The latest on Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent movement from Truthdig contributors, editors, commenters, from Twitter and sources across the Internet.
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Protesters coaxed by federal agents into plotting terrorist attacks are imprisoned without bond while known terrorists are allowed to walk free the day of their arrest. The difference? Political ideology: The entrapped “criminals” are associates of the Occupy movement, while the actual terrorists are merely well-established violent white supremacists.
Two men involved in the NATO summit protests in Chicago are being held on separate terrorism charges. One is accused of making a false threat about blowing up a highway overpass. The other is charged with discussing the making of a pipe bomb.
On Sunday, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars led thousands of people in a march on the NATO summit in Chicago, at the end of which 50 former soldiers renounced the wars by throwing their military service medals toward the building where leaders were gathered.
One percent of the adult human population qualifies as clinically psychopathic, exhibiting a lack of empathy and a knack for telling lies and getting away with it. That compares with 10 percent of wheeler-dealers on Wall Street, according to a recent study. American critic William Deresiewicz is not surprised. Update: The 1-in-10 figure is unsupported. See here.
Dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky sat down with “Democracy Now!” for an hourlong conversation about the Palestinian prisoner hunger strike, the relationships forged by Occupy Wall Street, Obama’s targeted assassinations, WikiLeaks’ whistle-blowing and Latin America’s gradual slip from U.S. dominance.
Despite a judge’s order to hand over the tweets of The New Inquiry Senior Editor Malcolm Harris, who was arrested in October marching with Occupy protesters across the Brooklyn Bridge, Twitter is fighting for the principle that its users own their communications and should determine what to do with them.
“When you have high unemployment and a lot of underutilized capacity, the idea is you cut public budgets? That’s insane. Because that leads to a shrinking of the entire economy, when the real problem is … the ratio of debt to the size of the economy overall,” says the former Labor secretary. “If you shrink the economy, that ratio becomes worse and worse.”
After the first few years of the Great Depression there was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it.” It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.
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Long before Occupy Wall Street took form, and long before the corporate media caught on, two of our top columnists at Truthdig foresaw the economic calamity that still grips our country. Chris Hedges devoted his time and energy warning Americans about the disastrous symbiosis between big business and our government, both in his columns and in the streets. Meanwhile, Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer covered the buildup to the meltdown for over a decade, naming names and taking no prisoners in his latest book, in his own columns and in his zinger of an acceptance speech at the 2010 Webby Awards -- held, as it happened, in the heart of Wall Street.