If so -- if this is really about "the 99%" -- then you need to understand a few things.

Some of you already do. To those, this article is redundant. To the rest, and to the majority of the people in this nation, it is not.

Last night I appeared on Dylan Ratigan's show. You can watch the segment, and should. I used the word financialization, which a few people emailed me about and asked me to explain.

Thus, this Ticker.

So what is financialization anyway? It is the process by which something very ordinary (say, a TV set) becomes financed. In doing so there is inherently created the use (and usually the abuse) of leverage.

What is leverage? Leverage is simply the ability to act as though you have much more of something than you really do. For example, you can use leverage to pry off the lid on a beer bottle. Your raw strength is multiplied by the lever (the bottle opener) to lift the cap.

As Occupy Wall Street protests spring up in cities across the country, authorities are thinking up creative ways to contain this peaceful and inspiring uprising. Although laws and municipal ordinances vary from city to city, there is a consistency in the tactics being used to stifle the movement. More importantly, as demonstrated by the protesters at Zuccotti Park who kept strong in the face of a looming eviction that never came to fruition, these maneuvers are not working.

Still, there is no shortage of justifications and rationales behind the constantly evolving schemes being implemented to destroy the spirit of Occupy Wall Street. Here are 12 desperate and unsuccessful measures the authorities are using to discourage, deter and crack down on peaceful protests.

US President Barack Obama has announced he is deploying 100 "combat-equipped" troops to Uganda to help efforts against rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who have been accused of grievous human rights abuses over the course of a decades-long insurgency.

The US troops, subject to the approval of national authorities, could also deploy from Uganda into South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of the Congo, Obama said in a message to Congress.

LRA rebels are accused of murdering, raping and kidnapping thousands of people in those four nations. Tens of thousands of people have died in their 20-year war in northern Uganda.

A peer-reviewed study released this week has concluded that the government's safety testing methodologies for Gulf of Mexico seafood were insufficient to prevent oil-tainted animals from being sold in U.S. supermarkts.

Produced by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and published in the journal Environmental Health Perspective, the study concludes that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) used outdated risk assessment techniques when evaluating the safety of gulf seafood in the wake of the worst accidental oil spill in human history.

Ultimately, the FDA was responsible for allowing food with "10,000 times too much contamination" than should be permitted, the study's authors said, failing to highlight the elevated risk to children and pregnant women.

The results of the NRDC's study are in line with a Raw Story investigation published late last year, which cited independent chemists and toxicologists states apart whose tests had concluded that tainted seafood was headed to the U.S. market.

A well-known truism in the culture of morality, both the Jewish and global, is that those who mistreat others, resort to wicked gossip, lie, cheat, rob, humiliate and abuse, end up hurting not only their victims but also themselves: They became corrupt and rot on the inside, their moral fabric decays, and their dreadful reputation - a result of their flawed humanity - spreads far and wide.

Whether we believe in full retribution in the afterlife or in the constancy of "Karma", or whether we are rationalistic and atheistic, we know that at the end of the day wickedness only gives rise to wickedness, and that moral ugliness comes with a high price

I am addressing these issues here and now especially given the "price tag" phenomenon displayed by morally corrupt Jews, but also to criticize the indifferent majority in general and our leaders in particular, who reconcile themselves with their silence to the injustices of our moral ugliness and the high prices we all pay for it.

In case you are not yet aware, OfCom, Britain's Office of Communications, decided to take Press TV off air in the UK this week. The significance of this move by the state regulator should not be underestimated. The battle for free speech is definitely on.

With this move, the state apparatus has all but declared war on a foreign network's ability to broadcast a political perspective that differs from the consensus reality line. Note that the state, particularly in the UK, will spend millions per year in order to enforce a rolling agenda of talking points. The US will also spend billions to ensure the same thing.

An attack by a US unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has killed at least 78 people and injured 64 others in southern Somalia, Press TV reports.

The Friday attack took place near Qooqani town located in southern Somalia, a Press TV correspondent reported.

In a different incident on Friday, another US drone attack killed 11 civilians and wounded 34 more in Hoosingow district in the south of the country.

Somalia is the sixth country where the US military has conducted drone strikes.

The US has employed drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Iraq and Yemen to launch aerial bombings.

Washington claims the airstrikes target militants, though most such attacks have resulted in civilian casualties.

Somalia has been without a functioning government since 1991, when warlords overthrew former dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

A non-UN-sanctioned US drone strike has left at least four people dead in northwest Pakistan near the Afghan border, Pakistani officials say.

The US unmanned aircraft targeted a vehicle near Darpa Khel village, which is located about four kilometers (two miles) west of Miranshah, the main town in the district of North Waziristan, AFP quoted local officials as saying on Friday.

This is the third drone attack by US forces near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in 48 hours.

The incident comes as at least 12 people lost their lives in two separate strikes in North Waziristan.

Hundreds of Pakistanis have been killed in illegal US drone strikes in recent years.

FBI Insider (with clearance) finds nothing on plot within FBI channels.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer says that an FBI insider told him the dubious terror plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador which has been blamed on Iran was likely manufactured by the Obama administration, because no information about the plot even exists within FBI channels.

"The FBI's had a record lately and I did talk to one of my inside guys and he is saying he thinks the same thing, you know why, because he can't find any real information and he's got a clearance - so that tells him that there's something going on that's extraordinary by the fact that he's an inside investigator, knows what's going on and yet, I'm gonna quote here, 'There's nothing on this within the DOJ beyond what they've talked about publicly' - which means to him that there's something very wrong with it," said Shaffer.

Imagine that you couldn't drive on major highways without agreeing to put a camera in your car -- one that could film either the occupants or the vehicle's surroundings and transmit the images back to a central office for inspection.

You don't have to read George Orwell to conjure up such an ominous surveillance state. You just have to skim through filings at the U.S. Patent Office.

It's hard to imagine Americans would tolerate such a direct, Big-Brotherish intrusion. But they might not notice if the all-seeing cameras were tucked inside another kind of government tracking technology that millions of Americans have already invited into their cars.

Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that just signed a 10-year contract to provide in-car transponders such as the E-Z Pass to 22 electronic highway toll collection systems around the U.S., recently filed a patent on technology to add multi-function mini-cameras to their toll gadgets. Today, transponders are in about 22 million cars around the U.S. Adding inward and outward facing cameras to the gadgets would create surveillance capabilities far beyond anything government agencies have tried until now.

The stated reason for an inward-pointing camera is to verify the number of occupants in the car for enforcement of HOV and HOT lanes. The outward-pointing camera could be used for the same purpose, helping authorities enforce minimum occupant rules against drivers who aren't carrying transponders.

But it's easy to imagine other uses. The patent says the transponders would have the ability to store and transmit pictures, either at random intervals or on command from a central office. It would be tempting to use them as part of a search for a lost child, for example, and law enforcement officials might find the data treasure trove irresistible. The gadget could also be instructed to take pictures when the acceleration of a car "exceeds a threshold," or when accidents occur, so it could be used like an airplane cockpit flight recorder.