German police Wednesday have cleared the Occupy Frankfurt encampment that has been in place since October 2011, ahead of scheduled anti-capitalism protests this weekend.

Via:

German authorities on Wednesday cleared out a group of protesters who have camped for months in front of the European Central Bank, ahead of huge anti-capitalism protests expected at the weekend.

Some of the demonstrators hurled paint at police who were moving them on, after they ignored a request to leave voluntarily, said an AFP reporter at the scene. There were a dozen or so arrests, according to a police spokesman.

However, the clearing of the “Occupy Frankfurt” camp was largely peaceful, with around 50 demonstrators sitting stubbornly on the ground in a show of passive resistance.

The ban on the about 100 “indignants”, who have held vigil outside the ECB since October — the longest continuous protest in Europe — runs until Sunday.

Police expect 40,000 people from Thursday for demonstrations that are expected to climax on Saturday. They want to set up a security cordon around the ECB, meaning the camp has to be cleared.

Authorities have already banned several protest actions, fearing “public disorder” after violence at similar events.

Hopefully, Occupy Frankfurt will return to their regular spot after the end of the protests.

Norman and Oriane Rousseau were homeowners who did everything "right" when they purchased their home. They had 30 percent of the purchase price as a down payment, and they made their payments on time. After being contacted about refinancing their mortgage, the Rousseau's “stated that they were only interested in obtaining a conventional 30-year, fixed-rate loan, and explained their desire to have consistent payments over the life of the loan.”

Via:

They were “assured … that they could significantly reduce their monthly payments, by more than $600 per month, with a lower interest refinance loan.” The bank assured them that the Payment Option ARM was “the new industry standard” that had “historically low rates that were continuing to decrease” and in “the worst case scenario [they were] assured that historical data for the index indicated that changes in interest rate were slight, and if an increase should occur it would have a negligible effect on their monthly payments of no more than a few dollars.”

The bank's promises about the new mortgage were not true, and before long the Rousseau's were faced with a much higher interest rate than promised and large fees added that they had not been told about. Around the same time, as we've heard over and over from homeowners, the bank began calling with claims that the couple had missed payments even after they provided documentation that they had been paid.

Phone calls from the bank came morning, noon, and late into the night even though Norman Rousseau had hired an attorney. A loan modification that never came through, additional fees and interest continued to pile up, and finally foreclosure, with eviction scheduled for Tuesday, May 15th, Mr. Rousseau went into his garage on Sunday morning and shot himself. The attorney won a two week extension of the eviction date on Tuesday.

Devastated in every possibly way, Oriane now can't even afford to bury her husband and is hoping the VA will be able to help. If you'd like to help, please contact the Rousseau's attorney, Chris Gardas: chrisgardas@comcast.net.

Full article with the court documents are here, and they detail much more thoroughly the misdeeds of Wells Fargo.

Good morning! Today is Wednesday, May 16, 2012. Austerity & Neo-Nazis, oh my!

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been one of the most outspoken critics of the Volcker Rule, a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that aims to keep the banks in which you deposit your money from gambling it on their own sometimes-risky investments. Now Dimon has announced that risky trades have cost his company $2 billion in losses. In this April 22, 2012 Moyers Moment from Moyers & Company, Paul Volcker himself responds to Jamie Dimon’s complaints about the rule and its effects.

"Be the Boss": An anti-authoritarian children's song about respect and consent follows the Occupy Wall Street's "leaderless" movement premise that befuddles many.

May is Move Our Money Month.
Bank Local! http://fthebanks.org

Will we continue down the path to less freedom, less free time, and more stress. More bills, more greed, environmental destruction. Will we allow the 1% to get away with destroying communities and controlling the government? Or will we say no more. We are the 99% and we will no longer tolerate the greed and rule of the 1%. Our actions determine the direction we go. Lets organize.

Let's move our money out of their criminal too big to fail banks.

Shot by Andrew Stern and Jeremy Baron of Starr Street Studios.

There have been at least 40 alleged members of the hacktivist collective Anonymous arrested during the past year. In an interview with the National Post, one of the group's last remaining leaders tips us off to the group's next planned action.

Christopher Doyon, aka "Commander X," whose name is public because he's been indicted for hacking a California county government website after government officials forcibly removed a homeless encampment from courthouse steps. Doyon faces 15 years in prison for that action. For the interview, he met with a reporter and photographer from the Post in Canada where he is a now a fugitive from the FBI.

At the end of the interview, Doyon makes a whopper of a claim, make of it what you will:

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Every classified database is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around. I can't even begin to imagine how many such databases our nation uses. But remember that Bradley Manning released a few hundred thousand emails from just one such database.

The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Now this claim, that the Anons next action could be the result of an inside job is quite plausible, and again, recall Bradley Manning. As we saw with Manning's Cablegate, just that one database created quite the stir for the U.S. government. Even with the "keys" to but a few of these databases would make Anonymous quite the force to be reckoned with, despite their diminished membership.

Good morning! Today is Tuesday, May 15th, 2012. Jamie Dimon faces his shareholders today. Oh, to be a fly on that boardroom wall!

Throughout human history, seeds have been treated as a common human inheritance. This sacred and vital means of survival and biodiversity, however, is today being systematically eradicated and privatized. Massive agro-chemical companies like Monsanto (Agent Orange) and Dow (Napalm) are feeding us genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that have never been fully tested and aren't labeled in the United States, where they grow on over 70% of our farmland. This small handful of corporations is tightening their grip on the world's food supply—buying, modifying, and patenting seeds to ensure total control over everything we eat. Today in the United States, by the simple act of feeding ourselves, we are unwittingly participating in the largest experiment ever conducted on human beings. We are the oblivious guinea pigs for the large-scale experimentation of modern biotechnology.

“Control the food, and you control the people.” - Henry Kissinger

This film by Jeremy Seifert demonstrates how little Americans truly know about the food they eat and the companies that alter it.

Today in the United States, by the simple act of feeding ourselves, we unwittingly participate in the largest experiment ever conducted on human beings. Massive agro-chemical companies like Monsanto (Agent Orange) and Dow (Napalm) are feeding us genetically-modified food, GMO’s, that have never been fully tested and aren't labeled. This small handful of corporations are tightening their grip on the world’s food supply—buying, modifying, and patenting seeds to ensure total control over everything we eat.

The GMO Film Project (Untitled) tells the story of a father’s discovery of GMO’s through the symbolic act of poor Haitian farmers burning seeds in defiance of Monsanto’s gift of 475 tons of hybrid corn and vegetable seeds to Haiti shortly after the devastating earthquake. After a journey to Haiti to learn why hungry farmers would burn seeds, the real awakening of what has happened to our food, what we are feeding our families, and what is at stake for the global food supply unfolds in a trip across the United States in search of answers.

Are we at a tipping point? Is it time to take back our food? The encroaching darkness of unknown health and environmental risks, seed take over, chemical toxins, and food monopoly meets with the light of a growing resistance of organic farmers, concerned citizens, and a burgeoning movement to take back what we have lost.

We still have time to heal the planet, feed the world, and live sustainably. But we have to start now.

A film by Compeller Pictures
gmofilm.com

Directed by Jeremy Seifert
Produced by Joshua Kunau
Co-Producer, Elizabeth Kucinich
Associate Producer, Timothy Vatterott
Cinematographer, Rod Hassler

Filmmaker Bianca Smith captures Occupy Los Angeles as they come from the north, south, east and west to converge into a Workers' Day celebration. "We are babysitters, nannies, we're gardeners, janitors, security guards," a woman shouts at a union rally. "We're all kinds of workers, and we demand respect!"

Marchers also share their visions of a more just world. "My version of a perfect society would be someplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to live up to their potential," a young man says. "I think that's the ideal place to live in."

Smith explains, "We had been anticipating for the May 1 General Strike (M1GS) for several weeks. Once the date got closer we held a couple meetings to talk about how we could cover all bases throughout the day. We knew that M1GS planned to flood the city in four "winds" (north, south, east, west) until the marches and caravans converged in Downtown LA. We created a camera team for each wind, composed solely of film students from The Los Angeles Film School, and we interviewed the likes of every culture and walk of life we could. Los Angeles is a city full of diversity and we wanted to capture that. There are a multitude of different types of people with a multitude of issues at hand to be dealt with. We wanted to convey the spirit of people, and I think we're all very happy with the results. This is a beautiful movement with real momentum, and I believe the medium of film and internet can play a very important role in that.