A different type of occupation is supposed to start later this week in Washington, D.C., with a specifically anti-militarism/end the wars/cut the war spending focus. I believe the intent is similar in that it is an open-ended occupation of a central plaza in downtown DC just a couple of blocks from the White House.

On October 05, 2011, at 3:00 in the afternoon the residents of Liberty Square will gather to join their union brothers and sisters in solidarity and march. At 4:30 in the afternoon the 99% will march in solidarity with #occupywallstreet from Foley Square to the Financial District, where their pensions have disappeared to, where their health has disappeared to. Together we will protest this great injustice. We stand in solidarity with the honest workers of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFnVfMCydKI&feature=player_embedded

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein

And now it seems that protestors in every major city in the U.S. -- and even some cities in Canada -- are joining in. In Chicago, protesters banged on drums in the financial district. In Boston, 3000 people marched through the downtown area. Protesters set up campsites in Atlanta's financial district. Crowds camped out outside Los Angeles City Hall.

And there will be even more in the coming weeks. Occupy D.C. plans to move their protest outside the White House on Thursday. Portland, Oregon's demonstration will be on October 6. Ft. Lauderdale's got one October 8. The Canadian news outlet CBC News reports that on October 15, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver will all have their own demonstrations. And the list goes on.

We can all look forward to higher quality trolls in comments courtesy of the New York Fed (assuming we don't have them already) thanks to a more thorough blogosphere/social media monitoring program the Fed is planing to launch (hat tip reader Tom via TPM):

New York Fed Social Media Request for Proposal

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

keep to the Fen Causeway

Which is to say that Occupy Wall Street offers the prospect of possibly unifying progressives and progressive populists while wedging radical reactionaries.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

I'm a bit busy to link, but I've seen a report that the Los Angeles city council is set to pass a resolution in favor of the protests.

Just what they're after? Power? I'd say they're being naive at best: I'll just sit here in this square until you give me the power that I so deserve. Saying fuck you to the older generation (i.e. their parents)? Possibly, but it seems more of a whisper than a shout. Attention? Well they're getting that. Given the focus on media and packaging, maybe they just want to star in their own movies. I don't know. Perhaps this is just one small step...

[Note: Quoted in full]

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.

They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.

They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers' healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people's lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

Two interesting open articles about electronic trading show the problem. In the NYT today is an article about the need for regulation of high speed trading. It talks about the issue in a general way and makes some good points.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/business/clamping-down-on-rapid-trades-in-stock-market.html?_r=1&a mp;ref=business

Regulators are playing catch-up. In the United States and Europe, they have recently fined traders for using computers to gain advantage over slower investors by illegally manipulating prices, and they suspect other market abuse could be going on. Regulators are also weighing new rules for high-speed trading, with an international regulatory body to make recommendations in coming weeks.

Coincidentally, an article in IEEE Spectrum magazine this month provides some technical detail:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/it/financial-trading-at-the-speed-of-light

[Lots of editing in this summary; read the whole article to get a better picture.]

Today, virtually all stock trading is done through massive, globally interlinked computer systems. The rates of these transactions are now limited only by technology and, increasingly, by the speed of light. So a costly arms race has begun for telecommunications and network links that can give traders a competitive edge as small as a few tens of microseconds.

The impetus is a recent phenomenon called high-frequency trading. Typically, a high-frequency trading firm--or rather, its computer systems--buys and sells financial instruments while holding on to them for perhaps just fractions of a second. High-frequency traders make money by exploiting tiny and fleeting disequilibriums in the markets--say, when the price of one asset changes and the price of another that should be equivalent in value doesn't shift immediately to match.

One reason the high-frequency traders can beat others to the punch is that they often locate their computers in data centers run by the exchanges. The New York Stock Exchange, for example, moved its computer infrastructure last year to a facility it built in Mahwah, N.J., where it also leases space to trading firms. It can command premium prices for that space because close physical proximity means fast access to the exchange's raw trading data. Most other market participants don't see that data until milliseconds later, after it's been consolidated and combined with information from other exchanges

High-frequency traders also gain an edge by having the fastest telecommunications link possible between distant trading centers where the prices of what is being bought and sold are fundamentally related. The fate of some companies whose stocks are being traded in New York City, for example, hinges on the price of commodities being traded in Chicago, and vice versa. If the computerized trading platform in one of these cities has access to information about the market in the other sooner than anyone else--even just a few milliseconds sooner--it can execute profitable trades.

That's why Spread Networks, of Ridgeland, Miss., invested what probably amounts to a few hundred million dollars last year to install a new fiber-optic cable along the shortest route it could find between New York and Chicago and then began marketing the connection to high-frequency trading firms. The round-trip travel time of a signal along its new cable, 13.3 milliseconds, is 3 ms faster than competitors can offer. With electronic trades now taking less than a millisecond to execute, firms with access to this fast connection can profit handsomely.

Hibernia Atlantic appears to be thinking quite far ahead here. One of its advisers is Alexander Wissner-Gross, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory who (with Cameron E. Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa ) published an article last year in Physical Review E titled "Relativistic Statistical Arbitrage." That article investigates, in a rigorously quantitative way, what happens when the kinds of trading opportunities that high-frequency traders exploit are limited only by the speed of light, or at least the speed that light travels at in optical fiber.

"The naive solution is to put preprogrammed computers on either side of a low-latency link," says Wissner-Gross. That's what's happening now, and it's led to "an arms race to reduce point-to-point latencies," he says. But his research highlights a different strategy for making money. "The next phase is setting up at nodes." He means that the most advantageous position to be in, if you're trying to wring a profit from tiny discrepancies in price between two distant trading centers, is at an intermediate point between them. For example, if prices are fluctuating rapidly in New York but shifting only slowly in London, you should set up your trading machines between the two cities--but closer to the U.S. end of the connection. (Of course, this might put them, awkwardly, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

So the "Wall Street" image of guys madly using hand signals to buy and sell at the direction of their corporate bosses should be replaced by a picture of mathematics professors, computer engineers, and data center real estate brokers. And if you want to change how the system works, you have to figure out how to change--or at least regulate--the massive but almost invisible technical infrastructure that makes the modern trading system work. That is a BIG problem, it seems to me...