This is my blog about my experience and involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement – one of the most important movements my generation has seen so far. As there is a lack of consistent, comprehensive U.S. media coverage of the movement --and many people get their news from one source -- my blog will serve as (what I hope to be) a comprehensive reading list of coverage from various sites as well as my own personal, photos, thoughts, and musings on the movement. Enjoy!
Did you hear that a barge leaked 31,500 gallons of crude oil into the Mississippi River over the weekend? When the tanker collided with a tugboat, the resulting spill caused 65 miles of the river to be shut down for two days as New Orleans Port traffic ground to a halt and drinking water intakes were closed.
Or did you hear about the radiation leak at a New Mexico nuclear waste storage site? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant stores plutonium-contaminated waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory and other government nuclear sites. The storage site has been closed since the Valentine's Day leak, but just this week, officials reported that more airborne radiation has been detected in southeastern New Mexico.
Both incidents come at a dangerous time, where American oil and energy companies are getting increasingly wide discretion and the Environmental Protection Agency has been hollowed out, losing its authority and resources to protect public safety. In Louisiana and New Mexico, officials insist there is no public health threat, but such assertions are suspicious when our government at all levels is more interested in protecting the power of the military and energy industries than the public interest.
A month after coal-processing chemicals leaked from an energy company's storage tank into West Virginia's main water supply, officials say the water is safe to drink. But residents are still wary. West Virginians report that just showering in their water causes headaches and rashes. In the staunchly anti-government, anti-EPA state, people wish there had been more government oversight and regulation to prevent the leak.
For instance, the Keystone XL pipeline. Forget the inflated claims about how many jobs the pipeline will create or even its environmental implications. Just think for a second about the fact that an existing stretch of the Keystone pipeline leaked 12 times in its first year of operation.Which should make us all incredibly skeptical of expanding domestic dirty energy projects in the United States.
Forbes energy analyst James Conca, commenting on the second pipeline spill in a week in 2013 involving Canadian crude oil, wrote, "It's crazy to think the Keystone XL pipeline won't leak." That is a terrible risk to bear for a pipeline that many experts believe will simply pump a lot of Canadian crude oil over United States soil in order to be processed and sold internationally and which will actually increase the domestic price of oil in America, according to a study by Cornell University and a report by Bloomberg news.Keystone denies that the oil will end up being exported -- despite many reports that its refined product will.
Air pollution in parts of China is now so extreme it could lead to conditions similar to a “nuclear winter,” scientists say. The smog that covers the country has become so thick it is impeding photosynthesis, potentially disrupting China’s food supply.
China’s pollution problem is reaching crisis point, with acrid smog covering six southern provinces for the past week. Over the last few days a total of 19 cities have recorded levels of pollution drastically exceeding the World Health Organization’s (WHO) safety levels.
Beijing’s concentration of micro-particles small enough to enter into people’s lungs and trigger serious health issues reached 505 micrograms per cubic meter Tuesday. The WHO’s safe level is 25 micrograms per meter.
The toxic smog is having severe consequences, with aircraft being grounded across the country because of poor visibility, roads closing and a significant reduction in tourist numbers. An associate professor at China Agricultural University, He Dongxian, told the South China Morning Post that if these conditions continued, China will experience something akin to a “nuclear winter.”
Furthermore, she said an experiment in Beijing in recent months had shown a significant slowdown in photosynthesis (the process by which plants turn light into chemical energy). According to He Dongxian’s tests, chili and tomato seeds that usually take 20 days to sprout could take over two months to grow into seedlings.
"They will be lucky to live at all. Now almost every farm is caught in a smog panic," He Dongxian said, adding that the poor seedling quality would have a severe effect on agricultural output this year.
Beijing authorities have come under fire from environmental organizations this week for failing to activate a red alert – which requires schools to close to minimize the impact of the smog on the public.
"The officials are not proactive enough. They should listen to public opinion when setting the conditions [for the alerts],” said Greenpeace campaigner Huang Wei, adding that the authorities had not met the public’s expectations.
China’s smog problem has begun to affect its neighbors overseas. On Wednesday officials in Kumamoto prefecture in southwestern Japan issued a health warning to residents after a dramatic rise in air pollution levels. Authorities advised people to stay indoors and not to exercise outside.
Ministers from China, Japan and South Korea are set to meet in May to discuss ways to mitigate the rising levels of pollution in the region. China has been criticized by its neighbors for its excessive use of coal-burning power stations.
Estimates say somewhere between 80 and 100,000 people turned out for the Moral March on Raleigh.
The “Moral March on Raleigh,” organized by Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ), marched from Shaw University to the state capitol to push back against the “immoral and unconstitutional policies” of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory during the 2013 NC General Assembly session. Since North Carolina Republicans took over both legislative chambers in 2010, legislators have eliminated a host of programs and raised taxes on the bottom 80 percent, repealed a tax credit for 900,000 working families, enforced voter suppression efforts, blocked Medicaid coverage, cut pre-Kindergarten funding, cut federal unemployment benefits, and gave itself the authority to intervene in abortion lawsuits.
Activists have gathered at weekly protests, called ‘Moral Mondays,’ in North Carolina since 2013 as a way to give voice to individuals whose rights were under attack by the Republican-controlled legislature. While there were no reported arrests in Saturday’s protest, hundreds of nonviolent protesters were arrested during last year’s Moral Monday events.
— The world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 50 percent of humanity.
— 70 percent of the world's people live in a country where income inequality has increased in the past three decades.
— In the U.S., where the gap between rich and poor has grown at a faster rate than any other developed country, the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-recession growth (since 2009), while 90 percent of Americans became poorer.
"[People] are increasingly separated by economic and political power, inevitably heightening social tensions and increasing the risk of societal breakdown," the report says.
In September, a University of California, Berkeley study found that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes grow by 31.4 percent over the period 2009 to 2012, while the other 99 percent experienced just 0.4 percent growth. Last month, the Pew Research Center published a study that found income inequality in the U.S. was at its highest since 1928, the year before the start of the Great Depression.
Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class.
I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.
Dozens of different types of 12-step support groups — including Clutterers Anonymous and On-Line Gamers Anonymous — exist to help addicts of various types, yet there is no Wealth Addicts Anonymous. Why not? Because our culture supports and even lauds the addiction. Look at the magazine covers in any newsstand, plastered with the faces of celebrities and C.E.O.'s; the superrich are our cultural gods. I hope we all confront our part in enabling wealth addicts to exert so much influence over our country.
It's so refreshing to read something that frames the discussion about wealth and income inequality in a completely new light. I believe this perspective introduces a crucial piece of understanding that has been missing from the dialogue thus far regarding possible solutions for fixing our economy. It also applies to many of the ills that beset our society such as obesity and environmental destruction. When these ills are viewed through the lens of being the symptom of an overarching spiritual malady, there is a fundamental paradigm shift from a systems perspective. Very enlightening.
"The general and very severe problem of the economy that's staring us in the face … that has nothing to do with bad apples in Congress," Chomsky said. "These are deep structural problems having to do with, in effect, the neoliberal assault on the population, not just of the United States but of the world, that's taken place in the past generation. There are areas that have escaped, but it's pretty broad." Chomsky told HuffPost that corporate interests dominate the policy agenda of the Democratic Party, and cited conservative scholar Norm Ornstein's observation that the Republican Party has "drifted off the spectrum" and no longer functions as a serious parliamentary entity. "It used to be said years ago that the United States is a one-party state -- the business party -- with two factions, Democrats and Republicans," Chomsky said. "That's no longer true. It's still a one-party state -- the business party -- but now it has only one faction. And it's not Democrats, it's moderate Republicans. The so-called New Democrats, who are the dominant force in the Democratic Party, are pretty much what used to be moderate Republicans a couple of decades ago. And the rest of the Republican Party has just drifted off the spectrum."
In Sweden, the minimum wage is $19 per hour and workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks paid vacation every year. In the U.S. the minimum wage is a tick above $7 per hour and workers can expect no more than 12 days of annual vacation. So guess what? IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. Moreover, the profits of these foreign companies goes toward stimulating their economies instead of ours.
“Robust public investment had been a key to US prosperity in the previous century. It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. Roadways and scientific research were examples. In the post–World War II years, the country invested great sums of money in its interstate highways and what were widely considered the best education systems in the world, while research in well-funded government labs led to inventions like the Internet. The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.”
Why do we Occupy? Because, damn it all, 50 years later we're still waiting for this nation to deliver on King's Dream, which was at least as much about jobs and economic justice as racial equality. We Occupy because income inequality in this country, now at an all-time high, is growing. Because a single family -- the Waltons -- controls as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of Americans, yet Walmart will not pay its workers a living wage. We Occupy to demand that this nation live up to its hype: "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..." and "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
So cool Occupy Harrisonburg has met uninterrupted for two years. Beautiful. It might not me media head line glamourous, but it's steady and strong, real, alive and well.
Great piece. Dave Pruett -- former NASA researcher; computational scientist; emeritus professor of mathematics; James Madison University; Author, 'Reason and Wonder' -- tells about his involvement in Occupy Harrisonburg for the last 2 years.
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