Tuesday, February 21, 2012

[Written for a child] “I am 3 years old and lucky to go to preschool, have a roof over my head and spaghetti-o’s in my belly. I am lucky to have Medicaid while my parents don’t qualify.”
“i am 22, living in a trailer in exchange for labor… We eat 69c mac’n'cheez or ramen; i drive a car illegal with disrepairs. And i’m lucky.
“I am lucky my husband has a decent job because before I was on his health insurance my coverage denied normal, annual GYN visits because ‘Being a woman is a pre existing condition.’ And we are the lucky ones!!”
“But I am one of the lucky ones. I was finally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder I am properly medicated”
“I’m one of the lucky ones. I enjoy my part-time job… yet… [have a] $65,000 [student] loan. 4 side jobs – not enough for rent. No health insurance. No children, so I don’t qualify for any aid, but I’m one of the lucky ones.”

“I am a lucky one. I have enough money to eat 3 of 4 weeks of the month…”

***************
Mr. Romney: “I’m not concerned about the very poor we have a safety net for them."
Mr. Gingrich:  "Child labor laws are stupid schools should fire janitors and replace with them poor kid."
Mr. Santorum: "No One has ever died because they are uninsured and don't have health care."
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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Republicans want your taxes to go up. (Think Progress/yfrog)
 
The payroll tax cuts extension bill that Senate Democrats introduced yesterday would be funded by a 3.25 percent surtax on income over a million dollars. To find out what that would mean for American taxpayers, Greg Sargent asked the non-partisan Citizens for Tax Justice to crunch the numbers:
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If Congress doesn't act, your taxes will go up. Find out how much more you'll pay.Payroll Tax Cut Calculator http://www.whitehouse.gov/economy/jobsact/calculator
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Wednesday, November 2, 2011

 

99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.    

GOP Senator Tom Coburn: 
$30 Billion Aid For Richest 1% Is 'Sheer Stupidity'  - Link 

In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public." His idea was simple: The starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food. 

http://www.celdf.org/img/thumb/17263.jpg

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California Berkeley Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics, dug into the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances and:

    Then compared those numbers to the net worth of the six members of the Walton clan as reported on the Forbes 400 list in 2007. They are all children or children-in-law of the founders of Walmart. Their total net worth that year: $69.7 billion.

    That’s equal to the wealth of the poorest 30 percent of all Americans, according to Allegretto’s calculations. As if that's not outrageous enough, Allegretto also notes that:

    The new 2011 Forbes 400 has the inherited worth of these six Waltons at $93 billion. The 2010 SCF data that is slated for release spring of 2012 will almost certainly show a further widening of the wealth gap given that corporate profits, stocks and CEO pay have all recovered while housing values & equity (the lion’s share of wealth for average American’s), wages and family incomes have yet to turn around.

Six people. As much wealth as 30 percent of people. In 2007, the population of the United States was 302.2 million people. Six people had as much wealth as 90.7 million of those people. Or, to put it in another way, we're not talking about the top 1 percent. We're talking about the top .00000002 percent.



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Saturday, October 8, 2011

While the Occupy movement targets the 1 Percent, we want to introduce you to the elite among the gang of superrich: the war profiteers. Meet the 0.1% -
The War Profiteers


First Commercial - Occupy Wall Street
We Are The 99% - The Essential 3 Minute Video


Star Light News - Link 

Don't miss the Mother Jones' #OccupyWallStreet coverage - Link 
Link 2 
Link 3
Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis was arrested at the Occupy Wall Street protests this morning outside of the New York Stock exchange.
 
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Saturday, October 1, 2011

Photobucket
We Are the 99 Percent - Link  managed by activists at occupywallst.org - Link
EXCERPT - Wall Street has long been the home of the biggest threat to American Democracy. Now it has become home to what may be our best hope for rescuing it.

For everyone who loves this country, for everyone whose heart is breaking for the growing ranks of the poor, for everyone who is seething at the unopposed demolition of America's working and middle class: the time has come to get off the fence.

A new generation has gone to the scene of the crimes committed against our future. The time has come for all people of good will to give our full-throated backing to the young people of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The young heroes on Wall Street today baffle the world because they have issued no demands. The villains of Wall Street had their demands -- insisting upon a massive bailout for themselves in 2008, while they pocketed million dollar bonuses. The Wall Street protesters are not seeking a bailout for themselves; they are working to bail out democracy.




Preview



www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

  • David Dayen asks Sen. Jeff Merkley for his take on the protests:
    “I think the movement is a reaction to how quickly the United States responded to the banks when they were in trouble, and how feebly we responded to American workers when they faced troubles of their own,” said Merkley. “They are responding to both problems in the economy and government dysfunction.” I asked Merkley for his reaction to how the movement is essentially protesting him and his colleagues for their inability to break free of corporate shackles that prevent them from building an economy that works for the other 99%. “I agree that the system is broken,” Merkley said.
  • Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl Grijalva and Keith Ellison released a statement in support of the protests. It reads in part:
    We have been inspired by the growing grassroots movements on Wall Street and across the country. We share the anger and frustration of so many Americans who have seen the enormous toll that an unchecked Wall Street has taken on the overwhelming majority of Americans while benefitting the super wealthy. We join the calls for corporate accountability and expanded middle-class opportunity.
  • Tuesday, AFSCME, the Communications Workers of America, and the Amalgamated Transit Union expressed their support for Occupy Wall Street. In addition to a statement from the national CWA, CWA District 1, which represents New York and New Jersey, sent out a statement of their own. District 1 had already featured Wednesday's march on its website.
  • The Amalgamated Transit Union, like 1199 SEIU, pledged material support like food and supplies in addition to offering solidarity and rally participants.
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Return of the Robber Barons

Essay by Mark E Andersen

JP Morgan
J.P. Morgan

Recently I began to re-read Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States and in the chapter “Robber Barons and Rebels” I was struck by the similarity of what was happening from the 1870s through the early part of the 20th century and today.
All quoted sections, unless otherwise noted, are from A People's History of the United States.
[T]he strikes of the white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex national origin, social class, in such a way to create separate levels of oppression—a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.
Sound familiar? It should. It is the same divide and conquer strategy the Republican party of today is using. Making teachers and other public servants pariahs, splitting the have-a-littles from the have-nots. Making soldiers into heroes, until they speak out against the system they served and fought for … then they are attacked and called cowards for speaking out against the very oppression they were fighting. Organized labor was the enemy of the robber barons then and is again today—even though the most productive time in our nation's history was from the post-WWII years to roughly the mid-seventies when the unions were at the height of their power.
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of “rags to riches” were true for a few men, but mostly a myth and a useful myth for control.
Recently a right-wing friend told me that the reason he supports tax cuts for the rich is because he will someday be rich. I do not know how he will ever become rich—he is underwater on his mortgage and up to his eyeballs in credit card debt. But he will vote against his own best interests because of the myth that everyone, if they work hard enough, can become a millionaire in the United States. Mr. Zinn has it right: The myth of rags to riches is one to control the masses. It worked in the gilded age and it works today.
In 1895 the gold reserve of the United States was depleted, while twenty-six New York City banks had $129 million in gold in their vaults. A syndicate of bankers headed by J.P. Morgan & Company, August Belmont and Company, the National City Bank and others offered to give the government gold in exchange for bonds. President Grover Cleveland agreed. The bankers immediately resold the bonds at higher prices, making $18 million profit.
Nice to know the banks were just as corrupt then as they are now. The more things change, the more they stay the same. JP Morgan is now JP Morgan Chase and the National City Bank is now PNC—and they are both still ripping off the U.S. government.
And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.”
High prices, low wages and government subsidies … sound familiar? If not it should. Look at the profits the oil industry is pulling in, and how much money they get from the U.S. government. How much money has the government given the banking industry alone over the last few years? The more things change the more they stay the same.
Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state: pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. [Emphasis added]
I think the above quote speaks for itself and needs no further iteration from me.
[T]he Supreme Court, despite its look of somber, black robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate? How could it be neutral between the rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always from the upper class.
Citizens United, anyone? Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush pushed the Supreme Court not to the right but to the corporations. Sure, they will throw a bone or two out the right-wing faithful now and again on social issues, but for the most part the Supreme Court and the leaders of the Republican Party of today really don’t give a rat’s ass about abortion or gay marriage (they do use social issues to drive people to the polls, but that is about the extent of it). They only care about corporate profits and how to protect them. That is how we got Citizens United and money equaling speech. It was not about speech, it was about giving corporations more power.
We are the 99 percent and we have been for close 150 years. Other than a few brief years during the postwar period we have not gained any ground on the 1 percent. Of late we have lost ground. We have learned nothing from our history: If the robber barons of old were given an inch, they took a mile. The modern day robber barons were not only given an inch—they were given the keys to the castle with deregulation. They made and are making millions at the expense of millions.


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