Occupy Oakland 2.0

So, along with Mayor Quan's seachange regarding the Occupy Oakland movement (she even officially announced tomorrow's historic General Strike), the mainstream press seems to be less focused on myths about rats and sexual assaults, and more on what is actually happening inside the camp.
It helps that a better camp has been built with input from City Hall and labor unions taken account, but I believe that Quan's reversal has everything to do with her realizing that WE the grassroots got her into office. The political machine, which tried its hardest to prevent her from getting elected, were the people who wanted the PEOPLE evicted from the public park in front of City Hall. She'll never appease those people (The Ignacio de la Fuentes and Larry Reids of the world), and it seems like she is taking less direction from them....for now.
Thankfully, the media has changed course with her, and they are beginning to wake up to the fact that, like the city itself, Occupy Oakland is one of a kind, and the best of the best.

A view is taking shape that while New York was the genesis of the movement, Oakland has become, as one Oakland resident tweeted, the "front line of the revolution."

From the beginning, in fact, the protesters in Oakland set their sights high. They organized and planned for a full week before setting up their camp in the plaza. Once there, they made a point of trying to serve the needs of residents they felt the city had largely neglected -- mostly the poor and homeless. But it was about more than that.

"This is a base camp for a lot of different struggles," said John Reimann, 65, a retired Oakland carpenter and longtime union organizer who helped call for the general strike this week. "We're trying to unite a lot of struggles that people see as separate."

Now, that sense of collective purpose is continuing to draw in people from many sectors of society.

"There's a radicalism in Oakland. The working people, they're not coming to protest and then going home to watch themselves on the news; that makes it special," said Harry Brass, 71, a self-described former radical from Berkeley. "If it stays like this, it could be the leader, Oakland could take over from New York."

Others said Oakland, with its high unemployment rate, violent crime problems, health care disparities and foreclosure scandals, was a convenient and appropriate symbol for what was happening elsewhere in the country, and the world.

"Every community has its own Oakland," said Marco Dondero, 61, a schoolteacher from San Mateo who had come to see Michael Moore on Friday. "The hurt and anger is all over the country. People are here for a reason. They are not going away."
-Inside Bay Area

It was refreshing to see so many "tourists" coming around this weekend to check out the camp. There was so much excitement and energy of the good kind, where people were trying to show off how great the camp is rather than trying to keep outsiders out. I ran in to a lot of people who were coming around for the first time, and they were all amazed at how organized and communal it is.
Don't take my word for it, come on down and see for yourself.

Occupy Oakland Lives!

Wow, I don't really know where to begin.
This was a crazy fuckin week.
On Sunday, my wife performed her music at the Occupy Oakland Children's Village, and my son decided to take home a piece of lego home with him. When I saw it, I said that I'd have to return it to the camp on Monday.
Unfortunately, I was feeling sick on Monday, and worked from home. By the time I woke up on Tuesday morning, it was already too late to return the piece of lego.
The camp had been destroyed.
I went downtown and saw the damage.
It was horrible.
Riot cops surrounded Oscar Grant Plaza, which looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Banners had been torn down, tents had been trampled, and almost everything was covered in tear gas residue. It was a truly depressing site.
I thought to myself that this was the saddest day in American history.
Somehow, I went to work for a couple of hours, but came back to 14th and Broadway at midday. The scene was even more tense than it had been in the morning. Many campers who hadn't been arrested were there, as were many others who disapproved of the cops' presence.
After work, I joined the march leaving the main library on its way downtown.
The scene when the march first squared off against the police line at 14th & Broadway and chanted "Oscar Grant! Oscar Grant!" can only be described as amazing.
Then later in the night, this happened.

The cops shot some guy in the face with a tear gas cannister, and then when people came to help him, another cop threw a grenade at them.
That pretty much guaranteed that that was the saddest day in American history. Not just because of Scott Olsen, but because of Occupy Oakland. Scott was the cherry bomb on top.
Occupy Oakland, just like its hometown, is like no other in the world.
Diverse.
Conscious.
Organized.
Wired and amplified even.
It provided services for the city's neediest residents that the city was unable/unwilling to provide. Jobs, food, shelter, heath care, community, and electricity. More importantly, it provided meaning for the city's neediest.
It had to be destroyed, because it represented something completely new and radically different.
It represented the future.
Everyone in, no one left out.
This is what democracy looks like.

Mayor Jean Quan really did have a grass roots background, and she really did betray it. She let someone else do her job for her. She is an Oaklander who kept it real, and it was a horrible mistake, but she has a chance to make things right and make history in the process. We'll see where she goes from here.
The day after her police force shot and teargassed and grenaded a thousand of her constituents, three thousand showed up the next night to reclaim Oscar Grant Plaza. There were no cops, and the fence surrounding the grassy area was easily dismantled and made into geometric sculptures. A general strike was agreed upon for November 2. Mayor Quan waited to speak, but was booed back into the confines of the building.
The Occupation continued.

World Revolution Update

OPD says protestors teargassed them

This is the kind of outright lying coming out of cops' these days.
They showed up with about 500 cops in gas masks at 3:30 in the morning, started shooting rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, hurled grenades, and yet claim that they got teargassed....even though the protestors didn't have gas masks.
Logic tells you that the people who showed up in gas masks were most likely the ones who used the tear gas.
Duh.

Does this look "peaceful"?

Pic above from http://twitpic.com/75mjjh/full

Early this morning, sometime around 5am, the rumored and expected police raid came in swiftly and violently. As protestors chanted "You are the 99%!" to the police, their cries were silenced with tear gas, flash bang grenades, batons, rubber bullets, several hundred cops in riot gear and gas masks....the cops trashed the camp and aggressively arrested 75 some people, perhaps more.
The camp now looks like a tornado swept through it....i.e. it now looks how the mainstream media has been presenting it all along.
Protestors who are returning to the camp to get their belongings are allegedly being arrested.
This is one of the saddest days in American history.

More pics here.


Here are two nice before-and-after shots of the camp.

Quan recall effort officially underway

Gene Hazzard, of the Oakland Black Caucus, filed an official notice of intent to circulate a recall petition against Mayor Jean Quan today .

"She has willfully ignored the City's most pressing issue: public safety," the filing states. "She ignored the call of Oakland residents to significantly increase the number of police officers and instead supported a regressive $11 million parcel tax."

Charles Pine, of the group Oakland Residents of Peaceful Neighborhoods, signed the petition and echoed the complaint, criticizing Quan for her vote in June 2010 to lay off 80 police officers. Quan was then on the City Council, which was facing tense police union negotiations and a huge budget deficit, and the layoffs won by a 5-3 vote of the council.
-Inside Bay Area

Interestingly, rumors are circulating around the Occupy Oakland camp about a raid early tomorrow morning.

Occupy Oakland hits the streets

#occupyoakland protestors fill the streets after tent city eviction notice from Oakland North on Vimeo.

And apparently, they mobbed a Chase bank down by the lake and shut it down.

Occupy Oakland lives

Second night after getting their first eviction notice, Occupy Oakland is still going strong.
Here's a surprisingly good video from the msm on Occupy Oakland.

Cops in Utah pepper spray haka dancers

Police in Roosevelt, Utah pepper sprayed a group of haka dancers at a high school football game.

The group in Roosevelt, a town of 8,000, had traveled about 125 miles east from the Salt Lake City area to watch a relative play his final game for Union, which lost to rival Uintah and finished the season without a victory.

The group reportedly was trying to boost Union's morale with the Haka as the players left the field.

Spectators, coaches and players told police that everything was fine and they should let the men perform, Jessica Rasmussen said, but officers asked them to make room and started using pepper spray.

Rasmussen said she and other bystanders also got spray in their eyes, ears and mouths.

Union fan Jason Kelly said the way police reacted was an embarrassment to the community of Roosevelt.

"I've never seen anything like it," Kelly said. "It was totally unprovoked."
-Associated Press

Cops got evicted from Occupy Oakland

So this week, the mainstream media and Oakland City Hall ramped up their campaign against the Occupy Oakland encampment with stories about rats, drug use, sexual harassment, graffiti, yadda yadda yadda...
They claim that the protestors don't have any demands, but the protestors have been unified in their main demand: "Join us."
Please don't believe the lies.
Occupy Oakland, like the city itself, is unlike any other. It is diverse, political, organized, and a little crackhead-y too (You can't win them all).
The most notable thing about the now two-week-old protest is that it is an unparalleled experiment in human civilization. They have toilets, food, shelter, roads, educational workshops,informational booths, political discussions, a full entertainment schedule, a family zone, and a first-aid tent too. They even have their own pedal-powered media tent. Every night, the general assemblies are vibrant and chaotic....and somehow effective. Last night, under the threat of eviction from the city, they approved a no-smoking no-drinking policy. Oh yeah, and they collectively thumbed their noses at the eviction notice.
This ain't no burning man. This is democracy at its best/worst.
Everything is free, and everyone is welcome in this utopia.
Well, everyone but the mainstream media and the cops.


Since the City has sent out an eviction notice, this link might be useful to anyone hanging around the camp over the next few days.

Also, here's a good read from the Huffington Post which lists 10 ways you can suport the Occupy Everywhere movement wherever you might be.

The real rats are in city hall, not Frank Ogawa Plaza

An interesting piece that clairifies the rat situation at Occupy Oakland:

The fact that the journalist “reporting” the story simply repeats, at length, what a single city spokesman tells him should be seen as the gift from the newspaper to City Hall that it is. I’ve underlined the main verbs in the first six sentences to make that as clear as possible; that story is almost literally nothing but variations on “what City Hall told us [about the people protesting against it].” And so, the “objective” reporting just happens to repeat exactly the narrative that city hall wants to tell — things were under control before, but now the demonstrators are “attracting rats, alcohol and illegal drug use” — and imagine out of existence any possible counter-narratives which might be told.[1]

But the story that city hall wants to tell is preposterous. There are rats there at night because there are always rats there at night. I’m sure the smell of food does attract more vermin than usual — even as the presence of people also repels them — but the bottom line should still be obvious to anyone with a brain: you don’t normally have a rat “problem” in the park at night because you don’t normally have any people there (or at least not any people the city cares to notice). Even during the day, the only people that use this (quite unused) park are on their lunch break, eating their sandwiches or whatever, and then at night the rats eat their leavings. And no one cares. But now that there are people there — people creating a political headache for city hall — now, suddenly, the rats are an important problem. Suddenly, coincidentally, the city is very concerned about “rats.”

I invite you, by the way, to take a stroll through any part of the adjacent downtown Oakland at two in the morning and observe the rats which have been living off Oakland’s messy humans for many decades, and who will for many more. They’re not hidden, or even particularly shy; you’re just not there to see them and have your sensibilities offended by their presence. But that entire area is a filthy fast-food ridden stretch of a typical dirty downtown, well and truly “marred” by the fact that day-time human leave their waste everywhere for the night janitors to feast on, and who are the real causes of whatever vermin problem it has. It would be truer, in fact, to say that Oakland’s rats are invading the Occupation’s camp.
-Zunguzungu

World Revolution Update

Mayor Quan has issued an eviction notice to Occupy Oakland camp

View the livestream here.

Less than 1 in 4 have faith in financial institutions

According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, 23% of people surveyed trusted US financial institutions.
What do the bottom 22% of those people not get?

Trust in banks has experienced an even steeper decline, falling from 39% in June to 33% in October. Notably, people were much more inclined to trust local banks and credit unions: More than half of those surveyed said they still had faith in those institutions.

The survey also revealed that nearly 60% of respondents were either angry or very angry about the current economic situation -- the highest level of anger measured since the earliest months of the financial crisis.
-Daily Finance

And that is why tent cities are springing up everywhere.

Irishman tries to make gold out of poo

I shit you not.

A man from Northern Ireland has been jailed after an experiment in which he attempted to turn his own faeces into gold went wrong and started a fire in a block of flats.

Paul Moran will now serve three months in jail and a further 12 months on license after the failed experiment caused a fire at his Housing Executive home in Derrin Park, Enniskillen.

Moran admitted arson and endangering the lives of others in the fire, which reportedly caused over £3,000 worth of damage.

It is thought that as part of the bizarre experiment Moran left his faeces, along with other waste products such as fertiliser, on a heater.

In his ruling Judge McFarland told Moran: “Rather bizarrely you were attempting to make gold from human faeces and waste products.

“It was an interesting experiment to fulfil the alchemist’s dream, but wasn’t going to succeed.”

Moran’s barrister mentioned that his client was a man of ‘considerable intellectual ability’ but that he had problems battling drug abuse.
-Yahoo! News

Murder is terror

2003: "Hey, you're Al Qaeda, we're gonna kill you and steal your oil."
2011: "Hey Al Qaeda, can you help us kill this other guy and steal his oil?"

Moral of the story: If you get in bed with the CIA, you'll prolly end up dead.

Jerry Amaro's family wins $1.7 million settlement

Today, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to approve a $1.7 million settlement to the wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Jerry Amaro, who was beaten to death by as many as five Oakland police officers in 2000.

Amaro, 36, died on April 21, 2000, from pneumonia caused by multiple rib fractures and a collapsed lung. He had told his mother and several other people that he had been beaten by police officers who arrested him during a drug sting on March 23, 2000. The police report of the arrest made no mention of use of force.

Amaro was jailed for five days and repeatedly complained of pain in his ribs, which jail officials noted. On April 18, Amaro saw a doctor who took X-rays that revealed five rib fractures and a collapsed lung. The doctor recommended that Amaro seek emergency medical treatment to drain fluid from his lung. Amaro did not seek further treatment and died in his friend's basement three days later.

Attorneys John Burris and Jim Chanin filed the federal wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Amaro's mother, Geraldine Montoya, in March 2009, shortly after the details of the internal police investigation were leaked to the press.

Investigators found that Amaro had been "severely injured" during his arrest, and at least five officers had used "some form of physical prowess" on Amaro without noting the reason for such force or mentioning the use of force at all.

The report also concluded that the reporting officer falsified his supervisor's signature on the police report and the commanding officer, Lt. Edward Poulson, inappropriately met with the arresting officers before the interviews with Internal Affairs investigators.

The investigation also found that the officers were "derelict" in not seeking medical attention for Amaro.
-Inside Bay Area

SFPD gets their canopies

Shortly before midnight last night, 50 SFPD officers marched into the Occupy SF encampment. The officers aggressively removed the camp's two canopies. Then, they trashed and seized the belongings and supplies of the camp. The 150 camp members and supporters attempted to block the streets to prevent the DPW trucks filled with their belongings from driving away.
A number of participants tried asking the SFPD to end this intimidation and asking the truck drivers to show their support. Instead they were met with swinging batons and were nearly run over as the first truck filled with supplies was leaving. Protesters who laid down in the street to block the police vans from leaving with those arrested were beaten with nightsticks and thrown to the curbs.
The results of the night were five arrests, one injury, one serious injury, and a vivid reminder of who's side the police stand on.
The SFPD tore-down and trashed many of the personal belongings of the camp. They need our support to rebuild. Go to occupysf.com for a list of items required.

Join today's General Assembly meeting at 6pm at Justin Hermann Plaza (Embarcadero BART Station) to show your solidarity.

World Revolution Update

Glenn Beck < A Nazi propagandist

Glenn Beck is a douche bag, and that isn't news to anyone.
But wow, on his Monday show, he called the Occupy Wall Street Movement (Americans gathering in a public space and exercising their freedoms peacefully) a bunch of murderers.

"Capitalists, if you think that you can play footsies with these people, you're wrong. They will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you...they're Marxist radicals...these guys are worse than Robespierre from the French Revolution...they'll kill everybody."

He also warns that getting into bed with the "Michael Moores of the world" will result in your death, even though Michael Moore has never been accused of murder by anyone. I highly doubt that anyone on this planet would ever openly admit to thinking that Michael Moore was in any way intimidating even...other than Glenn Beck that is.
Disturbingly, Beck cites a Nazi political assassination campaign as his dream end to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"It will be the Night of Long Knives. It will be a purging of this country."

At the risk of sounding mysogynistic, Glenn Beck is the epitome of some clueless person having their panties in a twist. Is he afraid of real democracy, or is this just more of the same from Beck (i.e. blind lapdogging for his corporate pimps)?
Either way, he is being dangerously immature once again, especially given the lower IQs of his followers.

RIP Coach

"You don't adjust. You just dominate."

So everybody is saying nice things about Al Davis now that he is dead.
Steve Sabol often had nice things to say about Al while he was still alive, so check out this great video tribute by Sabol.

The thing that strikes me the most about Coach Davis is that, not unlike Steve Jobs, for better or worse, he always did it his own way.
No one is perfect.
But few people have the courage to truly be themselves. Fewer have the drive to relentlessly push themselves to be the best that they can be...and then still lust for more.
Al was a character indeed, but he was mostly a good person. The media has portrayed him otherwise though, and that is a testament to his disdain for the status quo. He didn't care about being popular, or even likable. He knew what he was doing, and he was gonna do it his way.
He wasn't just likable though, he was lovable. Every owner, player and fan has him to thank for the lucrative spectacle that is professional sports.
He wasn't just a billiant evaluator of talent, he also had a knack for bringing the best out of people, especially those who had previously been cast off onto the scrap heap. He let his players be who they were, and they kept themselves in line for him...to some degree. His motley crew of America's worst nightmares delivered on Sunday, that's for sure.
Al was so comfortable with diversity (he was instrumental in opening the doors to professional sports for black athletes, and he hired the first Latino coach, the first black coach, and the first female CEO) that he openly admitted that he studied and admired Hitler...and he didn't care if you thought less of him for it.
He was who he was, and the people who knew him loved him because he was a good person who championed the little man and judged people by their commitment, not by anything else.
And he was human and had his faults.
He was about as Oakland as you could possibly get.

He was also the greatest mind in the history of professional sports, and Coach Davis lived and breathed the Raiders, in a way that no other professional sports franchise owner has ever or will ever.
Al has missed on his share of occasions, and it seemed for a while there that he had completely lost it, but in 2009, he started making a series of decisions that can only be described as clutch.
The current team is 100% his, both those who are on it, and not on it, and they have an opportunity to be special. Now that they have some motivation, we'll see.

Coach Davis will be missed by many.

Davis, who died Saturday, wasn't an only-in-America success story. He was an especially-in-America success story, with his abiding appreciation of hard work, wealth, confrontation and litigation. He loved victory, mystery and standing on the outside looking in.

He inspired awe, disdain, blind loyalty, blind rage, imitators, sycophants, friends and enemies. He was so much to so many for so long that he defies a complete and fitting eulogy.

He would have liked that.
-Inside Bay Area

World Revolution Update

The Second Front

Al Jazeera has a bunch of great pics along with this article:

The 'War on Terror' rages in the Philippines
In 2002, the US launched Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines; nine years later, the campaign there continues.

As violence between insurgent groups, local governments and American troops still rages in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States continues to sponsor local military missions to combat "terrorism" in dozens of countries encompassing every major region of the world. The so-called Global War on Terror, now entering its tenth year, has become a military behemoth that accounts for the majority of US defense spending.

In the Philippines, a staunch US ally that receives most of its military funding and training from the US, the Pentagon launched Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines - part of a military effort linked with the main Operation Enduring Freedom mission in Afghanistan - to fight "terrorist insurgent groups" in 2002.

Although the military describes its mission in the Philippines as a success, nearly ten years later, the results are devastating. All-out wars against the Muslim separatist group Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the communist guerilla group New People's Army (NPA) and the Islamist insurgent group Abu Sayyaf have left a trail of destruction across rural areas of the country.

While the American military argues that its presence has been a stabilising factor in the southern Philippines, wars between the government and insurgents continue with killings on a near-daily basis. And although the Philippine constitution prohibits foreign troops from participating in combat operations in the country, joint operations in war zones are often labeled military "exercises" to avoid controversy.

Nearly ten years after the initial troop deployment some 600 American special operations forces remain in the country, and will likely stay there for the foreseeable future.
-Al Jazeera

We face a "Worldwide Banking Meltdown"

IMF advisor Robert Shapiro warns of a meltdown worse than 2008.
So what’s a country to do when faced with sovereign default?
Well in the birthplace of democracy, as the Greek government circles ever-increasingly down the toilet of fiscal insolvency, it apparently has found enough money to purchase 400 M1A1 Abrams tanks from the United States.
Well, I guess if they can’t afford to provide the Greek people with good governance, I guess they will NEED 400 tanks to keep the Greek people in line.

To the west, Spain tops that by offering Uncle Sam a navy base.

Under the agreement, four U.S. Aegis ships will be based at the Rota naval base near Cadiz in Spain. The agreement is part of U.S. President Barack Obama's phased adaptive approach to missile defense, under which ship-based, anti-ballistic missiles are being deployed in the eastern Mediterranean followed by ground-based systems in Romania and Poland.
The agreement "reflects a commitment of both countries to the alliance" and marks "an important step forward to protect NATO territories against missile threats," Rasmussen said. "It is smart defense at its best," he said, describing it as "countries working together and sharing together to provide something that benefits us all."
-Defense News

Come to think of it, considering that 169,000 Americans lost their job in September, Uncle Sam might need some more tanks and missile boats too.

Oakland OKs small urban farms

On Tuesday, the Oakland City Council voted to lift an outdated ban on selling home-grown produce within city limits.

"It's the first step in legitimizing urban agriculture in Oakland," said Esperanza Pallana, 37, who has a 1,200 foot backyard plot in the Grand Lake neighborhood and has been pushing for the change. "It's also preserving our right to grow our own food for ourselves and our community."

The code change altered the definition of "home-based businesses," which previously mandated that it had to be indoors. The new code allows outdoor vegetables as long as it didn't need farm equipment to produce it. Previously, all it took was one phone call from a neighbor to bring down the city's wrath on someone selling backyard carrots.

Eric Angstadt, the city's deputy planning and zoning director, said he estimates that anywhere from a half to three-quarters of urban farmers in Oakland will be protected by this change.

"These are people for whom urban farming is not a primary, money-making occupation," he said. "These are maybe people who are just trying to recover their own costs of growing, or maybe people who are trying to see if it can be a possible commercial occupation."
-SF Gate

The code change won't allow large commercial farms to operate within Oakland, and it doesn't address the issue of farm animals. It simply allows residents to sell produce that they grow in their own yard.

Occupy Oakland

People are pissed

Good ol Paul Farrell.

Occupy Wall Street is a virus spreading rapidly as Occupy Everything, a reform movement that will overshadow the GOP/Tea Party as the voice of the people, leading to an Occupy America.
-MarketWatch

And Jesse La Greca explains it another way:

Linton Johnson still MIA

Oh brotha, where art thou?

Linton Johnson, the all-purpose public voice of BART, remains on leave more than a month since his public relations war with protesters put him even more under the spotlight. BART officials said Wednesday they don’t know when he will return. Johnson’s response to email messages says that he is on a two-month leave for family reasons and he will return around Oct. 17.

His previous email message had him returning Sept. 19, but that was amended with the later return time.

Johnson, the chief media spokesman for an agency often in the news, made news in the last month during the continuing tensions between BART and protesters and hackers upset with shootings by BART police officers.
-Inside Bay Area

Family reasons?
More like he has been shamed into submission by anonymous hackers who posted a picture of him exposing his family jewels while embracing a shirtless man.
His incompetence on the job, which is detailed in the Inside Bay Area article quoted above, pales in comparison to the damage done by this.
Even though Anonymous gets accused of being immature and unfocused, I call this brilliant move very strategic and very targeted, and apparently, extremely effective.
Immature, maybe, but effective as well.
When you're paid a helluva lot of money to be a public persona, don't be surprised if your persona is made public.

China: Don’t electioneer at our expense

Yesterday, the US Senate voted 79-19 to open a week-long debate on a bill that calls for U.S. tariffs on imports from countries with deliberately undervalued currencies.
(Ahem)
Naturally, the move prompted an angry rebuke from China, which holds down the value of its yuan currency to give its exporters an edge in global markets. China claims it is committed to gradual currency reform, noting that the yuan has risen 30 percent against the dollar since 2005, and warned that passage of such legislation will spark a trade war.

Supporters of the legislation say it would create new jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but China, and some in the United States, say it could trigger a damaging trade war.
The Chinese central bank warned the proposed law would not fix the economic problems in the United States and could cause more serious problems.
If the bill passes, it "cannot resolve insufficient saving, the high trade deficit and the high unemployment rate in the U.S., and it may seriously affect the progress of China's exchange rate reform and may lead to a trade war, which we do not want to see," the bank said.
-Yahoo! News

Top Republican legislators in the US agree.

The strong misgivings of House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner were the first clear sign the currency legislation might fizzle out, as similar bills have done since lawmakers began targeting China's yuan policy in 2005.
"I think it's pretty dangerous to be moving legislation through the United States Congress forcing someone to deal with the value of their currency," Boehner told reporters.
"While I've got concerns about how the Chinese have dealt with their currency, I'm not sure this is the way to fix it."
-Reuters

So Democrats want to, Repulicans don't want to...no news there.
What is news though, is that China is pissed off at the rhetoric flyin around inside the beltway...and that's actually pretty big news.

The men who crashed the world

Meltdown is a four-part investigation that takes a closer look at the people who brought down the financial world. It can be seen on Al Jazeera English from Tuesday, September 20, at the following times GMT: Tuesday: 2000; Wednesday: 1200; Thursday: 0100; Friday: 0600; Saturday: 2000; Sunday: 1200; Monday: 0100; Tuesday: 0600.

In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the throne.