Robert Reich sums it up.
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Thank you to my distinguished friends, President Amy Gutmann, Provost Vincent Price and Rev. Charles Howard for inviting me to share a few reflections on this joyous occasion. It is an honor and privilege to congratulate you — UPenn’s class of 2012.
Right now each one of you is sitting on the runway of life primed for takeoff. You are some of the world’s most gifted, elite, and driven college graduates – and you are undeniably ready to fly. So what I’m about to say next may sound a bit crazy. I want to urge you, not to fly, but to – walk. Four years ago, you walked into this marvelous laboratory of higher learning. Today, heads held high, you walk to receive your diplomas. Tomorrow, you will walk into a world of infinite possibilities.
But walking, in our high-speed world, has unfortunately fallen out of favor. The word “pedestrian” itself is used to describe something ordinary and commonplace. Yet, walking with intention has deep roots. Australia’s aboriginal youth go on walkabouts as a rite of passage; Native American tribes conduct vision quests in the wilderness; in Europe, for centuries, people have walked the Camino de Santiago, which spans the breadth of Spain. Such pilgrims place one foot firmly in front of the other, to fall in step with the rhythms of the universe and the cadence of their own hearts.
Back in 2005, six months into our marriage, my wife and I decided to “step it up” ourselves and go on a walking pilgrimage. At the peak of our efforts with ServiceSpace, we wondered if we had the capacity to put aside our worldly success and seek higher truths. Have you ever thought of something and then just known that it had to happen? It was one of those things. So we sold all our major belongings, and bought a one-way ticket to India. Our plan was to head to Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram, since he had always been an inspiration to us, and then walk South. Between the two of us, we budgeted a dollar a day, mostly for incidentals — which meant that for our survival we had to depend utterly on the kindness of strangers. We ate whatever food was offered and slept wherever place was offered.
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A university in Georgia is bleeding faculty after adding a new section to employee contracts last October. The “Personal Lifestyle Statement” requires employees to reject homosexuality, premarital sex, adultery, drug use and public drinking near campus. It also mandates that staff be active in a local church.
In an anonymous survey in April, only 12 percent of faculty and staff said that they planned to stay at Shorter University, a 139-year-old Baptist school, reports Inside Higher Ed. More than 50 resigned before the new contracts were even distributed, and certain departments, such as science and fine arts, have been “eviscerated,” according to Michael Wilson, a tenured librarian for the university who’s worked there for 14 years.
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The first person I met at Zuccotti Park after it had become Liberty Plaza was Camille Raneem. She had been an Obama supporter and was disappointed, like so many, with his politics since the election. She’d been at Occupy Wall Street (OWS) since September 17, the day the camp sprang up.
“I’ve been waiting for this for three years,” she told me then.
Months later, she elaborated: “The two most shining moments of my life were election night 2008 in Times Square, just because everyone was so together. The second time I had that feeling of just complete and utter connectedness was the second night of Occupy, when we spontaneously organized a candlelight vigil at a couple of different spots by Wall Street.”
Disillusionment with Obama, for many of these activists, led not to a search for another hero – as Micah Sifry noted – but a turn away from the idea of heroes and toward the specific problems that need to be fixed. “The conversations are between people who are looking at the politics of personalities and people who are looking at the politics,” Evry noted and Raneem echoed her. Evry continued, “OWS is very issue-oriented. It’s not being built around leaders. You start looking at what do you believe in, what do you want to organize around?”
For Husain and Shepherd and others, their disappointment led to questioning the two-party system and returning to activism on the outside. “I got pretty cynical after 2010 and Occupy really re-lit my hopes,” Shepherd said. And Raneem points out, “I don’t believe that anybody can get anywhere close to running for president without having certain ties and certain interests.”
Packard agreed. “With Occupy, by not having a person, an agenda, the dream is shared by everyone and can be worked on by everyone. The dream is similar: no war, no patriarchy, the least among us gets strengthened.”
“Just walking through those quiet dark streets in the middle of the night with the lights, we were all completely silent, a hundred and some odd people in dead silence with their candles, it was beautiful and it took me back to when I started believing that I could have faith in my country again, that I could work together with citizens,” she continued. “That’s what I felt when Obama was elected. I had that shattered, but I never lost that hope because I knew it was possible.”
It doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch at this point to say that Obama is responsible for Occupy Wall Street’s existence. The failures of his administration to stop the bleeding caused by financial meltdown have been well documented, as well as the disillusionment among many former supporters.
What’s been discussed less often is the fact that the Obama campaign trained a lot of first-time political operators, young people as well as older folks inspired for once to go beyond showing up on election day and then left without much to do. Organizing for America was supposed to continue the movement that sprang up around the campaign, but political movements are unwieldy things and the control of the Democratic National Committee shut down much of the free-flowing energy that helped elect the president. For three years, as Raneem noted, activists waited and wondered if they’d made a mistake.
But some of them were planning something else.
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Matt Taibbi
A quick note on the disastrous news emanating from J.P. Morgan Chase, whose unflappable (well, unflappable until yesterday) CEO Jamie Dimon yesterday disclosed that the bank suffered $2 billion in trading losses this quarter.
Here’s the summation from the New York Times:
Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, blamed “errors, sloppiness and bad judgment” for the loss, which stemmed from a hedging strategy that backfired.
The trading in that hedge roiled markets a month ago, when rumors started circulating of a JPMorgan trader in London whose bets were so big that he was nicknamed “the London Whale” and “Voldemort,” after the Harry Potter villain.
I’m still not entirely clear on what the trades by Bruno Iksil, the so-called “London Whale,” were exactly. According to the excellent Felix Salmon at Reuters, Iksil had taken a massive long position on corporate CDS, and when word of this leaked out, the market turned on him and beat his brains out. From Salmon’s piece:
Whenever a trader has a large and known position, the market is almost certain to move violently against that trader — and that seems to be exactly what happened here. On the conference call, when asked what he should have been watching more closely, Dimon said “trading losses — and newspapers”. It wasn’t a joke. Once your positions become public knowledge, the market will smell blood.
If you’re wondering why you should care if some idiot trader (who apparently has been making $100 million a year at Chase, a company that has been the recipient of at least $390 billion in emergency Fed loans) loses $2 billion for Jamie Dimon, here’s why: because J.P. Morgan Chase is a federally-insured depository institution that has been and will continue to be the recipient of massive amounts of public assistance. If the bank fails, someone will reach into your pocket to pay for the cleanup. So when they gamble like drunken sailors, it’s everyone’s problem.
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SANTA CRUZ, CA—Just as PG&E enters the final phase of its deployment of wireless “smart” meters in California, the largest of the state’s Investor Owned Utilities (IOU’s) has reversed course, quietly beginning to replace the ‘smart’ meters of those reporting health impacts with the old trusty analog version. Consumer rights and health groups immediately seized on the news, demanding that millions of Californians unhappy with their new wireless meters get their analogs returned immediately at no cost.
‘Smart’ meters are new wireless utility meters being installed as part of the “smart” grid initiative, spearheaded by technology firms and backed by the Obama administration and the Department of Energy. Promises ranging from lower utility bills to enhanced renewable generation capacity have failed to materialize, with widespread reports of higher bills, privacy violations, fires and explosions, and commonly reported health impacts such as headaches, nausea, tinnitus, and heart problems associated with powerful wireless transmissions. Widely disparate political groups- from members of the Green Party to the Tea Party and Occupy protesters have attacked the program, and dozens of grassroots organizations have sprouted up over the past several months to fight what they call an undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous assault on people in their own homes and neighborhoods. Dozens of people have been detained or arrested for peaceful civil disobedience and even simply speaking out against deployments.
In California, more than 47 cities and counties have demanded a halt to installation, and a dozen local governments have passed laws prohibiting the controversial technology. [2] The ‘smart’ meter issue has further angered a public already seething at the utilities over repeated gas explosions, safety breaches at nuclear reactors, and an increasingly extortionate rate structure. Word of California’s ‘smart’ meter nightmare has spread across the country and around the world, prompting some utilities to place smart meter plans on hold, and recently Nevada’s PUC to call for investigations into the health effects and other smart meter problems.
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A team of researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, has opened the door to a future of clean, cheap hydrogen fuel by ditching a popular platinum catalyst in favor of one based on two low cost alternatives, nickel and molybdenum.
Until now, the manufacture of hydrogen gas has faced a huge and somewhat ironic obstacle: Though hydrogen gas is produced from a chemical reaction in plain water, one of the cheapest and most abundant substances imaginable, the most efficient catalyst for generating that reaction is platinum – which currently weighs in at a hefty $50,000 per kilogram price tag, and rising.
In contrast, nickel costs only $20 per kilogram. Molybdenum, a silvery gray metal, costs $32.
If successfully commercialized, the new catalyst could have a powerful impact on the price of hydrogen, leading the way to a new generation of emission-free hydrogen-fueled vehicles as well as hydrogen fuel cells for many other uses.
Drawing more juice out of nickel and molybdenum was a complex project that Brookhaven describes as “Goldilocks chemistry:”
“For a catalyst to facilitate an efficient reaction, it must combine high durability, high catalytic activity, and high surface area. The strength of an element’s bond to hydrogen determines its reaction level – too weak, and there’s no activity; too strong, and the initial activity poisons the catalyst.”
By itself, nickel is not nearly as efficient a catalyst as platinum. To get to that “just right” point, the team tried infusing a nickel-molybdenum combination with nitrogen.The nitrogen expanded the metals into two-dimensional, lattice-like forms, resulting in nanosheets of nickel-molybdenum-nitride.
The 2-D nanosheets provide far more surface area for the reaction, boosting the new catalyst’s performance beyond the team’s expectations.
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Unless the spirit of the last year continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.
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Will our hedge funds, notorious for ‘gambling’, finally get seen for what they are? This article, just published about 1/2 hour ago, says perhaps this is the beginning of the end.
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Chomsky in this interview with Laura Flanders says Europe and US are both committing suicide, but in different ways: Europe with austerity, US by offshoring, incarcerating our excess population and other ways.
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