Occupy Chicago Protesters

Here are some of the folks who showed up at the Occupy Chicago demonstration site on Saturday, October 22. Absolutely everybody I talked to was very pleasant, although a couple asked me for money (their pictures are not included here).

[Update: That evening, 1,500 to 2,500 protesters marched from this site to Grant Park, where about 100 of them were arrested. Here's the story from the Chicago Sun-Times.]

Drums were ever-present.

The place was crawling with people with cameras. This is one worth clicking to expand it.

Tour bus riders shout and wave their approval.

The Chicago Police were nicely blasé about everything. At most, there were two cars. Here, there's one car and a bicycle.

Signs of the Times - Part 2

See the post below for background on these photos.

I'm really disappointed that the above photo didn't come out. I thought I had it cold, but she moved the sign, and I didn't notice when I was chimping the picture. The sign says: "Screw the Chicago School of Economics. F**k [Milton] Freidman (sic) to hell."

My people!

Signs of the Times - Part 1

Okay, the title is a cliché.

This morning I went down to the Occupy Chicago site on LaSalle St. to see what was going on. One thing I discovered is that protesters aren't, as a group, early risers. When I got there, I'd say there were 15-20 folks there. And they all smoked and had facial hair. Ugh.

But as time went by people started arriving from the suburbs, and the average age of the group increased. There is a march scheduled for 6:30 tonight, I'm told, and last week 5,000 people were there.

I'm told.

Well, I took almost 200 photos in the 4 hours I was down there, and a picture is worth a thousand words, so the next few posts will equal maybe 100,000 words to describe what I saw. The first two posts will just show signs I saw.

Remember: if you want a closer look at the picture, click on it.

I know a poly sci major when I see one. [Above]

 

The picture above is particularly interesting, I think. The plaque on the building commemorates the fact that "Standard Time" was created on this site.

A Must-See

Stephen Colbert is shocked to learn that American soldiers in Afghanistan have burned Bill O'Reilly's latest.

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Small Town Virtues

I found this post at The Reality-Based Community to be thought provoking. Even many of the comments were interesting, which is not the case at most blogs (Sempringham being a notable exception). A taste:

Sara Robinson gave me permission to post the following ... about her home town of Bishop, CA:

In my mind’s eye, I can walk up and down Main Street of my hometown as it was 30 years ago and easily name 50 thriving small businesses, each of which was supporting at least one middle-class family, often two or three (and I can usually name the families, too, because one of them was mine). On the profits they made from these businesses, these families were able to own nice middle-class houses, send their kids to college, take vacations, buy new cars, and generally live the American Dream as we understood it then.

Several things happened to put an end to that. First, K-mart moved into town, and in short order shut down several of the sporting goods stores, at least one book store, one family-owned pharmacy, two hardware stores (one of which had been in business since 1888), the local dairy, and a couple of dozen other core businesses. The result was a significant loss of middle-class, independent jobs, which were only partly replaced by the deeply inferior $6.50/hour jobs offered at the new store.

The next was that the Berlin Wall fell, which led two years later to the closing of the Union Carbide mine that was the biggest employer in town. Seven hundred union jobs in a town of 5,000 — poof. Suddenly, the US decided that having a domestic source of strategic metals like tungsten, molybdenum, and vanadium was no longer a security necessity; now, was OK to depend on Russia and China for these things, especially if their miners got paid a quarter what ours did. Losing the mine and the related jobs also cost us another big chunk of Main Street.

This one-two punch set the stage for the third plague, which of course was the meth epidemic that came along just after the mine closed.

In my small-town experience, big corporations give (as Carbide did for 50 years) and big corporations also take away (as both Carbide and K-Mart did in the late 80s). But the ultimate effect was to turn my town from a comfortable, optimistic middle-class American town to a working-class trailer-park meth-fueled hell where nobody can get a job that pays a living wage unless they’re running a lab in their garage. “Home” as I knew it has been gone for 20 years.

Read the whole thing here.

Something We Can All Agree On

Over on the conservative blogs, they're running this picture of President Obama and Qaddafi:

The idea, of course, is that Obama was good buddies with Qaddafi.

On the liberal blogs, they're running this video of Senators McCain, Lieberman, Graham, and Collins with Qaddafi:



The idea, of course, is that McCain, Lieberman, Graham, and Collins were good buddies with Qaddafi.

Well, if you want to get something done is this world, sometimes you have to shake hands with somebody you'd rather not, if you had your druthers. Move on, nothing to see here.

But we can all agree that "Clueless Marco" Rubio is a Class A jerk:



Rubio is so anxious that President Obama not get any credit for this that he's willing to ignore the role of the American military.

Anyway, number of American soldiers killed overthrowing Qaddafi: ZERO.

Worth the wait, numbskull.

It Was Only Eleven Years Ago

NPR's Planet Money program got hold of a secret government document from 2000 that contemplated the effect on the world financial system of the United States paying off its debt, which looked to be possible by 2012.

It was not necessarily a good thing! There would be no U.S. Treasury bonds, and that was the safest haven in the world. Ah, the good old days.

What the heck happened?

Oh yeah. George W. Bush. Thanks again, Scalia.

Thanks to Steve Benen for  directing me to this.

Indeed

Andrew Sullivan:

To rid the world of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki and Moammar Qaddafi within six months: if Obama were a Republican, he'd be on Mount Rushmore by now.

Nine Nine Nine

Via Paul Krugman's blog, I've learned that the Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers on Herman Cain's Nine-Nine-Nine tax plan. Here's what they found out:

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of  nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000. This would give Warren Buffet severe heartburn.

My gosh, I'm surprised.

Social Security

For months I've been wanting to write about Social Security funding issues. There is so much BS written and spoken about it that even intelligent, well-meaning people can be excused for believing some of it.

I considered writing a four-part series, but truthfully that's more work than I can muster the energy for this year.  Lucky for you.

Lucky for me, it's not that complicated. Here it is in a nutshell:

• Under current law there is a gap between what's coming in and what's going out, and the gap is getting bigger.

• BUT the gap does not continue getting bigger forever. By about 2030 the gap levels off, and then stays constant as far as the eye can see.

• The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) measures the gap at 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the next 75 years.

• And the CBO provides us with a list of Social Security change options and their size as a percent of the GDP.

Click on it to enlarge it. Then pick one or more items that add up to 0.6.

Congratulations, you've just saved Social Security and doubled your sexual desirability quotient!

Kevin Drum has written about this at greater length, and I especially recommend this post and this one. The CBO document, Social Security Policy Options, is available here.

Caveat: Somebody needs to worry about the fact that worker's FICA taxes have been temporarily reduced (2%) during this recession. It's a quick and easy way to put a little extra money in employed person's hands, so has some stimulus effect. But it has an effect on the gap described above, too. That's something to watch. Plus, there's a crowd out there that doesn't like Social Security not because it doesn't work – it obviously does – but because it's against their "philosophy." They are bound to try to use that 2% as a wedge to promote their views. Life has taught me to be very cautious of people who have a philosophy (which seems to be just about anybody who went to the University of Chicago).

Occupy Chicago

Today your intrepid reporter grabbed a camera and took the L down to the Loop to check out the Occupy Chicago protest going on in the city's financial district. I've been wondering what to make of the protest, which originated in New York City's Wall Street district and has since spread to literally hundreds of cities around the country.

From afar, the protests seemed unfocused: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"

Oh.

So I went down to talk to people and take some pictures. Here they are, in no particular order. Click on any picture to get a bigger size.

I particularly liked this first one. It's the self-imposed rules everyone must abide by. People drive or walk by and bring bags of apples, sandwiches, coffee, etc. There is a central place where everything is kept.

There were a lot of people with cameras.

This captures almost everyone at the protest, including the cameramen.



"End the Fed" was a popular sign. I was getting just a little suspicious.

The guy lying on his side with his feet in the street was singing something. I agree that money is not speech.

I like the above sign, too.

These people had been there for a while. I talked to the fellow on the right for a few minutes. He was really nice, and was very articulate. He had hitchhiked in from Oregon on his way to New York City. He had to change his party registration back in Oregon in order to vote for Ron Paul. He told me he had to quit school. He was getting food stamps and the government was paying for his education, but he lost his part-time job. If I understood him correctly, he thinks the federal government should be shrunk, power returned to the states, and there should be competition among the states for citizens. He was having a good time. Two nights in a row he was picked up by attractive young women and driven to a place where he could sleep. I wouldn't keep going to New York, either.

I agree with this young man, too. We are so naive.

Well, yeah.



This is an architectural treasure in Chicago, the Continental Illinois Bank Building. According to Wikipedia:

The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company was at one time the seventh-largest bank in the United States as measured by deposits with approximately $40 billion in assets. In 1984, Continental Illinois became the largest ever bank failure in U.S. history, when a run on the bank led to its seizure by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Continental Illinois retained this dubious distinction until the failure of Washington Mutual in 2008 during the financial crisis of 2008, which ended up being over seven times larger than the failure of Continental Illinois.

Now, as you can see, it is renamed the Bank of America building.

Heh, heh.

The second floor of the bank is absolutely gorgeous, an homage to money. You used to be able to go up there and gawk at the place, which said, very unsubtly, "MONEY LIVES HERE."

Since Bank of America took over, though, the public is not allowed in what was once a very public area of the bank. You cannot take pictures of it. You cannot even see it. A couple of years ago Bank of America bought out my bank. Now they want to charge me $5.00 a month for using my ATM card at Costco. It's part of their "Building Customer Loyalty" program.

The Masters of the House

I'm reading Michael Lewis' book about the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, which I can recommend to you. It's about how a small group of people made billions betting that the subprime mortgage market was going to collapse – which it did.

On one hand, they deserve credit for all the work they did to understand the flim-flam job the investment banks were running (if you have any doubt about that, read the book). On the other hand, they became billionaires without actually doing something worthwhile. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs pioneered an industry and employed thousands on the road to making their billions. These guys placed bets. And the investment banks' need to cover those bets just made the 2008 collapse that much worse.

One of the guys who shows up in The Big Short, John Paulson, also popped up in a revealing NY Times article the other day about how Wall Street feels about the Occupy Wall Street protests – dismissive, though usually privately. But Paulson had actually released a statement to the press.

The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state .... Paulson & Company and its employees have paid hundreds of millions in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high-paying jobs in New York City since its formation. [My emphasis.]

Are you surprised to learn that Paulson employees are major contributors to the coffers of John Boehner?

As I make my way through The Big Short, I can't help thinking of a passage in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Having just given a fascinating description of the Battle of Waterloo from the French perspective, Hugo describes the scene of carnage afterward. A sunken road in the countryside...

... was filled with horses and riders inextricably heaped together. Terrible entanglement. There were no longer slopes to the road; dead bodies filled it even with the plain, and came to the edge of the banks like a well-measured bushel of barley. A mass of dead above, a river of blood below....

As night falls on the battlefield, a lone figure is seen making its way among the corpses.

He looked about. He passed an indescribably hideous review of the dead. He walked with his feet in blood.

Suddenly he stopped.

A few steps before him, in the sunken road, at a point where the mound of corpses ended, from under this mass of men and horses appeared an open hand, lighted by the moon.

This hand had something upon a finger which sparkled: it was a gold ring.

The man stooped down, remained a moment, and when he rose again there was no ring upon that hand.

This is our introduction to Thénardier, or "The Master of the House," as he's known in the popular musical made from the book.

GOP: Choose Mitt! PLEASE!

Because Sempringham's readers are intelligent and well-informed, they will already know that Mitt Romney made big bucks as head of a so-called vulture capital firm, Bain Capital. What they did was buy companies, break them up, fire their workers, and send their jobs overseas.

But Sempringham's readers may not have seen this picture of the partners at Bain Capital:

That's Mitt, front center. From the Boston Globe.