This Mini-documentary was shot on the afternoon of election day at St. Camillus Church and the surrounding areas in Far Rockaway, Queens.
The lights are on in Manhattan, and Far Rockaway is still dark, cold and isolated. A public health crisis looms ominously over the community as winter temperatures intensify. After being in the field, it's fairly clear that Occupy is the only major outside presence with a long-term commitment to Rockaway Community.
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In the age of Facebook and Twitter, a new crime has hit America: "Sharpie parties," gatherings of revelers armed with "Sharpie" magic markers and lured by social media invitations to wreak havoc on foreclosed homes.
Five years into the U.S. foreclosure crisis, Sharpie parties are a new form of blight on the landscape of boarded-up homes, brown lawns and abandoned streets. They are also the latest iteration of collective home-trashing spurred by social media.
At least six Sharpie parties were reported in one California county in recent months, where invitations posted online drew scores to foreclosed homes.
The partygoers are handed Sharpie pens on arrival by their hosts and urged to graffiti the walls - a destructive binge that often prompts other acts of vandalism, including smashing holes in walls and doors, flooding bathrooms and ripping up floors.
If revenge on the banks is the motive, does anyone think the banks really care? They make their money no matter what, that's how they stay rich and powerful, they designed the system to work that way.
Those of us fighting to change the system, and hoping to see crooked bankers punished for things like mortgage fraud will have a more difficult time doing that if we're all looked upon as criminals or potential criminals. Please, think beyond yourself, and remember that there are families still fighting to keep their homes.
Bill Moyers talks with independent filmmaker Anthony Baxter, director of You’ve Been Trumped, a new documentary about the perils of rampant capitalism and gluttonous conspicuous consumption, epitomized by Donald Trump’s aggressive efforts to build “the greatest golf course in the world” across ancient sand dunes in Scotland. A veteran journalist, Baxter says what Trump and the Scottish government are hailing as an economic boon is actually a disaster to the environment and a callous disruption of people’s lives by a ruthless one-percenter run amok.
“It seems to me there’s one rule for the super-rich and one rule for everybody else,” Baxter says. “And the 99 percent of people in the world are tired and fed up of having money and power riding roughshod over their lives and our planet… Our planet, I don’t think, can afford these kinds of decisions.
The full transcript of the exchange is available here, and the official trailer for You've Been Trumped follows below the fold...
This Youtube video has good footage of the damage as a result of the July 18, 2012 riot at the Maruti Suzuki plant in India, but it is a continuous loop of the same images for over 6 minutes.
Outsourcing to cheap foreign labor may have to eventually become a thing of the past as now auto workers in India have resorted to deadly violence in their desperate efforts to have India's outdated labor laws overhauled, and their wages increased.
Hiding in his office near New Delhi as workers armed with iron bars and car parts rampaged through the factory, Maruti Suzuki(MRTI.NS) supervisor Raj Kumar spent two terrified hours trying to comprehend the warzone his workplace had become.
By the end of the day, one of his colleagues had been burnt to death and dozens wounded, many with broken bones, as a long-running struggle between the shop floor and management exploded at a factory racked by mistrust.
While police investigate and the carmaker counts its mounting losses, the July 18 clash has rattled corporate India and shone a light on outdated and rigid labour laws in a country where cheap labour drives manufacturing and draws foreign investment. High inflation, a shortage of skilled labour and rising aspirations have emboldened workers' demands.
"There was always a strong sense of unease," Kumar, 43, told Reuters as he stood outside the locked factory gates more than a week after the riot in the industrial town of Manesar.
"We are living in fear... The kind of violence these guys showed was unbelievable."
Hyundai and Honda plants located in India have also seen labour unrest in their plants as some labor laws date as far back as 1920.
Since July's rioting, Maruti Suzuki has remained on shut down, with its some 2,500 workers in hiding fearing punishment from the company, criminal charges or both.
Troubles for Maruti began as far back as 2000, when workers hunger-striked for better wages. The best and highest paid manufacturing workers in the area are paid 25,000 rupees a month, the equivalent of just $445.79 in U.S. currency.
Mitt Romney. Was he a job creator or a corporate raider?
That's the question this film answers.
And it's not pretty...
Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn't seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical.
He is exhibit number one the left wants to use in the coming election to give capitalism a bad name.
He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney's 'creative destruction' model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.
Mitt Romney and his cronies pioneered 'deindustrialization,' a process by which they searched out vulnerable companies, took them over, loaded them with debt, and collected obscene fees while doing so. He sent jobs overseas or killed them altogether, and then picked apart the remains - including pension funds - before the companies went bankrupt.
Some might call that the free market. Most of us think its just plain wrong.
If you wonder why America has lost so many manufacturing jobs overseas, look no further than Mitt Romney -- the King of Bain.
A member of Occupy Wall Street has filed a claim on behalf of the group stating that the city of New York had either damaged beyond repair, or destroyed books and other property from the People's Library at Zuccotti Park totalling $47,000. Filing the claim is the first step towards a civil suit in the matter.
When the Occupy Wall Street encampment was evicted from the park on Nov. 15, police officers and sanitation workers dismantled and removed belongings and furnishings that had been kept in the park, tossing them onto sidewalks, into metal containers and into a dump truck. Many of those items ended up at a Sanitation Department facility in Midtown, where they were made available for pickup by their owners, some of whom found them damaged beyond repair. Other property, some of the Occupy protesters say, never resurfaced.
The lawyers who filed the claim, Alan Levine, Michael L. Spiegel and the law firm Siegel Teitelbaum & Evans, wrote that the city “unreasonably seized and took possession” of about 3,600 books, four computers, WiFi equipment, shelves, wooden chairs and the large tent that covered the area that the protesters called the People’s Library. The man who is named in the claim, Peter Dutro, is described in the notice as the “de facto treasurer” of the group.
When the librarians went to the sanitation facility, the claim said, only 1,003 of their books could be found and 201 of them were so damaged as to be unusable. The four computers were also damaged beyond repair, the claim said, and protesters said at the time that hard drives were missing from those machines that were retrieved and that the casings of the computers had been twisted and bent.
The claim put the value of the lost books at $43,000 and estimated the value of furnishings that were not recovered at $4,000. The lawyers wrote that the value of the damaged computers and communications equipment had not yet been determined.
The library's destruction drew condemnation from a host of writers and organizations, including the American Library Association and author Salman Rushdie. Some of the books were signed copies given by authors, including one donated the previous day by Philip Levine, the US poet laureate.
