Occupy Wall Street day 14

The 'Occupy Wall Street' campaign is entering its third week. Thanks to the heavy handed tactics of the New York City police, which, according to the 'New York Times' is law unto itself, the protest has gained worldwide attention.
In the US, the campaign is spreading by word of mouth and slowly by a supine media tightly wedded to Wall Street through powerful corporations on the New York Stock Exchange and to Big Bracket banks, 'too big to fail'.
More importantly, each day brings more sympathisers to Liberty Park within a short walk to the hallowed grounds of the World Trade Centre, to join for the day the protesters.
More significantly, too, is that labour unions under attack by corporate America and municipal, state, and federal government are joining the 'Occupy Wall Street' campaign. Today protesters will join US Postal Workers in a peaceful march to the central post office to publicly show that they are not going to take cuts in wages, benefits, employment, and six day postal service.
The attack on America's 'middle classes', working class, and the poor are the result of the 2008 global financial crisis that the Wall Street banks are responsible for. Yet, not one banker on the Street has been tried, convicted, and sent to prison for sending millions on breadlines, the dole; in fact, the men responsible like US secretary Timothy Geitner is in Obama's cabinet, and in a position to protect his class of super rich. The Republicans are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Wall Street bankers whom the taxpayer feed grandly and profitably so that American capitalism wouldn't go down into the drink!. Does anyone recall when Congress was debating the Dodd Frank bill to make US finance capital more accountable but not before the courts of justice, the Elephant party's Mitch McConnell was on Wall Street working closely with the banking lobby to stay, delay, or defeat any regulations on the banks? Does he and his party as servants of finance capitalist give a thinker's damn about Americans losing homes and jobs which are directly traceable to the computer generated financial instruments bundling mortgages and sold to investors for handsome profits? Probably not as the record shows.
Now a popular movement is on the rise and the plutocrats and coupon clippers and corporate military industrial America should take heed. Already American values and jobs have energises an indecisive Obama as he enters another presidential election cycle. The Elephants (the Republicans) trumpet they stand for the true America! Eyewash! They represent the rise of American nativism and know nothing thinking that run through 19 century American history. They stand for the wealthy and the privileged and the Anglo Saxon elite. They support a very narrow fragile sand castle which a populist tide will wash away.
And that is the meaning of 'Occupy Wall Street'.

Wanted 174 Israel military for crimes against the 'Mavi Mamara'

Turkey is not taking Israel's cavalier dismissal of its call for an apology and compensation to the families of the killed and injured and aggressed by the Israel Defence Force's special commandos who illegally bordered the 'Mavi Mamara' in June 2010, killing nine Turks and hijacking the ship to the port of Ashkalon.
The Turkish ship formed part of a peace flotilla carrying non military supplies of food, medicines, educatioanl and building materials to Gaza. The eight ships had the intention of breaking Israel's illegal blockade of Gaza which its blitzkrieg three week war at the end of 2008 brought death to its civilian population and destroyed its infrastructure in what the Israeli called 'Operation Cast Lead'.
To exact justice for Israeli crimes of piracy and targeted killing, Turkey has published a 'Wanted' poster of 174 pictures and names of IDF military involved in the assault of the 'Mavi Mamara' on the high seas in violation of international treaties and conventions.
Now each participant in the raid has a 'price on his head', meaning he or she is libel to pursuit before international courts of justice.
No longer can Israel get away with murder and mayhem. Justice, if not in Israel but elsewhere, hold Israel responsible for acts of murder and violation of international law.

1100 reasons not to believe Netenyahu

Israeli prime minister came to undercut Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas' call for full membership in the name of the state of Palestine in the United Nations.
He proudly thumped his oratorical chest by saying the UN wasn't the proper venue for talks on a Palestinian state. The right place was outside the international body in negotiations between Israel and the PA.
Everything is on the table, he trumpted. But was it? With the US threat of a veto of the Palestinian bid at the Security Council and the obsequious treatment accorded to him by a supine American media, Netenyahu could and did return home to a 'hail thee hero for a job well done'.
Basking in the glow of his PR campaign to thwart Palestinian aspirations for a state of its own, and a moment of supreme overconfidence, the Zionist prime minister gave the green light to the construction of 1100 housing units in Arab East Jerusalem and illegal Israeli settlement on the West Bank.
By doing this, Netenhayu was giving the 'birdie' to the Palestinians, the UN, and the US his most ardent backer. He was telling the world that Israel was above and beyond the rules of international law, and was a law unto itself.
If further proof needs be, Netenyahu is not willing to agree to a two state solution in the Palestinian matter. The record shows the many times he has held power, he has done everything in his power to sabotage the 1993 Oslo Accords and any and all negotiations with the PA unless they cave into to Israeli demands.
For him, as a revisionist, right wing Zionist, he embraces the goals of a 'Greater Israel' from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river which includes the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. To him, the West Bank is the biblical 'Sumaria and Judea', which is God given land and not the land of the Palestinians.
Netenyahu's gambit is open to challenge but not from the US: he full well knows that Israel has become an American domestic issue; in the upcoming presidential cycle, he also knows that American Jews have an influence far beyond the three percent they represent in the US population. And by and large, they support in contributions the Democrats. Obama, in a presidential election year, is in for a fight for his political career, so he will not push Israel hard on negotiations and will do its bidding at the UN.
As such, Netenyahu speaks with a forked tongue. And there is little reason to trust his words; only concrete steps in helping the Palestinians to have a state of their own will show that he is telling the truth.

South Korea's Grand National Party looking to relax tensions with North Korea in a post Lee Myung bak era?

Bles 'Agence France Presse' for venturing where Anglo Saxon wire services tip toe.
In a press release from Seoul, AFP makes mention that the Grand National Party which rules South Korea under the hard liner president Lee Myung bak is going to send a high ranking party member to North Korea.
Since Lee's ascension to the Blue House, he has done everything with the power he has to return to a cold war with the North; reckless and ill thought out his joint military activities using live fire with US approval along the Northern Limit Line in November 2010 within a spit's throw of North Korea's international waters, provoked an exchange of gun fire. That incident set the region's teeth on edge since one it was the first such incident since the 1953 armistice putting the Korean war on hold between the two Koreas, and two, it raised fears of another war in Asia. The US stayed Lee's bellicose designs at that time, but it has hardly stopped his irrational exuberance in trying to provoke Kim Jong il.
Happily, Lee cannot run for re election. So, it may very well be that the GNP is planning to make nice to North Korea to ease 'high cross border tensions' Lee has kept on red alert!
Park Keun Hye, a dominant GNP figure, as well as the daughter of the assassinated ROK dictator Park Chung hee, four years ago, met Kim Jong il in Pyongyang. Lee unlike his predecessors has never gone to Pyongyang. North Korea has apparently agreed to the visit of the GNP's leader Hong Joon pyo.
Are we seeing the first signs of a more flexible GNP policy for post Lee South Korea? If so, it is a welcome sign!

Support Jeju islanders protest of the building of a US ROK naval base

To its credit 'The New York Times' has been covering the protest of South Korea's Jeju islanders against the construction of a US ROK naval base on the UNESCO designated World Natural Heritage site. Gloria Steinem, out of solidarity, written and spoken out on this issue. She remains almost alone in bringing the issue before the court of public opinion besides the inhabitants of Jeju Island themselves, who, in a way, are hampered by language and broader access to the outside world, and under the constant harassment of the Lee Myung bak government in Seoul.
The people of Jeju do not want at the Gangjung naval base that would damage the ecology of the island; house 20 warships and two US Aegis missiles to begin with. They do not see the won or dollars and sense in the base; the US and South Korea do as the Republic of Korea expands its military eye in the region.
Lee claims with full support of US military agreements and backing that the naval installation will 'protect' South Korea from an irrational North Korea, and therefore keep South Koreans, including Jeju islanders, safer than they are now.
The Jeju protesters do not see the base with the same eye. If anything it will put them and South Koreans further into harm's way. Look at the map: navy ships and missiles armed with multiple warheads [atomic?] pose a threat to China and Japan and of course North Korea which is hardly in the vicinity of Jeju; they also make Russia which share a narrow border on the Korean peninsula and might cause unease in Mongolia and of course heighten anti US and Korean feeling on a restive Okinawa where for the last 66 years lives uneasily with US bases.
The base at Gangjung is not only a step to challenging China's claim to the Yellow Sea as its 'mare nostrum', but also conflicts with small islands which are no more than rocks which China, South Korea, and Japan claim as its own, and then there's the untapped large natural gas undersea gas reserves which no one is talking about.
The Chaebol Samsung has the contract to build Gangjung, and as such, risks a boycott of its long list of products should Jeju islanders call for one, which they should.
Jeju needs the support of foreign friends to spread the word, bring pressure on the US and ROK to stop construction, and keep Jeju a South Korean 'garden of eden' rather than an the frontline of naval confrontation!

Mahmoud Abbas pulls the chain on the US and Israel

Mahmoud Abbas' speech before the UN General Assembly on 24 September 2011 pulled the chain on US' and Israel's street fighting policies to deny the Palestinian people a state of their own.
The Palestinian Authority president showed before the world body's gathering the letter of application to the Security Council for full membership. By this act, he stripped the US of its right to broker a two state solution between Israel and the PA, and brought it back to the only 'fair' body that can act as a broker of peace between the two peoples and ease the birth of a Palestine state composed of the West Bank, Gaza, and Arab East Jerusalem.
President Obama's speech was not directed to the UN but to his Jewish backers who do not see him as being 'pro Israel' enough and may very well not contribute to his campaign to run for the White House again in 2012.
Prime Minister Netenyahu, once again, arguing that the UN wasn't the right place to birth a two state solution, made it clear again that he wasn't going to honestly enter negotiations, for the plain and simple truth, for him, there is no Palestine only Judea and Sumaria which are the West Bank that he is tirelessly bringing into a 'Greater Israel' from the Mediterranean and Jordan in violation of international law and conventions.
Suddenly Abbas cut the ground from under Obama and Netenyahu. He defined an alternate way to achieve peace and a two state solution with clearly defined borders on the land which will house Israel and Palestine.
He broke the US Israel egg, and scramble the yoke any which way you like, in the end, the 44 year occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem will ultimately be the state of Palestine with Hamas controlled Gaza.

Occupy Wall Street

On 17 September 2011 the 'Occupy Wall Street' began. A heavy police presence, however, kept the hundred of protesters well away from Wall and Broad where the New York Stock Exchange reigns. The protesters--mostly young--took over nearby Zuccotti Park to stay the course; they had come to stay and raise the flag of citizen discontent: at a time when a majority of Americans are having a hard time to make ends meet; when many are out of work for a long time; when families are failing below the already low bar which the government sets for the poverty level; when millions face home foreclosures; when schools are underfunded and the countries infrastructure is falling apart, the big bracket banks that are too big to fail, after having being rescued by the ordinary taxpayer from collapse for the 2008 global recession they engineered, have not only recovered but are sitting on trillions of dollars that they are not lending to spark economic recovery but are feathering their own bed with horse chocking bonuses and flaunting modesty by conspicuous consumption with monies that could feed, house, and clothe millions in need--the financial elite, aided by the government in Washington they have bought with campaign contributions have rarely been held accountable for high crimes against the livelihood, the lives, and commonweal of the American people.
'Occupy Wall Street' participants have cried 'basta ya!', enough's enough, and they are bringing the people's anger to the bastion of US finance capitalism demanding an accounting and a call for indictment, punishment, and imprisonment of the fat cats who are driving Americans to despair and ruin.
Wall Street is a golden goose for New York City. It is a major industry and although it pays less taxes than it should, what it pays buoys up an economy that lives by cheek and jowl. Translation the poor pay more and receive less in goods and services which are geared to the pleasure of the plutocrats, coupon clippers, and the rich.
So, the billionaire mayor Bloomberg doesn't take the protests lightly. New York City police have roughed up the demonstrators, arrested them on the slimmest excuse which violate their civil rights of freedom of assembly and speech and then release them without charges. They do it simply for harassment and in order to push the 'Occupy Wall Street' organisers and participants to roll up sleeping bags [yes! more than a hundred have camped out in Zuccotti Park since Day One; hundreds more go home at night but return in the morning; still others come down to cheer the protesters on and swell their ranks].
Radio has fleetingly mentioned the campaign to occupy Wall Street; national television is sternly silent except for rare exceptions like Rachel Maddow and Amy Goodman.
Suddenly on Saturday 24 September, a week into the protest, the police turned the ignored 'Occupy Wall Street' into an object of international media coverage. In a large, peaceful march to New York's Union Square, swelled to several hundred marchers, New York's finest as the police pride themselves in being, manoeuvred the protesters into meshed walled in pens where the law officers beat, dispersed pepper spray, and ultimately arrested 90. The excessive use of force by police authorities turned a small march into an international event, making headlines and gracing media with repeated showing of police attacking peaceful protesters on television and in still photos.
'Occupy Wall Street' is like a magnet which draws 'right on!' cheers from everyone who is suffering from the fallout of the 2008 global recession and today's fear of an anemic economy slipping into depression, whilst stuff shirt bankers like JPMorgan's Jaime Dimon is ranting and raving that governments are trying to make banks pay a greater share of profits to pull the economy at home and abroad out of economic morass if not disaster.
And the 'Occupy Wall Street' protest continues, and with the passing of each day, complacent bankers should take note and be afraid of the people's anger.