Night with a Martini

theyhatelight:

Since we’ve bailed out the 10 largest banks $83 billion this year alone, should they give it back to us by paying into the U.S. Treasury the amount of this year’s sequester? After all, it’s the same amount.

On February 20th, Bloomberg News editors headlined, “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?” and issued the first-ever thorough and current analysis of the taxpayer-subsidy to the Wall Street mega-banks. They found that this subsidy is $83 billion this year, but they made no note of the fact that this amount is only $2 billion less than this year’s sequester cuts are estimated to be, so that all that would need to be done, in order to avoid those cuts, would be to have those mega-banks that we bail out every year forego their subsidy from taxpayers, for just one year.

What the Times article doesn’t mention is that Occupy Wall Street was one of the 90 coalition groups that helped make this protest happen.  That’s how I found out about it, and was able to attend it, because I saw it on the Occupy Los Angeles tumblr page.

It was a great protest. Glad to see coalitions forming around such an important issue.  

I became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement for the expressed reason that it was the first time I saw any large group of people in the U.S. make the connection between degradation of the environment and the corruptive effect big money has on the political process.  ’Big money’ in particular from the oil and gas industry.  

We saw that Wall Street can get away with anything they want by corrupting the political process.  This point is only underscored by the lack of prosecutions of those responsible for the crimes on Wall Street to this day. By fully understanding how corruptive the effects of big money are on the U.S. political and justice system, one has a better understanding for why the U.S. has failed to address climate change, or ratify the Kyoto Protocol.  It’s bad for Big Oil.   

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LA Times: L.A. protesters join campaign against Keystone oil pipeline:

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Hundreds of protesters marched on Los Angeles City Hall on Sunday as part of a nationwide demonstration designed to pressure President Obama into rejecting a Canadian pipeline that would bring oil into the United States.

The local demonstration — led by environmentalist and actor Ed Begley Jr., Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) and L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar — was focused on rejecting TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline as a first step in taking action on climate change.

“We’ve seen climate change coming for a long time, but now it’s here, and it’s getting worse faster and causing greater harm than we ever expected,” Waxman said. “There is simply no more important fight for the future of our children and grandchildren.”

A coalition of 90 groups, led by Tar Sands Action Southern California and the Sierra Club, organized the march to coincide with a larger group of demonstrators who converged on the White House.

“You cannot occupy the White House, but you can surround it,” said Bill McKibben, an environmental writer who founded 350.org, whose name alludes to keeping greenhouse gases at less than 350 parts per million. That’s the level scientists believe to be a dangerous tipping point for the planet.

McKibben and hundreds of others have been arrested in protesting the pipeline, which would carry what he considers some of the “dirtiest oil on the planet.” The oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sand deposits is bitumen, which is heavier, more viscous and contains more impurities, and thus takes more energy to extract and process.

The demonstrations and arrests are beginning to emerge as the largest green civil disobedience campaign in a generation. The target, for the moment, is the proposed construction of the 1,600-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to U.S. refineries that ring the Gulf of Mexico.

Locally, clean energy supporters also rallied behind a recent initiative by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to wean itself from two out-of-state coal plants that now supply nearly 40% of the city’s electricity.

“That will help reduce our city’s climate change pollution footprint,” said Aura Vasquez of the Sierra Club. “But the time has come for the federal government to take strong action too, before it’s too late and global warming spirals out of control.”