Not about the new Golden Eye

Oyf Eybik Yung

Isn't it time to make the Wall Street Suits soil the pants of their Armanis?

And it would be happening several times a day to each Wall Street profiteer and thief if those 'public' policeman weren't acting as the PRIVATE security personnel for the Corporations. It would be happening if the police worked for the people instead of brutalizing the people who are so far doing nonviolent demonstration that is mere street theater compared to protests of the 1960s-70s.

If only the police served the people instead of the corporations alone....Look--are you guys NEW YORKER policemen or are you being exploited to serve the Thieving, Dishonest Wall Street Overlords?

Public Constabulary OR Private Enforcement Goons? Let's get the right words to describe how dissonant is the behavior of the police and those who tell them what to do.

About the vast wealth of books still remaining from the great African cultural center at Timbuktu from the age of Ghana-Mali-Songai empire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYMkTxNQGGU&feature=related

I do not want to see the USA become a backwater like Europe during the European "Middle Ages", but could it happen if we don't act civilized soon?

The Christian Crusaders succeeded in looting, temporarily occupying others' lands, and then running for their lives. What resulted was the rest of the world isolating the cccrazy European Christians, the majority of whom then lived in considerable squalor, illiteracy, and backwardness, fighting amongst themselves in Europe.

Meanwhile -- the rest of the world was capable of considerable interconnectedness: There was an amazingly vast and cooperative structure of production, travel, education and commerce all the way from India and China through the Middle East caravan routes down through Egypt and from the ports of East Africa and across Africa in caravans to the African empires (centered between present day Chad and Senegal) to the West Coast of Africa. The African peoples were the source of the amazing conquest and flowering of Moorish Spain, and the singular schools and libraries of Moorish Spain now appear to be a reflection of the link to the astounding resources at the libraries of the African city of Timbuktu.

What intellectual advancements Europe made between the 6th Century and the European 'Renaissance' look to have been largely a result of access to the knowledge from Timbuktu via the librairies of Moorish Spain.

Are the current Euro-American bloody 'Christian-nation' Crusades and the pillaging by the Corporatist Free Market model relegating us to an uncivilized backwater of our own making yet again? (And are we already sliding backwards fast? USA literacy rated as 45th in the world... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate )

"In time, the election of Barack Obama may stand as one of the single most devastating events in our history for civil liberties. Now the president has begun campaigning for a second term. He will again be selling himself more than his policies, but he is likely to find many civil libertarians who simply are not buying."
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29269.htm

Obama: A Disaster for Civil Liberties

He may prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.

By Jonathan Turley

September 30, 2011 " Los Angeles Times" -- With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties.

Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. ...

read on

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29268.htm

The Due-process-free Assassination of U.S. Citizens is Now Reality

By Glenn Greenwald

September 30, 2011 "Salon" - - It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki's inclusion on President Obama's hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing."

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.
What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

The Due-process-free Assassination of U.S. Citizens is Now Reality

By Glenn Greenwald

September 30, 2011 "Salon" - - It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki's inclusion on President Obama's hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing."

After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.
What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed.

From an authoritarian perspective, that's the genius of America's political culture. It not only finds way to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.

* * * * *

In the column I wrote on Wednesday regarding Wall Street protests, I mistakenly linked to a post discussing a New York Times article by Colin Moynihan as an example of a "condescending" media report about the protest. There was nothing condescending or otherwise worthy of criticism in Moynihan's article; I meant to reference this NYT article by Ginia Bellafante. My apologies to Moynihan, who rightly objected by email, for the mistake.

UPDATE: What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President -- even Barack Obama -- vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process.

Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight? So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this: how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

I was on Democracy Now earlier this morning discussing the Awlaki assassination and presidential due-process-free killings:

Watch the Glenn Greenwald VIDEO

"For ten years, the “superpower” American population has sat there, being terrified by the government’s lies. While Americans sit in fear of non-existent “terrorists” sucking their thumbs, millions of people in six countries have had their lives destroyed. As far as any evidence exists, the vast majority of Americans are unperturbed by the wanton murder of others in countries that they are incapable of locating on maps.

Truly, Amerika is a light unto the world, an example for all."
----

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29273.htm

Is The War On Terror A Hoax?

By Paul Craig Roberts

September 30, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- In the past decade, Washington has killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans millions of Muslims in six countries, all in the name of the “war on terror.” Washington’s attacks on the countries constitute naked aggression and impact primarily civilian populations and infrastructure and, thereby, constitute war crimes under law. Nazis were executed precisely for what Washington is doing today.

Moreover the wars and military attacks have cost American taxpayers in out-of-pocket and already-incurred future costs at least $4,000 billion dollars--one third of the accumulated public debt--resulting in a US deficit crisis that threatens the social safety net, the value of the US dollar and its reserve currency role, while enriching beyond all previous history the military/security complex and its apologists.

Perhaps the highest cost of Washington’s “war on terror” has been paid by the US Constitution and civil liberties. Any US citizen that Washington accuses is deprived of all legal and constitutional rights. The Bush-Cheney-Obama regimes have overturned humanity’s greatest achievement--the accountability of government to law.

If we look around for the terror that the police state and a decade of war has allegedly protected us from, the terror is hard to find. Except for 9/11 itself, assuming we accept the government’s improbable conspiracy theory explanation, there have been no terror attacks on the US. Indeed, as RT pointed out on August 23, 2011, an investigative program at the University of California discovered that the domestic “terror plots” hyped in the media were plotted by FBI agents.

FBI undercover agents now number 15,000, ten times their number during the protests against the Vietnam war when protesters were suspected of communist sympathies. As there apparently are no real terror plots for this huge workforce to uncover, the FBI justifies its budget, terror alerts, and invasive searches of American citizens by thinking up “terror plots” and finding some deranged individuals to ensnare. For example, the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York city subway plot, the plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago were all FBI brainchilds organized and managed by FBI agents.

RT reports that only three plots might have been independent of the FBI, but as none of the three worked they obviously were not the work of such a professional terror organization as Al Qaeda is purported to be. The Times Square car bomb didn’t blow up, and apparently could not have.

The latest FBI sting ensnared a Boston man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who is accused of planning to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes packed with C-4 explosives. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz assured Americans that they were never in danger, because the FBI’s undercover agents were in control of the plot.

Ferdaus’ FBI-organized plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes has produced charges that he provided “material support to a terrorist organization” and plotted to destroy federal buildings--the most serious charge which carries 20 imprisoned years for each targeted building.

What is the terrorist organization that Ferdaus is serving? Surely not al Qaeda, which allegedly outwitted all 16 US intelligence services, all intelligence services of America’s NATO and Israeli allies, NORAD, the National Security Council, Air Traffic Control, Dick Cheney, and US airport security four times in one hour on the same morning. Such a highly capable terror organization would not be involved in such nonsense as a plot to blow up the Pentagon with a model airplane. ....

read on

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29267.htm

The FBI Again Thwarts Its Own Terror Plot

By Glenn Greenwald

September 29, 2011 "Salon" -- The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade -- much of it valid -- but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots. Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out -- only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.

Last year, the FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro. And now, the FBI has yet again saved us all from its own Terrorist plot by arresting 26-year-old American citizen Rezwan Ferdaus after having spent months providing him with the plans and materials to attack the Pentagon, American troops in Iraq, and possibly the Capitol Building using "remote-controlled" model airplanes carrying explosives.

None of these cases entail the FBI's learning of an actual plot and then infiltrating it to stop it. They all involve the FBI's purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them. Each time the FBI announces it has disrupted its own plot, press coverage is predictably hysterical (new Homegrown Terrorist caught!), fear levels predictably rise, and new security measures are often implemented in response (the FBI's Terror plot aimed at the D.C. Metro, for instance, led to the Metro Police announcing a new policy of random searches of passengers' bags).
I have several observations and questions about these matters: ...

read on

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

Extrajudicial Executions

Obama Can Kill Anyone He Wants To

By Robert Dreyfuss

September 30, 2011 "The Nation" - -Now we know what embattled Yemeni President Saleh meant when he cryptically told reporters from the Washington Post and Time yesterday: “We are fighting the al-Qaeda organization in Abyan [in Yemen] in coordination with the Americans and Saudis.” The defiant Saleh, who’s long promoted himself as an asset in America’s seemingly nonstop Long War on Terrorism (LWT), apparently knows what he’s talking about. Hours later, Yemen’s military announced that a missile strike had killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the bombastic, American-born Islamist who’s been linked to Al Qaeda and to recent terrorist attempts against the United States.

He’s not exactly Osama bin Laden, whose takedown in Pakistan in April helped spark the current U.S.-Pakistan confrontation. But Awlaki’s assassination, and that’s what it was, is a signal that the Obama administration intends to pursue the LWT to the ends of the earth, regardless of the consequences, even if it means an extra-judicial killing of an American citizen.

Not that killing non-citizens is kosher, but killing an American isn’t. Still, rules are rules, and American citizens are supposed to have legal and civil rights that protect them from political or prosecutorial assassinations, even if they’re bad guys. Apparently, no longer. Still, Awlaki’s killing comes as no surprise, since the Obama administration long ago deemed him kill-worthy. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the CIA tried to kill Awlaki recently: “The U.S. narrowly missed Mr. Awlaki in a failed assassination attempt back in May. U.S. drones fired on a vehicle in the southern Yemen province of Shebwa that the cleric had been driving in earlier the same day.”
Since then, the United States has vastly expanded its Predator and Reaper drone capability far beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, setting up bases on Indian Ocean islands and targeting Yemen, Somalia and other countries.

The killings were first announced by the Yemen defense ministry and its military, ironic in that the entire country of Yemen is perched at the brink of a civil war in which its establishment, including its military command, has divided loyalties. Not only Awlaki, but another American citizen was killed in the U.S.-orchestrated attack, too:

“Yemen's Defense Ministry said another American militant was killed in the same strike alongside al-Awlaki — Samir Khan, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani heritage who produced ‘Inspire,’ an English-language al-Qaida Web magazine that spread the word on ways to carry out attacks inside the United States.”

Awlaki was born in New Mexico, and he was linked to the Fort Hood shootings at a military base in Texas and to the attempted Times Square bombing, though his exact in role in those and other cases is unclear, that is, whether he masterminded or organized them or simply served as a kind of spiritual mentor to people who were planning acts of violence anyway. The point is, no judicial case has been made against Awlaki, he hasn’t been formally accused in those events or others, the charges against him have never been proved in court. He was deemed guilty by the CIA and the U.S. national security apparatus, and the sentence of death was carried out.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, a senior U.S. official said: “His death takes a committed terrorist, intent on attacking the United States, off the battlefield. Awlaki and AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] are also responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in Yemen and throughout the region, which have killed scores of Muslims.” Of course, whether Awlaki and AQAP have killed scores of Muslims or not isn’t the point: unless the Obama administration truly wants to arrogate to itself the role of World Policeman, it shouldn’t be in the business of executing, extra-judicially, anyone it wants to, whether they’re guilty of killing Muslims, Hindus, Jews, or Christians.

"Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont."

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/30/the-myth-of-bernie-sanders/

Senator Bait-and-Switch
The Myth of Bernie Sanders

by THOMAS H. NAYLOR

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has recently been elevated to near godlike status by the political Left in the United States. Some of his fans have even suggested that he should challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic Presidential Primary. The more often he is accused of being a socialist by his political enemies on the Right, the more convinced the Left becomes that he surely walks on water.

Although Sanders may have once been a socialist back in the 80s when he was Mayor of Burlington, today, a socialist he is not. Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return. If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s. The new high-tech instruments of death will cost $115 million a pop in sharp contrast to the F-16s which cost a mere $20 million each.

From whom might these F-35s protect Vermont? Possibly, Canada, separatist-minded Quebec, upstate New York, the New Hampshire Free State, or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Why on earth would anyone want to invade Vermont? Vermont has no military bases, no large cities, no important government installations, and no strategic resources unless you count an aging nuclear power plant. What if Canada, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or even the U.S. Marines were to invade the Green Mountain state? Just what would they do with it? Would all of the black-and-white Holsteins be confiscated, or perhaps the entire sugar maple crop be burned? Imagine trying to enslave freedom-loving Vermonters. Good luck!

Vermont is too small, too rural, and too independent to be invaded by anyone. It is a threat to no one. Furthermore, Vermonters, not unlike the Swiss, tend to stick to their own knitting rather than intruding into the affairs of their neighbors. Vermont has always been that way and probably always will be.

Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard, has expressed the hope that the Vermont Guard might be morphed into a center for unmanned drone aircraft. Sanders, not unlike President Obama, thinks drones are cool.

Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel. He has done everything within his power to keep the myth of Islamic terrorism alive. He never questions the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israeli acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It is as though these are nonevents.

Last, but by no means least, is the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories. For over two years Sanders and former University of Vermont President Daniel Fogel have been encouraging Sandia to open a satellite laboratory in Vermont. Sandia, whose historical origins can be traced back to the Manhattan Project in World War II, designs, builds, and tests weapons of mass destruction. The Vermont laboratory envisaged by Sanders would not be involved with nuclear weapons but rather would be engaged in projects related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric grids. Sandia, interestingly enough, is operated under contract by Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world. Lockheed Martin produces F-35s and drones. General Dubie, who has close ties to Lockheed Martin, recently received an honorary doctorate from UVM. No one at UVM seems to care whether or not the University gets in bed with a manufacturer of atomic bombs.

Bernie Sanders loves to rail against Corporate America, Wall Street, and the super-rich, but has nothing to show for it. He’s done little to constrain their power and influence. But everybody on the Left loves Bernie.

Thomas H. Naylor is Founder of the Second Vermont Republic and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Duke University; co-author of Affluenza, Downsizing the U.S.A., and The Search for Meaning.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-provides-terrorists-a-safe-haven-while...

Obama Provides Terrorists a Safe Haven While Hailing Death of Al-Awlaki

The hypocrisy is staggering, even by Obama’s standards

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Friday, September 30, 2011

President Barack Obama has triumphantly hailed the death of Anwar al-Awlaki as a crushing blow to Al-Qaeda’s hopes of acquiring a safe haven, even as the US-backed NATO bombardment of Libya provides terrorists with a safe haven in North Africa.

V I D E O : Obama praises killing of Anwar al-Awlaki

Responding to the news that Al-Awlaki, who received an upgrade in his role after death to “chief of external operations” for al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, had been killed, Obama labeled it “another significant milestone” in the war on terror, adding, “This is further proof that al Qaeda and its affiliates will have no safe haven anywhere in the world.”

Aside from the fact that Al-Awlaki was a confirmed double agent, having dined at the Pentagon shortly after 9/11 despite being declared the spiritual leader of the hijackers, and going on to become chief patsy handler for intelligence agency entrapment operations, the hypocrisy here is staggering even by Obama’s standards.

If Obama was so concerned about not providing safe havens to terrorists, then why has he just helped hand an entire country over to them in Libya?

As we have previously highlighted, shortly after the start of the conflict in March, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the leader of the anti-Gaddafi rebel army, admitted that the rebel ranks include Al-Qaeda terrorists who have killed U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These terrorists are part of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), led by Abd Al-Hakim Belhadj, designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department, yet now being hailed by the establishment media as liberators even as they round up, imprison, and slaughter innocent black people en masse. ....

read on

"If Al-Awlaki really is dead this time around, the Pentagon has lost one of its top go-to men as far as the manufactured “war on terror” is concerned."
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http://www.prisonplanet.com/no-more-pentagon-dinners-al-qaeda-leader-kil...

No More Pentagon Dinners: Al Qaeda Leader Killed… Again

Anwar al-Awlaki dead for second time in two years

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Sept 30, 2011

According to a “senior US administration official”, Al Qaeda Boogie Man Anwar al-Awlaki has been reported killed in an air strike in Yemen, which is the exact same way he died in 2009.

The Yemeni defense ministry confirmed the claim, stating that the same counterterrorism unit that killed Osama bin Laden used a drone and jet strike in Yemen to kill al-Awlaki.

“Cynics will point to the strategic timing” notes TIME, adding “just a week after embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned from four months of medial treatment in Saudi Arabia following an attack on the presidential compound.”

Moi? Cynical? Never.

There are a couple of issues I would like to address, however.

Why should we believe the American born cleric al-Awlaki, who has been linked with everything from the aborted Christmas Day underwear bombing to the ink toner plane bomb plot, is dead this time around?

Like many supposed terrorist leaders before him, Awlaki has previously been reported killed.

On December 24, 2009 several news outlets reported that Awlaki was believed to have been killed in a joint U.S-Yemeni pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of 30 or so senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd, a remote mountain valley in eastern Shabwa.

The Reuters news agency spoke to an unnamed Yemeni official at the time who said: “Anwar al Awlaki is suspected to be dead (in the air raid).”

Awlaki’s death was also reported by Fox News and Al Jazeera....

read on
watch VIDEOS -

http://www.prisonplanet.com/dumb-tv-reporter-brings-the-stupid-on-gold.h...

Dumb TV Reporter ‘Brings The Stupid’ On Gold

Is it any wonder that distrust in corporate media is at an all time high?

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, September 30, 2011

Is it really any wonder why distrust in corporate media recently reached an all time high? Watch this TV news clip in which the reporter claims that the U.S. dollar is a safer investment because it is backed by “the American government,” whereas gold is backed by nothing at all.

V i d e o

No, you’re not watching a clip from The Daily Show, this is a real “news” anchor telling her audience that gold has no intrinsic value or backing and that the U.S. dollar is a safer investment because it is backed by “the American government.”

And before you ask, CTV’s markets reporter Bridget Brown is not part of Obama’s new economic advisory team, nor is she speaking as a contestant in Miss Teen USA.

There’s so much wrong with this on so many levels.

For a start, gold is backed by the fact that there is a finite amount of it in the world, that it takes a lot more work to mine that it does to press a button on a printing press, and that other little nugget of information – gold has been used as a store of value and as a means of financial transaction by hundreds of civilizations for thousands of years. Gold is backed by the full weight of human history.

There’s also the huge number of gold reserves – 20 per cent of the total amount of gold on the planet – held by central banks around the world.

On the other hand, the U.S. dollar is not backed by “the American government,” since the Federal Reserve is not part of “the American government,” it is a private entity which “the American government” has to borrow U.S. dollars from in order to pay its bills.

It is not gold but the U.S.dollar that is backed by nothing. ..... read on

http://www.prisonplanet.com/michael-moore-hearts-the-federal-reserve.htm...

Michael Moore Hearts the Federal Reserve

Kurt Nimmo
PrisonPlanet.com
September 30, 2011

We Are Change journalist Luke Rudkowski caught up with filmmaker Michael Moore the other day. Luke asked the radical socialist if he has problem with the Federal Reserve. Moore retorted that we have bigger issues and advocated ending capitalism.

He didn’t say what he’d replace it with, but that doesn’t take a lot of imagination – a stale version of the same old legalized thievery radical socialists always demand.

Michael Moore either does not know that the Federal Reserve, the banksters, and their fiat money and fractional reserve banking system are the problem, or he doesn’t care.

Anyway, Peter Schiff put it all into perspective in the second part of Luke’s video.

Kudos, Luke. Another job well done!

V I D E O

http://www.prisonplanet.com/chemtrail-article-in-project-censored%E2%80%...

Chemtrail article in Project Censored’s Top 10 most censored stories

Rady Ananda
Activist Post
Friday, September 30, 2011

For the past 35 years, Project Censored has published an annual collection of the top 25 censored news stories. In the2012 book edition, just released this September, my article,Atmospheric Geoengineering: Weather Manipulation, Contrails and Chemtrails, ranks as the 9th most censored story in the United States.

Originally published at the Centre for Research on Globalizationin July 2010, an updated version at COTO Report has seen over 13,000 page views as of this writing. The article is widely posted across the world in several English and non-English speaking countries, giving it far broader readership than we’ll ever know, but likely over a million.

Ironically, and as if to prove Project Censored’s point, after I posted a link last year to the Atmospheric Geoengineeringpiece on the “progressive” link site, buzzflash.com, I was banned, and all my contributions removed, though my links often made their front page.

In another bit of censorship irony, the link site, reddit.com, just banned me for posting links towordpress.com (which hosts COTO Report), because it considers all wordpress articles spam.

The moderator known as lanismycousin told me, “We hate links to blog articles, stories are better served by linking to an actual reliable news source.” When asked for a list of acceptable news sources, s/he called me a “douche.”

Further emphasizing WP rejection, the reddit moderator known as luster called me “a wordpress blog spammer.”

WordPress sees over 30 million unique visitors a month and provides a button that drives traffic to reddit, which sees less than 2 million a month. The huge drop in views last month might have something to do with reddit’s new policy.

Since reddit moderators are now banning WP links, Matt Mullenweg might want to reach reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian. Or, Mullenweg could simply reciprocate the ban.

read on ...

----

Here’s the Top Ten 2012 countdown:

#10 Statistical Games with the Unemployment Rate. At Information Clearing House, Greg Hunter showed that instead of 9%, the real unemployment rate is over 22%.

#9 Chemtrails. Atmospheric Geoengineering: Weather Manipulation, Contrails and Chemtrails, July 10, 2010.

#8 The Truth on Nuclear Power. The Union of Concerned Scientists published a report describing 14 near-miss nuclear accidents in 2010 in the US. (One is Fort Calhoun, which I covered here andhere.) Other nuclear pieces mentioned in this category include Jeff Goodell’s “America’s Nuclear Nightmare” at Rolling Stone.

#7 U.S. Army and psychology’s largest experiment – ever. Horrified by war? Be positive! A series of APA articles describing and promoting a program of “psychological resilience” is confronted by Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz at Truthout.

#6 Google Spies for CIA, US Military. In January 2010, Eric Sommer wrote “Google’s Deep CIA Connections” for Pravda.ru.

#5 Prison Companies Fund Anti-Immigrant Legislation.Exposed in depth by Peter Cervantes-Gautschi at AlterNet, Wall Street is profiting from immigrant lock-ups.

#4 Wall Street Engineers Food Crisis. On March 24, 2011, David Moberg wrote “Diet Hard: With a Vengeance” for In These Timesshowing that speculating on food commodities, along with income inequality, cause hunger – not lack of production.

#3 Obama’s Extrajudicial Hit List. State sanctioned assassinations outside the scope of law is somehow okay by this dictator. This is an under-reported story later covered by Glenn Greenwald at Salon and William Fisher at IPS. Originally titled “Death by Drone: ‘CIA’s hitlist is murder’,” IPS later changed it to “Death by Remote: But Is It Legal?”

#2 Army of Fake Personas to Promote Propaganda. Two sites broke the story on Feb. 22, 2011: Darlene Storm at Computer World and Stephen Webster at Raw Story. In March, Guardian writers Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain covered it.

#1 US Soldier Suicides Exceed Combat Deaths in 2010. Cord Jefferson broke the story on Jan. 27, 2011 at Iceland’s Good Magazine.

If you like the work the Project is doing, they survive on book sales. You can buy Censored 2012: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2010-11 for $20 plus shipping and handling. Prior editions are also available.

Manna from heaven for also supporting my work, and that of Global Research.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/cancer-feeds-on-fructose-america%E2%80%99s-n...

Cancer Feeds on Fructose, America’s Number One Source of Calories

Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post
Friday, September 30, 2011

High-fructose corn syrup is the primary source of calories in the United States. In addition to containing mercury, a known carcinogen, cancer cells actually feed on high-fructose corn syrup after it is metabolized by the liver. A new study, published in the Expert Opinion on Therapeutic Targets, examined the link between refined sugar and cancer. The results add further evidence to the reports of many health experts and scientific studies that have drawn the connection between excess sugar consumption and the development of cancer.

The researchers highlighted the numerous ways in which fructose directly contributes to cancer risk and other health problems, including:

DNA damage
Inflammation
Altered cellular metabolism
Increased production of free radicals

According to Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, as much as 80 percent of all cancers are “driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells.”
Similar research published in the journal Cancer Research found that the way in which sugar is metabolized stimulates cancer growth. The researchers reported:

“Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different … These findings show that cancer cells can readily metabolize fructose to increase proliferation.”

What is even more concerning is that the scientists conducting the research used pancreatic cancer cells, widely considered to be the most deadly form of cancer. The discovery was monumental because not only did the researchers prove that tumor cells feed on sugar (glucose), but the tumor cells used fructose for cell division in order to speed up the growth and spread of the cancer. Fructose consumption actually led to a massive increase in tumor cell growth and proliferation way beyond that of glucose. ...

read on

http://www.prisonplanet.com/gore-sets-a-new-record-for-personal-stupidit...

Gore Sets A New Record For Personal Stupidity

Real Science
Sept 30, 2011

Al Gore: clear proof that climate change causes extreme weather. Former US vice president tells Scottish green conference that evidence from floods in Pakistan and China is compelling

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

China and Pakistan have been having disastrous floods for as long as they have existed.

read on

Thanks.

Just wondering: Where did al Awlaki and Khan get the money to do what they did? The Saudis? The CIA? If it was the CIA, does that make them sitting duck patsies? Like the shoe bommer and underwear bommer, etc., were they just set up in order to be 'sacrificed' later [reference to the post with Glenn Greenwald's piece on so-called 'stings' from Bridge and 9:12]. If so, it would be imperativr that these guys never-ever speak to the press; it would mean their assassination was an inevitability.

And even if these guys were the world's worst creeps, do these assassinations mean that Barack Obama is not only President, but that he now has seized EXTRA powers, and we now should call him President Law Judge & Jury Obama?

Is Obama the actual source of these assassination plots? Who is advising him to use this 'tactic'? If someone is advising Obama to use this tactic of extra-legal operations, why isn't Obama getting worried about being boxed in by this wierd system of unlawful methods? One has to hand it to John F. Kennedy; at least he resisted being boxed in by bad 'advisors'.

Many thanks for this link of yours, Bridge, to the geoengineering/weather modification article now included in Project Censored -- http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/case-orange-60-years-of-geoenginee...

The comments and exchanges at the end are also informative!

"Engrossing posts, Bridge and Ghettodefender..."

Don't encourage batshittery...and I don't mean GDs posts.

"Obama: A Disaster for Civil Liberties"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 8:47pm.

So, someone unable to prosecute a criminal is actually worse than the criminal themselves?...

"The Due-process-free Assassination of U.S. Citizens is Now Reality"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 8:59pm.

Actually, traitors are not in the same category as 'citizens'

"Is The War On Terror A Hoax?"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:08pm.

This is what amuses me most about right wingers...They will bitch that you're not killing a particular somone, then they will bitch if you do kill that someone then they will bitch that you didn't really kill someone.

They're against everything, even themselves.

"The FBI Again Thwarts Its Own Terror Plot"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:12pm.

For the slow kids, one more time, in every agency there are good guys and bad guys, becuase every agency is made up of humans.

A ready example of this is the difference between the white shirts and the blue shirts at Occupy Wall St..

"Extrajudicial Executions: Obama Can Kill Anyone He Wants To"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:17pm.

Hey, did you know that the president can launch a nuclear war without congressional preapproval and wipe out the entire planet? That's kind of why the armegeddonists want Obama out so badly...because he won't do it.

Bridge...Batshittery...synonymous.

"Senator Bait-and-Switch - The Myth of Bernie Sanders"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:24pm.

Why am I not surprised to see you attacking Bernie Sanders?

"Michael Moore Hearts the Federal Reserve"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:44pm.

...and Michael Moore

"Gore Sets A New Record For Personal Stupidity"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 10:02pm.

...and Al Gore

Is this what they call a batshittery trifecta?

All people have flaws but trying to spin Bernie Sanders as somehow prowar is beyond the pale.

Michael Moore is actually correct in saying that we have worse problems than capitalism, a system that will exist so long as trade does.

Climate denial has gone past the point of simple batshittery at this point and has drifted into Jim Jones, let's all drink the kool aid territory.

If you want to commit suicide, fine, you just don't have the right to take the rest of us with you.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/09/30-5

Published on Friday, September 30, 2011 by the Associated Press
Canadian Arctic Loses Nearly Entire Ice Shelf

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this northern summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in newly published research.

Picture:
{ In this July 10, 2008 photo, ice floes float in Baffin Bay above the arctic circle seen from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent. Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this northern summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in newly published research. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jonathan Hayward) The loss is important as a marker of global warming, } ...more at link...

What about The Wolves you (Obama) allowed to be taken off ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST AND MURDERED. We, WTP (We The People), arranged to REPAY AT MARKET PRICE any livestock killed by Wolves. The Ranchers are pathetic and will PAY for all this Trauma - they CAUSE!

"Chemtrail article in Project Censored’s Top 10 most censored stories"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:52pm.

Ya except that isn't exactly the truth at all...

#10 Widely known...not censored
#9 Total Batshittery
#8 Widely known...not censored
#7 Widely known...not censored
#6 Widely known...not censored
#5 Widely known...not censored
#4 Widely known...not censored
#3 Widely known...not censored
#2 Widely known...not censored
#1 Widely known...not censored

Notice a pattern?...Sort of looks like this one I posted last thread...

Submitted by Nobody on Wed, 09/28/2011 - 10:13am.

...

Rainbows
Unicorns
Puppy dogs
Candy and cake
Eating babies
Toys for every one
Happy good times

...

This is an especially pernicious propaganda technique when the subjects are nearer together than the above example, the subconcious mind simply doesn't filter out the incongruities and it forms contradictory associations in memory.

Technically this would be called, subliminally embedded near field associative neurolinguistic programming. It's all very Pavlovian.

...

You can also think of it as being similiar to the "The secret that your doctor doesn't want you to know"...

See the mind plays tricks on you, by declaring anything secret, repressed or censored, that information becomes more 'valuable', if someone doesn't want you to have the cookie then you want it all the more...

And because it's more 'valuable' the brain treats it as more 'true' even though it can be totally wrong. This technique has been used for centuries by flim flam artists and snake oil salesmen.

But that isn't the worst part really...

The worst part is that the more people disagree with you, the more 'secret' and thus 'valuable' this knowledge becomes to you.

If you want to keep the kids out of the cookie jar, let them overhear that the 'better' cookies are hidden somewhere else.

You don't even need the "better cookies"...They're harder to find if they don't exist.

The fact that the wolves are off the endangered species list kind of shows that they've made a remarkable come back...Which is more that can be said for all the new species getting added to the endangered species list every day due to climate change and loss of habitat...

Obama made a lot of mistakes when he took the advice of guys he thought were smart...It's what newbs do...In the parlance, you could say that Newbama got trolled by the "I'm an expert trolls"

He's improved a lot since he's stop listening to them...

Parecon and Spain’s CNT
By Michael Albert and Spanish CNT

Friday, September 30, 2011

This interview was conducted by email in preparation for a trip to Spain by Michael Albert. CNT is Spain's Anarchist Labor Federation and Periodico is CNT's Journal. The questions come from an array of Periodico writers.

1. Historically, only a few anarchist authors have analyzed the economic features of society. According to your view, what are the most relevant contributions from anarchists to economic thinking?

The primary anarchist economic contribution, I think, is its desire to reduce hierarchy to a minimum and to enlarge informed participation and self management in its place. These aims should inform any sensible thought about the economy, or any other social phenomena.

A second anarchist awareness has been its attention to the role of non property sources of class division. Bakunin and others were pivotal, I think, in the emergence of an understanding that a division of labor that gives a minority a monopoly on work that conveys influence, social skills, initiative, and confidence, while the majority does only disempowering work that requires mainly obedience while diminishing social skills and confidence, causes the former group, whom I call the coordinator class, to dominate the latter, the working class. To understand class interests as a motive force in economic change requires that one highlight not only two classes - capital and labor - but three, capital, labor, and, between them, the coordinator class, not least because the coordinators can become the ruling class in what has been called market or centrally planned socialism but what should have been called coordinatorism.

Finally, I think the work of Kropotkin on mutual aid and also regarding the intrinsic virtues of work can help us understand how markets produce anti sociality and what it will require for allocation to instead foster mutual aid, as well as to understand the impact of contemporary divisions of labor and illuminate what it will require to have equitable economic relations and sensible economic incentives.
...

http://www.zcommunications.org/contents/181579/print

"Obama Provides Terrorists a Safe Haven While Hailing Death of Al -Awlaki"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:30pm.

So, you can't kill em and you can't make friends with em...what is your plan?

"No More Pentagon Dinners: Al Qaeda Leader Killed… Again"
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:36pm.

"The Reuters news agency spoke to an unnamed Yemeni official at the time who said: “Anwar al Awlaki is suspected to be dead (in the air raid).”"

The word "suspected" sort of jumps out at me, how about you?

How can you read this obviously dishonest crap and then say to yourself "I should share my stupidity with others!"?

Here's something you might not have figured out...

If they can convince you that the "war on terrah" that George Bush gave us isn't real then there's also no way to end it and it keeps going and going and going.

Right now you're going "EXACTLY!"...But you're wrong to cheer if you actually want it to end because the very purpose of this propaganda is to keep it going.

When all the names are checked off the US list and Obama declares the "war on terrah" over...These same writers, these same sites, they'll try and keep it going...

And you...will repeat their nonsense all the while proclaiming yourself to be against violence and war.

I hate phoneys, I really do.

"The primary anarchist economic contribution, I think, is its desire to reduce hierarchy to a minimum and to enlarge informed participation and self management in its place."

It won't work because humans are naturally hierarchial and they self organize into hierarchies. Ask yourself, is an imposed disorder any different than an imposed order.

Sorry, no perfect solution down this route.

We are coming to a transformative period though...

What use are workers when robots are cheaper and never tire?

What use is educating those workers when you don't need them any more?

What use are social programs at all, when you don't really need people?

...

This is the real problem to be solved, finding worth in human life.

Teaching people to do what the machines can not yet do.

How do you change a society that's generations deep into consumption into something more creative.

Those were the first things they took out of schools...things that foster creativty.

...

All in all, I find the article wishful thinking at best and at worst, just more divide and conquer, go it alone, rugged individualist bullshit.

Never has a human problem been solved through the promotion of the self over the group.

And when you seek to tear down structures, remember that you are also tearing down groups of PEOPLE.

By Nick Thompson

Prehistoric children as young as three were encouraged by adults to make cave art 13,000 years ago, new research shows.

The Cambridge University study sheds new light on the lives of children and the ancient art they made during the prehistoric hunter gatherer period in the French caverns at Rouffignac, known as the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths.

While the caverns are famous for their striking drawings of woolly mammoths, bison and horses, the research focused on the thousands of lines made by people running their fingers along the soft clay walls throughout the five mile cavern complex.

Cambridge archaeologists were able to identify the age and gender of the children who made the simple ancient art form known as "finger fluting" by measuring the width of the flutings and the profile of the middle three fingers.

"We have found marks by children aged between three and seven years old -- and we have been able to identify four individual children by matching up their marks," said Cambridge University archaeologist Jess Cooney.

"The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around five -- and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl."

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/09/30/world/europe/prehistoric-cave-art/inde...

We know, you disagree...

was freakin' awesome! SO interesting! I had not heard of it and never would have if not for you... thanks!It was in lots of parts and I've almost watched the whole thing...

Alice, ART is exquisite.

Nobody, No regarding The Wolves - off list so they can be culled! Ask SCIENCE & SCIENTISTS! Research.
I was going to be not voting for the VERY FIRST TIME in many decades, and wanted to talk/debate with you, but just talking to myself as to what to debate regarding Obama & that was enough THAT REMINDED ME -- if for no other reason VOTE FOR SUPREME COURT. (BTW Not Voting equals a vote for rethugs!)

It hurts so very much to vote Obama - yet I WILL WOLF-BITCH LOUDLY & OFTEN. Obama will think I could (& I Can) get MANY DOWN SOUTH TO VOTE AS ME - especially since I literally changed MANY RETHUGS to vote DEM.

My strategy is to REMIND "OBAMA" THE ONES WHO "changed & saved The Wilderness" was Teddy R & in 80s we had another rethug - Ronnie Raygun - WHEN MANY SAVED THE WOLVES & achieved even PAYING stupid ranchers for any loss of livestock (grrr)!

write someone. ;)

MONK ... ;)
"It's A Jungle Out There ..."

**

It's not that I disagree, it's that you have to dismiss reality and the reality of human nature to even engage in the mental masturbation that is 'anarchism'.

Anarchism was our first form of government...We abandonned it in favor of coordinating our efforts to larger purposes...We abandonned it because it did not work...The groups with centralized leadership just took over...Because they could.

Everyone that believes that they can survive without the coordinated effort of other people, should take the clothes on their back and as much food as they can carry and walk into the wilderness and stay there until they realize that they need the rest of us.

You defend it like it were a religion...

It's not, it's just the echoes of childhood..."you're not the boss of me!"

Don't like being led, then lead.

"Michael Moore is actually correct in saying that we have worse problems than capitalism, a system that will exist so long as trade does."

In that post, Michael Moore advocated ending capitalism.

"Moore retorted that we have bigger issues [than the Fed] and advocated ending capitalism."

And I agree with the spirit of what he's saying there 100%.

"Anarchism was our first form of government...We abandonned it in favor of coordinating our efforts to larger purpose"

And form groups and stuff. There's no anarchist's code written anywhere that says otherwise, as far as I know.

(Listening to Ring of Fire)

...sponsor of the hour suggested that we refer to the Tea Party movement as "Teahadists."

...when you're the only one around.

I didn't have a problem with what Michael Moore was saying, except that he's wrong if he thinks that it'll actually happen...What I had a problem with is the following.

"He didn’t say what he’d replace it with, but that doesn’t take a lot of imagination – a stale version of the same old legalized thievery radical socialists always demand.

Michael Moore either does not know that the Federal Reserve, the banksters, and their fiat money and fractional reserve banking system are the problem, or he doesn’t care."

Anarchists can coordinate their efforts to a larger purpose

Technically that's true but when the purpose get's complex enough then it takes on the form of a government and we're right back where we started...

People formed a number of communes based on the anarchic principles back in the 60s...Let me know if you can find one that still exists.

There are a few out there but they aren't anarchists any longer...If you think that any given set of human beings will have a different result then you're fooling yourself.

I understand the ideal and I understand the goal but you just can't there from here.

Me too.

---

Anarchy only works...
new
Submitted by CeeCee on Sat, 10/01/2011 - 3:32pm.

...when you're the only one around.

"Anarchism does not mean bloodshed; it does not mean robbery, arson, etc. These monstrosities are, on the contrary, the characteristic features of capitalism. Anarchism means peace and tranquility to all." --August Spies, Haymarket anarchist

I think CeeCee and August must be talking about two different things.

It's still amazing to me, when I see people on the left that are ignorant of what Anarchism is. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by now.

A tactically stupid move on the part of the march, in my opinion; much more difficult for the cops to surround a park on four sides, then to cut off a few lanes on a bridge.

Although I think tactically the cops are making a big mistake, as well. If the protest loses the grounding anchor of the park as a base, all hell has the potential to break loose. I predict many random acts of civil disobedience if the protest shuts down. Which I think will be more effective, actually.

Here's hoping this thing is too big too fail, now.

onto the bridge, and then arrested them. There were cops waiting for them already on the bridge. So it was a set-up, separating a few hundred from the rest, and arresting them.

To hear corporate media tell it, "protesters were arrested for blocking traffic."

"I think CeeCee and August must be talking about two different things.

It's still amazing to me, when I see people on the left that are ignorant of what Anarchism is. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by now."

There's a big difference to how something is intended to function and how it actually functions.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

There is nothing intrinsic to capitalism that causes those things either...the causes are intrinsic to nature itself...

I'm not joking when I say that it's defended with pseudo religious fervor...The arguments are the same...

If only everyone followed the plan, then everything would be perfect.

Take a central precept of anarchism...Everyone just does there own thing...What if everyone is already doing there own thing?...'cause you know they kind of are, well up until it infringes upon what someone else wants to do.

CeeCee knows what she's talking about...Anarchism only works until there are other people involved, then it becomes the world you live in now.

Here's a simple rule to remember...Only one person can use a toilet at a time and no one wants to clean one.

At some point a line forms, at some point someone decides they're not going to wait, at some point someone get's angry, at no point will that toilet get cleaned.

So they all get together and decide to make a rule, and then someone breaks that rule...

No matter which thread you pull you end up right back here.

So what's the point? I don't like chasing my own tail or gazing at my own navel.

And before you call me ignorant, consider for the moment the slight possibility that you might not have put enough thought into it and instead rested on a comfortable answer.

pseudo religious?

Yeap.

that's the problem with anarchy right there...herded like sheep.

Antisocial Personality Traits Predict Utilitarian Responses to Moral Dilemmas

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2011) — A study conducted by Daniel Bartels, Columbia Business School, Marketing, and David Pizarro, Cornell University, Psychology found that people who endorse actions consistent with an ethic of utilitarianism -- the view that what is the morally right thing to do is whatever produces the best overall consequences -- tend to possess psychopathic and Machiavellian personality traits.

In the study, Bartels and Pizarro gave participants a set of moral dilemmas widely used by behavioral scientists who study morality, like the following: "A runaway trolley is about to run over and kill five people, and you are standing on a footbridge next to a large stranger; your body is too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, you will save the five people. Would you push the man?" Participants also completed a set of three personality scales: one for assessing psychopathic traits in a non-clinical sample, one that assessed Machiavellian traits, and one that assessed whether participants believed that life was meaningful. Bartels and Pizarro found a strong link between utilitarian responses to these dilemmas (e.g., approving the killing of an innocent person to save the others) and personality styles that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless.

These results (which recently appeared in the journal Cognition) raise questions for psychological theories of moral judgment that equate utilitarian responses with optimal morality, and treat non-utilitarian responses as moral "mistakes." The issue, for these theories, is that these results would lead to the counterintuitive conclusion that those who are "optimal" moral decision makers (i.e., who are likely to favor utilitarian solutions) are also those who possess a set of traits that many would consider prototypically immoral (e.g., the emotional callousness and manipulative nature of psychopathy and Machiavellianism).

"CeeCee knows what she's talking about...Anarchism only works until there are other people involved, then it becomes the world you live in now."

I still say we're defining Anarchism two different ways. The difference is, my way is the correct one. *smiles*

---

"Here's a simple rule to remember...Only one person can use a toilet at a time and no one wants to clean one.

At some point a line forms, at some point someone decides they're not going to wait, at some point someone get's angry, at no point will that toilet get cleaned.

So they all get together and decide to make a rule, and then someone breaks that rule...""

Anarchists can make rules, and organize too.

"that's the problem with anarchy right there...herded like sheep."

Anarchy? It's actually a problem with capitalism, if you think about it.

"Anarchists can make rules, and organize too."

...and Jews can eat bacon...How does that make anarchy any less of a pseudo religion?

Sure they can...that's how capitalism was invented...and democracy...and socialism...and communism...and fascism...ad infinitum.

All of these things are and were derived from what people wanted to do, they didn't spring out of the ground.

Submitted by dada on Sat, 10/01/2011 - 8:52pm.
"Anarchy? It's actually a problem with capitalism, if you think about it."

Wrong...All "isms" are constructs, things, tools, weapons...It is not the tool that makes the choice as to how it's used...Just like capitalism is misused so would anarchism be exploited...

Capitalists are what they are because it gives them an advantage. Advantage seeking is a pretty dominant thing in nature...that's a lot of inertia to will away with happy thoughts and wishful thinking.

One of the core problems with anarchism and the same is true for democracy or anything 'pop' driven...it acts upon the lowest common denominator...the stupidest idea that everyone shares is the one that will be carried out. Mob mentality 101.

As the mob made it's decision to go marching across the bridge...

The popularity of an idea doesn't make it smart, more often than not it's the reverse that's true...like I said though "herded like sheep"

How about you try this one...

"Take a central precept of anarchism...Everyone just does their own thing...

What if everyone is already doing there own thing?...'cause you know they kind of are, well up until it infringes upon what someone else wants to do.

So really what is the point?"

I've yet to see an anarchist get passed this argument...Care to give it a try?

Or you could just admit that you're actually so jaded that you no longer really have any core philosophy and 'anarchism', being the intellectual version of 'whut evah' covers every situation in the exact same manner as krishna, vishnu, mohamed,jesus, jehova or the generic 'god'

or you can just gimme a flower and/or your newsletter, straighten your tie and hike up your robes and move along...

Because frankly...I think you got nothin.

I don't care much for any -ism, so I don't feel the need to defend anarchism against pseudo-religous accusations. Although, out of all the -isms, Anarchism makes the most sense. Speaking for myself, of course.

You know I'm not much of a "joiner", n. Except in an esoteric sense.

From what I gather, to the protesters it seemed like the cops had opened up that portion of the roadway under the walkway in order to "help" them; it was a big march, and there was overspill beyond what the walkway could handle.

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

It was a different vibe a half hour ago.

They are not allowed to use a megaphone or a PA and microphone, so they're doing the "human public address system"

Pretty interesting thing, the human public address system.

I just saw Democracy Now in the PBS television listings! That's amazing!!! Yay for Amy and DN!!!!

http://www.livestream.com/occupyfdsf

But what happened? I'm not sure if SF is still hangin' or not..Says there were a bunch of arrests..but did they arrest everyone and end it, (after the cops were saying they were legally placed for a protest)..hmmm...

http://occupysf.com/

That's not all of them...

Thinking of BARTing in to the city tomorrow...But that means grabbing up all my camping gear...

pretesting and being arrested in his videos from OWSNY.

6:59PM - Colin Moynihan: "After allowing them onto the bridge, Police cut off and arrested Dozens of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators."

7:19PM - Al Baker and Colin Moynihan: "In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge's Brooklyn-bound roadway."

...

I found out late this evening that there was an "Occupy Cleveland" action at the famous "Free" Stamp on Saturday where we CLE OH activists frequently gather for protests like our "Peace Show" every Labor Day for the last ten years to protest the "War Show" going by the moniker "Cleveland Air Show" (this year's pics at link)

I suspect all the usual suspects showed up at 3 PM but I highly doubt anyone actually "occupied" Willard Park and camped out. When we do the Peace Show we have to raise serious $$$$ for permits for putting up a stage, selling food, having a sound system and so forth and the city inspectors stop by in the AM to check if everything is legit, pissed off they have to "work" on a holiday. My guess is if anyone TRIED to camp out they would have been arrested PRONTO by the CPD blue-shirts who incidentally are also under attack from Guvnor Kasich and his own brand of ALEC-led Brown-Shirt policies. We now have TWO ballot issues, one AGAINST SB 5 that attacks union collective bargaining and another against HB 194 that attacks voting rights, BOTH ALEC-written-and-composed legislation. So we're doing SOMETHING against Kasichstan and his Brown Shirts! More details in this week's
Brick TeeVee WAR ON WALL STREET CONTINUES!
You BlogSpotters can go to Brick TeeVee WAR ON WALL STREET CONTINUES!

Not sure about "ANARCHISM" but I tend toward dada's explanation: "I don't care much for any -ism, so I don't feel the need to defend anarchism against pseudo-religious accusations. Although, out of all the -isms, Anarchism makes the most sense. Speaking for myself, of course."

I think we can all agree the system we have now (capital-ism) is not working. At all. That radical anarchist ABRAHAM LINCOLN once said,

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

I think that's about right.

*bleh*

nite nite, Blog and Filthy Rich..

;)

:):(

but loud & strong.

You jaded mfker you...Why you gotta mess with me like that?...I was so excited to be having that argument...It's been a long time since we've gotten into anything together...ah well fuck it...It did give me opportunity to segue onto the topic that's more than just pseudo religion for me...practicality.

That's the one thing that everyone leaves out of their isms...How do we get there from here?...

I mean, I'd really like to see a little bit of utopia going on myself...

In the end it doesn't matter if you get rid of capitalism or not, it'll be getting rid of us if we can't produce the means to our own survival.

Since we last had this conversation I've had my two youngest sons drag home literally a dozen people at a time from raves, ya know, because the all loved each other and such..."No raver tetris in my house ya little shits"

Half these kids as it turned out were runaways, they planned on building a camp and scrounging for supplies...Which isn't entirely impossible in a town that was called hobo heaven in the 30s...

But as it turns out, no one actually did any scrounging and in less than a week I was out of food and toilet paper and they were ready to go home to their bourgeois parents.

One of the last kid to leave was this gay kid with pink hair...Now it is true that I did eventually try and negotiate a trade with his parents, offering my two youngest son in exchange, because he was the only one out of the bunch that tried to help out around here but that's the point...unlike the other kids he had some practical skills that gave him a comfort zone to be able to work things out with his parents.

In a way each of those kids had their own ism, they were a 'movement' unto themselves, with their parents playing the role of government and corporation all at once and only one kid was able to actually 'win'.

If any movement is going to 'win' then it has to prove itself to be unreliant upon the system that is. It has to prove that it can feed itself, clothe itself and provide itself with shelter.

Skip that and you're just using up someone elses toilet paper.

"No mob decision to go across the bridge.

From what I gather, to the protesters it seemed like the cops had opened up that portion of the roadway under the walkway in order to "help" them; it was a big march, and there was overspill beyond what the walkway could handle."

That's exactly the definition of a mob decision, bud.

birth of liberalism had a lot to do with this exact same situation and ended with guillotines?

It sounds more like a portion of the march was lead down the roadway by police.

Parecon as Anarcho Snake Pit: Scene Setting
By Michael Albert

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Finding Unity?

Anarchism says, in all life's dimensions, reduce the exercise of power of one person or group over other people or groups to a minimum. Reject all hierarchies of power and reward whether are based on position in the economy, culture, polity, or kinship. Favor free association of informed actors exercising a self managing say over decisions that affect them.

We ask, what is the broad view of this type of liberatory, anti authoritarian, free association anarchism toward participatory economics? In reply some liberatory anarchists aggressively favor parecon as a vision. They pal around with parecon. And we pareconists are happy about that. However, other liberatory anarchists see in parecon a quicksand snake pit of deadly deceit. They reject and even revile parecon. And we pareconists are sad about that.

The anarchist parecon proponents don't understand the anarchist parecon critics' funeral dirges. The anarchist parecon critics, in return, don't understand the anarchist proponents' advocacy. The critics reason that if parecon was buried, surely no one should pal around with it. The advocates reason, if parecon was buried, shouldn't a public autopsy have sealed the deal?
http://www.zcommunications.org/parecon-as-anarcho-snake-pit-scene-settin...

"It sounds more like a portion of the march was lead down the roadway by police."

Lol...those two things aren't mutually exclusive...

Exploiting crowd behavior has been around for thousands of years...cops are trained to do it...So are soldiers...So are sheepherds.

Just like you will reflexively step to one side when meeting someone on a sidewalk, so will every individual in a mob situation attempt to spread out if given an opening.

Soldiers have to be trained NOT to behave like that because that behavior is predictable, manipulable, exploitable...

Was it a dumb move by the mob?, yes.
Was it a dick move by the cops?, yes.

I'm not ever thrilled by entrapment, nor am I impressed by those that fall for it.

Celebrating Wall Street
By Michael Albert at Sep 30, 2011

Due to work and travel, I have been unable to visit Wall Street. I admit, I also doubted the occupiers’ wherewithal to keep on occupying and growing.

But it appears I was wrong about the event's staying power. Activists who went to Wall Street to initiate action have done their job. The event has legs. It is lumbering along quite nicely, and it even seems poised to start running. Further success depends more on other people joining then on the tenacity of initiators - which has been established beyond any doubt.

Commentators have disparagingly noted that not everyone is focused and there is a lot of frivolity. But why is this bad? In a society that smothers creativity and annihilates spontaneous play, having a lot of each is a good thing.

From what I hear, perhaps the occupation could benefit from having more diverse options for people, in spontaneity and play and also in its task dispersal, particularly for people with jobs, kids, and other pressures. But more diversity will come - right along with the arrival of unionists, for example.

As to communications, I hate Twitter. It is a corporate giant and not a friend of the left. Ditto for Facebook. But making good use of these otherwise vile institutions is like making good use of any alienated, profit seeking, vile aspect of society. It is just doing the best we can. And the one-liners emerging from Wall Street put to shame what typical movement stalwarts generate when they slap the keys. You know who I mean: we activists who have been around the political block so many times that we think we own it - we around-the-blockers.
http://www.zcommunications.org/celebrating-wall-street-by-michael-albert

"Reject all hierarchies of power and reward whether are based on position in the economy, culture, polity, or kinship."

That last word right there..."kinship"...that's going to be a pretty tough sell...

I've read Michael Alberts stuff and frankly it's just a paraphrase of neolibertarianism. The same neolibertarianism that calls for the dissolution of unions, has promoted the dissolution of the family unit, has promoted that go it alone rugged individualism that's served no one but those that would see the population be easier to control.

He might indeed intend well but in the least he's misguided as to the actual effects of what he proposes.

I refer you to this link

Antisocial Personality Traits Predict Utilitarian Responses to Moral Dilemmas

I'll do a complete break down of parecon, how it's exploitable, why it won't work if you wish.

We can start with the idea that we can just give everyone a non transferable debit card...Nothing can ever go wrong with that...LOL

Shit! I can't find any of my Nirvana recordings. I had Bleach in the original cassette version.

Please do. And then go and confront Michael Albert himself about your specious conclusions of Parecon.

"Please do. And then go and confront Michael Albert himself about your specious conclusions of Parecon."

Intersting that you'd call them specious without first hearing them.

But obviously you don't wish to hear any criticisms at all.

There's a word for that.

nor am I impressed by those that fall for it."

Well, everyone can make mistakes. Even soldiers and shepherds. And maybe it wasn't a mistake, after all. Or not entirely... there are positive and negative outcomes.

Remember war dog and his outcomes??

Outcomes!!

I miss that Dog!

True that but it's a dangerous path to take when you begin to accept the ends justifying the means...

I miss that sob too...and honestly he wasn't far off the mark with his "outcomes" at all.

But he did too good of a job as goad and came awfully damn close to turning things on their head.

He could've described a socialist wet dream and people would've fought it just because it was coming from him.

Hence my argument with him that he was actually promoting a liberal philosophy...

When you say that Parecon is a paraphrase of neo-libertarianism--do you mean Ron Paul's libertarianism, or something else?--then I know you are jiving. Where did Albert say that he wanted to dissolve unions? Parecon is based on unions, or councils of people organized democratically.
Hey, I didn't say for you to not present your critique; I said you should run it by Michael Albert.

"When you say that Parecon is a paraphrase of neo-libertarianism--do you mean Ron Paul's libertarianism, or something else??--then I know you are jiving."

I have to assume from the general quality of your posts that you understand the prefix "neo" as meaning "new" and simply didn't expect me to understand the difference, which is insult enough but then to think that I was jiving you?...I am old enough to know the meaning of that word too.

Classical libertarianism is almost indistinguishable from liberalism, the two split apart when libertarianism began to more resemble anarchism. There is little difference between modern libertarianism and anarchism and if you want that argument we can have that one too but let's wait until after the parecon thing k?

Libertarianism

Neolibertarianism

"Where did Albert say that he wanted to dissolve unions?"

I didn't say that he did, I said that he was paraphrasing it and that it had called for unions to be dissolved. I also noted that he was might not be aware of that or the consequences of this line of thinking...That being said...

"Anarchism says, in all life's dimensions,

reduce the exercise of power of one person or group over other people or groups to a minimum.

Reject all hierarchies of power and reward whether are based on position in the economy, culture, polity, or kinship.

Favor free association of informed actors exercising a self managing say over decisions that affect them."

This is the EXACT same reasoning behind making government so small that you can drown it in a bathtub, deregulation and getting rid of unions.

"Parecon is based on unions, or councils of people organized democratically."

So it would seem, in fact so much like what we already have that it's neglible and forces one to look at the only real differences...and those I've tried to highlight here.

"Hey, I didn't say for you to not present your critique; I said you should run it by Michael Albert."

Granted, you know your intended meaning better than I and when Michael Albert posts on this blog I'll do just that. Frankly, I'm more interested in what you think at the moment then what he thinks.

And since you brought the topic up for discussion, I will give my critique, mind you that it's not for the purpose of undermining the effort but to find a workable way to reach the same declared goal. Also please be patient as I'm not likely to be able to get to it until tomorrow.

A number of the popular criticisms are presented here. Mine is not amongst them.

Participatory economics

This is also an interesting thread of argument to follow that you might be interested in.

Exploring Libertarian Municipalism and Parecon...

specious?...really?

Parecon relies on the substitution of money for a debit card. In fact, it's a house of cards built upon the central premise of these funds on these cards being non transferable. They say it would end bribery but there is no restriction on the the goods that one good buy or what you do with those goods. This system still allows for bribery, so it effectually changes nothing.

We already have a 'working' example of these cards in our present economy, government issued food stamp cards. And although the government has tried it's best to make those funds both limited and non transferable, I bet it wouldn't take me long to find out the price of a gram of weed in milk and cocoa puffs.

And while we're talking about shady business, not only will those that issue and track those funds have extraordinary power but so will those that can hack those cards.

In response these cards would be loaded with so many biometric identifiers, probably encoded with your dna and then we have another kind of power besides the monetary, that of information.

Can you imagine how people would react to this form of ID being issued? You'll lose 30% of the population right off the top as direct and potentially violent opposition to such a thing.

It's not that humanity is intrinsically selfish, because they actually aren't, it's that life itself intrinsically seeks advantage in any given siituation.

I realise that Polity tries to address a lot of the criticisms of the system but it also fails but that's a different argument for a different day.

...

Perhaps the biggest reason that I'm critical of parecon is that it mirrors a great deal of my own early theories...emphasis on "early".

You can start with the premise that you can change the behavior of the individual within the system by changing the system...

For the longest time I toyed with the idea of substitutes for 'money' as parecon does, about 30 years of it in fact...I can be very slow and very persistent, I guess.

But in the end, it's not the method of exchange of resources that's the problem, and it's not really the uneven distribution of those resources as much as it is allowing those resources to stockpile outside of the economy.

Money is after all only a way of representing time, work, resource...whatever you use to replace it will have the same function and thus the same 'evils' intrinsic to it.

I've said that capitalism will exist as long as there are trades to be made and this isn't a defense of it as a system but an understanding that capitalism exists in all natural systems.

Every single tree in a forest is just as mindless, opportunistic and monopolistic as any corporation developed by the mind of man. In fact, every species on this planet operates on some parallel with the corporations, but why does it work in nature and not in society?

Because nature has something that wealth and power are virtually immune from in our society, death.

Now I know for a fact that I'm not the first to realize that corporations 'living' more than a fixed amount of time would be corrosive to society, the original charters for corporations were limited to a maximum of 50 years.

I also know that the inheritance tax was also designed to stop the undo accumulation of power. Effectively killing part of the immortality of wealth and returning it to the 'forest floor'.

If I were able to rewrite corporate law, I would limit their lifespan to that of the average lifespan of the people that they say they are. I'd make it a constitutional amendment if I could, forever tying their fates to the people they profess to serve.

I'd also just as strongly require that every corporation be majority employee owned. The reasons here should be obvious. Every single corporation instantly a union.

And then the inheritance tax would come back at 50%, no getting out of it. It's a small sacrifice for your children to live in a better world. Wealth certainly hasn't done the Paris Hiltons of the world any good. Being born with that sense of entitlement that the Koch boys did hasn't done any of us any good.

...

I'd start there for repairing our economic system, because it's something can actually be done and done now.

at occupy wall street. Recorded earlier, but replaying right now.

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

Nice!

Not true.

"...and no one wants to clean one."

'cleaning toilet fetish'

Google result:
About 10,500,000 results (0.29 seconds)

"Simple rules, common sense," those are just loaded, meaningless phrases.
It's just possible, for example, E=MC2 is no longer true.
Perhaps, "Anarchists" with a capital "A" can make rules and organize-- just like Ds and Rs-- but then they're not anarchists are they?

Apparently, in the future, after we all choose to do the right thing, some old problems will remain:

How to Clean a Composting Toilet
http://www.ehow.com/how_5628314_clean-composting-toilet.html

do your dirty work:

Extrajudicial Executions: Obama Can Kill Anyone He Wants To
Submitted by bridge on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 9:17pm.

First of the 'Cuban Five' spies set to be released from prison Friday

Rene Gonzalez, an airplane pilot imprisoned for 13 years for spying on anti-Castro groups in Miami, will be a free man Friday - but the first of the so-called Cuban Five agents to be released from prison won't be going home to Cuba anytime soon.

Gonzalez, a dual U.S.-Cuban citizen, must serve his three years of probation in the United States, a judge has ruled, possibly in South Florida where he and four colleagues were found guilty of conspiring to infiltrate Cuban exile groups and a U.S. military complex.

As soon as the 55-year-old Gonzalez is released from a federal prison in North Florida, his lawyer said he will renew his client's request to serve the supervised release in Cuba so he can be reunited with his wife and two daughters - a bid that prosecutors in Miami strongly oppose.

"He has no family in the United States," said attorney Philip Horowitz, who represented Gonzalez at the Cuban Five federal trial in Miami in 2000-01. "His goal is to return home to Cuba - home to (wife) Olga, home to (daughters) Irma and Ivette."

"Unbelievably, (prosecutors) want Rene to remain in the United States to serve his three years of supervised release," Horowitz said in a recent telephone press conference sponsored by a San Francisco-based group seeking his and the other defendants' freedom. "Our contention is that it's three years of additional punishment away from his family."

Horowitz would not disclose where his client plans to live, citing safety concerns.....

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/03/125958/first-of-the-cuban-five-spi...

Hand cuffs are expensive, so zip ties are often used as a cheaper and fairly effective way of binding someone's wrists. If you find yourself bound by the annoying plastic, here's an easy way to break free.

"Imminent threat solutions" blog It's Tactical shows you how easy it can be to break zip ties with a little practice. As you can see in the video above, all it really takes is a forceful smack in the butt (from your bound fists) fueled by momentum, pushing outward as you complete the range of motion. That is, if your hands are tied behind your back. If they're in front of you, just pull in towards your stomach instead. You can find detailed instructions for all hand positions at the full post on It's Tactical.

But why would you ever need to do this if you didn't deserve to be arrested? Perhaps you felt you were restrained unfairly in a protest, or you were tied up during a robbery. Any tool used for good can also be used for evil, whether you're trying someone up or breaking free.

http://lifehacker.com/5846172/an-incredibly-simple-way-to-escape-from-wr...

...If you have a compost pile, bat guano is an outstanding "activator" for the pile. Bat guano is actually twice digested, providing breakdown of nutrients: the bats drop their guano on cave floors, where they eat it and redeposited it. Guano was highly regarded by the Inca for its fertilizing properties.
Good Organic Fertilizer for Flowers | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/way_5607305_good-organic-fertilizer-flowers.html#ixz...

(Seems, bats don't think their shit stinks.)

...I have been unable to visit Wall Street. I admit, I also doubted the occupiers’ wherewithal to keep on occupying and growing...."

That should read for me: Due to work and impoverishment...
Feeling very guilty, but a friend and I are planning to go to Occupy Detroit on the 21st.
Hopefully, the revolution won't be over by then. Better still, hopefully it will be unavoidable by then.

Dude, I'm pretty sure theres a rule about fuckin with another guys metaphors...LOL

Submitted by ghettodefender on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 4:09pm.

Bats are also having a hard time due climate change and they're big pollinators here in apply country...I encourage anyone that has any space at all, anywhere to put up batboxes because of it.

George W. Bush Presidential Center reaches a milestone

Today, there's going to be a celebration in Dallas.

After months of work, the last piece of the frame on the George W. Bush Presidential Center -- an approximately 20-foot-long steel beam -- will be lifted by crane and placed at the tallest point of the building, over what will become Freedom Hall, a light-filled space topped with a lantern-shaped roof that will glow at night.

Former President George W. Bush, former first lady Laura Bush and other dignitaries will gather with hundreds of workers during a traditional topping-out ceremony, marking when the building under construction reaches its highest point.

"This is a celebration for the workers," said Peter Arendt, director of design and construction of the center. "This is a milestone to celebrate."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/03/125922/george-w-bush-presidential-...

God loves Motown. Deal with it redneck fucks.

The zip ties commonly used by law enforcement will cut through your wrists before breaking...

Also, it's not a simple resisting arrest charge you face but escape which generally carries a 20 yr maximum sentence...

Masters of the repeated lying sound byte, the craven Congressional Republicans are feasting on the health and safety of the American people with gleeful greed while making the corporate and trade association media swoon. “Job-killing regulations,” exudes daily from the mouths of Speak John Boehner, his Wall Street-licking side-kick Eric Candor and Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell.

Then all the way down the line, the Republicans are on cue bellowing “job-killing regulations” must be revoked or stopped aborning over at OSHA (protecting workers), EPA (protecting clean air and water), FDA (safer drugs and food), and NHTSA (making your vehicle safer). Imagine how much more civil servants could do to accomplish the statutory missions of their respective agencies if they could get the Republicans and their corporate pay masters off their backs.

These same Republicans get in their cars with their children and put on their seat belts. Out of sight are the air bags ready to deprive them of their freedom to go through the windshield in a crash. Who makes those seat belts and air bags? Workers in the USA.

The jobs these regulations may be “killing” are those that would have swelled the funeral industry, or some jobs in the healthcare and disability-care industry. On the other hand, by not being injured, workers stay on the job and do not drain the workers’ compensation funds or hamper the operations of their employer.

About twenty years ago, Professor Nicholas Ashford of MIT came to Washington and testified before Congress in great detail about how and where safety regulations create jobs and make the economy more efficient in avoiding the costs of preventable injuries and disease. He received a respectful hearing from members of the Committee. It is doubtful whether Messers Boehner, Cantor, McConnell and Dr. Coburn (Senator from Oklahoma) are reading Professor Ashford these days, who just co-authored a book with Ralph P. Hall called Technology, Globalization, and Sustainable Development.

The corporatist Republicans’ minds are made up; don’t bother them with the facts. But we must keep trying to dissolve the Big Lie.

In 2009 Professor David Hemenway published a stirring book titled While You Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention which in clear language described the success stories of people, often with the support of a past, more enlightened Congress, made lives safer and healthier in the U.S. Yes, life-saving, injury-preventing, disease-stopping regulations resulting in life-sustaining technology produced by American industry and workers.

Wake up Democrats. Learn the political art of truthful repetition to counter the cruelest Republicans who ever crawled up Capitol Hill. You’ve got massive, documented materials to put the Lie to the Republicans.

President Obama should set an example. For instance, on September 2, 2011 President Obama fell for the regulation costs jobs lie. He said: “[I] have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover."
Pete Altman, from the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote:

"In reversing his Administration’s previously strong support for ozone regulations to protect the health of American children, President Obama (in the words of one observer): “drank the conservative Kool-Aid, and agreed that tightening ozone emission rules would have cost billions and hurt the economy. But clean air is very popular politically, and the EPA's own studies show that a tighter standard could have created $17 billion in economic benefits.”

Earlier this month, Public Citizen issued a report about five regulations that spurred innovation and a higher quality of economic growth. As one of the authors Negah Mouzoon wrote, when federal agencies implement rules for efficiency, worker safety, or public health and welfare, companies need to reformulate their products and services to comply. And so begins good ol’ American competition. To comply with federal standards, companies need to invest in research and development, which often yields to new products and systems that both solve public policy problems and, often, boost business. The result? A brighter idea emerges.

It is important to note that such regulations give companies lengthy lead times to comply and, under the daily sandpapering of corporate lobbyists, regulations issued lose much of their early industry-controlling reach.

Here are the report’s five innovation-spurring products or processes that at their outset encountered significant industry resistance and inflated estimates of complying with the regulations. Before that is, the companies came to their senses, responded and found that such changes were not just good for the people but for their own bottom line.
1. Protecting workers from poisonous vinyl chloride.
2. Reducing sulfur dioxide emissions.
3. Preventing ozone-layer-destroying CFC emissions from aerosols.
4. Improving the energy efficiency of home appliances.
5. Utilizing energy-efficient light bulbs.

For the full report go to http://www.citizen.org/regulation-innovation.

Maybe some “kids”—between the ages of 10 and 12 – having learned from their parents the importance of telling the truth, can start a Kiddy Corps for a Truthful Congress drawn from the Internet-savvy children all over the U.S. What a wonderful expression of grassroots truth-telling directed toward the Great Prevaricators on Capitol Hill. Yes –job-producing, life-saving, economy-stimulating, innovation-producing regulations for a more secure future for our children.

Interested parents may contact us at info@csrl.org.

We know, you disagree...

Neat.

If we can arrange to lose that war and get Mexico to take Texas back...We really don't need it any more really...REALLY.

Perry: Send U.S. troops to Mexico to fight drug wars

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Saturday that he would consider sending U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug-related violence and stop it from spilling into the southern United States.

“It may require our military in Mexico,” Perry said in answer to a question about the growing threat of drug violence along the southern border. Perry offered no details, and a spokesman, Robert Black, said afterward that sending troops to Mexico would be merely one way of putting an end to the exploding cartel-related violence in the region.

Black said Perry’s intention is to work with the Mexican government, but he declined to specify whether Perry is amenable to sending troops into Mexico with or without the country’s consent.

What exactly are you talking about?

you know what you do...

I think that you do, because when I disagree with something I say so...I haven't said so.

Kill The Brats:

"Beat on the Brat" was said by Joey to have origins relating to the upper class of New York City.

When I lived in Birchwood Towers in Forest Hills with my mom and brother. It was a middle-class neighborhood, with a lot of rich, snotty women who had horrible spoiled brat kids. There was a playground with women sitting around and a kid screaming, a spoiled, horrible kid just running around rampant with no discipline whatsoever. The kind of kid you just want to kill. You know, 'beat on the brat with a baseball bat' just came out. I just wanted to kill him.
—Joey Ramone,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramones_%28album%29

"I encourage anyone that has any space at all, anywhere to put up batboxes because of it."

I should build some of those in my garden I guess. The bats already live under the eaves of house, however. That brings up more guilt. We've done so much damage to the earth, the moral thing is probably to tear the doors off the house a let the animals and plants take it back. Oh well, I won't be letting any old Disney films encourage rash decisions:

Do lemmings really commit suicide?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDqlZjpSJCc
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp

I can't say that I don't share the sentiment...Joey Ramones or yours...

Fruit bats like snacks left out for them and bug bats like a light to attract insects...honey on apple slices where they won't be bothered...

Even the little solar charged light's hung in a tree will work if you don't got a big yard light...

I don't think it's bad...I think it's an awesome outlet for people to finally be able to express themselves.

...

ravages of humanity...The going theory at my house is that humanity needs a predator...preferably zombies, so that we can see how that survival of the fittest thing really works...but it won't be that way...Ya know they say that hunger is the slowest, most painful way to die...

The Pro-Hunger Lobby - GOP Frontrunners Fight Aid for Starving Americans

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, is one of the most efficient, effective, penny-pinching programs in today's government-scape. Food stamps have cushioned the recession's blow for the 45 million Americans that depend on them for daily meals. And we're not talking government-subsidized caviar: On average, food stamp recipients can expect an allotment of $30 per week.

Plus, it's a dream of a stimulus - every $5 in SNAP benefits generates nearly double that in economic activity.

However, as the race to 2012 builds and the crazies get crazier, the top GOP presidential hopefuls have turned on this all-star program with a vengeance.

In September, Rick Perry proclaimed a "Hunger Action Month," expressing "deep concern" for his state's hungry families. It was about time: Texas has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the country. However, it appears that Perry staunchly opposes action to alleviate the problem.

I'll leave fb up so we can chat and I'll answer your questions as best that I can.

I'll wait.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/us/anti-wall-street-protests-spread-to...

Anti-Wall Street Protests Spreading to Cities Large and Small
By ERIK ECKHOLM and TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Published: October 3, 2011

...This lack of a message thing they harp on at the very end of the article...It's obvious that the he is frustrated that he can't put all this into a flippant phrase that would be understandable to so-called 1%. Here's one for Timothy...YOU SUCK!....is that simple enough...? And 'loose-knit' at the start of the article...how dismissive..he must be in shock to see people who aren't clones of each other, people who don't duplicate and replicate, the same crowd controlling garbage...

Parecon relies on the substitution of money for a debit card. In fact, it's a house of cards built upon the central premise of these funds on these cards being non transferable. They say it would end bribery but there is no restriction on the the goods that one good buy or what you do with those goods. This system still allows for bribery, so it effectually changes nothing.
===
This is not what Parecon is based on. It is people organized from below in a democratic manner who create an alternative to capitalism. The goal is to overcome capitalism. The great wealth that is produced will flow to everyone more equitably.

"This is not what Parecon is based on. It is people organized from below in a democratic manner who create an alternative to capitalism. The goal is to overcome capitalism. The great wealth that is produced will flow to everyone more equitably."

No, that's the polity portion of parpolity...parecon is just the functional economics portions of it, I'm afraid that you've confused the two.

And btw I did link to an explanation of participatory economics, here it is again.

Participatory economics

...

"Money in a participatory economyMain article: Labour voucher
"Money" in a parecon would be more akin to a bookkeeping system than traditional currency. Money as it now exists would be abolished and instead replaced with a personal voucher system which would be non-transferable between consumers, and would be only usable at a store to purchase goods.

Electronic "credits" would be awarded to workers for their work, as a means of saying that this worker benefited society with their work. The more effort and sacrifice, the more credits are awarded. Credits would then be used to buy goods and services. Once used to purchase something, a credit would be deducted from the consumer's total; it "disappears" and does not go into a till or bank, it is simply deducted from the consumer's total. There would be no banks in the capitalist sense. Individuals would have to work more to get more credits. In this way, there would be no flow of money and no way to "make money off of money" as in a capitalist economy. People would be able to borrow cedits if approved by an appropriate board, but no interest would be charged.

The non-transferability of parecon credits would make it impossible to bribe or even beg for money.[4] and would thus make monetary theft impossible. People would still be free to barter their individual goods with each other, e.g. exchange a couch for a stereo, but any attempt to create an exchangeable currency would likely be discouraged, as this might lead to attempts to reinstate money and capitalism. Credits might be shareable amongst family members, depending on how the parecon is set up. A lost or stolen "credit" card would not be usable by another person, as presumably there would be means to verify the identity of a citizen at shopping centers.

Albert and Hahnel did not clarify how a currency of this form would be used in international trading with non-parecon countries. If a capitalist country refuses to be paid for their bought goods in this way, it is likely that a parecon nation would use money for international trading, but keep its unique credit currency for internal purposes."

White House on Occupy Wall Street: `We understand’

I’m pretty sure this exchange at today’s briefing with Jay Carney represents the first time the White House has been asked to weigh in on the Occupy Wall Street protests — yet another sign of the movement’s astonishing growth in recent days:

QUESTION: Have the “Occupy Wall Street” protests reached a level of the President’s engaged awareness? Is he sympathizing with the protestors? Is he concerned about the protests at all?

CARNEY: I haven’t discussed it with him. I’m sure he’s aware of it because he follows the news. I would simply say that, to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand. And that’s why we’re so urgently trying to focus Congress’s attention on the need to take action on the economy and job creation.

And as regards Wall Street, I mean, one of the things that this President is very proud of is the consumer protections that were put into place through legislation that Republicans are now eager to try to dismantle. We think that’s a bad idea...Because these are common-sense consumer protections that would prevent the kind of abuse that credit card companies engaged in against credit card holders, that would protect against some of the actions that were taken that led to, or contributed to, the financial crisis that we saw in 2008. These were measures that the President felt were very important, and there’s a clear effort within the Congress to prevent the full implementation of legislation by holding up this nomination. We think that’s cynical and a bad idea.

Why God made Tony Romo throw all those INTS--
Submitted by ghettodefender on Mon, 10/03/2011 - 4:26
George W. Bush Presidential Center reaches a milestone

Today, there's going to be a celebration in Dallas...the George W. Bush Presidential Center...topping-out ceremony, marking when the building under construction reaches its highest point.

Meanwhile...

Massive fire and explosions at Texas plant
1:10 p.m. CDT, October 3, 2011

Explosions and plumes of black smoke pour from the Magnablend chemical plant in Waxahachie, Texas -- a town just south of Dallas.
Video:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/video/breaking/chi-video-massive-fire-and-...

bullshit wikileaks summary on parecon, why not go to a lecture by Albert of Hahnel.

Grinder: Could you describe the currency a parecon would use?

Albert: Here again - why is this something that would arise in a person's mind, I wonder, who is taking the model seriously, unless he or she has already gotten on board, largely, and is wondering if there is a problem about currency that could really make a serious difference. But in that case, why not read the full treatments, and then ask a more pointed question, more specific, if one arises?

In an established parecon there is no currency - money - in the sense we now know it. Think of the output of society as a giant pie. Who gets pieces, how big, and of what quality? Well, the share we each get is a function of our income - if we can work - and of our human right despite being unable to work, if we can't. In a parecon, if we can work, the share of pie we are entitled to is in proportion to our duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued work. If we can't work, our medical needs are met, and our income is, other than those medical needs, socially average - or, at any rate, that is one policy a parecon might opt for, among many others, for those who cannot work.

So, let's say I work, and I have my income, now how do I get pie for it? Well, I "buy" it from pie producers. Which pieces do I want? I decide, based on what I like and my income determined budget, so I can't just take more more more, because my income limits what I am entitled to. How? By the price attached to the pieces of pie indicating what part of my income goes to having different pieces.

So, in one sense, you can think of my income as currency I receive and as my outlay for each piece I opt for as my transferring that currency to the firm, and so on. But, in fact, first, even as is now true, this can be done all on paper, all without coins and bills. But second, unlike now, I can't accumulate coins and bills and then grow them by investing them. I can save, to get something more expensive, better pie or more pie, than I can now afford. I can even borrow for that purpose, and so on. All this is discussed with possible examples, etc., in books on parecon, better than I can do in a brief interview, however.
http://www.zcommunications.org/parecon-and-participatory-society-by-mich...

Grinder: In "Economic Justice and Democracy" Robin Hahnel proposed that a parecon nation trading with a less developed capitalist country would allow the less developed country to get most of the "efficiency gains" of the transaction. The parecon nation would get gains as well, but not as much as it could get if it tried to get as much benefit for itself as possible. It would be ethically beholden to allow for more positive development of the less advanced country. If dealing with a more advanced capitalist nation, ethically it is fine for the parecon nation to try to get as many efficiency gains as it can. Do you think that a parecon nation would really be motivated to be so nice? Why wouldn't a parecon nation be more selfish?

...
I know this isn't your personal reasoning or purpose, but what strikes me as odd about questions like this one, when I receive them, and in fact many, many other questions, too, is that so many are typically asked by people who are quite comfortable going about their daily routines in existing economies and societies. They worry about very arcane and minimal ways, which they really are only at most guessing about in any event, in which a parecon or parsoc wouldn't be absolutely perfect by some inflexible norm in every respect, but they then fail to notice that the economies we now have - and for that matter in other proposed visions too - aren't just capable of error, or merely able to be violated by the pathological, and so on - but are intrinsically geared to produce grotesque and virtually unlimited violence and horror as their defining features. I find this asymmetry of concern, very hard to address without getting irritated... I have to admit to you, since I think you want to know my whole feeling about these matters, not just what I might say to someone.
http://www.zcommunications.org/parecon-and-participatory-society-by-mich...

Hurting the POST OFFICE is bad for election participation and hurts rural areas. More on this from Ed Schultz and his guest John Nichols...

http://wegoted.com/videoblog/details.asp?BID=565

Just something I came across recently.

Thanks for your parecon discussion. Interesting.

Bits and pieces in some history lectures the last few months indicated that the European capitalist system was born via the New World slave trade initiated by Christopher Columbus. Euro-centered Capitalists have been stealing the wealth of other places ever since.

Today's capitalism continues to feed on exploitation and pain and suffering.

Somehow a purposeful ILLUSION has been created about capitalism via the claim that it is merely an 'amoral' system; that's the first thing that needs to be challenged and rejected right there in Economics 101. Capitalism started out immoral and clearly remains an immoral expression. It's not a matter of capitalism having become corrupted; it is born of it and the free market corporation today is its highest expression.

Sorry. I'm just venting.

But OCCUPY WALL STREET has brought back my insomnia (which I consider to be a WIDE AWAKE hunger for answers to 'why?'). And I despise the sight of the police and their political bosses under whose orders they are hurting those young people, and their unfairness and brutality are making this time even more difficult. Such regular looking kids they are, who are learning and figuring things out for themselves. But I hope they are not believing they can make this Capitalist System behave morally, because that is impossible, imo. Any system based on the immoral principle of profit first and foremost cannot be redeemed.

Mercantilism was better. At least there were many centers of self-interest instead of just one like now (the small single class of Global Power Elite).

And bribery? That's the individual immorality that will be there no matter what system is in operation. From the hieroglyphs on the tomb wall of the Tjaty (sort of like a vizir) named Rekmire in the ancient Egyptian 18th Dynasty (about three thousand years ago) when there was no currency: "...Indeed I never took a bribe from anyone...." Bribery, graft, extortion, etcetera -- that's what the law is supposed to hunt down, prosecute and punish. But I guess if the current Establishment, capitalist as it is and enjoying its no-bid defense contracts, doesn't prosecute war profiteering and war criminals, then how do we go after even the garden variety bribester and bribee? (The Establishment may be so corrupted now that laws are not enforced, however, with change we can restore the striving for Justice.)

I admire those who jump in and test ideas and work for change. I applaud them.

Sorry.

Where did I put my homeopathic remedy that induces sleep?!

Brave New World or the world of 1984?

Chris Hedges tackles the question--

http://www.utne.com/Politics/Huxley-and-Orwell-Were-Both-Right.aspx

Interesting essay--

http://www.pilibrary.com/articles1/HOW%20BORN%20AGAIN%20CHRISTIANS%20RES...

How Born Again Christians rescued capitalism,
launched an industrial revolution,
and set the moral tone of The West

Bill Geddes

Buying loyalty?

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/10/jp-morgan-chase-donates-4-6-million-to-ny...

[excerpt]

JP Morgan Chase Donates $4.6 Million To NYPD On Eve Of Protests

Posted by JacobSloan on October 3, 2011

Wondering how much it costs to buy off the police department? JP Morgan Chase just gave the New York City Police Foundation the largest donation in its history. How the police show their gratitude will presumably determine whether they receive similar donations from companies in the future. Via Naked Capitalism:

No matter how you look at this development, it does not smell right. From JP Morgan’s website, hat tip Lisa Epstein:

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.

[read more at link]

Like an avalanche, capital holdings descended on Europe from the theft of people and resources from other continents....

http://uhurunews.com/story?resource_name=parasitic-capitalism-101

New technology possible...

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/09/30/Inexpensive-system-can-disinf...

was superior to 1984.
Orwell wrote excellent political essays.
Cockburn trashes him for ratting on communists.

"Instead of linking that

bullshit wikileaks summary on parecon, why not go to a lecture by Albert of Hahnel."

Submitted by Leah on Tue, 10/04/2011 - 12:08am.

"Grinder: Could you describe the currency a parecon would use?"

...

"All this is discussed with possible examples, etc., in books on parecon, better than I can do in a brief interview, however."

So, your proof that I am incorrect doesn't actually contradict anything I've said and also contains a quote from Albert saying that he isn't going to say anything much but that you should check for a better explanation in the books already written on parecon...is that correct?

You didn't happen to check how that "bullshit wiklleaks summary" was sourced did you?

1.^ Albert, Michael Parecon: Life After Capitalism Chapter 19 Individuals / Society
2.^ Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel , "Looking Forward" p. 18-21
3.^ a b c Albert, Michael Parecon: Life After Capitalism Part II, Chapter 7: Remuneration p. 112-117
4.^ a b Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel , "Looking Forward" p. 92-93
5.^ Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel , "Looking Forward" p. 86-89
6.^ a b c "Participatory Economics by Michael Albert | ZNet Article". ZCommunications. 2008-11-19. http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19697. Retrieved 2010-08-17.
7.^ Michael Albert, "Parecon: Life after Capitalism" p. 231-237
8.^ "ZNet | Qafinepoints". Zmag.org. http://www.zmag.org/zparecon/qafinepoints.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-17.
9.^ a b c "ZNet | Qahn". Zcommunications.org. http://www.zcommunications.org/zparecon/qahn.htm. Retrieved 2010-08-17.
10.^ Michael Albert, "Parecon: Life After Capitalism", p.282
11.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation, p. 221, Hahnel, Routledge, 2005
12.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation pp. 241, Hahnel, Routledge, 2005
13.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation pp. 240, Hahnel, Routledge, 2005
14.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation ch. 4, Hahnel, Routledge, 2005
15.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation pp. 81, Hahnel, Routledge, 2005
16.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation, 85
17.^ Economic Justice and Democracy: From Competition to Cooperation, 274
18.^ Robin Hahnel, (2004). "Protecting the Environment in a Participatory Economy". Retrieved February 13, 2006.

Good thing we have a natural and inexpensive source of UV light hanging in the sky every day....

I prefer solar water distillation as it also removes sediments and is extremely cheap and easy to set up and maintain...even in third world or post apocalyptic situations.

but the ultimate terrestrial based water cleaning system would use solar power to produce produce hydrogen and oxygen from the source water and then burn it to turn it back into water.

Ultraviolet is extremely useful in closed environments, underground, in space...processing food under "blacklight" also helps control e.coli...Having a small blacklight above your cutting board is a good idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_purification

The water problem is going to be a big one to solve and it doesn't have to be done for profit but if it isn't solved quickly and cheaply, it will be monopolized for profit.

Campaign Tops $200,000 in “Corporate Free” Contributions

Donations to Norman Solomon’s congressional campaign have surged above the $200,000 mark, despite his refusal to accept any corporate PAC money “as a matter of principle.”

Solomon -- a progressive Democrat running for the open seat in California’s new coastal district that extends from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border -- has taken the unusual step of pledging not to accept a single campaign contribution from a corporate Political Action Committee.

“The large corporations giving big bucks to candidates are not engaged in philanthropy -- they’re buying influence,” Solomon said. “Candidates for Congress routinely take money from Wall Street and say it’s necessary. I say it’s undermining democracy, and I don’t want any part of it.”
http://normansolomonforcongress.com/

Reagan insider: 'GOP destroyed U.S. economy'
Paul B. Farrell
August 10, 2010

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse."

Get it? Not "destroying." The GOP has already "destroyed" the U.S. economy, setting up an "American Apocalypse."

Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats' Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider -- someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology -- says about America, helps all of us better understand how America's toxic partisan-politics "holy war" is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.
Continue reading:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reagan-insider-gop-destroyed-us-economy...

...maybe that's why the teabagger rallies got smaller:)

Since its launched two weeks ago, the #OccupyWallStreet movement has gone national, spawning copy-cat demonstrations in far-flung locales like Tulsa and Boise (see our map). Its members have serious concerns--about income inequality, the influence of large corporations in our political system, and their own financial futures. The #OccupySesameStreet movement? Not so much. A quick primer:

"The few prosper, while others live in garbage cans!" #OccupySesameStreet

-cjciaramella

"The counting vampires are destroying America!" #OccupySesameStreet

-pattonoswalt

#OccupySesameStreet: The Making of a Meme
Storified by Mother Jones

You are baffling us with bullshit. You obviously have not read any books or articles on Parecon. You are just posting mindless flak.
Present something cogent, and may proceed.

So when presented with something that you don't like...you lie about it?

really now, why the hell would you want to do that? It certainly isn't going to help you understand things any better.

Those are direct quotes from his books...

Anyone can make a mistake and you have. Big fucking deal. Now I really don't give a rats ass one way or another that you've made a mistake. I'll forgive that the instance you decide to drop the subject. Just think, that after all this time you and I have never had a single disagreement and this is the hill that you choose to die on...Really?

Seriously, I'm not trying to hurt you by giving you 'accurate' info.

How fucked up is it, when you're pissed that someone is NOT lying to you?

And the thing is and you don't seem to be getting it, I agree with a LOT of what Albert is talking about. He outlines a lot of the problems very well and even attempts to solve them. How can I disagree with that?

The part that you seem to like best is the same part I agree with most, that of bottom up organizing of the system and direct economic participation...Basically, the 'no bosses, let's form a co-op' portion of it.

Actually, I believe that there are ways of doing that from within our present structure. Things that can be done NOW. Soon as you're done trying to start a fight or defend yourself from embarassment, we can try something positive and talk about that instead?

It's your choice.

been missing him for a while!

"been missing him for a while!"

could say the same thing about you, ya old coot...

dude, you could stop by more often.

"Wang Yee on guitar, Ladies and Gentlemen!"

...

William Samuel McTell, better known as Blind Willie McTell (May 5, 1898 (sometimes reported as 1901 or 1903) August 19, 1959). He was a twelve-string finger picking Piedmont blues guitarist, and recorded 149 songs between 1927 and 1956.

http://youtu.be/awskKWzjlhk

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2011/10/download-ten-secs-of-every-hit-son...

1966

http://youtu.be/-Eh-vRR33eU

Alan Pratt, Richard Laub, Christopher Essey and Darius Kaufman channel the healing and transformative powers of the Archangels Amyon, Michael, Ariel & Uriel. The magickal musical vibrations are provided by Matt Robson and the Brooklyn Raga Association. Fellow love warriors include Daniel Levin, Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, Peter Mandes, Isabel Amarante & tribe. Visit www.alanpratt.net for more.

Anatomy of a $30 Billion Medicare Crime
Monday 3 October 2011
by: Kathleen Sharp, Truthout

... Before slashing desperately needed services for the poor and elderly, we should get aggressive about recovering funds stolen from taxpayer-supported programs. Fraud is an annual $250 billion business, and at least $100 billion of that is siphoned from Medicare and Medicaid. Recovering billions of dollars from these crimes would go a long way in protecting the health of all of our citizens, not just program beneficiaries...

...Johnson & Johnson (J&J), was so confident of its top-selling drug, it believed more was better. So, imagine McClellan's horror when he learned that Procrit triggered strokes and multiplied cancer cells. "I never would have sold the stuff if I'd known it was killing people," he told me.

These allegations are detailed in McClellan's 2006 complaint pending in US District Court in Boston. Whistleblower McClellan and his buddy, the late Mark Duxbury, claim their bosses paid doctors about $17 million to gun Procrit doses and company profits. They were told to give doctors the drug free and discounted, and to show them how to submit false insurance claims...

US Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer will no doubt keep tabs on this suit they know well. Before becoming America's top lawmen, the two were partners at the same DC firm that's now defending J&J against McClellan's charges. Perhaps, this is another reason why our government is soft on fraud. Our health care crisis may be pummeling the weak and vulnerable, but safeguarding the status quo is still an incredibly lucrative job - even when performed in plain sight.
Read in its entirety at the link.

Here's the problem...That would technically be called medicare / medicaid reform and would get a negative spin put on it by those that most profit from defrauding the system...and because of that, low information voters of all stripes would be against it.

I got to the starting point at Foley Square at 5:30, an hour after the march started, and you can see there are tons of people that haven't even started marching yet. Link to a photobucket album with a dozen pics, because I don't feel like linking and resizing them.

http://photobucket.com/occupy10-5-11

From there the march turned the corner and just kept going as far as you could see. And at 6:30pm, more than 2 hours after the march started, people were still just beginning to march. It was people of all ages, even babies, and seniors riding in those little scooters.

Things still unfolding right now... pretty chaotic. Incredible to watch all the livestreaming. Gotta hand it to the media team.

There's some wild video, even livestreaming from some of the media team arrested broadcasting from a paddywagon. wow.

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

http://twitcasting.tv/johnnydiggz

Another SF cam..not always live
www.livestream.com/occupyfdsf

Sixty Department of Public Work's Trucks just showed up. Come now. Call media!

We just received this notice from the City police. Please come to the camp immediately. We need everyone we can. Please call Mayor Ed Lee, Board of Supervisors, and the District Attorney's office immediately. There is no date on the letter, there is no author. The letter is not official. Call them and leave a message NOW!

Mayor Ed Lee: (415) 554-6141
SF Board of Supervisors: (415) 554-5184
SF District Attorney: (415) 554-5184

JOIN US NOW! WE NEED YOU NOW!

Notice from the City and County of San Francisco (transcribed at camp)

Notice

The City and County of San Francisco and its police department celebrate and protect the right of an individual to engage in free speech and of the right to assemble. However, this encampment is a violation of the law. For those involved in the encampment at the Federal Reserve Bank, you are in violation of one or more of the following local ordinances or state laws:
· Open flames on a city street or sidewalk without a permit from the department of Public Works and the San Francisco Fire department (Section 105.6.32 Fire Code – open flame, LP Gas 3801.2 FC, Gas 105.6 and 105.7 FC)
· Disorderly conduct-lodging in any building, structure, vehicle, or place, whether public or private (647(e) Penal Code)
· Public nuisance 581 Health Code
· Preparing or serving food without a permit
· Permit required for temporary occupancy of the street and/or sidewalk
· Civil sidewalk violations (168 MPC)
Accordingly, you are being ordered to take down this structure. Refusal to comply and/or obstruction of our efforts to remove the structure may result in your arrest.
The City’s homeless outreach team will provide, for those whop wish, support for shelter. The Department of Public Works will store your property if you do not have the means to take it with you.

Posted by David Wendt ⋅ October 5, 2011
Occupy Wall Street

Five Occupy Wall Street protesters are suing the city of New York and the NYPD over last week’s Brooklyn Bridge mass arrest. The protesters claim that their Fourth Amendment rights were violated and that they were ‘falsely’ arrested.

Garcia v. Bloomberg, 11-CV-6957, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan) has been filed by the Washington-based non-profit Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJ), and seeks a number of things:

Monetary compensation.

Arrest nullification.

Expungement of records.

An injunction prohibiting similar mass arrests in future.

The protesters allege that the arrests were carried out to stop the protesters rather than in response to any particular illegal action that was being carried out. It’s unclear what defence the city and the NYPD will use. The PCJ alleges that the effect of the arrests was to stifle the free speech of the protesters. If the lawsuit is successful, some of the others arrested on the bridge could also take action.

News of the lawsuit comes as Occupy Wall Street continues to gain strength. Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum appeared on Tuesday night to play a few songs for the crowd, while the General Assembly continues to work to draw up a plan of action. Meanwhile, there are conflicting reports over whether a group of US marines have joined the protest, although so far it looks like that might be wishful thinking on the part of the organisers.

http://100gf.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/occupy-wall-street-protesters-file...

...

The protests need to be mobile...need to be able to pack up and move to a new location at a moments notice...disperse and reform...like water.

You can't carry water in a fist.

else needs to behave themselves, makes you less likely to behave yourself...and they needed a study to know this?...lol

But you know, I did dig this story up for a reason and it's a sobering one.

You Wear Me Out: Thinking Of Others Causes Lapses In Our Self-Control

ScienceDaily (Apr. 7, 2009) — Exerting self-control is exhausting. In fact, using self-control in one situation impairs our ability to use self-control in subsequent, even unrelated, situations. What about thinking of other people exerting self-control?

...

These findings suggest that our own self-control can be worn out simply by mentally simulating another person acting with self-control. The authors note, for example, that imagining someone else's self-control "could result in small breakdowns of self-control, such as employees speaking out improperly during a meeting, to catastrophic ones, such as police officers responding to an emotionally charged encounter with deadly force."

Submitted by CeeCee on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 6:54pm.
Submitted by Nobody on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 7:21pm.
Here's the problem...That would technically be called medicare / medicaid reform and would get a negative spin put on it by those that most profit from defrauding the system...and because of that, low information voters of all stripes would be against it.

...but what appears at the very least unseemly, if not a conflict of interest, to me is:

"US Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer will no doubt keep tabs on this suit they know well. Before becoming America's top lawmen, the two were partners at the same DC firm that's now defending J&J against McClellan's charges."

Without going into detail, this has been the sort of thing that creates personal cognitive dissonance in legal system which has affected me personally in several ways. With all the intricacies involved, we the people, have to rely on what is to be worked out between friends/advocates who are wealthy and will not be affected by the outcome. Though I don't know much about him and how extensive his role is in this case, Whistleblower McClellan may be our true advocate, and the motivator, since a successful case may only result in "lunch money" from Johnson & Johnson, but could make him a rich(er) man.

LA protesters get official support from city

The five-day old campout demonstration outside Los Angeles City Hall to protest Wall Street greed is getting official thumbs up from the city.

City News Service says the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa distributed 100 rain ponchos to the demonstrators on Wednesday while seven of the 15 council members voted in favor of a resolution in support of the Occupy LA protest.

The resolution, which is slated for a final vote next week, called the protest "a peaceful and vibrant exercise in First Amendment rights."

As part of the resolution, the council will vote later this month on a measure that would require the city to divest from financial institutions that have not cooperated with measures to prevent foreclosures.

It's difficult to trust in a system that few even understand any more and when those that do, try and ensure that it stays that way.

I'm not sure how this will shake it out and I'm not particularly fond of Eric Holder in particular. I hope that your fears aren't realized.

It's just frustrating as hell that if anyone tries to do anything about the fraud that they'll be branded as trying to kill medicaid.

The profiteering needs to stop but it won't be in this emotionally driven poliical environment.

Last night the SFPD issued us an unsigned, undated notice that declared we had to pack up our tents without giving us a timeline or else we would risk arrest.

They said that we could remain occupying if we pulled down our tents and complied with their other demands.

We complied with their demands by taking down our tents and beginning to clear-out the rest of our infrastructure that was allegedly in violation of City and/or State laws.

We made a call to action. Our numbers doubled within half an hour.

Occupy Oakland, along with many others, immediately responded when we announced that the cops were here to take us down. Thank you Occupy Oakland and all others!

Yet still, the police, wearing helmets and carrying batons, formed a perimeter around our goods and prevented us from saving anything while they supervised Public Works employees as they stole everything.

Occupy SF and Occupy Oakland surrounded the police cars and Public Works trucks to prevent them from leaving. There, we sang This Land is Our Land and We Will Not Be Moved.

The police stole food, water, shelter, and other necessities of life from the 99% at Occupy SF.

They kidnapped one of our friends.

Officer Pascua (#4014) said to multiple Occupiers that "[He] I can't wait to get the chance to bust your face in."

Another officer struck a woman last night. Let's hold him accountable.

We saw multiple officers with tears rolling down their cheeks. We could tell that they wanted to join us.

John Avalos, member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors now running for Mayor, came out to defend our right to assemble and act as our police liason. Please send him our thanks.

We livestreamed the entire thing.

We are still at the camp indefinitely.

Last night the police took criminal actions. They violated the Constitution. They committed theft, battery, kidnapping, etc.

We are calling on all of the 99% to mobilize ASAP. This occupation must continue to grow.

We need new donations of everything all over again.

We are the 99%. We will not be moved. We love you! We will feed you, clothe you, house you, and massage you. You can equally represent yourself in our directly democratic system.

Join us today!

Occupy Wall Street & What Liberals Now Aim to Do with the Movement’s Energy
By: Kevin Gosztola Thursday October 6, 2011 9:16 am

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/

Also an excellent recap of yesterdays events:

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/10/05/live-blog-for-occupywallstre...

Occupy Austin, Dallas, New Orleans, Philadelphia starting up today.

From Tahrir Square to Wall Street

What can "Occupy Wall Street" learn from the activists who took down Hosni Mubarak?

After three weeks of camping out in Lower Manhattan, and with protests now breaking out in other cities throughout the United States, the "Occupy Wall Street" movement has proved it has staying power. It also has an image problem. The movement has been widely portrayed in the U.S. media as a disorganized group of dreadlocked, privileged college students without coherent goals.

But as we've seen throughout the Middle East this year, a movement of fed-up, tech-savvy young people can quickly snowball into something more significant. So I spoke with a veteran of the Tahrir Square uprising that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to get his thoughts on what lessons Occupy Wall Street can take from the Arab Spring.

Author: Vicki Ryder (Triangle, NC)
Tune: "Oh Mary, Don't You Weep"

This is the day we say “no more,”
No more bailouts and no more war,
No more killin’ on foreign shores,
Today we say no more!

This is the day we take a stand,
In Washington and all the land,
And stand together hand in hand,
Today we say no more!

http://raginggrannies.org

"I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training."

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-most-impor...

"...Anarchism stands for social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth, an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations."

"Remember, also, that none of these schemes is proposed for its own sake, but because through it, its projectors believe, liberty may be best secured. Every Anarchist, as an Anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.

For myself, I believe that all these and many more could be advantageously tried in different localities; I would see the instincts and habits of the people express themselves in a free choice in every community; and I am sure that distinct environments would call out distinct adaptations.

Personally, while I recognize that liberty would be greatly extended under any of these economies, I frankly confess that none of them satisfies me.

Socialism and Communism both demand a degree of joint effort and administration which would beget more regulation than is wholly consistent with ideal Anarchism; Individualism and Mutualism, resting upon property, involve a development of the private policeman not at all compatible with my notions of freedom.

My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be forever free to all, and the worker individually able to produce for himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he needs not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the development of the modes of production and the taste of the people. Meanwhile we all cry with one voice for the freedom to try.

Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just the beginning."

Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
"Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,
"Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage."
O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word's right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

http://ontheblockradio.posterous.com/cynthia-mckinney-speaks-on-libya-in...

by Lloyd Hart
Thursday Oct 6th, 2011 4:02 PM

Last night while I was watching MSNBC

Ed Schults Co-opts Occupy Wall St. for Democratic Party!

By Lloyd Hart

Last night while I was watching MSNBC what I predicted would happen, happened, Ed Schultz, the MSNBC host and a couple of Union leaders basically co-opted the Occupy Wall St. protest and the entire Occupy movement as being apart of Barack Obama's reelection campaign. If this perception is allowed to persist Occupy Wall St. and the broader Occupy movement will lose all credibility.

The people that voted the dems into a massive majority in 2008 are not stupid and know full well that a real economic stimulus bill could have been voted into place with just 51 senators in reconciliation. That a real health care bill could have been voted in with 51 senators in reconciliation and that a real banking reform bill bringing back Glass/Steagall could have been voted in with just some minor arm twisting by the president and members of congress and the public but what did the dem and Obama do, they sold their souls to the corporations and the defense dept.

Now the dems and Obama have crafted a too little too late jobs bill which is really their 2012 reelection campaign designed to black mail voters into voting democrat, "If you want jobs your going to have to vote for us!" the whole smelly democratic campaign seems to be saying.

The dems had their chance but reached out and took that sleazy money from wall street and the corporations and joined the republican party in spirit and body as they have done over and over again through out recent history.

It is now time to end the political monopoly that has choked the life out of the working and middle classes and search for the alternative.

Progressives and real lefties must leave the democrat party in the dust bin of history as too many of it's members are completely corrupt. Yes, it will be painful to watch the corrupt politicians in both parties work to crush working people's aspirations while a new alternative is being born but fighting for an new alternative will be far more rewarding than continuing to enable the kleptocracy of the democratic and republican parties.

While I will still give my all to the younger generation's aspirations and to working people's aspirations, the democratic and republican parties are dead to me.

Lloyd J Hart
508-687-9153

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2011/10/06/18692411.php

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1376666217029167167
Yesterday was the 42nd anniversary of the first broadcast of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0FtgZNOD44&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

doesn't it seem strange to you when they start telling you who isn't allowed to come to the party?

It would be nice if everyone hyping the protests would take a look at who isn't there and ignore for a moment who is.

Those that aren't there, aren't there because they don't believe. They aren't there because they already know that they won't be welcome.

Poor Ed didn't understand that.

Power corrupts, especially when it lacks status

Some authority combined with little respect is often a toxic combination, according to new research from USC, Stanford and the Kellogg School

Ever wonder why that government clerk was so rude and condescending? Or why the mid-level manager at your company always doles out the most demeaning tasks? Or, on a more profound level, why the guards at Abu Ghraib tortured and humiliated their prisoners?

In a new study, researchers at USC, Stanford and the Kellogg School of Management have found that individuals in roles that possess power but lack status have a tendency to engage in activities that demean others. According to the study, "The Destructive Nature of Power without Status," the combination of some authority and little perceived status can be a toxic combination.

He started with a comparison of the occupy movement to the tea party. Yet he knows that the occupy movement is not occupying for the Dems.

Many people already know they are not welcome in the Democrats tent. I know I'm not, the liberals made it clear to me after Obama was elected that I wasn't welcome.

People who want to hijack the movement are not welcome. And why should they be?

"People who want to hijack the movement are not welcome. And why should they be?"

So you're going to fall back on an us vs. them dichotomy?

Do you really want this 'movement' to be exclusive to your own views?

I doubt that you'd answer in the affirmative but EVERYONE that is in the 'movement' is there for their own reasons, with their own agenda.

I've asked this question of a lot of people without ever getting an answer...

Do you still believe in democracy when you're NOT in the majority?

Cuz y'all kind of act like assholes when you think you are.

...

‘Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one’

Nietzsche

we need to outthink em!

eya Dada! glad yer alive!

The us vs them dichotomy is not left/right, but up/down.

Just defending something I believe in, n. What am I supposed to do, trust Obama, hero of the Wall Street bailout? No way. If Obama is not against the occupy movement, (which I highly doubt given his authoritarian nature), he's too spineless to stand up for something he believes in. Either way, looks bad. I wouldn't want to be associated with that.

---

Heya jim! me too!

Yeah, we could have a brainstorming session right here at some point, just like old times. Maybe Sunday night? Who's around?

What would be a solid concrete demand that OWS should make of the Obama administration?

OWS: We demand __________________ or we will ______________! (Fill in the blank.)

The ‘getting’ of Assange and the smearing of a revolution
6 October 2011

...it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a "grave danger" to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the "torturous" dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive "He broke the law".

This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange's extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury - a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country - has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America's national security establishment. The grand jury is a "fix", a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist.

Under the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, said, "Whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal". His embrace of George W. Bush's "war on terror" has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any US president. The problem for his administration in "getting" Assange and crushing WikiLeaks is that military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning, reports NBC. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice President Joe Biden's absurd description of Assange as a "hi-tech terrorist"....

...The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has called the WikiLeaks disclosures "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years". Indeed, this is part of his current marketing promotion to justify raising the Guardian's cover price. But the scoop belongs to Assange not the Guardian. Compare the paper's attitude towards Assange with its bold support for the reporter threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act for revealing the iniquities of Hackgate. Editorials and front pages have carried stirring messages of solidarity from even Murdoch's Sunday Times. On 29 September, Carl Bernstein was flown to London to compare all this with his Watergate triumph. Alas, the iconic fellow was not entirely on message. "It's important not to be unfair to Murdoch," he said, because "he's the most far seeing media entrepreneur of our time" who "put The Simpsons on air" and thereby "showed he could understand the information consumer".

The contrast with the treatment of a genuine pioneer of a revolution in journalism, who dared take on rampant America, providing truth about how great power works, is telling. A drip-feed of hostility runs through the Guardian, making it difficult for readers to interpret the WikiLeaks phenomenon and to assume other than the worst about its founder. David Leigh, the Guardian's "investigations editor", told journalism students at City University that Assange was a "Frankenstein monster" who "didn't use to wash very often" and was "quite deranged". When a puzzled student asked why he said that, Leigh replied, "Because he doesn't understand the parameters of conventional journalism. He and his circle have a profound contempt for what they call the mainstream media".....
http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-getting-of-assange-and-the-smeari...

...or we will shut down Manhattan with its army of "Little Eichmanns."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns

Why did bin Laden attack the World Trade Center anyway?

The Threat of Warships on an "Island of World Peace"
Friday 7 October 2011
by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | News Analysis

Jeju Island, 50 miles southeast of South Korea’s mainland, has been called the most idyllic place on the planet. The pristine, 706-square-mile volcanic island comprises three UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites.........

Today Jeju Island is once again threatened by joint U.S.-South Korean militarization and violence: the construction of a naval base on what many consider to be Jeju’s most beautiful coastline.

For more than four years, island residents and peace activists have engaged in determined resistance to the base, risking their lives and freedom.

The stakes are high for the world as well. Recently the Korean JoongAng Daily, in Seoul, described the island as “the spearhead of the country’s defense line” – a line recklessly located 300 miles from China.

In these troubled waters, the Jeju base would host up to 20 American and South Korean warships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers, several of which would be fitted with the Aegis ballistic-missile defense system.

For the United States, the base’s purpose is to project force toward China – and to provide a forward operating installation in the event of a military conflict. The last thing the world needs is brinksmanship between the U.S. and China........
http://www.truthout.com/threat-warships-island-world-peace/1317996246

Poor editorial broad of the Nation. Imagine being John Nichols or Katrina vanden Heuvel and having to appear with Ed on a regular basis.
I suffered through Ed's whole "show" on Thursday while I worked on my garden.
My God, I'd rather listen to Limbaugh. I've always cut Ed some slack for having Kucinich on occasionally. I just can't do it anymore.

Nobel Peace Prize to Tawakul Karman for Resisting Obama-Saleh Massacres of Peaceful Protesters, Premeditated Murders & Democracy Suppression — by NormanB (Deviations from the Norm”)

This morning in Oslo, in a show of solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, and a direct slap in the face of the Obama Administration, the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded the world’s top honor to Tawakul Karman for opposing President Obama’s:

~~Massacres of Peaceful Protesters in Yemen and Bahrain;
~~Premeditated Murder Program, carried out by Obama Death Squads (ODS) in Yemen, Bahrain, Honduras, Mexico, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere;
~~Coward Drone Program, in which cowards in the US Military remotely Murder innocent children in nearly every Muslim nation in the world;
~~Parking the US 5th Fleet war machine in Bahrain, thus supporting Slavery (56% of people in Bahrain are non-citizen Slaves) and Repression there;
~~Cruel and criminal wavier of the Child Soldier Law in Yemen and elsewhere http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/obama-waives-child-soldier-ban-yemen-congo... (President Obama continues to claim that using child soldiers is “in our National Interest”);
~~Taking of Political Prisoners;
~~Suppression of Freedom of the Press;
~~Suppression of Democracy...........
http://my.firedoglake.com/normanb/2011/10/07/nobel-peace-prize-to-tawakk...

"Dear smart friends, a question: As we can see people are 'taking it to the streets' en masse here in America. At the moment the energy is building, and it's all very exciting and invigorating - but we still have our corporate chains on. We all really do want institutional and systemic change and not just noise and crowds. So, the question: how do you imagine that this growing movement in the streets can evolve from mass 'occupations' to actual, measurable, visible systemic change?" - Doug Henwood

Write a short essay answering Doug's question.

Yes, you are the only motherfucker that's ever gotten the joke without explanation.

"Homework for the brainstorming session.

What would be a solid concrete demand that OWS should make of the Obama administration?

OWS: We demand __________________ or we will ______________! (Fill in the blank.)"

Well since the core of the 'movement' is based around economic issues why would you be asking it of the executive branch rather than the branch with the power of the purse?

I mean, if you really wanted to bust someones balls, wouldn't you want to go after the ones that don't want to tax the rich, or have blocked Wall St reform, or have blocked the Consumer Protection Agency, or those that simply want to see unemployement go as high as possible so that they can win an election and further their perverse social agenda?

I dunno, if I had anything to say to Obama at all it'd be along the lines of "never underestimate the stupidity and spite of a people that elected Bush twice and the first time because Clinton had been too far to the right."

Immediate replacement of Geithner with Stiglitz.

Transaction tax.

Restoration of Kennedy era taxation rates.

Restoration of Glass-Steagall Act.

Abolition of all free-trade acts

Repeal of all "right to work" laws.

Restoration of tariff rates of about 5%.

Mandatory union membership for all employees working in companies of 1,000 or more employees.

Replacement of stock option compensation for executives with traditional salaries.

Replacement of minimum wage laws with "living wage" laws.

Medicare for all.

Free education for all qualified through the first four years of college.

Ten percent reduction (after inflation) of the Pentagon budget per decade.

Ten percent per decade closure rate of all oversees bases.

No military action without congressional approval.

Nationalization of the energy sector.

"Or we will..."
Well, there's the rub.

"how do you imagine that this growing movement in the streets can evolve from mass 'occupations' to actual, measurable, visible systemic change?""

It won't happen.

Winters coming.

Next question?

You city kids never learn a damn thing. Big Ed is the Man! It's easy to claim the 99%, but in fact the street people are little or nothing. Sure they made a nice 30 sec clip gettin their melon's split by the cops, but no one cares. It's like watching a YouTube video, not reality.

Big Ed talks for the Democratic Party, and if you think you can change anything without Congress, you're just another melon waiting to meet a nightstick.

Except for the first one the president doesn't have the ability to do any of that...But as for that first one...asking for Eric Holders resignation is one I'd add to that.

And there is the real rub...

The american people doesn't even understand how their own fucking government works.

They just want me for my vote. Well, they can't have it
Submitted by dada on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 12:57pm.
People who want to hijack the movement are not welcome. And why should they be?

...they are the 99% and the 1% sympathetic to the cause. The genius of the movement--not being too issue specific--is for the purpose of being inclusive.

The four habits of highly successful social movements
Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:24 AM ET, 10/05/2011

(On Monday, I asked Rich Yeselson for his thoughts on Occupy Wall Street. Yeselson, a research coordinator at Change to Win, is a skilled organizer and a thoughtful historian of social movements in America and Europe. On Tuesday, he sent over some notes, and I think they’re worth publishing in full. All opinions expressed here are his own. -- Ezra)

The Wall Street protests seem to be gathering strength and expanding beyond the geographic limits of downtown Manhattan. The media, too, is finally amplifying the story. Whether they will grow larger and sustain themselves beyond these initial street actions will depend upon four things: the work of skilled organizers; the success of those organizers in getting people, once these events end, to meet over and over and over again; whether or not the movement can promote public policy solutions that are organically linked to the quotidian lives of its supporters; and the ability of liberalism’s infrastructure of intellectuals, writers, artists and professionals to expend an enormous amount of their cultural capital in support of the movement.

Americans--infatuated with the next new thing, and proud to believe they are outside the constraints and burdens of history--love neophytes, gifted amateurs. We’re action-oriented and suspicious of elitist expertise, and we thrill to the idea that anybody with moxie can jump in and deliver a baby or land a 737. Right now, it appears that anti-hierarchical, relatively inexperienced people are “running” the Wall Street protest. And they are doing big demonstrations really well. So far, so good. Anger can beget action. And action itself can be a battering ram that knocks down the doors of history.

But anger alone can’t sustain action. And action alone can’t sustain political militancy. Much like today’s Wall Street movement, the French students who struck their universities during the Events of May 1968 had a charming way with utopian sloganeering: “Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!” as they said back then. But the students couldn’t work out a sustained alliance with their working-class allies or move to making structural demands for change that their militancy could leverage. They were not, in fact, realistic. In the end, a massive Gaullist backlash cleaned their clocks.

Movement building is exhausting, highly skilled work. What appears to be “spontaneous” is the result of painstaking organizing and--just like Oscar Wilde never said--constant meetings. Over the decades, social movements have convened meetings of every kind and size, from the farmer’s alliances of the Populist movement to the consciousness raising sessions of the second women’s movement. There have been meetings to assign mundane tasks of list building and phone calling to volunteers; meetings to debate and decide changes in strategy; meetings to hold people accountable for the stuff they promised to do at the last meeting—meetings meetings meetings.

Experienced organizers teach the less experienced and expand the circle of competent leadership. Rosa Parks was an activist veteran. Key CIO staff who organized the steel industry in the late 1930s got their start by organizing the great 400,000 worker strong steel strike of 1919. Betty Friedan was no novice housewife—she worked for a militant, leftist union in the 1940s. And today academics are learning that the Tea Party is composed not only of the newly disgruntled, but also of many people who have been politically active, some of them since the Goldwater campaign.
Continue reading:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-four-habits-of-h...

Actually Ed's a bit of a dumbfuck but a lot of people do like him and he has gone to Wisconsin and Ohio in support of the people on these issues.

But see, right now the anarchists and libertarians are engaging in a bit of a circle jerk...So it's just no longer cool to talk about the REPUBLICAN policies that caused this fucking mess.

Why couldn't anger sustain action?

"Why couldn't anger sustain action?"

How long are you willing to sustain anger?

And btw...greed hasn't always been the mantra of this country...Reagan brought that...and that's why the republicans deify him.

There's anger and then there's knowing what feels improper inside...Do you not have a flash of anger when you read about injustice, etc?

were pretty greedy, I'd say.

Pam Geller Linked Anti-Muslim Activist Calls For Mass Murder Of Congressmen, Muslims, Liberals And Journalists (Updated)
By Alex Seitz-Waldon
Oct 4, 2011 at 4:04 pm

The anti-Muslim activist John Joseph Jay has issued a call for the mass murder of the leadership of both parties in Congress, the governors of seven states, and prominent academics, along with a demand to “burn all mosques. period.”

Jay helped in the founding of anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller’s group American Freedom Defense Initiative. AFDI is the umbrella organization of the prominent Stop the Islamization Of America (SOIA). Jay’s signature can be seen below those of Geller and fellow arch anti-Muslim activist Robert Spencer on AFDI’s incorporation document (PDF), as Charles Johnson at LGF pointed out. The P.O. Box listed for Jay is also the same as Geller’s.
For links and to continue reading:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/10/04/335823/pam-geller-john-jay-...

by that standard show me a human society that doesn't or hasn't had individuals that are self interested?

No, before Reagan stood up behind that bully pulpit and declared that greed was good and that it was ok to hate poor people, things were a lot different.

But I'm not surprised, that you wouldn't remember that difference. Most people my age barely remember the difference if at all.

I experienced him too.. I was a Good Morning America, Joan London fan at the time, if I recall...But in my lifetime Gordon Gekko proclaimed that as well...I had nightmares all the time that we were going to be nuked from Regan...this is all on the Sam blog record, I had a dream once that I had to kiss Regan and his breath was so horrifying that there isn't even a word to describe it accurately!!

What's the matter with being self-interested? That's not greed..there are degrees...

"There's anger and then there's knowing what feels improper inside...Do you not have a flash of anger when you read about injustice, etc?"

I also feel a great sadness when I have to stomp all over your idealist view of how things should be and point out how things actually are.

This might not seem like a big deal to you but anyone up north knew exactly what I meant when I said...

"Winter is coming"

It doesn't really matter what you feel like doing, when winter comes, you do what you have to do.

I KNOW the US Govt. could have changed the course of the planet and chose not to...I can't get behind that...

You can't speak to other's what's are sos....

or something...

"What's the matter with being self-interested? That's not greed..there are degrees..."

If you want to play semantic games and shift the definitions around sure...

However, they are the same thing for all intents and purposes.

What you might call greed someone else would just call "looking out for themselves and their families".

The truth is that before Reagan, self interest included a commitment to helping pay for society.

What Reagan basically sold the wealthy was the vision that they could become as rich as they wanted to be and that it wouldn't hurt anyone except those that deserved it...

There was true evil in what he did.

uhhh...what are you talking about?

No, they aren't the same thing to me, self-interested is not smoking, eating well, exercising...greed is stealing just to have - not recognizing ENOUGHNESS...

for everyone...you can say anything you want to about anything, (as you and I and everyone does), and somewhere, someone will prove us wrong with their perception of what's so....

Love Gun was my first KISS album....

What's your favorite record of ALL TIME?

(Hi SJ! Nice to read you.... Did you move to the other blog?)

will be different if pressed...

"You play that game with Anarchism all the time"

I'm not the one that doesn't understand the term or it's consequences or shifts it around to meet some untenable ideological impossibility just to make my utopian visions seem possible while requiring a complete lack of effort.

"No, they aren't the same thing to me, self-interested is not smoking, eating well, exercising...greed is stealing just to have - not recognizing ENOUGHNESS..."

Really?...In a world going to hell a few million dollars can buy you an island somewhere where you can feel safe...a few hundred million allows you to have your own food supply and private army...A few billion and it doesn't matter what anyone thinks or does.

If money wasn't such a big deal there wouldn't be anyone at the protests wanting jobs so that they could get enough of it to survive.

Life is a shit sandwich...the more bread you have the less shit you have to eat.

But before this goes any further...Thanks for letting me know that you haven't read a fucking thing I've said about those that horde the wealth at the top of the ladder and don't return it to the economy.

"I'm talking about your what's so of the planet is not the same

for everyone...you can say anything you want to about anything, (as you and I and everyone does), and somewhere, someone will prove us wrong with their perception of what's so...."

No Alice, reality is not just a matter of opinion.

When someone successfully proves me wrong, I'll let you know...Don't hold your breath or expect it to be on any major issue or with any great frequency...I have an insanely accurate record so far.

I don't have the energy and it's my big go out to dinner night...woo hoo....see you later...

...

Thursday 6 October 2011
by: Greg Palast, Truthout | Investigative Report

http://www.truth-out.org/uber-vultures-billionaires-who-would-pick-our-p...

The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs - and why they need to buy the White House.
...

(and How They Can Get Them)

http://www.good.is/post/the-five-things-occupy-wall-street-wants-and-how...

http://hotforwords.com/2011/07/24/15-wonderful-words-with-no-english-equ...

A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/

Noam Chomsky debates with Michel Foucault
1971

QUESTION:
I would like to get back to the question of centralisation. You said that technology does not contradict decentralisation. But the problem is, can technology criticise itself, its influences, and so forth ? Don't you think that it might be necessary to have a central organisation that could criticise the influence of technology on the whole universe ? And I don't see how that could be incorporated in a small technological institution.

CHOMSKY:
Well, I have nothing against the interaction of federated free associations; and in that sense centralisation, interaction, communication, argument, debate, can take place, and so on and so forth, and criticism, if you like. What I am talking about is the centralisation of power.

QUESTION:
But of course power is needed, for instance to forbid some technological institutions from doing work that will only benefit the corporation.

CHOMSKY:
Yeah, but what I'm arguing is this : if we have the choice between trusting in centralised power to make the right decision in that matter, or trusting in free associations of libertarian communities to make that decision, I would rather trust the latter. And the reason is that I think that they can serve to maximise decent human instincts, whereas a system of centralised power will tend in a general way to maximise one of the worst of human instincts, namely the instinct of rapaciousness, of destructiveness, of accumulating power to oneself and destroying others. It's a kind of instinct which does arise and functions in certain historical circumstances, and I think we want to create the kind of society where it is likely to be repressed and replaced by other and more healthy instincts.

QUESTION:
I hope you are right.

http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=player_embedded

Mayor Mike McGinn says the City wants to accomodate the “Occupy Seattle” protesters who have been gathering at Westlake Park – part of a broader national movement that has seen large groups in cities across.

On his blog late Thursday, McGinn said officials are providing a permit for protest activities at Westlake Park which would allow an organizing tent that can remain overnight.

“As a condition of the permit, protestors will have to allow for cleaning of the park, protect park property, accommodate the other existing permitted events, and protect access to businesses,” McGinn said.

The presence of tents was an issue earlier this week when police arrested 25 “Occupy Seattle” protesters at Westlake Park Wednesday after McGinn ordered the demonstrators to pack up their tents and leave.

...

McGinn said the City has also made City Hall Plaze available to people who want to stay overnight.

In his blog post, McGinn said the latest offers and permits would last for two weeks and then be reconsidered.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/10/07/mcginn-city-to-work...

From:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2276862435883.2125515.10784044...

Chomsky thought some intersting things back in 1971...but why make a big deal just because someone is good with words?

True, he does say it well but he's wrong on so many counts...

It's not whether or not power is centralized or decentralized that causes the problem, it's whether or not power is 'scaled' from top to bottom evenly...

Not only does wealth pool at the top but so does power along with it but also it's more than that.

Human beings primary driver in the quest for wealth and power besides the utilitarian aspect of both, is simply the hard wired intrinsic need for status.

At the top of the ladder, it isn't greed that compels them to accumulate more wealth than they will ever spend, that they know they can ever spend, they're merely competing for status.

It's not 'things' that they accumulating it's numbers on a bank account, the high score in a game.

This country has gone through a lot of different phases as to who it would grant status to...

At different points we granted status to the thinkers amongst us, and we had more thinkers.

At other points we granted status to soldiers and we had more soldiers.

There were even points where we just granted status on good looks.

But every single time we granted status for simply having money, it all started going down the shitter.

Before the first depression that's exactly what we did...We made millionaires into cultural heros.

It's long passed the time where we need to stop this or at least recognize those that are doing the right things or trying to do the right things with their money.

Be very careful whom you grant status to.

The seeds for President Obama’s demagogic press conference on Thursday were planted last summer when he assigned his right-wing Committee of 13 the role of resolving the obvious and inevitable Congressional budget standoff by forging an anti-labor policy that cuts Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and uses the savings to bail out banks from even more loans that will go bad as a result of the IMF-style austerity program that Democrats and Republicans alike have agreed to back.

The problem facing Obama is obvious enough: How can he hold the support of moderates and independents (or as Fox News calls them, socialists and anti-capitalists), students and labor, minorities and others who campaigned so heavily for him in 2008? He has double-crossed them – smoothly, with a gentle smile and patronizing pattern talk, but with an iron determination to hand federal monetary and tax policy over to his largest campaign contributors: Wall Street and assorted special interests. The Democratic Party’s Rubinomics and Clintonomics core operators, plus smooth Bush Administration holdovers such as Tim Geithner, not to mention quasi-Cheney factotums in the Justice Department.

[...]

So here’s where the Committee of 13 comes into play. Given (1) the agreement that if the Republicans and Democrats do NOT agree on Obama’s dead-on-arrival “job-creation” ploy, and (2) Republican House Leader Boehner’s statement that his party will reject the populist rhetoric that President Obama is voicing these days, then (3) the Committee will wield its ax to cut federal social spending in keeping with its professed ideology.

President Obama signaled this long in advance, at the outset of his administration when he appointed his Deficit Reduction Commission headed by former Republican Sen. Simpson and Rubinomics advisor to the Clinton administration Bowles to recommend how to cut federal social spending while giving even more money away to Wall Street. He confirmed suspicions of a sellout by reappointing bank lobbyist Tim Geithner to the Treasury, and tunnel-visioned Ben Bernanke as head of the Federal Reserve Board.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/07/obama%E2%80%99s-new-populist-fake...

It's a time worn path that you walk and one that's led to the same point again and again.

and 'hijacking' of movements...Here's something that you should probably be aware of...

http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

Yes, but the article I posted makes some important points, about Obama and his actions vs his words.

Powerful stuff. Very exciting!

EYA GANG!

sunday night? i'll check in!

Cool!

but it does so by omnitting big parts of reality. I'm not fond of omitting reality.

Was it foolish to extend these olive branches to the establishment in order to lessen opposition to his presidency?

If you're not aware of my opinion of 'bipartizanship' by now, then either I haven't been clear in my literally thousands of posts or you haven't been paying attention.

Was it also foolish of the democrats in general to not get everything done before losing the ability to do anything at all in 2010?

Just as foolish as all the self righteous Obama supporters that allowed that loss in 2010 but not as foolish perhaps as the spiteful vindictive scapegoating that allows them to ignore their own failures.

Obama didn't say "Yes, I can" he said "Yes, we can"...Where the fuck was the 'we' in 2009?

Oh, I'm really not all that fond of compromise but when polls are showing that the majority of people wanted Obama to do just that can you fault him for trying it?

Seriously, I didn't support Obama not so much because of his centrist positions but because of the
all too predictable cult of personality backlash which we're seeing now.

The fact of the matter is, that even considering the circumstances, this president has gotten more positive things done than any president in 40 years.

We can start with health care...25 million kids allowed to be on their parents insurance and before someone says that this is a giveaway to the insurance industry you can also think about discrimination based upon preexisting conditions being also illegal now...

Ah, but then there's that nasty mandate that requires people to buy health insurance...I don't like this but that was a requirement to passage made by the republicans who flat opposed medicare for all...but it is a rather toothless mandate so meh.

The same republicans that are using the mandate to politic against 'Obamacare'.

This country has been having the debate about health care since before we even had Social Security and yet when we finally get some progress the country stands poised to put republicans back in office and they WILL repeal it.

Actions vs words...

Try these..."We want everything that the republicans oppose, so we're going to beat up on the democratic president and elect republicans to get it."

The truth about common sense is that it's not common and when it is, it rarely makes sense.

Jeremy Varon, a historian at the New School, said of Zuccotti Park: "This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration."

http://www.livestream.com/occupywallstnyc

You might as well disagree with gravity, the effects will be the same.

I remember how the disappointed Clinton generation did pretty much the same thing which resulted in a Bush administration...or the disappointed Carter generation resulting in a Reagan administration or go even further back when the parallels become even more apparent, down to the rejection of the unions, that resulted in a Nixon administration....that resulted in a lack of representation of the middle class that led us here.

It's the same tired shit as each 'generation' get's played against their own interests like puppets on a string.

I'm having trouble that a movement I believe in, publically rejects large swaths of the population...the unions, Obama supporters...

"People who want to hijack the movement are not welcome. And why should they be?"

I don't suppose you realize how elitist that statement actually is do you?

Because they are also america, and these are also their issues, this is also their lives, this is what democracy really means, you do not own this 'movement' and you shouldn't be playing gatekeeper to it.

At some point sooner or later someone will actually have to do something and not just talk, tell me who is that going to be after you've slammed those doors shut?

A consensus amongst yourselves is nothing to be lauded. The republicans do that every single day.

But seriously thanks for telling me that I'm not welcome in your america.

When you actually get around to asking more than "what" it is that everyone wants and start asking "how" any of it can be achieved...or when that glimmer of realization hits that like every other generation you ended up in a worse stuation than the last not in spite of your efforts but because of them.

That's when you'll hear me laughing my god damned ass off, right before I walk away to cry.

or grandparents or are you destined to place your feet on the same well worn path, when they too thought themselves wiser than those that came before them?

Conservative journalist says he infiltrated, escalated D.C. museum protest

A conservative journalist has admitted to infiltrating the group of protesters who clashed with security at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Saturday — and he openly claims to have instigated the events that prompted the museum to close.

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor at the American Spectator, says that he joined the group under the pretense that he was a demonstrator. “As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator ,” Howley wrote. (The language in the story has since been changed without explanation.)

A group called the October 11 movement had organized the march in order to protest the U.S. government’s use of unmanned drones overseas, joined by a few members of the D.C. branch of the Occupy Wall Street movement, as the Post reported Saturday. Howley writes that a small number of protesters—himself included—had tried to move past the security guards at the main entrance of the museum and got pepper-sprayed before they hit the second set of doors that led to the museum.

But, according to his account, Howley was determined to escalate the protest further. “I wasn’t giving up before I had my story,” he writes, describing how he continued to rush past security into the museum itself. “I strained to glance behind me at the dozens of protesters I was sure were backing me up, and then I got hit again, this time with a cold realization: I was the only one who had made it through the doors....So I was surprised to find myself a fugitive Saturday afternoon, stumbling around aircraft displays with just enough vision to keep tabs on my uniformed pursuers. ‘The museum is now closed!’”

Republicans block Wall Street reform bill

By Alexander Bolton and Silla Brush - 04/26/10 08:27 PM ET

Senate Republicans held ranks on Monday and blocked a Democratic effort to overhaul the financial system and crack down on Wall Street.

In a 57-41 vote, Democrats fell short of the 60 votes necessary to proceed to the Wall Street bill.

One Senate Democrat, Ben Nelson (Neb.), joined Republicans in voting against the motion. Nelson had reportedly been pushing for a provision backed by Warren Buffett that would have largely exempted existing derivatives contracts from the bill’s new rules.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) immediately moved to intensify the pressure on Republicans by scheduling additional procedural votes on Tuesday and Wednesday that would open debate on the financial reform bill.

finally joining in, someone should point out that they're aiming their guns at the people that were already fighting it.

Obama chides banks, taps anger over Wall Street

ASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama launched an onslaught against banks and Republicans on Thursday for working to block financial reform, using a populist tone amid public anger over Wall Street practices.

...

"What we've seen over the last year is not only did the financial sector with the Republican Party and Congress fight us every inch of the way, but now you've got these same folks suggesting that we should roll back all those reforms and go back to the way it was before the crisis."

that really screwed up wall street reform...

"wall street reform blocked"

1-10 of 15,700,000 results

Cain: Wall St. protesters playing victim card

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on Sunday accused anti-Wall Street protesters of playing the "victim card" - and suggested that those participating in protests nationwide against corporate greed and a lack of jobs are merely doing so out of "jealousy."

Cain, in an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation," argued that the recent protests against the financial sector were "anti-American," and that they were meant to be "a distraction" from the Obama administration's "failed policies."

...

He contended that those protesting against banks were merely jealous of wealthy Americans, or those with financially lucrative jobs, and lambasted them for playing the "victim card."

"Part of it is jealousy," he said. "I stand by that. And here's why I don't have a lot of patience with that. My parents, they never played the victim card. My parents never said, 'We hope that the rich people lose something so we can get something.' No, my dad's idea was, 'I want to work hard enough so I can buy a Cadillac - not take somebody else's.'

they smelled like...I remember a lot of things...Rubber bullets hurt for instance...I remember how it died on the vine because of the same "you're not one of us" bullshit when anyone offered to join that might lend legitamacy to the cause because they were afraid the movement would get hijacked.

I love you guys, I really do, but if you fuck this up you're gonna fuck us all.

Seasoned activists critique Wall Street protests

Whether the energy of protesters can be tapped to transform the political climate remains to be seen

...

"There's a difference between an emotional outcry and a movement," said Andrew Young, who worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a strategist during the civil rights movement and served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "This is an emotional outcry. The difference is organization and articulation."

...

"Labor unions and students joined the protest on Wednesday, swelling the ranks for a day into the thousands, and lending the occupation a surge of political clout and legitimacy. President Barack Obama said Thursday that the protesters were "giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works;" some Republicans have been seeking to cast Occupy Wall Street as class warfare."

...

"The Rev. Jesse Jackson said the protest was a growing success. "There is a legitimacy to their demands for economic reconstruction," he said, with the analysis of the problems in the economic system "dead on," as he wrote in a commentary.

He said the protest could become a powerful movement if "it remains disciplined, focused and nonviolent — and turns some of their pain into voting power.""

...

"History is littered with social movements that failed to emerge as political forces to create lasting change — including mass labor protests to end unemployment and to call attention to job injustices, said Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the editor of the "Encyclopedia of American Social Movements.""

...

"Todd Gitlin, an author and former president of the Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, attended Wednesday's rally and said the emerging movement was different.

The demands of the protesters were crystallizing around calls to tax the wealthy to address inequality, he said.

"'We are the 99 percent' is a clear message," he said. "It is unfair and in fact disgusting that the American political economy is run for the benefit of a plutocracy. I don't see how that can be misunderstood."

But he said the movement was still evolving and it remains to be seen whether it can evolve as an effective organization. "This is the new order of movements. They're informal and ragged, and yet if they're well-timed, they touch a nerve and get translated by actually existing political forces," he said."

...

"Ambassador Young said that to be effective, the protests need a serious discussion component and that leadership needs to emerge.

"I can understand people being frustrated with Wall Street, but this just needs to be more than people voicing their frustrations and a few leaders having their 15 minutes of fame," he said. "It is important for those who have thought through their values and objections to somehow be heard.""

...

"Naomi Klein, whose writings helped shape the anti-neoliberal globalization movement that emerged in the late 1990s, made an appearance Thursday at Zuccotti Park, where she delivered a speech to the protesters. In a version of the talk posted on her website, she offered praise and a warning.

"It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off," she said. "It's because they don't have roots. And they don't have long-term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away.""

If Obama can't assert his will over the republicans, then obviously he is out of his league, and someone who can take charge should be in charge.

The poor well-intentioned beleaguered president. Talk about talking vs doing... lots of talk from the white house, lets see some action.

But we all know where Obama's money comes from.

--
Interesting re-framing by the way n- from it being made clear that the democrats will not hijack this movement, to democrats aren't welcome in the movement.
--

I do understand your concern, about lessons from past generations. We're all aware of what we're up against.. I'm also glad those concerns don't seem to be slowing the momentum of this thing.
--
I don't know where you got that unions are left out, there's a whole lot of mutual support between the movement and the unions.
--
Me? gatekeeper? interesting.. Like a counter to the gatekeepers on the 'left', I guess? hmm... Maybe I am! I'll have to ponder that one

The sustained presence will have an effect. It already has.

"If Obama can't assert his will over the republicans, then obviously he is out of his league, and someone who can take charge should be in charge."

NO ONE CAN...Three equal branches of government?...Ring any fucking bells?

"The poor well-intentioned beleaguered president. Talk about talking vs doing... lots of talk from the white house, lets see some action."

The president doesn't make laws...his only power is TALKING...the bully pulpit...FFS.

"But we all know where Obama's money comes from."

And we all know where all of their money comes from...why focus on just him?...Why not take a look at teh republicans?...Are you suggesting that there are no rich people that give a fuck?...really?

"Interesting re-framing by the way n- from it being made clear that the democrats will not hijack this movement, to democrats aren't welcome in the movement."

I don't know how anyone could ever come to that conclusion after the anti union, the anti Ed Shultz, the anti Obama or anti democratic rhetoric at all Dada...I just don't...

Seriously, if it's not their movement to use as they wish too, aren't you trying to own it for yourselves and doesn't that make you gatekeepers as to who is and who isn't allowed to use it (read hijack)?

I've got kids in two cities at these protests, dada...I've called for just this sort of thing for years...but if it doesn't include EVERYONE...If politicians and unions and Obama himself aren't allowed to be part of it then it will go right down the shitter.

You have to askyoursef, "who is it that is supposed to do something with the message?"

If it isn't Obama and the democrats than it's going to be no one because no one else even gives a shit and even so they can't do shit about the republicans in congress blocking every fucking thing.

but to do something about that one would have to be "gasp" political and take sides...and frankly the only reason that more republicans aren't pissing themselves right now is the well publicised anti Obama sentiment by a faction of the OWS...and I mean FACTION.

and when this protest can't get a 'win' because all it's done is talk, while slamming the door shut on "hijackers" and the backlash of emotion and helplessness hits...

long time no chat eh?

sunshinejim on skype when it's on

Germany, France agree on Europe bank bailout

BERLIN — The leaders of Germany and France, the eurozone's two biggest economies, said Sunday they have reached an agreement about how to strengthen Europe's shaky banking sector amid the region's debt crisis.

"We are determined to do the necessary to ensure the recapitalization of Europe's banks," German Chancellor Angela Merkel following talks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Berlin.

A "comprehensive response" to the eurozone's debt crisis will be finalized by month's end, including a detailed plan on recapitalizing the banks, Sarkozy said at Berlin's chancellery.

"The economy needs secure financing to ensure growth. There is no prospering economy without stable banks," he said. "That is what is at stake."

as pigs in shit...

Investors to shift focus from Europe to earnings

Season to get under way, although bad news from continent could hit markets

NEW YORK — Investors tiring of the euro zone's debt crisis dragging the market all over the place are hoping to focus on something else this week — earnings.

But will third-quarter results be enough to drive the S&P 500 higher? Or will Europe's woes get in the way?

The unofficial start of earnings season begins on Tuesday, when Dow component Alcoa Inc reports third-quarter results after the close of trading.

The earnings and guidance that may follow could give investors some clues on the health of the global economy, including any impact the euro-zone debt crisis has had and might continue to have on profits.

wish I still had skype or even a useful mic...it's been a while, master james.

"NO ONE CAN...Three equal branches of government?...Ring any fucking bells?"

It's your argument that Obama is the good guy failing against the bad republicans, not mine.
---

"If politicians and unions and Obama himself aren't allowed to be part of it then it will go right down the shitter."

Unions are a part of it. Politicians and Obama, let them do their part, if they have the guts. No one is stopping them.

I do like that the movement has such power. The poor dem politicians, not invited to the party! Pretty funny.

---

"You have to askyoursef, "who is it that is supposed to do something with the message?"

If it isn't Obama and the democrats than it's going to be no one"

This movement is more than a message. Like I said before, the sustained presence is doing something. It is changing the playing field. No amount of belittling what's happening, by framing it as powerless talk that needs corrupt politicians to turn it into something 'real' will change that.

It's already happening.

But something troubles me, n... On the one hand you seem to be saying the dem politicians are misunderstood victims; powerless to effect any meaningful change, they need the help of the movement to do anything. But on the other hand they are the only ones who can save us, and the movement is powerless. Doesn't add up logically.

My 'puter is full and overheats when I video chat.

But we got the blog to brainstorm on!

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17783033

good to see ya pop up!

sofrajones@telus.net

"It's your argument that Obama is the good guy failing against the bad republicans, not mine."

What was that you said...

"If Obama can't assert his will over the republicans, then obviously he is out of his league, and someone who can take charge should be in charge."

Why would that be your argument when you apparently believe that the presidency works like a dictatorship? Since when so you not understand the basics? Since they became inconvenient?

"Unions are a part of it. Politicians and Obama, let them do their part, if they have the guts. No one is stopping them."

If you go to a place and you get heckled and booed...you leave and you find somewhere else to be...and not only would you have encouraged that behavior you lauded it. Seriously, they'd just be attacked for trying to "hijack the movement"...

"If it isn't Obama and the democrats than it's going to be no one"

This movement is more than a message. Like I said before, the sustained presence is doing something. It is changing the playing field. No amount of belittling what's happening, by framing it as powerless talk that needs corrupt politicians to turn it into something 'real' will change that."

Oh for fuck sake, if every man woman and child stood up tomorrow and walked out into the streets and had the exact same message...there is still the "what happens next"...saying it alone just isn't enough and the way things get done in this world let alone this country is via political means...and my saying so isn't belittling it at all...that's just the reality.

"It's already happening."

And then what?...seriously, try thinking just a couple steps into the future...

Hey you remember the anti war protests back in the Bush days...millions...tens of thousands in NYC alone...it went world wide...how'd that work out without a political response?

"But something troubles me, n... On the one hand you seem to be saying the dem politicians are misunderstood victims; powerless to effect any meaningful change, they need the help of the movement to do anything. But on the other hand they are the only ones who can save us, and the movement is powerless. Doesn't add up logically."

That's how system works, all three branches have to agree on something for it to happen and right now we have 2 out of 3 branches willing to do what needs done and one branch that is flat saying no to everything.

The other two branches have no power over the house...none...the only ones that have any power over the house are the people at the voting box and that's not for much longer the way things are going.

Now you can bet that the democrats and Obama will go to the people and ask that they change the house so something can be done...they call that campaigning...that's also how the system works but again it would be called "hijacking the movement".

What could happen is that the house could be pressured to do the right things by the people NOW before any elections...but no one dares mention them at all...You'll get called Obamabot and get a whole faceful of derision....

What's likely to happen...next election they'll lose the house, dems will lose the senate and the presidency...and we're right back to where we started.

Pressure on the republicans now could get them to allow wall st reform to finish being implemented...it could allow the jobs bill to go through and actually put ppl back to work...It could allow the consumer protection agency to begin work...

Why would they be afraid of a bunch of anti Obama, anti government types?...wow...I just described the tea party didn't I? Ok I get the difference, you guys are stoned instead of drunk...is that it?

I don't agree with him mostly, but I thought this was a worthy discussion starter...

Krugman: "if the protests goad some politicians into doing what they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been a smashing success."

I think that's aiming pretty low. While I guess "effective goading" could be considered a success of some sort, I don't think it qualifies as smashing.

A smashing success would go much farther than that. A new economy not tied to Wall Street and the markets. Change the way things are done. Bottom up instead of top down.

What would a smashing success look like to you?

--

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

— Seen on Democracy Now! at the Occupy Wall Street rally.

**
Thanks to Robert S

Bartcop.com

**

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

Your argument is that he wants to help us, but his hands are tied.

extinguish it to protect the 'purity' of the movement...

Cantor says he's concerned by 'mobs' at 'Occupy Wall Street'

The second-ranking House Republican castigated "Occupy Wall Street" protesters on Friday, just as Democrats begin cozying up to the weeks-old demonstrations.

House GOP Leader Eric Cantor decried the protests that started several weeks ago in New York, and have spread to major cities across the country. Cantor said in a speech at the Values Voters Summit in Washington that he is "increasingly concerned" about the "growing mobs" represented at the protests.

Cantor's remarks, some of the harshest by a Republican toward the "Occupy" demonstrators, comes amidst a growing political divide over the protests. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi backed the demonstrations, saying, "God bless them for their spontaneity." And other Democrats have been even more open in their embrace of the movement, which has also attracted support from organized labor.

Organizers behind the movement, which expresses outrage toward the conduct of corporate America and seeks campaign finance reform, have hoped it develops into an analogue for the Tea Party on the left, which has helped fuel a Republican political resurgence over the past two years.

"my argument is that Obama is part of the problem."

Alright, let's swap him out for one of the republicans...You see any improvement?

Third party candidate?...that ain't happening.

You bitch about Obamas love of the banks and wall st and yet he already signed wall st reform into law and helped create the consumer protection agency that will have the power to police both...

And the only thing stopping that from happening is the republicans.

Your answer...Obama is the problem...

What?

"If you go to a place and you get heckled and booed...you leave and you find somewhere else to be...and not only would you have encouraged that behavior you lauded it. Seriously, they'd just be attacked for trying to "hijack the movement"..."

You keep playing this "Oh, the poor politicians" card. I don't think they are so beset upon, myself. Although that's starting to change, thank goodness!

"You bitch about Obamas love of the banks and wall st and yet he already signed wall st reform into law and helped create the consumer protection agency that will have the power to police both...

And the only thing stopping that from happening is the republicans."

So if the republicans would just stop stopping it, everything would be just fine. Wall Street would straighten up and fly right, all thanks to Obama's tough reform law.

You really believe that, n?

"if every man woman and child stood up tomorrow and walked out into the streets"

Then we'd have something. Everything would grind to a halt. The people would realize the power they have.

I think you are thinking too small about where this is going, or could go, n. The struggle to shake off the chains of slumber and all that have had a new life breathed into it suddenly, unexpectedly, wonderfully. And you're worried about Obama getting re-elected.

October 05, 2011
monkeyfister.blogspot.com

First published in 2006, they are clearly still the operating policy of the 1%-ers. Their contempt for us, down here, is palpable, and it is clearly stated that the #1 fear is that we'll finally catch on, and demand our share back. Also in the memos: They have the power and the influence to start major conflicts, should we get uppity.

http://monkeyfister.blogspot.com/2011/10/citis-plutonomy-memos.html

*******

"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."

MMRules

"The dems would love to hijack the movement. You know they'll try"

dude...you're gatekeeping again...you do NOT own it...the hijack word really needs to be confined to those that WILL infiltrate and turn it violent.

A lot of dems have already thrown their support in, what else you want, cake?

And besides you know that I never actually said that bit about "oh, the poor politicians"...I just described the functional reality of a political system that a 10 year old would show more understanding of than the piss poor argument you're giving me.

Imagine being a good politician and giving a damn about people...

How would act, what would you look like and how could anyone tell any difference between you and the bad ones?

Please keep your answer somewhere in the realm of possibility.

"So if the republicans would just stop stopping it, everything would be just fine. Wall Street would straighten up and fly right, all thanks to Obama's tough reform law."

That's one of the big problems with what happened with the banks and wall st...What they did for the most part wasn't even illegal.

If on the other hand you're claiming that this law and the agency designed to police this industry will do nothing at all, then you need to ask yourself why is most of the big money opposing its implementation?

If on the other other hand you think that this movement is going to bring down capitalism itself, then well good luck and I'll meet you on the other side of the apocalypse.

Good for them. Lets see some action and not just words. If a politician truly embraces the movement, it would be easy for them to see why we don't want to be affiliated with the dems. If a politician embraces the movement, they'd respect and understand the resolve of the movement to be unaffiliated. And they wouldn't blame them. How could they?

Just to oppose. They'd oppose a strongly worded lecture as punishment. They'd oppose anything. It's what they do.

Dude, accusing me of thinking small or being narrow in my scope at all is like someone accusing you of being Hank Williams Jr.

Here's the thing...

You will never see that happen, because it's not actually the 99% vs the 1% it's the 70% vs the 30%.

Only 70% of the worlds population carry the gene for altruism. That other 30% doesn't give a fuck about anyone but their immediate circle.

Oh ya, and then also tend to vote republican by a huge margin.

Ya I'm worried about Obama being reelected...if he is reelected it'll be a crushing blow to the right wing and will swing national politics back toward the left...If he loses however it'll put us back under their control and slam the brakes on any possibility of reform in time to cope with the effects of climate change...flood, fire and famine...and the rest of the horsemen of the apocalypse for that matter.

I don't want a bunch of armegeddon wishing sobs or even one with his finger on the button in power until 2016 has come and gone.

"Good for them. Lets see some action and not just words."

And that isn't going to happen because the congress is owned by the republicans.

"If a politician truly embraces the movement, it would be easy for them to see why we don't want to be affiliated with the dems. If a politician embraces the movement, they'd respect and understand the resolve of the movement to be unaffiliated. And they wouldn't blame them. How could they?"

Oh I'm pretty sure that the 'politicians' don't mind one little bit...I wasn't speaking on their behalf I was speaking on behalf of everyone that considers themselves a dem or an Obama supporter...take your response to what I've been saying for instance...are you in any way encouraging someone of my beliefs to be part of this or are you drawing a line in the sand and saying you can't cross here?...

At some point the rubber actually has to meet the road...

You mean the predatory "capitalism" that is destroying everything? That doesn't need any help, doing just fine bringing itself down.

Radical changes in the way things are done across the board, now yer talking.

Either business as usual, or the apocalypse? I think there may be other options.

---

"A lot of dems have already thrown their support in, what else you want, cake?"

See, the drive behind that kind of thinking is wrong. It confuses who is in charge. The people, or the politicians who work for them? I have the cake, the dems want it. But they can't have it.

---

"dude...you're gatekeeping again...you do NOT own it"

Don't be ridiculous. It's no secret the dems would love to hijack this movement.

---

"Imagine being a good politician and giving a damn about people...

How would act, what would you look like and how could anyone tell any difference between you and the bad ones?

Please keep your answer somewhere in the realm of possibility."

See my post @ 1:45

why is most of the big money opposing its implementation?

"Just to oppose. They'd oppose a strongly worded lecture as punishment. They'd oppose anything. It's what they do."

LOL...Bullshit, they spend money to make money and they're spending a lot of money in opposition because this law will cost them the money they'd make continuing the same practices that led to the last melt down. They want things to remain exactly as they are.

By the second day of the occupation Wall st had an equal sized contingent of high paid lobbyists in washington whining about it.

Seriously dude, you're going to try and sell the line that the agency that Elizabeth Warren helped create is just a toothless sham?...Really?

It's not a secret club, it's fighting back against class warfare. People who identify as dems and Obama supporters are sympathetic to the movement as well. I didn't get an invitation. I don't think you should expect one either.

"You mean the predatory "capitalism" that is destroying everything? That doesn't need any help, doing just fine bringing itself down."

Ya exept that they're not hurting and most of us would be dead before they'd even feel it.

"Either business as usual, or the apocalypse? I think there may be other options."

That's not the choice I laid out...a little honesty would be helpful here.

"See, the drive behind that kind of thinking is wrong. It confuses who is in charge. The people, or the politicians who work for them? I have the cake, the dems want it. But they can't have it."

No, because at some point someone actually has to write the law, implement it and enforce it. You want the cake without making any of the previous possible. Dude, I'm pretty sure that you smoked your cake long ago.

"Don't be ridiculous. It's no secret the dems would love to hijack this movement."

When did you get so dumb?

"See my post @ 1:45"

The republican congress says "fuck you dude it ain't happening and btw we're going to lower taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor".

It's a breath of fresh air to have a good intelligent debate. I have to go, but hopefully pick back up again tomorrow. Love you, man!

And you too, jim! Get into the conversation when you get a chance!

Dude, the kids already offered to push my wheel chair down to the protests...

You just can't be using that kind of language because it locks people out...it's contentious...it's elitist...it makes it sound like an exclusive club...perception matters.

People were turned away by what happened when Ed came down cover the protests...

Here's another quote "fucking unions coming down here and trying to impose their order on us"...

That kind of shit needs to not happen just the same as you don't want anyone trying to instigate shit with the cops.

I once said on this very blog many years ago that this country won't be right again until a poor man could become president.

What do you suppose that would entail?

"It's a breath of fresh air to have a good intelligent debate. I have to go, but hopefully pick back up again tomorrow. Love you, man!"

Who the fuck are you calling intelligent?

Seriously, you gotta stop being such a dick.

I'll catch ya tomorrow bud.

The granddaughter came to stay the night and I have to go confuse her...it's easy, she's 2 mnths old.

""Just to oppose. They'd oppose a strongly worded lecture as punishment. They'd oppose anything. It's what they do."

"LOL...Bullshit""

Actually no, it's not bullshit. If you weren't so set on twisting every statement I make into something negative and trying to cast me in a certain light to prove some point about how the protesters are elitist thugs, you'd see that. I understand you're worried about Obama's re-election, but that no reason to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Here's Krugman, saying in essence what I said. Maybe you'll understand it if it's not me saying it.

"The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.

Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”

But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees — basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes paying lower rates than middle-class families.

This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny. Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic sliming of Elizabeth Warren.

So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html?_...

That's twice now you tried to make it seem that the Unions and the movement are at odds. They're not.

The unions are not in charge, no one is. But they are supporting. Transport Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Federation of Teacher, the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO... the list goes on.

Why you feel the need to make it appear different... Well, we know why. You're worried about Obama's re-election.

"People were turned away by what happened when Ed came down cover the protests..."

What happened when Ed came down to the protests? He hung out, did his show. Some people didn't agree with some of the ways he portrayed the movement afterwards. Perception is important, as you say. So what? It's a big movement, lots of points-of-view. Ed supports it. I haven't heard him say anything but positive things about Occupy Wall Street.

---

"I once said on this very blog many years ago that this country won't be right again until a poor man could become president.

What do you suppose that would entail?"

I like this one. It deserves some thought put into it before being answered.

n is worried the protests will hurt Obama, the 'independent' types think it's been engineered to help Obama. The republicans think it's the communist invasion they've always been afraid was coming, and the end the FED-ers say we're doing it wrong, it's a trick of the elite to bring about the new world order or whatever. All because people started saying 'no more' to the economic warfare being used against them.

Pretty wild stuff.

October 9, 2011
Premiums Skyrocketing Where Health Insurers Have Their Way With State Legislators, As in Maine
By Wendell Potter

Augusta, Maine -- Almost 3,200 miles separate Sacramento and Augusta, but the gulf between those two state capitals actually seems much greater when measuring the comparative trust that political leaders there have placed in health insurance companies...Golden State voters last year elected a Democrat, Jerry Brown, to succeed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, and kept Democrats in control of both chambers of the legislature. Maine voters did exactly the opposite; Democrats lost control of both the House and Senate, and Republican Paul LePage was elected governor by slightly more than 10,000 votes in a field of five candidates.
Continue reading at the link.

...not perfect but a difference.

"Actually no, it's not bullshit. If you weren't so set on twisting every statement I make into something negative and trying to cast me in a certain light to prove some point about how the protesters are elitist thugs, you'd see that. I understand you're worried about Obama's re-election, but that no reason to lose sight of the bigger picture."

Seriously, I never lose the big picture. I'm not twisting anything. It is not my intention to portray the protesters as elitist thugs (even though I do personally know a couple that are there and kinda are...lol).

I'll try and make it clearer...With every protest of any sort you're gonna attract newbs that don't know how to behave. Some will taunt the police, some will throw rocks, some will try and get people to do stupid things by exploiting crowd dynamics, like that conservative guy at the air and space museum.

Another way to hijack a movement is simply to exploit our tribalist tendencies and start pointing out differences. It's most usually done under the cover of protecting the purity of a movement. And a lot of the time it's done by well meaning idiots that don't know any better and it's up to the more experienced people to point out that jeering and sneering is a big no no if you want a movement to grow.

The civil rights movement had some of these same issues when caucasians wanted to march too. "this is ours, we don't need you" throw in some suspicion of people trying to subvert the movement. This happens with every movement but the wiser heads of their time prevailed and 'purity' took a loss and 'unity' took the win.

This is exactly what went wrong with WTO. Anyone who's position wasn't 'pure' was cast aside as an outsider and that movement died. Big Ed definitely isn't 'pure' by even my standards let alone those of some pseudo anarchist/libertarian but in this particular fight or any other that he wished to throw his weight into I'd welcome it, even if he was just using it to get ratings or make a profit, because you NEVER turn people away and especially not the media.

If there's lesson to be learned from Egypt it's that when building a movement, you worry about the differences AFTERWARDS and concentrate about what's shared.

Now truthfully, it's particularly hard for me to make the big tent argument because I am a deeply partizan individual and draw a lot of hard lines that I will fight over if they're crossed but even so I do believe in that big tent.

Did FBI get wrong man for anthrax killings?
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and SCOTT SHANE
updated 10/10/2011 5:07:35 AM ET

...If the authors of the new paper are correct about the silicon-tin coating, it appears likely that Dr. Ivins could not have made the anthrax powder alone with the equipment he possessed, as the F.B.I. maintains. That would mean either that he got the powder from elsewhere or that he was not the perpetrator.

If Dr. Ivins did not make the powder, one conceivable source might be classified government research on anthrax, carried out for years by the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Ivins had ties to several researchers who did such secret work.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is conducting its own review of the anthrax evidence. Nancy Kingsbury, the official overseeing the project, said the agency had spoken with the paper’s authors and judged that “their questions are reasonable.”...

love it A,!

"Here's Krugman, saying in essence what I said. Maybe you'll understand it if it's not me saying it."

Did you forget which side of the argument you'd taken up?

Condense Krugmans article down...

Wealthy right wing polticians are smearing the Occupiers...and they're wrong.

Wealthy right wing wall streeters are smearing Obama for regulating them...and they're wrong.

Wealthy right wingers of all stripes are smearing Elizabeth Warren...and they're wrong.

...

This is my argument.

(I am a fan of his not because of his politics, although we agree there but because of his rejection of the rational actor principle in economics)

From his most recent email:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that our Government has handed out $16 trillion to the banks.

Let me repeat that, in case you didn’t hear me the first time. The GAO says that our Government HAS HANDED OUT $16 TRILLION TO THE BANKS.

That little gem appears on Page 131 of GAO Report No. GAO-11-696. A report issued two months ago. A report that somehow seems to have eluded the attention of virtually every network, every major newspaper, and every news show.

How much is $16 trillion? That is an amount equal to more than $50,000 for every man, woman and child in America. That’s more than every penny that every American earns in a year. That’s an amount equal to almost a third of our national net worth -- the value of every home, car, personal belonging, business, bank account, stock, bond, piece of land, book, tree, chandelier, and everything else anyone owns in America. That’s an amount greater than our entire national debt, accumulated over the course of two centuries.

A $16 trillion stack of dollar bills would reach all the way to the Moon. And back. Twice.

That’s enough to pay for Saturday mail delivery. For the next 5,000 years.

All of that money went from you and me to the banks. And we got nothing. Not even a toaster.

I have been patiently waiting to see whether this disclosure would provoke some kind of reaction. Answer: nope. Everyone seems much more interested in discussing whether or not they like the cut of Perry’s jib.

Whatever a jib may be.

In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing more about this. But right now, I wanted to keep this really simple. Just give folks something to talk about when they’re standing next to the coffee maker.

The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it.

Think about it. Think about what that means.

Courage,

Alan Grayson

"The Unions and Occupy Wall Street support each other"

That I'm glad of however...

"That's twice now you tried to make it seem that the Unions and the movement are at odds. They're not."

What I've been trying to relay isn't that they're at odds but is in response to the Ed Shultz event and the behavior of some in the audience.

Not only was there people in the crowd jeering Ed but there were people all over online spouting anti union crap that night and the day after...I even posted a quote to highlight not only what was being said but who the intended targets were...

Imagine this being said by someone in their 30's dressed like they were 20 and getting the lingo wrong and occasionally asking where they can score some dope...

"fucking unions coming down here to try to impose their order on us"

Wanna see that as a psycholinguistic diagram?

(Unions bad) (coming from above) (to our place) (trying to control us) (I am us and we are not order)

(identify the enemy) (emphasize difference) (invoke terratorialism) (invoke fear response) (identify self as belonging to the tribe)

I've known a lot of anarchists over the years and I've known a lot of trolls, agent provocateurs, snitches, narcs...

You bring up the term "hijack"...I'd use the term troll.

Now it's possible that this could've been just a bad anarchist that doesn't even understand the precepts of the ideology but I have doubts when it was occompanied with an online meme blitz to echo this sentiment.

And then I read here that some had swallowed the divisive bait and then you defend the use of anti hijacking as a means of protecting message purity, in effect defending those that were attempting to kill the movement from inside by providing them a cover story...even going so far as saying that it was good that Ed was heckled and made unwelcome as he sat there with union guys.

Then across multiple posts I try to get it through your thick head why it actually hurts a movement when you try to maintain message purity and how it runs counter to the growth, impact and inclusiveness of that movemnt...you argued every step of the way.

And then after all of that you want to try and spin that it's me trying to paint the protests in a negative light rather than being the one giving warning NOT to allow it to happen that way...Seriously? that 3000+ miles away is serving you well right now, because if you were in the same room you'd be trying to dislodge my boot from your skinny ass.

"The unions are not in charge, no one is. But they are supporting. Transport Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, the United Federation of Teacher, the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO... the list goes on."

This is good news and exactly what I want to see. The clergy is also joining in. However, if there are people in those crowds that start to heckle, then they need shut down just as quickly as someone taunting the cops and I don't care if they give the excuse that X is trying to hijack the movement.

"Why you feel the need to make it appear different... Well, we know why. You're worried about Obama's re-election."

Dude, the spin is unecessary, poorly constructed and a hugely disrespectful coming from someone that should know a little more about my skill level in this area than the average shmuck that wanders by.

It would be tantamount to me insinuating that you'd have difficulty playing 2 major chords sequentially...

Seriously...dude.

People were turned away by what happened when Ed came down cover the protests...

"What happened when Ed came down to the protests? He hung out, did his show. Some people didn't agree with some of the ways he portrayed the movement afterwards. Perception is important, as you say. So what? It's a big movement, lots of points-of-view. Ed supports it. I haven't heard him say anything but positive things about Occupy Wall Street."

And there was a big online push to try and exploit that disagreement and drive a wedge in between Ed, the unions and the protests and it was done in the name of stopping the message from being hijacked.

...

I once said on this very blog many years ago that this country won't be right again until a poor man could become president.

What do you suppose that would entail?

"I like this one. It deserves some thought put into it before being answered."

I'll give you the short version as a headstart on the conversation.

Get money out of politics.

How do you get money out of politics?

Step one get people to realize that you need to get money out of politics by tying it to things that they can directly relate to.

Skip a bunch of steps and we're at Occupy Wall St.

Skip a bunch of steps and while the issues are still burning in people minds take control of the law making apparatus.

...

My point was to hint at exactly how much I have invested in Occupy and how long I've been working towards it.

Really, after all this time and all that I've said, you still don't know me?

that will be used to try and kill this 'movement'? Make sure to read the comments...

Civil rights legend John Lewis snubbed by 'Occupy Atlanta'

U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon, John Lewis (D-Ga.) may have had something profound to say at Occupy Atlanta -- but he wasn't given the chance to speak.

Friday evening, Lewis attended Atlanta's offspring of Occupy Wall Street, which has inspired similar protests around the nation.

Lewis was introduced by the Occupy Atlanta general assembly, but he ended up not saying anything at all due the assembly rules, which mandate a consensus before anyone can make a public announcement.

"John Lewis is no better than anyone else!" yells a protester off camera.

Lewis later said he was not disappointed that he was not able to address the crowd, but some of the protesters were quite upset by the public dismissal of a well-respected veteran activist.

"To #occupyatlanta general assembly. U are a bunch of d***heads. Congressman John Lewis is an American hero," hip hop mogul, Russell Simmons tweeted. "In order for #occupywallstreet to succeed we are gonna need John Lewis to write legislation," he added.

One attendant, Michelle Williams told a CBS Atlanta news reporter that the protest is no more than an "organized mob."

"I'm angry because this is not what democracy is about" Williams said.

"Occupy Wall Street is saying, 'We will not take it anymore,'" Lewis said in a statement.

"They are saying we must not forget about those in need, about those who work for starvation wages, those who bear their burden in the heat of the day and in the darkness of the night."

Dude...seriously...you're not listening.

and then tell me that I'm wrong about what is happening to Occupy...

Go ahead...I'll be waiting.

Listening to the Majority Report MEMBERS ONLY podcast...Cliff Schecter, a regular Casual Friday guest, made a fantastic announcement during the Campaign for America's Future Conference presentation last week concerning the panelists--Nicole Sandler and Sam Seder.

THANK YOU CLIFF SCHECTER!

Become a Majority Report member for only $10.00 a month and find out what it is.
http://majority.fm/become-a-member/

"The Government gave $16 trillion to the banks. And nobody else is talking about it.

Think about it. Think about what that means."

That the government had 16 trillion to give away might ring a few bells...that it required printing money and that devalued the dollar...that that 16 trillion is now sitting somewhere outside of the economy collecting dust...that the 16 trillion that it replaced is also sitting somewhere outside of the economy also collecting dust...that the bankers have our economy by the balls and are basically holding each and every one of us hostage to get what they want...

Ya I think about it...

And a jib is a sail and the cut of the jib determines in large part the performance of the sail boat.

Real Demands

Submitted by ghettodefender on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 4:19pm.

Immediate replacement of Geithner with Stiglitz.

Transaction tax.

Restoration of Kennedy era taxation rates.

Restoration of Glass-Steagall Act.

Abolition of all free-trade acts

Repeal of all "right to work" laws.

Restoration of tariff rates of about 5%.

Mandatory union membership for all employees working in companies of 1,000 or more employees.

Replacement of stock option compensation for executives with traditional salaries.

Replacement of minimum wage laws with "living wage" laws.

Medicare for all.

Free education for all qualified through the first four years of college.

Ten percent reduction (after inflation) of the Pentagon budget per decade.

Ten percent per decade closure rate of all oversees bases.

No military action without congressional approval.

Nationalization of the energy sector.

"Or we will..."
Well, there's the rub.

==============================

Great!

May I add some from my wishlist--

Universal paper ballot voting (de-privatization of elections).

Works program like WPA Conservation Corps (and on steroids) including REforestation.

Nationalize the Federal Reserve.

Submitted by Alice on Fri, 10/07/2011 - 4:51pm.

There's anger and then there's knowing what feels improper inside...Do you not have a flash of anger when you read about injustice, etc?

===========================

I think our culture lacks sufficient vocabulary. We need a larger vocabulary to describe/distinguish the variations of feelings.

Ever since hearing Dr. Helen Caldicott speak for the legitimacy of "righteous indignation", I now feel that that is what wells up in me about situations of injustice.

I don't think righteous indignation is spiritually corrosive and depleting like anger can be. I think fighting for justice in energizing because the GOAL is so great.

"Universal paper ballot voting (de-privatization of elections).

Works program like WPA Conservation Corps (and on steroids) including REforestation.

Nationalize the Federal Reserve."

You know why I don't like you...This is why I DO like you.

Even though you approach almost everything backasswardly, you somehow end up in the right place.

Now immediately forget that I said any of that.