The individual mandate, a requirement in the Affordable Care Act that individuals buy private health insurance or pay a fine, is still very unpopular according to the newest Kaiser Family Foundation poll. According to the poll 63 percent have a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of the individual mandate, while only 35 percent have a [...]

Last night the Los Angeles police raided and shut down the Occupy LA encampment and then dismantled it, bringing in heavy equipment to destroy all structures and throw everything into dumpsters. Here’s the sanitized version from the AP: More than 1,400 police officers, some in riot gear, cleared the Occupy Los Angeles camp early Wednesday, [...]

When former Goldman Sachs exec Henry Paulson was Treasury Secretary he apparently gave his hedge fund buddies extremely helpful and lucrative secret information about his plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while still assuring the public everything was fine. To a room full of hedge fund mangers, including many of his former colleagues, [...]

We took delivery on our first shipment of heavyweight duck blanket lined jackets, made by UFCW local 1541 workers and modeled by Jon Walker in the photo.  The boxes piled high behind him give an indication of what the rest of my house looks like at the moment.

There’s an FDL membership liaison webinar meeting this Wednesday at 8pm, so if you joined the FDL Membership Program and want to be a liaison in your community, you’ll be getting an email invitation soon. If you’d like to join the Membership Program and become a liaison to your local occupation, you can join here.

Many thanks to all our liaisons who have been doing an absolutely amazing job. Jackets and base layer underwear are on their way!

Robert J. Samuelson writes an extremely disappointing  and misleading article about health care policy in today’s Washington Post. The column starts out fine with Samuelson looking at the basic OECD data that shows America spends dramatically more on health care than any other industrialized country on earth but doesn’t get better health outcomes as a [...]

Give gifts that reflect your values this holiday season at our brand new Occupy Supply online store.

As part of the basic social contract, we as a society have given the police the awesome responsibility of protecting public safety by having a monopoly on the legal use of force. We do not provide police this awesome power because we think society would be better off if a special group of sadists could [...]

The overall level of popular support for the Occupy Wall Street movement has remained basically unchanged since last month according to Gallup. What I find most interesting about the poll is that the “neither” number has remained so high even after a month of significant media coverage. It is a reminder that even though the [...]

This is a powerful statistic from Forbes. The Top 0.1 percent of the country captured about half of the capital gains, which are currently taxed at just 15 percent, making this a prime mechanism for increasing income inequality.  From Forbes: Capital gains are the key ingredient of income disparity in the US– and the force behind the winner [...]

I’ve previously stated my curiosity about who is paying for these massive late, style raids on the Occupy encampments. Getting hundreds of officers working overtime in the middle of the night isn’t cheap. That is why I’m glad legal groups supporting the occupations are taking steps to find out what role, if any, the federal [...]