News & Views

Author Barbara Ehrenreich accused Barack Obama and the Democratic establishment of betraying the Occupy movement on Tuesday by failing to stop the evictions from Zuccotti Park.

Suddenly the Occupy movement is under siege everywhere. There's been a wave of simultaneous, seemingly coordinated clampdowns on peaceful demonstrators in cities all across the country. Why now?

Last night, I watched lower Manhattan turn into a militarized lockdown. The park known as Liberty Square was apparently cleared by force, though I arrived 20 minutes after the police barricades encircled a two-block radius, kicked out all media and prevented all foot traffic on public sidewalks surrounding the park.

There is no three-strikes law for crooked bankers, not even a law for a fifth strike, as The New York Times reported in the case of Citigroup, cited last month in a id="mce_marker" billion fraud case. Unlike the California third-striker I once wrote about whom a district attorney wanted banished forever to state prison for stealing a piece of pizza from the plate of a person dining outdoors, Citigroup executives get off with a fine and by offering a promise not to do it again, and again and again.

Over a quarter century ago, in 1984, the Washington, D.C.-based Citizens for Tax Justice released its first in-depth report on how much America's top profitable corporations were actually paying in taxes.

“I have great respect for each of you individually, but collectively I’m worried you’re going to fail — fail the country,”former White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, a co-chairman of President Obama’s fiscal commission, sternly told the congressional supercommittee last week. Elite pressure is building on the committee to reach for a “grand bargain” to cut trillions out of the budget deficits over the next 10 years. Last week 100 House members, including 40 Republicans, dispatched a letter urging “a big, grand bargain" with “all options”–code for tax hikes–“on the table.”

OAKLAND -- Occupy demonstrators turned their ire on big banks Wednesday by marching, blocking traffic and chanting -- and in some cases, defacing ATMs and pounding on doors at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase and Citibank branches around downtown.

Thousands of workers are expected to support the 'Occupy Oakland' movement with an attempt to shut down the city

Incredible footage emerged from downtown Oakland last night - not of basic law enforcement efforts to maintain public "health and safety" as the police have been claiming - but of a war zone in which police shot tear gas, bean bags, wooden dowels, flash grenades, and rubber bullets at protesters.

Here are some other big beneficiaries of government debt ... Wall Street financial institutions, transnational investment banks and members of the Federal Reserve System who derive billions of dollars in interest payments provided by American taxpayers. Where did sixteen trillion dollars in taxpayer loans come from to bail out corporations and domestic and foreign banks that crashed the global economy with their mortgage derivatives casino? That credit was generated by the Federal Reserve whose member banks created the crisis. Their liabilities were transferred to taxpayers and bailout funds were used to increase their monopolies. The US Treasury is their ATM and we, the taxpayers, supply the cash.