#Occupy Key West?

I've come back to Key West after having spent the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in NYC, with friends and strangers and a lot of folks taking a break from the smarmy cynicism that poisons too much conversation.  There  is such beauty in mourning and we mustn't ever let anyone tell us to "move on."  Yes, being dysfunctional is not good but as long as one is still participating in the real world, who is to say what is dysfunctional?  I love New York.  I will always be a New Yorker and completely understand when people are proud of their hometowns.  Nowadays, there seems to be more to be proud about, since communities all over America, Canada, Europe and many places without media to cover them, even the Tundra are participating in Occupy Together on October 15!

Living in Paradise has a surprising set of difficulties unique to organizing an event in this place.  Very few people have one job, and many jobs are for the tourists, meaning the ability to have a demonstration might be easier if this was a factory town or a college town. But we're a tourist town and holidays and weekends are prime time to make money.

In spite of that, this Saturday, October 22 a group of leaderless people will hold an Occupy Key West event at Mallory Square,  beginning with an open mike and ending with a march, location yet to be determined.

This Occupation is sponsored by those of us Key West citizens who have had enough of the lies, the obscuration, the degeneracy of any true faith that justice is equal for all the people. We CAN'T BELIEVE that justice is blind in a Bubba land.

We, the 99% want the Occupation of OUR OWN institutions, built and paid for  by We, the People!

We want jobs that have nothing to do with patronage.

We want to stop the outright scandalous behavior that becomes acceptable once you have achieved a certain status. When you look at the patronage and interconnecting favors and debts which weave a very complicated pattern between certain tribes in the Paradise known as Key West, well, it could, rather should give you pause.  Perhaps it's more useful to let the more ambitious ones slug it out and just pick up the pieces of what's left.  Sounds like a wrecker way of doing things!  Then you can put some time into assessing which tribe to join.  The facts are that this island has always been occupied!

When you finally get your mind set on a particular set of strategies to accomplish the goal you have already decided on, the next step is get it together.

I will present myself to tout le monde on Duval Street astride my faithful, never complaining tricycle, Jezebel, who will be all tricked out with signs which will let  people know that Saturday night at 5:00 something very special is going to happen on Mallory Square.

We, the 99% will reclaim our public square, our public streets and the lovely little parks which appear like out of a dream.  We will pass around a megaphone or mike or use the human megaphone to proclaim the right to gather to peacefully petition our government for a redress of grievances, to be determined by the General Assembly which will beheld just prior to the march.

We will inform our neighbors, new friends and old friends that our lives are facing irreversible changes not because of our poor choices or lifestyles but because the ones who hold all the power are capable of doing whatever they want or serves their purpose which is ultimate power. FACE IT. We don't matter any more to them with their electronic heartbeats and bunkers where you can ride horseback.

The time has come for all of us to know where we stand.  Howard Zinn said you can't stand still on a moving bus. We must acknowledge change is inevitable and adapt.  Hopefully, the ruling class will recognize this as well.  I'm heartened by the growth of the web site by those in the 1% who side with we, the 99%.  You can see their posters here: http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com/

Change is coming, for all of us.  Let's try to handle it gracefully.
For more on Occupy Together and to find events near you, go to: 
http://www.occupytogether.org/

10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Alternet [http://www.alternet.org/] is covering this story from a watchdog group which is "new" to me, Multinational Monitor. To read the full story click on the link at the end:
The System Implodes:

The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008
by Robert Weissman
2008 marks the 20th anniversary of Multinational Monitor’s annual list of the 10 Worst Corporations of the year.
In the 20 years that we’ve published our annual list, we’ve covered corporate villains, scoundrels, criminals and miscreants. We’ve reported on some really bad stuff — from Exxon’s Valdez spill to Union Carbide and Dow’s effort to avoid responsibility for the Bhopal disaster; from oil companies coddling dictators (including Chevron and CNPC, both profiled this year) to a bank (Riggs) providing financial services for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; from oil and auto companies threatening the future of the planet by blocking efforts to address climate change to duplicitous tobacco companies marketing cigarettes around the world by associating their product with images of freedom, sports, youthful energy and good health.
But we’ve never had a year like 2008.
The financial crisis first gripping Wall Street and now spreading rapidly throughout the world is, in many ways, emblematic of the worst of the corporate-dominated political and economic system that we aim to expose with our annual 10 Worst list. Here is how.
Improper political influence: Corporations dominate the policy-making process, from city councils to global institutions like the World Trade Organization. Over the last 30 years, and especially in the last decade, Wall Street interests leveraged their political power to remove many of the regulations that had restricted their activities. There are at least a dozen separate and significant examples of this, including the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which permitted the merger of banks and investment banks. In a form of corporate civil disobedience, Citibank and Travelers Group merged in 1998 — a move that was illegal at the time, but for which they were given a two-year forbearance — on the assumption that they would be able to force a change in the relevant law. They did, with the help of just-retired (at the time) Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who went on to an executive position at the newly created Citigroup.
Deregulation and non-enforcement: Non-enforcement of rules against predatory lending helped the housing bubble balloon. While some regulators had sought to exert authority over financial derivatives, they were stopped by finance-friendly figures in the Clinton administration and Congress — enabling the creation of the credit default swap market. Even Alan Greenspan concedes that that market — worth $55 trillion in what is called notional value — is imploding in significant part because it was not regulated.
Short-term thinking: It was obvious to anyone who cared to look at historical trends that the United States was experiencing a housing bubble. Many in the financial sector seemed to have convinced themselves that there was no bubble. But others must have been more clear-eyed. In any case, all the Wall Street players had an incentive not to pay attention to the bubble. They were making stratospheric annual bonuses based on annual results. Even if they were certain the bubble would pop sometime in the future, they had every incentive to keep making money on the upside.
Financialization: Profits in the financial sector were more than 35 percent of overall U.S. corporate profits in each year from 2005 to 2007, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Instead of serving the real economy, the financial sector was taking over the real economy.
Profit over social use: Relatedly, the corporate-driven economy was being driven by what could make a profit, rather than what would serve a social purpose. Although Wall Street hucksters offered elaborate rationalizations for why exotic financial derivatives, private equity takeovers of firms, securitization and other so-called financial innovations helped improve economic efficiency, by and large these financial schemes served no socially useful purpose.
Externalized costs: Worse, the financial schemes didn’t just create money for Wall Street movers and shakers and their investors. They made money at the expense of others. The costs of these schemes were foisted onto workers who lost jobs at firms gutted by private equity operators, unpayable loans acquired by homeowners who bought into a bubble market (often made worse by unconscionable lending terms), and now the public.
What is most revealing about the financial meltdown and economic crisis, however, is that it illustrates that corporations — if left to their own worst instincts — will destroy themselves and the system that nurtures them. It is rare that this lesson is so graphically illustrated. It is one the world must quickly learn, if we are to avoid the most serious existential threat we have yet faced: climate change.
Of course, the rest of the corporate sector was not on good behavior during 2008 either, and we do not want them to escape justified scrutiny. In keeping with our tradition of highlighting diverse forms of corporate wrongdoing, we include only one financial company on the 10 Worst list. Here, presented in alphabetical order, are the 10 Worst Corporations of 2008. [...]
AIG
Cargill
Chevron
CNPC
Constellation Energy
Dole
General Electric
Imperial Sugar
Philip Morris Int’l.
Roche

http://multinationalmonitor.org/