Their REAL constituents---the corporations who have paid them much more money than you are even allowed.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Fighting for the Future of the Internet
Tis the season for your Senators and Congress members to hand out presents to their constituents.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Despite GOP Claims, U.S. Health Care
Nowhere Near ‘Best’ in the World
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/despite-gop-claims-us-health-care-nowhere-near-best-world-1322497805
By Wendell Potter
Nowhere Near ‘Best’ in the World
This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/despite-gop-claims-us-health-care-nowhere-near-best-world-1322497805
By Wendell Potter
A little more than a year ago, on the day after the GOP regained control of the House of Representatives, Speaker-to-be John Boehner said one of the first orders of business after he took charge would be the repeal of health care reform.
"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country," Boehner said at a press conference. "That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.”
Boehner is not the first nor the only Republican to try to make us believe that the U.S. has the world’s best health care system and that we’re bound to lose that distinction because of Obamacare. I’ve heard GOP candidates for president say the same thing in recent months, charging that we need to get rid of a President who clearly is trying to fix something that doesn’t need fixing, something that isn’t broken in the first place.
Well, those guys need to get out more. Out of the country, in fact. They need to travel to at least one of the many countries that are doing a much better job of delivering high quality care at much lower costs than the good old USA.
"I believe that the health care bill that was enacted by the current Congress will kill jobs in America, ruin the best health care system in the world, and bankrupt our country," Boehner said at a press conference. "That means we have to do everything we can to try to repeal this bill and replace it with common sense reforms to bring down the cost of health care.”
Boehner is not the first nor the only Republican to try to make us believe that the U.S. has the world’s best health care system and that we’re bound to lose that distinction because of Obamacare. I’ve heard GOP candidates for president say the same thing in recent months, charging that we need to get rid of a President who clearly is trying to fix something that doesn’t need fixing, something that isn’t broken in the first place.
Well, those guys need to get out more. Out of the country, in fact. They need to travel to at least one of the many countries that are doing a much better job of delivering high quality care at much lower costs than the good old USA.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Police Abuses Expose Our Current--Foretell Our Future--Military State
SCT NOTE: The United States is rapdily moving toward a total, tyrranical military state. We have seen it clearly in the brutality of police, at the command of their corrupt political bosses who are owned by Fourth Reich corporate powers, in blowing away Occupy in New York, Oakland and elsewhere. Keep your eye on the Department of Homeland Security. It is evoling into the Department of Homeland Suppression. Look for stock prices of private prison corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America which is based in Nashville, to move up in anticipation of further government contracting for prisons to become domestic Guantanamos for Americans who dare believe the First Amendment counts. There are already more than 800 vacant prison camps operated by the military in the U.S. and ready to accept the protesters who are not backed down by pepper spray. The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root to build more.
Following is a good article which lays it out. Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator and author of two New York Times best-selling books.
URL: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/
Sunday, Nov 20, 2011 6:09 AM 15:20:44 CST
Following is a good article which lays it out. Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator and author of two New York Times best-selling books.
URL: http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/
Sunday, Nov 20, 2011 6:09 AM 15:20:44 CST
The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying
The shocking abuse of police power at UC-Davis is important precisely because it is not aberrational
VIDEO(updated below)
The now-viral video of police officers in their Robocop costumes sadistically pepper-spraying peaceful, sitting protesters at UC-Davis (details here) shows a police state in its pure form. It’s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it’s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not. The Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta adeptly demonstrates with an assemblage of video how common such excessive police force has been in response to the Occupy protests. Along those lines, there are several points to note about this incident and what it reflects:
The now-viral video of police officers in their Robocop costumes sadistically pepper-spraying peaceful, sitting protesters at UC-Davis (details here) shows a police state in its pure form. It’s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it’s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not. The Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta adeptly demonstrates with an assemblage of video how common such excessive police force has been in response to the Occupy protests. Along those lines, there are several points to note about this incident and what it reflects:
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top
Taibblog www.RollingStone.com
by: Matt Taibbi
Was absolutely mesmerized last night watching the viral video of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying. It was totally amazing, simultaneously one of most depressing and inspiring things I’ve seen in many years.
To recap for those who haven’t seen it: police in paramilitary gear line up in front of a group of Occupy protesters peacefully assembled on a quad pathway. Completely unprovoked, police decide to douse the whole group of sitting protesters with pepper spray. There is crying and chaos and panic, but the wheezing protesters sit resolutely in place and refuse to move despite the assault.
Finally, in what to me is the most amazing part, the protesters gather together and move forward shouting “Shame On You! Shame On You!” over and over again. You can literally see the painful truth of those words cutting the resolve of the policemen and forcing them backwards.
To recap for those who haven’t seen it: police in paramilitary gear line up in front of a group of Occupy protesters peacefully assembled on a quad pathway. Completely unprovoked, police decide to douse the whole group of sitting protesters with pepper spray. There is crying and chaos and panic, but the wheezing protesters sit resolutely in place and refuse to move despite the assault.
Finally, in what to me is the most amazing part, the protesters gather together and move forward shouting “Shame On You! Shame On You!” over and over again. You can literally see the painful truth of those words cutting the resolve of the policemen and forcing them backwards.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Chris Hedges’ Speech in Front of Goldman Sachs Leads to Arrest of Hedges, 16 Others
By Chris Hedges
Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into the pockets of those who carried out fraud and criminal activity rather than the victims who lost their jobs, their savings and often their homes.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Free Speech and Democracy Prevail---for Now---in Nashville
Judge rejects Gov. Haslam's Imperial Order to stifle those who would criticize his corporate owners.....restores democracy and free speech in Nashville, for now. Stay tuned for the next stupid Republican scheme. All the states and municipalities that are brazenly attacking citizens are more stupid than I had believed as they are fueling the story and the outrage and injustice. Link to Nashville Scene story: http://www.nashvillescene.com/pitw/archives/2011/10/31/state-concedes-defeat-in-occupy-nashville-battle-judge-bans-more-arrests
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Corporate Takeover Boosts Wall Street's Prison Profits, Inflates Slavery Class
Prisoners - America’s New Cash Crop
By Cynthia Johnston
A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt
At the 2011 dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, many speakers, including President Obama, quoted from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which King eloquently spoke out for freedom and justice. Yet almost fifty years later King’s son, Martin Luther King III, says his father’s dream has not been realized, that America has “lost its soul,” in part by “having more people of color in prison than in college.”
He is not wrong. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in the last decade nearly one in three African-American men aged 20-29 was under criminal-justice supervision, while more than two out of five had been incarcerated.
By Cynthia Johnston
A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt
At the 2011 dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, many speakers, including President Obama, quoted from King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in which King eloquently spoke out for freedom and justice. Yet almost fifty years later King’s son, Martin Luther King III, says his father’s dream has not been realized, that America has “lost its soul,” in part by “having more people of color in prison than in college.”
He is not wrong. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, in the last decade nearly one in three African-American men aged 20-29 was under criminal-justice supervision, while more than two out of five had been incarcerated.
'Occupy' Forces Even Mainliners to Decry 'Crony Capitalism'
Published Oct. 26, 2011
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NEW YORK TIMES
The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.
To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed
by: Robert Scheer, Truthdig [3] | Op-Ed
It is class warfare.
It was not begun, however, by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly. Rather, this war was sparked by the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that's after payment of the taxes that the super-rich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.
With 2,000 Video Cameras, Wall Street Firms Use Big Brother's Tax-Paid Tech to Spy on Protesters
By Pam Martens, CounterPunch
Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152875/wall_street_firms_spy_on_protesters_in_tax-funded_center
The following article is original to CounterPunch.
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”
Posted on October 26, 2011, Printed on October 28, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152875/wall_street_firms_spy_on_protesters_in_tax-funded_center
The following article is original to CounterPunch.
Wall Street’s audacity to corrupt knows no bounds and the cooptation of government by the 1 per cent knows no limits. How else to explain $150 million of taxpayer money going to equip a government facility in lower Manhattan where Wall Street firms, serially charged with corruption, get to sit alongside the New York Police Department and spy on law abiding citizens.
According to newly unearthed documents, the planning for this high tech facility on lower Broadway dates back six years. In correspondence from 2005 that rests quietly in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s archives, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly promised Edward Forst, a Goldman Sachs’ Executive Vice President at the time, that the NYPD “is committed to the development and implementation of a comprehensive security plan for Lower Manhattan…One component of the plan will be a centralized coordination center that will provide space for full-time, on site representation from Goldman Sachs and other stakeholders.”
Thursday, October 20, 2011
'Carpetbagger, Go Home'
Redneck Party and Williamson Countians Decry Wisconsin Governor's Fund-raising Trip to Franklin, TN
FRANKLIN, TN---It won't be a Civil War reenactment, but the appearance of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at a Republican fund-raiser on Tuesday will be met with a peaceful protest from Williamson County residents and the Southern-based Redneck Party, workers' advocates who will trek to Franklin to act in solidarity with Wisconsin teachers and workers.
Walker, whose 2010 election was bankrolled by Tea Party funder David Koch and other extreme, neo-conservative special interests, will be raising money in Franklin for his recall election. The following day, Walker will be in Iowa for a fund-raiser; so his journey south to get money from the locals and then scurry back northward with his bounty mimics the Northern carpetbaggers, who came south after the Civil War to meddle in politics and exploit Southern states.
Walker will be the keynote speaker at the Williamson County Republican Party annual Reagan Day Dinner at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday Oct. 25 at Embassy Suites in Cool Springs.
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Scott Walker, Stay Home!!!
While the Rest of the World is Protesting Wall Street Corruption of Politics and the Corporate Takeover of Everything, Leave it to Our Williamson County Republicans to Do the Most Inappropriate Thing at the Worst Possible Time---Scotty Walker's Coming to Town!
Walker, Stay Home!
No politician in America symbolizes the war on the middle class and Wall Street's corruption of democracy more than Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
At a time when Americans at Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Nashville and around the country are rising up against how corporate money and special interests dominate politics and crush "We, the people," Scotty Walker's coming to town.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Why the Wall Street Elite Are in Trouble
Monday 10 October 2011
by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed
Ketchup, a petite 22-year-old from Chicago with wavy red hair and glasses with bright red frames, arrived in Zuccotti Park in New York on Sept. 17. She had a tent, a rolling suitcase, 40 dollars’ worth of food, the graphic version of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and a sleeping bag.
She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
She had no return ticket, no idea what she was undertaking, and no acquaintances among the stragglers who joined her that afternoon to begin the Wall Street occupation. She decided to go to New York after reading the Canadian magazine Adbusters, which called for the occupation, although she noted that when she got to the park Adbusters had no discernable presence.
The lords of finance in the looming towers surrounding the park, who toy with money and lives, who make the political class, the press and the judiciary jump at their demands, who destroy the ecosystem for profit and drain the U.S. Treasury to gamble and speculate, took little notice of Ketchup or any of the other scruffy activists on the street below them.
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Declaration of Occupation: New York City
Posted on
This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on september 29, 2011
Translations: French, Slovak, Spanish, German, Italian
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.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Republican Staffer Could No Longer Bear to Watch as this 'Cult' Gutted America
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Saturday, August 20, 2011
New Republican Law Makes it Harder to Vote for Elderly, Students, Poor---You Know, People Democrats Value
By Sam Wilcox
In Aug. 8, 2011 The Tennessean
In Aug. 8, 2011 The Tennessean
As an 18-year-old, college-bound student, I am excited to exercise my right to vote for the first time. I never dreamed that our state legislature would make it harder for everyone to exercise this right. Questioning how the new voter ID law will affect thousands of Tennesseans, I decided to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
In Monday’s Tennessean, the state Department of Safety and Homeland Security promised faster service lines and a system to handle the influx of new requests. I decided to go on a fact-finding mission to the driver’s license centers to see if that was the case.
We Could Create Good Jobs Now
By Michael Winship, AlterNet
Posted on August 20, 2011, Printed on August 20, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/653469/how_washington_could_create_jobs_right_now
I like to ask friends about the oddest summer job they ever had. One talks about how he used to don a rubber suit every morning at a Sylvania electronics plant in Syracuse, NY, and climb into a tank, where he dipped television tubes into some sort of mercury solution. He now moonlights as a thermometer.Monday, August 15, 2011
Buffett Knows Best
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich
OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
By WARREN E. BUFFETT
In New York Times, Aug. 15, 2011
OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks.
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