Scores arrested at Occupy Boston protest site comes from The Toronto Sun.

“Civil disobedience will not be tolerated,” Boston Mayor Thomas Menino told the local Fox News affiliate in an interview early Tuesday.

What an appropriate outlet for the mayor to use to get his message out.  One way to measure the difference between the Occupy … movement and the Tea Party is to look at which people get nervous about the movement.

I guess the politicians and their benefactors have two choices.  They can either spend their money on police to hold down the level of protest or they can spend the money fixing the causes for protest.  I guess I’ll state the obvious before someone else does.  At the moment it seems to be a lot cheaper to spend the money on police.  At least it gives someone a job.

Here is a tweet that I retweeted.

jtsmaggie maggie by Steve13565
@Occupy_Boston It’s ok for Wall Street corruption to disrupt life across America for years…but you guys can’t camp in a park! Insanity!

In the previous post, William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis, I quote Black, “…with a million plus cases of fraud a year…” describing what was going on in the mortgage market by mortgage brokers and bank executives.  I suppose Mayor Menino is just as adamant at stopping this civil disobedience, NOT!

If the government vigorously prosecuted the banker’s civil disobedience, there would be no need for the civil disobedience of the Occupy … movement.

It’s not our 15 minutes of fame, not even 15 seconds, but we did make the NECN news.
After the ad is over, our signs appear at about 1:43 into the video and last just 2 seconds.

Our Three frames

There is an Occupy Worcester movement starting up. I have found a video of their first General Assembly. It is an excellent education in how groups like this are being formed to arrive at consensus.

Watch the video below.

For me, it is so much easier to get to Worcester than it is to get to Boston, I may try to join in with this group.

Direct link to the album of pictures of Our Second Visit to Occupy Boston.

Panic of the Plutocrats is another great piece by Paul Krugman.

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

William Black: Why Nobody Went to Jail During the Credit Crisis is an interview with the man who wrote the book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One.  I also mention Black and his book in the post The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own A Politician.

The link to the article that is the focus of this blog has both an audio of the interview and a transcript.  To try to give you a sense of the magnitude of the fraud being discussed and to whet your appetite to read the article, I have selected some parts of the transcript to quote.

Remember I told you there were over a million cases of mortgage fraud a year and that overwhelmingly it’s lenders who foot the fraud, the lie in the liars loan.
…

To give you a comparison, at the peak of the Savings and Loan Crisis, there were 1,000 FBI agents working the cases.
…
Eight times more FBI agents than were working the cases in fiscal year 2007. And this crisis is forty times bigger and worse than the Savings and Loan Crisis. So you would have required massively more people. To give you another idea of scope, to investigate Enron, and Enron was complex, but it was nowhere near as big and as complex as Washington Mutual. It took 100 FBI agents. So you can see that with 120 nationwide, at most you could have done one major case.
…
Every year, with a million plus cases of fraud a year, if you prosecute a thousand of them or two thousand of them or three thousand of them, you are a million cases further behind every year, right. It is just insane. So the FBI says we got to start going after the big guys at which point Bush’s Attorney General Mukasey says no, he refuses to even create a National Task Force against mortgage fraud, saying famously, this is simply the equivalent of, and I am quoting again, “White Collar Street Crime,” little tiny stuff. Well of course he has assigned the FBI to only look at little cases and they report back, hey we’re finding little cases. And the Mukasey interprets from that, hey only little cases exist.

Is it any wonder that one of the signs I am going to hold up in the Occupy Boston march is Justice For Wall Street?  Sharon The Two Fisted Protester is holding this sign plus another.

For some reason, people cannot understand what the Occupy … movement really wants.  They must have very short memories.

I found the link to the William Black article on the Occupy Boston Facebook page, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how to create a direct link to that specific post.  If someone else makes a comment after I did, I may receive an email with the link.

Why don’t Ronald Reagan fans like President Obama. Is it because of his freedom?

Engineering by Steve, Protesting by Sharon (and Steve).

Now we have something to bring with us to Occupy Boston.

There is a list of events at Occupy Boston Arts & Culture Event Archive.

One event that I found was from the Free School University at Occupy Boston, Austerity Games and the Global Impacts of Wall Street.

Below are the descriptions of the three parts of the video. You’ll have to view them on Facebook.

Some comments in praise of Fed policy and Ben Bernanke occur at about 7:15 into the third segment of the video.

Part 1 of 3: Mark Blyth (professor of international political economy at Brown University and fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies) and Kevin P. Gallagher (associate professor of international relations at Boston University and research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University) discuss how Wall Street interests have hijacked the debates of crisis and debt in the US and across the globe and in so doing have duped publics into thinking that austerity is the route to recovery and growth. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

I have another sign to use when we protest.

October 9, 2011

I was told the above sign was ambiguous. How about this?

My critic tells me it’s still a little ambiguous. How about this?

Or maybe this?