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According to mythology, Hades made King Sisyphus roll a huge boulder endlessly up a steep hill in Tartarus. Unfortunately, the modern day version of Sisyphus is the middle class pushing a boulder endlessly up a steep hill while the top 1% (the elite class) horde more and more wealth. An example of the Sisyphus economy? The top 1% of earners (blue line) have seen an incredible increase in net worth, particularly after Fed Chair Alan Greenspan’s big rate cuts (green line) from 2000 to 2004. Each subsequent rate cuts under Bernanke (2007-2008) and Yellen (who just kept rates too low...

We must not allow the tragic murder of a young woman turn into attacks on men and attacks on the police. Video...

@ezralevant My whole life I was Back The Blue. My whole life I was pro-cop. I was a master of giving them the benefit of the doubt, even for pretty obvious cases of police brutality. I simply cannot say I'm pro-police anymore. Not after watching these "just following orders" thugs. Video... ("LIVE IN OTTAWA: POLICE MOVING IN ON TRUCKERS CONVOY")

Malcolm Harris, a writer for the Washington Post, attempted to justify mass-shootings targeting elected representatives following Wednesday’s radical left-wing attack. His first tweet on the shooting of Congressman Scalise read: “Some shot Steve Scalise?” with a number of eye emojis following it. Shortly thereafter, Harris tweeted the following in an attempt to justify today’s shooting that left a representative in critical condition making a reference to the repeal of Obamacare: “If the shooter has a serious health condition then is taking potshots at the GOP house leadership considered self defense?” Harris went on since to further deepen the hole he’s...

We know ahead of election day that the nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were selected in a fraudulent manner. We know that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump consulted just before Trump announced his bid for the GOP nomination. We know concurrently the Clinton Campaign colluded with the media to "elevate" Donald Trump's candidacy. Overt manipulation of the 2016 electoral process began eight years ago with the appointment of Debbie Wasserman Schultz to chair the DNC, who admitted publicly to violating rules, working to prepare the DNC for Hillary Clinton's nomination. The election is a hoax, and threatens the integrity...

One hesitates to give attention to Jesse A. Myerson. But it's probably worth it, if for no other reason to contend that many of his beliefs are likely shared by the mindless lemmings disguised as "journalists" who wildly cheered on Saturday when an obviously orchestrated "climate change" agreement designed ultimately to redistribute massive amounts of wealth from developed to underdeveloped countries — which would virtually guarantee that they will stay undeveloped — was announced in Paris. Almost two years ago, Myerson, whose experience includes "the Media and Labor Outreach committees at Occupy Wall Street," identified of "Five Economic Reforms Millennials...

The chief executive of General Electric raked in a $37.3 million pay package last year, a large sum by any standard. But how much larger was it than the average pay of the 305,000 employees who helped General Electric earn billions in profits that year? The industrial giant did not disclose that comparison, and corporate America rarely reveals how the compensation of the chief executive stacks up against that of the workers in the ranks below. That will soon change. After a long delay and plenty of pushback from corporations, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved in 3-2 vote on...

Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World by KATHERINE TIMPF July 9, 2015 A professor at the University of Texas at El Paso wrote a manifesto saying that animal-rights activists must rise up and commit “illegal raids” and “sabotage attacks” in order to save the world from a “mass extinction.” In a 2009 piece for the Animal Liberation Front titled “Manifesto for Radical Abolitionism: Total Liberation By Any Means Necessary,” associate professor of philosophy Steven Best says that groups like PETA are just not radical or progressive enough. After all, they work with corporations (boo!) “in...

The Republican field is crowded, which implies that primary voters have little information about where some of the candidates stand. That is particularly the case this season, with a few relatively unknown contenders who lack legislative experience or a long history of campaign contributions that would allow researchers to precisely identify where they stand on the liberal-to-conservative political dimension.However, one characteristic all candidates share is that they have active and popular Twitter accounts. And as I showed in an article published earlier this year in the journal Political Analysis — now freely available online as an Editors’ Choice article —...

A new TV ad from the “super PAC” supporting former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland is titled “Wall Street’s Public Enemy No. 1.” But it seems the intended target of the ad is Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush. The ad from Generation Forward splices excerpts from Mr. O’Malley’s recent presidential announcement speech, centered around his suggestion that the head of Goldman Sachs would be “just fine with either Bush or a Clinton.” It then repeats his criticism that “the presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth by you between two royal families.”

Wall Street wants Michael Bloomberg to run for president, but the billionaire isn't budging. At the Yale CEO Summit this week, the talk was of "drafting Bloomberg" however possible. The former New York City mayor seems like the perfect solution for Wall Street's problems with the current field of presidential candidates. The Street sees him as a centrist technocrat who adeptly managed one of the most complex cities in the world. They think he understands the global business community. Rumblings about a Bloomberg run are especially strong at several bulge bracket banks, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Merrill once...

Kristen Martin recalls her time as an intern for Bernie Sanders, in a contribution to the left's discussion of Sanders' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.TO THOSE who have spent any significant amount of time in Vermont, it is clear that Bernie Sanders is widely beloved by his constituents. The support for "Bernie," as his supporters fondly call him, was clear on May 26 as thousands flocked to Sanders' presidential campaign kickoff rally on the edge of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont. The "People's Assembly," organized by a group including former Occupy Wall Street activists and environmentalists, spoke to a...

Hillary Clinton is moving so quickly to the left that it’s hard to keep up. Her aides are telling the New York Times she wants to “topple” the One Percent, she’s pledging solidarity with union bosses over lunch meetings at Mario Batali restaurants in Midtown, she supports a constitutional amendment to suppress political speech, she’s down with a right to same-sex marriage, she’s ambivalent over the Keystone Pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, she’s calling for an end to the “era of mass incarceration,” she wants to go “further” than President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty. It’s called pandering, but the press...

Occupy may be gone, but it is clearly not forgotten. The people protesting Eric Garner’s death in New York City were marching to a slightly different drum beat in 2011, but they seem to have returned, having learned something from their previous mistakes.

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media. Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

The rich are not the problem, the greedy are not the problem, the crooked are not the problem - the problem is the system that brings them about. If the system is ours, the system means by the people, of the people, for the people, then now it is time to take it back. Now it is time to demand that it would be changed.

We're better than those damned Russians and their Putin; we have democracy! Well, maybe not. Quote: Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. Lots of big words in that paragraph. Let's distill it down -- the argument presented is that America is really no different than...

It is the most important question being asked of dozens of New Yorkers lined up as potential jurors for the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street activist accused of assaulting a police officer: what do you think of her protest movement? Unfortunately for those keen on the swift procession of justice, a series of Manhattan residents who presented themselves at the criminal courthouse this week declared that they strongly disagreed with it – and could not promise to be impartial about one of its members. “I’m involved in Wall Street things. I’m on the Wall Street side, not...

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history. Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market. The probes were announced just ahead of a much anticipated book on the subject by best-selling author Michael Lewis called...

A perpetually arrested member of the Occupy Wall Street movement has settled his lawsuit with the city, claiming that he was the victim of multiple beatdowns at the hands of police at Zuccotti Park. Those beatings allegedly left Shawn Schrader with a “bleeding ear, a hurt thumb and nightmares about cops.” No explanation was given as to how the gentleman came about developing a nightmare about soap. Via the NY Daily News: The city will pay out an $82,500 settlement to an Occupy Wall Street activist who claims police beat him up and arrested him three times – the last...