Alternative energy; 9,000 pigs plus a high-tech waste digester equals methane

By Bruce Henderson | The Charlotte Observer

YADKINVILLE, N.C. — The old saw about using every part of a pig but the squeal now includes its droppings, which are producing electricity on a Yadkin County farm.

Duke University is a partner with Duke Energy and Google in testing a system that captures methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from manure. The gas fuels a small power plant that makes enough energy to run the waste-processing system and part of the farm itself.

The Military Spending Fairy

by Dean Baker

 

Faced with the prospect of cuts to the Defense Department's budget, the defense industry is pushing the story of the military spending fairy on members of Congress. They are telling them that these cuts will lead to the loss of more than 1 million jobs over the next decade.

Believers in the military spending fairy say things like "the government can't create jobs," but also think that military spending creates jobs. Under the military spending fairy story, if the government spends $1 billion dollars paying people to do research or to build items related to the civilian economy it is just a drag on the private economy; however if the same spending goes to military related purposes, then it creates jobs.

Paul Krugman: The Path Not Taken

REYKJAVIK, Iceland

Financial markets are cheering the deal that emerged from Brussels early Thursday morning. Indeed, relative to what could have happened — an acrimonious failure to agree on anything — the fact that European leaders agreed on something, however vague the details and however inadequate it may prove, is a positive development.

But it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger picture, namely the abject failure of an economic doctrine — a doctrine that has inflicted huge damage both in Europe and in the United States.

The doctrine in question amounts to the assertion that, in the aftermath of a financial crisis, banks must be bailed out but the general public must pay the price. So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right; a time of mass unemployment, instead of spurring public efforts to create jobs, becomes an era of austerity, in which government spending and social programs are slashed.

Childhood poverty leaves its mark on adult genetics

16:30 26 October 2011 by Andy Coghlan

Genes can be reset during early life in profoundly different ways depending on whether children grow up in privileged or deprived households, a landmark study has shown.

 Although children in rich and poor households have very similar sets of genes, the scale of adversity at home dictates which combinations of those genes are switched on or silenced through a process called epigenesis – presumably to maximise the chance of survival.

Why the SEC Won’t Hunt Big Dogs

by Jesse Eisinger
ProPublica, Oct. 26, 2011, 12:56 p.m.

Back when the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was doing its work, I would check in periodically with someone who worked there to find out how it was going.

"Good news!" my source would joke. "We got the guy who caused it."

Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed


By Robert Scheer

It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather 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 is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.

Running Low on Scare Tactics, Fox News Tries to Tie Occupy Movement to ACORN

About a year ago, there was an unintentionally amusing survey from Public Policy Polling that found 23% of Republicans nationwide feared ACORN may help Democrats steal the election.

ACORN, of course, permanently closed its doors in March 2010, six months before the poll was taken. Groups can’t steal elections if they don’t exist.

Here we are now, more than a year and a half later, and ACORN is but a memory. But Fox News would have its audience believe the non-existent group is still up to no good. Today’s Fox News headline reads: “EXCLUSIVE: ACORN Playing Behind Scenes Role in ‘Occupy’ Movement.”

Why Conservatives Need to Stop Whining About Robert Bork

By Scott Lemieux, AlterNet
Posted on October 25, 2011, Printed on October 27, 2011

One of the great triumphs of Republican propaganda has been to turn the word “Bork” into a verb. The defeat of Robert H. Bork’s Supreme Court nomination in 1987 has come to stand for unfair attacks and political obstructionism. Joe Nocera’s recent New York Times column is the latest example of Bork being turned into a martyr who explains and perhaps justifies many dysfunctional aspects of American politics. The failure of the Bork nomination, Nocera asserts, was “obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.“ This Republican rhetorical triumph is particularly impressive because the claims about Bork are utter nonsense. The defeat of Bork was based on legitimate reasons, was not unprecedented, and was done the right way.

Senate obstructionism is a legitimate problem – the fact that it is difficult to get not only federal judges confirmed is a real problem for American government. But the claim that the defeat of Bork was “obstructionist” is transparently wrong. The Democratic majority scheduled Bork’s confirmation hearings in a timely manner and allowed an up-or-down vote. Bork was not (unlike LBJ’s Supreme Court nominee Abe Fortas) filibustered or left in limbo -- he was defeated fair and square by a bipartisan 58-42 vote in the Senate after getting only 5 out of 16 votes from the Senate Judiciary Committee. The charge of obstructionism also implies that the Democrats were unwilling to confirm anyone, but the more moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy was subsequently confirmed by the Senate by the razor-thin margin of 97-0.

Wall Street Isn't Winning – It's Cheating

I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he'd heard on the news.

"I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO," he said. "I think that's funny."

"Okay, I'll bite," I said. "Why is that funny?"

Nightmare scenario: U.S. deflation risks rising
By Jason Lange | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Risks are rising that a moribund job market and potentially steep drop in inflation could push the United States into a downward spiral of falling wages and prices.

That nightmare scenario of deflation might seem remote considering a recent rebound in growth, and the Federal Reserve would almost certainly try to head it off, probably well before prices started to fall.

But some investors and economists say the risk is real.

Paul Krugman: China's Policies Do Matter

Tuesday 25 October 2011

I thought I should offer a brief note about one of the arguments people make against the government’s focusing on Chinese currency manipulation — namely, the claim that China doesn’t really compete head to head with American manufacturing, so that a rise in the renminbi wouldn’t help.

I’d argue that this is wrong on three levels.

Immunity and Impunity in Elite America: How the Legal System Was Deep-Sixed and Occupy Wall Street Swept the Land

by Glenn Greenwald

As intense protests spawned by Occupy Wall Street continue to grow, it is worth asking: Why now? The answer is not obvious. After all, severe income and wealth inequality have long plagued the United States. In fact, it could reasonably be claimed that this form of inequality is part of the design of the American founding -- indeed, an integral part of it.

Income inequality has worsened over the past several years and is at its highest level since the Great Depression.  This is not, however, a new trend. Income inequality has been growing at rapid rates for three decades.  As journalist Tim Noah described the process:

“During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growth -- the ‘seven fat years’ and the ‘long boom.’ Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1%. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20%. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.”

The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated the trend, but not radically: the top 1% of earners in America have been feeding ever more greedily at the trough for decades.

Surprise on Refi Revamp: Key Regulator Agrees to Major Program Reforms

by Paul Kiel
ProPublica, Oct. 24, 2011, 6:51 p.m.

Last month, we noted that the Obama administration's push to allow more underwater homeowners to refinance faced a major barrier: the regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Federal Housing Finance Agency chief Edward DeMarco had blocked earlier efforts to help underwater homeowners.

But this morning, the administration announced major changes to its refinancing program -- changes beyond what analysts were expecting.

What Would Keynes Do? More Stimulus, More Monetary Policy

Monday, 10/24/2011 - 11:29 am by Mike Konczal

Keynes’s advice to FDR still holds overwhelmingly true for combatting our own crisis.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum has put scans up of several important documents that highlight FDR’s transition from trying to balancing the budget in the Great Depression to, after the crash of 1937, his ability to see that Keynesian deficit spending could help the recovery. The page that has the resources, plus a history, is located here: FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian.

It includes several campaign speeches by Roosevelt as they evolved over the 1930s, and it also includes John Maynard Keynes’s 1938 private letter to President Roosevelt. The Keynes letter is great. He is a model of clarity, wit, and seriousness with a towering intellect on all matters economic.

Secretive Religious Right Group's Electoral Plans for 2012

Frederick Clarkson
Sun Oct 23, 2011 at 12:10:15 AM EST

It may turn out that a non-profit agency funded by conservative Christian Silicon Valley money men called United in Purpose may be the most important Religious Right entity in the 2012 election cycle.  
Here is a primer on what we've learned so far.
First there was Rick Perry's giant prayer rally, The Response, organized by Texas operatives who are leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation. (An international network of dominionist evangelicals.)  This Christians Only event drew some 20,000 people -- unprecedented in the history of American presidential politics.

Then The Los Angeles Times reported that Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Foundation sent an email to people who had registered to attend The Response, promoting a project of United in Purpose.

Kansas Missing Key Files in Abortion Case

—By Kate Sheppard | Tue Oct. 25, 2011 4:00 AM PDT

Earlier this month, a disciplinary board in Kansas voted to suspend former Attorney General Phill Kline's license to practice law in the state indefinitely after he repeatedly violated the rules of conduct in his investigations of abortion providers. Despite that, Planned Parenthood of Kansas  and Mid-Missouri is still stuck in court fighting criminal allegations that Kline raised against the clinic back in 2007.

The case before the judge accuses doctors at Comprehensive Health, the Planned Parenthood office in Overland Park, of not properly determining the gestational age of fetuses before performing an abortion, and therefore carrying out illegal late-term abortions. The prosecution has accused Planned Parenthood of not keeping proper records, and of covering that up by creating fake records.

It Wasn’t Always This Way: America’s 99 Percent Used To Have A Much Greater Share Of The Nation’s Riches

The 99 Percent Movement was born out of the fact that the country has grown incredibly unequal and millions of Americans are struggling to get by. The richest 1 percent of the country now owns more than 40 percent of the wealth and takes home nearly a quarter of national income.

The common retort to this by the defenders of the economic status quo is that these disparities are a natural result of capitalism, and that those who complain about them are fundamentally against markets. Indeed, when the protests on Wall Street began, much of the media instantly referred to demonstrators as “anti-capitalist.”

CHART OF THE DAY: Repealing ObamaCare Would Be Disastrous For The Budget

Brian Beutler, October 24, 2011, 2:37 PM 

The Government Accountability Office has updated its fiscal outlook for the U.S. government and come to some familiar conclusions. The country has a long term imbalance that will have to be addressed, but not until today’s economic woes have passed. If Congress simply does nothing — and allows the Bush tax cuts, and other temporary laws to expire — the country’s fiscal health will improve significantly over the long term.

But the report implies something that’s been lost in the recent partisan debate over the country’s future: repealing ObamaCare would consign us to swift, ugly fiscal and health care crises.

Frank Rich: The Class War Has Begun

And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over—alone, in groups, with families—until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army—for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre–New Deal entitlement—especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist “Radio Priest” who became a phenomenon for railing against “greedy bankers and financiers,” framed Washington’s double standard this way: “If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?”

Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau: The Myth of Greek Profligacy & the Faith Based Economics of the ‘Troika’

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, and Rob Parenteau, CFA, sole proprietor of MacroStrategy Edge and a research associate of The Levy Economics Institute

Historically, Greeks have been very good at constructing myths. The rest of the world? Not so great, if the current burst of commentary on the country is anything to go by. Reading the press, one gets the impression of a bunch of lazy Mediterranean scroungers, enjoying one of the highest standards of living in Europe while making the frugal Germans pick up the tab. This is a nonsensical propaganda. As if Greece is the only country ever to cook its books in the European Union! Rather, the heart of the problem is in the antiquated revenue system that supports that state, which results in a budget shortfall consistently about 10% of GDP. The top 20% of the income distribution in Greece pay virtually no taxes at all, the product of a corrupt bargain reached during the days of the junta between the military and Greece’s wealthiest plutocrats. No wonder there is a fiscal crisis!

So it’s not a problem of Greek profligates, or an overly generous welfare state, both of which suggest that the standard IMF style remedies being proposed here are bound to fail, as they are doing right now. In fact, given the non-stop austerity being imposed on Athens (which simply has the effect of deflating the economy further and thereby reducing the ability of the Greeks to hit the fiscal targets imposed on them), the Greeks really are getting close to the point where they may well default and shift the problem back to those imposing the austerity. This surely can’t be much worse than the slow execution they are facing today.

Jean-Claude Trichet's dire tenure at the ECB

The retiring head of the European Central Bank presided over disaster: fixated on 2% inflation, he missed the housing bubble

Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 October 2011 10.30 EDT
Jean-Claude Trichet will be retiring as head of the European Central Bank at the end of October. He will step into retirement having wreaked the sort of destruction on the European economy that hostile powers could only dream about. Tens of millions of people across the eurozone countries are unemployed or underemployed because of his mismanagement of Europe's economy.

Meanwhile, the world teeters on the brink of another financial crisis because of the failure of the ECB, along with the IMF, to effectively address the sovereign debt crisis. Most incredible of all, Trichet probably thinks he has done a good job.

Platinum Citizenship

Posted: 10/17/11 11:39 AM ET

About a decade ago, I read an article in The Onion, "U.S. Offers PlatinumPlus Preferred Citizenship". Apparently, Tim Geithner did too, because from 2007-2011, this is the policy framework that he designed and executed, first as President of the New York Federal Reserve, and then as Treasury Secretary. Now, unequal democracy is not a new story, in many ways it's systemic and goes back hundreds of years. But what we're going to see in part this week is how Geithner deserves special recognition as sort of this decade's champion of making this system more explicit and entrenched.

What we're going to see this week, when the Government Accountability Office releases a more detailed version of an audit of the Federal Reserve's actions during that period, is more details on how this system worked. So let me give you some context on what the Fed bailouts meant, the details to match the persuasive message of the protesters in Zuccotti Park and around the world.

Wealthy corporations with a trillion dollars stashed offshore lobby for a 'holiday' from U.S. taxes

Rich corporations with money offshore want a tax holiday; Sen. Carl Levin says, 'I want them to pay their taxes like the rest of us'

By John Aloysius Farrell and Aaron Mehta
6:00 am, October 24, 2011, Updated: 6:24 am, October 24, 2011

Goaded by battalions of corporate lobbyists, members of Congress are working to give a select group of U.S. multinational firms like Apple, Oracle and Pfizer a lavish tax break on a trillion dollars stashed offshore.


The avowed goal is to generate jobs and investment, but the offshore tax holiday was tried before, in 2004, and the lion’s share of the benefits went not to unemployed workers and their families, but to corporate shareholders and executives.

Paul Krugman: The Hole in Europe's Bucket

If it weren’t so tragic, the current European crisis would be funny, in a gallows-humor sort of way. For as one rescue plan after another falls flat, Europe’s Very Serious People — who are, if such a thing is possible, even more pompous and self-regarding than their American counterparts — just keep looking more and more ridiculous.

I’ll get to the tragedy in a minute. First, let’s talk about the pratfalls, which have lately had me humming the old children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket.”

For those not familiar with the song, it concerns a lazy farmer who complains about said hole and is told by his wife to fix it. Each action she suggests, however, turns out to require a prior action, and, eventually, she tells him to draw some water from the well. “But there’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”

What does this have to do with Europe? Well, at this point, Greece, where the crisis began, is no more than a grim sideshow. The clear and present danger comes instead from a sort of bank run on Italy, the euro area’s third-largest economy. Investors, fearing a possible default, are demanding high interest rates on Italian debt. And these high interest rates, by raising the burden of debt service, make default more likely.

CHART: How Income Inequality Skyrocketed And The 1 Percent Profited From The Decline Of Unions
By Zaid Jilani on Oct 21, 2011 at 11:30 am

This evening, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) will give a speech at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business about how to address income inequality, likely trying to capitalize on the 99 Percent Movement he once derided as unruly “mobs.” Although exactly what policies Cantor will suggest to deal with this social problem are unknown, it’s unlikely that he will touch on one of the chief drivers of American income inequality: the decline of unions. (UPDATE: Cantor canceled his speech after learning it would be open to the public.)

The 1%'s Own Terror Gives the Game Away
I had a weird revelation the other day:  the ultimate success or failure of the Occupy Wall Street Movement will not be determined by the protesters themselves, but by the 1% and all of their political and media enablers.

But believe it or not, the 1% do feel . . . well, probably not guilt . . . but at least a vague and deeply disturbing apprehension that they may have to pay for what they’ve done in their sociopathy.  And it is this that will help ensure the Occupy Movement’s continuing success.

Recovery before Reform

Sunday 23 October 2011

by: Robert Skidelsky, Project Syndicate | Op-Ed 

 

The financial crisis that started in 2007 shrunk the world economy by 6% in two years, doubling unemployment. Its proximate cause was predatory bank lending, so people are naturally angry and want heads and bonuses to roll – a sentiment captured by the current worldwide protests against “Wall Street.”

The banks, however, are not just part of the problem, but an essential part of the solution. The same institutions that caused the crisis must help to solve it, by starting to lend again. With global demand flagging, the priority has to be recovery, without abandoning the goal of reform – a difficult line to tread politically.

Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters In Tax-Funded Center

Sunday 23 October 2011

by: Pam Martens, CounterPunch | Report 

 

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.”

Occupy: protesters in their own words

London became part of the global Occupy movement when protesters set up camp at St Paul's. From Frankfurt to Madrid, Wall Street to Athens, people are taking to the streets to rage against greed and inequality. Who are the demonstrators and what do they hope to achieve?

• Diego Salazar in Madrid, Hermione Hoby in New York, Helena Smith in Athens, Morwenna Ferrier in London, Helen Pidd in Frankfurt, Tom Kington in Rome
• The Observer, Saturday 22 October 2011

Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue

by Barbara Ehrenreich

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee?

Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join the revolution in diapers.

New Paper Examines Argentina’s Economic Success

“Argentina has had the fastest growth in the Western Hemisphere over the past nine years, and among the highest growth rates in world.”

WASHINGTON - October 21 - As Argentines prepare to go to the polls this weekend in new presidential elections, a new paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) finds that the Argentine economy and social indicators have done remarkably well since the country defaulted on its debt almost nine years ago. The paper notes that Argentina’s dramatic recovery from its severe 1998-2002 recession has significant policy implications for other countries, most notably Greece and some of the other weaker eurozone economies burdened by unsustainable debt.

“Since its recovery began, shortly after its debt default in 2002, Argentina has had the fastest growth in the Western Hemisphere over the past nine years, and among the highest real growth rates in the world,” CEPR Co-Director, and lead author of the paper, Mark Weisbrot noted. For the years 2002-2011, including the IMF projections for the end of this year, Argentina’s real GDP has grown by 94 percent.

Global economic fate hinges on European finance talks

By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The fate of the global economy, European unity — and the 401(k) savings of ordinary Americans — all hang in the balance as Europe's leaders meet over the weekend to try to resolve a burgeoning debt crisis that threatens to spread globally.

The leaders are expected to decide at their European Union summit by next Wednesday whether and how to expand the controversial bailout fund they created earlier this year. They also must decide how to add extra cash to their faltering banks — in need of somewhere between $100 billion and $300 billion — in order to prevent collapses or runs by nervous depositors.

Falling for New Neocon Propaganda

October 22, 2011

Exclusive: One not-so-funny fact about Washington is that nearly all the news media stars who fell for neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq are still around to fall for new ones on Iran, even some like Richard Cohen who briefly regretted his earlier gullibility, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.

By Ray McGovern

Paul R. Pillar, my former colleague in the CIA’s analytical division, has raised a warning flag, cautioning that the same imaginative neocon composers who came up with the various refrains on why we needed to attack Iraq are now providing similar background music for a strike on Iran.

He is right. And as one of my Russian professors used to say, “This is nothing to laugh!”

Pillar’s piece – dissecting an op-ed by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen about the alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington – first appeared on The National Interest Web site. On Oct. 21, it was posted at Consortiumnews.com under the title “Sloppy Iran Think by WPost’s Cohen.”

Meet the CEO Behind the Attack on “Privileged” Public Employees

By Ruth Conniff, October 18, 2011

"Government workers are the new privileged class," James E. MacDougald, the founder of Free Enterprise Nation, told the Washington Post recently.

MacDougald, the Post explains, is a retired CEO who now heads Free Enterprise Nation, which the paper describes as a "research and activist group" which he founded "to call attention to the financial burden posed by government workers."

Actually, Free Enterprise Nation, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, is an "activist" group in the same sense that the Washington office of Dick Armey's FreedomWorks runs "activist" campaigns.

Occupy Wall Street: Washington Still Doesn't Get It

POSTED: October 21, 8:25 AM ET 

I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of.

The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become.

Four Things Occupy Wall Street Should Know About the Federal Reserve

By Jake Blumgart, AlterNet
Posted on October 20, 2011, Printed on October 23, 2011

The Federal Reserve is ripe for critique. In fact, the Federal Reserve is a system in desperate need of reform. Occupy Wall Street seems perfectly positioned to apply the pressure needed to mend this hugely important, but little understood institution. Unfortunately, the movement is home to a more reactionary strain of monetary policy analysis too.

In Philadelphia, the first edition of the Occupy Philadelphia Inquirer had “End The Fed, End The Wars” displayed prominently on its front page (“Forget Wall St. as a whole...End the Fed....End the economic slavery”). Several similarly exasperating videos posted to the Facebook page were met with approving comments, while the Occupy Philly website was briefly dominated by a Federal Reserve-bashing activist.

Many people involved with Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs would denounce such posturing, and rightly so. This variety of fed-bashing is espoused by Ron Paul, a Republican candidate for president who wants to “Abolish the Welfare State,” repeal Roe v. Wade, scrap the EPA, and end most forms of taxation. Most importantly, eliminating the Federal Reserve, adopting the gold standard and having a tight monetary policy are directly opposed to the occupiers’ key goals: reducing unemployment, easing debt and stemming the foreclosure flood.