burst, investors who held the CDOs, who were going to be paid if the mortgages did work out, lost their investment. Then the banks went to the insurance agencies to claim their CDS, of which there were by then so many that insurance agencies started to fall, as did the banks that failed to participate in this carefully crafted, planned downward spiral.

So the banks that planned the crisis stood everything to gain from the fall of the housing bubble.

@Major Tom,

Yeah, largest employer per capita, and with all shit useless jobs that don't pay worth a damn.

What an achievement.

Workers will get overtime in making up for the schedule loss the blockade will cause. I'm horrified.

Welp. Time to call it quits. Republicans and Big Business won.

According to the Cafferty File, more people are concerned about big government, and less people are concerned about big business, even from Democrats.

http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/13/what-do-you-fear-most-big-government-big-business-or-big-labor

I guess anti-government is so deeply rooted in our society that nothing can be done to show people that business is the one controlling the strings.

edited 13th Dec '11 2:24:20 PM by Thorn14

I would say "time to let it germinate." The issues have entered the public mind/dominion and have seriously effected what words/stratagies the politicians use for their campaining. I will have to see what happens as the non-presidential races get closer (who runs for office, how they try to get their messages accross, how the opponits respond, how the public responds, etc.) before I say that big buisnesses have "won."

In fact, I actualy expect to hear news stories about "mic checks" occuring in more stockholder meetings and political ralies that include (or are folowed by) brief descriptions on the Occupy movement. Thus keeping the issues that the Occupy movement focused on in peoples minds.

EDIT: I just read that article. There is one major problem with it: It asks us to chose between "big government" and "big buisnesses." That is a problem because it completely ignores the possibility that someone would answer "both" or "big _________ with big _________ a close second." Someone could think that our government is is overextended and doing things wrong (the wars, just throwing money at problems without fixing them, etc.) but still think that there needs to be stronger controlls on buisnesses and/or protections for consumers and employees.

edited 13th Dec '11 2:45:38 PM by Belian