Like the Civil Rights struggle of the past, the people will win with persistence, determination, and steadfastness. The only question that remains is how long will the politicians prolong the suffering before the inevitable?

Excerpts from the NYT

While most other Democrats are afraid to talk about the need for higher taxes and are running away from the problem, Elizabeth Warren, the leading Democratic candidate for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, has engaged the fight and is beginning to rally supporters.

-snip-

Ms. Warren talks about the nation’s growing income inequality in a way that channels the force of the Occupy Wall Street movement but makes it palatable and understandable to a far wider swath of voters.

-snip-

It is an informed and measured populism...

-snip-

She is both knowledgeable and accessible when she explains the destructive credit-swap and subprime mortgage games that created the financial crisis....

Her larger appeal, though, comes from her ability to shred Republican arguments that rebalancing the tax burden constitutes class warfare. ....

-snip-

Democrats should not be cowed by conservative taunts that the speech advocated “collectivism,” and use this argument to push back against the Republicans’ refusal to raise the taxes of people who make more than a million dollars a year



Donate because they are going to keep going at her hard

This is what democracy looks like
Occupy Raleigh (NC), pictures by yours truly 10/15/2011







From the Capitol Grounds, down Fayetteville St. and back















Have a happy and safe occupation everyone.

coalition out protesting and involved with the Occupy Wall Street movement such as Unions and laid off teachers and public sector employees as well as recently graduated educated young people. Yet my Democratic Party Senator is out touting a new corporate tax holiday to "create jobs" that has a dismal record in doing so in past experience and contributes to future debt (which will be blamed on "big government spending"). The Washington bubble seems impenetrable and the bubble around the party keeps them out of the loop of trends they could benefit from like welcoming back instead of abandoning its former coalition.

What does it take?

I've heard people watching various protests springing up asking "what's the message?". I've even heard pundits say "what are they going to do to change things? Are they going to vote?" I'm pretty sure the majority of these people vote. People with enough passion to get out and march or picket a building surely have enough about them to simply vote every two years. Piece of cake. I've also watched as politicians watch warily wondering what this means for them. I'm sure they are checking their political "professionals" about what to say if asked about the situation, how to waffle or how to get the protesters interested in their campaign without affecting with the campaign's message of pretending to represent everyone without offending some their campaigns are after outside the hopes and dreams of those protesting. But this time, the politicians are mostly on the outside looking in.

If you want change and be on the right side of history, you can't be a spectator waiting to see which way the wind blows. You're not going to get the change we need as a people sending emails or calling switchboards to reach your representatives. That's been tried so much but change in the people's favor hasn't taken hold. Did Gandhi write a letter to Buckingham Palace saying how unfair things were? While that doesn't hurt, it most often doesn't change things enough to erase injustice. One needs to walk the walk.

It's not really that difficult to participate if you are able. Over the course of this past year alone, I have been to worker and environmental protests in various locations including outside my home state. Maybe it is something you can do in the course of what you do for a living. Maybe it's something you can do when you visit someone. Maybe it's something you can do on your day off. But it is something you can do or at least convince someone to be your proxy when you can't. In the meantime, those fighting for you will continue to do so until you can join them. But don't let them do it all for you. It's your future. There's no time left for cynicism.

Government hands off my Medicare.

If so, what does a headline such as this put in their minds no matter how crazy confused these people are?

Headline: Obama plan would hit wealthy with tax increases. Plan to reduce deficit includes adjustments to Medicare, Medicaid.

Who are Obama's advisors? The Marx Brothers?

As North Carolina struggles with high unemployment and a depressed economy aided by the legislature's budget cuts, they have decided to put a Constitutional amendment on the ballot box opposing same sex marriage. This follows numerous bills to post the ten commandments in public schools and political opposition to anti-bullying laws because they protect young gay and lesbian people from abuse. I have to ask whether we are a democratic republic or a theocracy like they have in the Middle East? I am reminded of the words contained in the Treaty of Tripoli written by George Washington's administration and signed into law by President John Adams which contains the words, "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". I wonder which group of North Carolinians in the future will have their rights up for a vote on a ballot?

I will "never forget" in a different sense than designed, which is life before 9/11.

As headlines across the corporate media world of the U.S. reported on August 11th, the U.S. Postal Service is proposing to cut its workforce by 120,000 jobs and withdrawing from the federal health and retirement plans. Initial reports were that during the last four years, the service lost $20 billion, including $8.5 billion in fiscal year 2010. Therefore, the U.S. Postal Service drafted two documents in “Workforce Optimization” paper and a paper on health and retirement benefits obtained by the Washington Post requesting breaking its labor contracts and reigning in its health benefit and pension costs. It would seem almost reasonable until one drills deeper down into the facts. If you do that, then you can see this is a case where the corporate state is union busting again (and attacking the middle class) through a deceptive creation of crisis to seek further privatization (classic shock doctrine).


At the heart of the matter is a 2006 Congressional mandate put on the US Postal Service contained in the “Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006” to pre-fund healthcare benefits of future retirees, a 75 year liability over a 10 year period. No other agency or corporation is required to do this. This provision costs the Postal Service $5.5 billion a year. When you add in an adjustment that was made in how workers’ compensation costs were calculated based on interest rate assumptions and long term predictions concerning health care and compensation of $2.5 billion (a non cash accounting adjustment), you come up with $8 billion in cost. Actual loss was $500 million and when added, comes to the $8.5 billion reported for 2010. While $500 million is a lot, it doesn’t compare with $8.5 billion and is down from the previous year loss of $1 billion. If you took out the onerous pre-funding mandate, the Postal Service actually shows a $700 million profit over the last four years instead of the $20 billion loss. The Postal Union has been trying to get Congress to authorize the transfer of the Postal Service’s money estimated to be between $50 billion and $75 billion overpaid in the Civil Service Retirement System transferred into the PSRHBF.


The National Association of Letter Carriers is pushing passage of Rep. Stephen Lynch’s bill, H.R. 5746 which calls for this transfer strategy. The American Postal Workers Union is pushing H.R. 1351 also introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) which would address the crisis without cutting pay and benefits, without eliminating collective bargaining rights, or slashing service. The corporatists, on the other hand also have a bill, H.R. 2309, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Dennis Ross (R-FL) which would not address the USPS overpayments to its pension accounts, will not address the onerous pre-funding mandate, force postal workers to make up the difference, create a commission that would order post office closures and a board to cut wages, abolish benefits, and end layoff protections, and increase postal workers’ health care costs. We can only hope this attack on American workers fails. Is there anyone taking any bets in this dark and disgusting period of American history?

I was opposed to putting social security, medicare, and medicaid on the table for cuts, charter school expansion and private money benefactors, lower pay for our teachers, freezing government employee salaries, cutting subsistance programs, health and social services, etc. in an economy of high unemployment and deep recession in order to extend and fund the Bush tax cuts and privatization. I hear this is an extremist and leftist point of view when I foolishly thought these were traditional Democratic principles. I'll go to my room and write "firebagger" 100 times on the chalkboard.

As someone who has worked many election cycles at the precinct, district, and state levels, I have never had the option of voting them or not voting them as the policy shop of the Democratic Party. I don't remember voting on any of their ideas as platform issues. So why are they the appointed or assumed arbitrators of policy? How were they able to circumvent the process determined through the delegate process?

On November 12, the U.S. Postal Service released a report that stated it had lost a staggering $8.5 billion in Fiscal Year 2010, which ended September 30.

Media coverage of the report predictably focused on its negatives—the historically high figure is undeniably a headline-grabber—and news stories, shying away from the somewhat harder analysis the report demanded, laid the blame for the losses on the ever-rising use of e-mail, text messaging and paying bills online as a substitute for communicating via postal mail.

But take away two key complications that are completely beyond the Service’s control, and you’re left with the real story: that postal losses instead amounted to about $500 million—still a lot of money, but considerably lower than $8.5 billion, and down by more than 50 percent from last year’s $1.1 billion loss.

The first complication is one that should sound familiar to all letter carriers by now. A 2006 congressional mandate legally bound the USPS on September 30 to once again make a $5.5 billion payment toward pre-funding its Postal Service Retiree Health Benefit Fund. This 10-year mandate to front-load the PSRHBF is both highly unusual (no other corporation or agency is required to pre-fund benefits at such an onerous level) and unnecessary (before September 30, the fund was already contained enough cash to cover current and future retiree health benefits for decades to come).


http://www.postalreporternews.net/2010/11/...

In a democratic republic, voting is representation, in a dictatorship, pacification.

Otherwise, we will lose any remnants left of the American system with a proper balance of a public sector and a private sector that it was in the past. We no longer need a compromiser unless your goal to define or shape a rightwing nation that has no healthy balance between sectors. Both parties believe in small government and limited regulation and flatter taxes. That is why we are going in that direction no matter the makeup of the branches of government. I can tell you, when I was growing up, there was no debt "crisis", there was no problem funding public schools, or housing for the poor, or our infrastructure. I will not participate in the dismantling of my country. That means I will not vote for Republicans, Libertarians, New Democrats, or Blue Dogs. My line in the sand has been reached. And when this sick agreement kicks in with its "Super Committee" and the next hostage crisis hits and leaves more destruction in its wake, I hope more people will see it my way. What we have witnessed isn't compromise. If you don't believe in rightwing theories, it has been surrender. Compromise is meeting somewhere in some sort of middle. But since only one party does, this all must be by design because it makes no sense otherwise.

On June 23rd, 2011, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R) Va., and Senate Minority Leader Jon Kyl (R) AZ, walked out on the federal debt limit ceiling talks in the kabuki theatre that is Washington, D.C, these days. Why would a party that relies on deficit spending to further its ideology and declares that deficits don’t matter when they are in power do this? To extract more blood out of America’s dwindling middle class, the poor, public sector workers, the elderly, and the unemployed (which further contracts, not expands economic activity) to further an American “shock doctrine” for its billionaires and multinational corporate CEOs. They will vote to raise the debt ceiling after more bloodletting. After all, Mitch McConnell (R), (KY) offered a way out of the phony debt ceiling crisis. But then Obama (always trying to burnish his Reagan bonafides) wanted the “grand deal” of the “gang of six” that offered up Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security (of which social security has not added to deficits and by law, cannot). But the extreme House radicals led by Eric Cantor pushed through the unworkable “Cut, Cap, Balance” in the House. That led the country back to negotiating what plans to further wreck the public square for theft by rich and powerful interests will prevail. Now it appears the “bi-partisan” deal making is a system of strait jackets and triggers. The corporatists who pretend to represent freedom are ironically trying to create the ultimate state controlled economy, a corporate state controlled economy.



Since the average American is neither a billionaire nor CEO of a multinational corporation, why would so many average Americans vote for such destructiveness of America’s social contracts and the public interest by electing these representatives? They would have to believe such destructiveness of the public interest would benefit them somehow and the vehicle which provided that was the deregulation of the communications industry and broadcast media that has taken place since 1980 turning broadcast news from a public service into political “news” that broadcasts ideology 24/7.



Belief in things not real has aided implementation of the “shock doctrine” in the United States. It has prevented a more violent reaction as was the case in Pinochet’s Chile after Allende’s assassination or in Iraq after Bremer’s announcement that Iraq’s economy would be privatized by foreign multinational corporations instead of Iraqis which led to insurgency. Maybe this is because the attacks of 9/11/2001 were more of a galvanized fear those in power could exploit. It was relatively easy to get many Americans to support elimination of habeas corpus and due process which has been the hallmark of western democracies as well as their constitutional liberties under the Bill of Rights. It has allowed Americans to give up the checks and balances for imperial presidencies above the rule of law and replace freedom with a privatized security state. And in the case of Katrina, to view the failures of the privatization of FEMA as a failure instead of “big government” and cold enough hearts to view the forced displacement of New Orleans’s poor to other states as something good or positive.



The underlying premise of a “shock doctrine” is that a catastrophic shock such as a natural disaster or Pearl Harbor like a terrorist attack, military coup, or even a fabricated crisis such as the debt ceiling issue will disorient the public enough that they will allow themselves to be ushered into a new order that transforms or erases the current society into a new one. In this case, under Freidman’s model, it is a dismantling of government social constructs with its people, laws to protect citizens and their welfare, etc., for a privatized, unregulated, lower flatter tax for millionaires and corporations, free enterprise “utopian” society with no government safety nets and no rules. In other words, it is to be a society of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation instead of the people.



It’s hard to argue that the quote of “creating our own reality” largely attributed to Karl Rove has not come true. The George W. Bush administration eviscerated Constitutional checks and balances, broke domestic and international laws as well as the Constitution’s restraints, and erased habeas corpus and due process and the rule of law as we had come to know it. They essentially made Nixon’s erroneous declaration that “when the President does it that means it is not illegal” reality. So why didn’t Bush meet the same fate as Nixon? The answer is corporatism made inroads in what used to be the party of the New Deal since that time.

After Reagan’s victory, in 1985, a group of primarily southern Democrats in the Senate created what was called the Democratic Leadership Council to distance the Democratic Party away from the New Deal structures, unions, and the civil rights movements that had made it the most popular party and turned the United States into an economic powerhouse which lifted people out of poverty and despair with a higher standard of living. It immediately became the policy shop of the Democratic Party and today is alive in the New Democrats, Third Way movement and the Progressive Policy Institute (which isn’t progressive in any sense of the word). In other words, there hasn’t been a political party pushing the tenets of progressivism and the New Deal with its regulations and social spending for 26 years, legislative wise for 31 years. That was probably an essential shift in removing remaining barriers to creating a corporate state. Anything democratic in nature is in itself, a barrier to corporatism or rule by a few.



The quotes by Voltaire concerning people being made to believe absurdities are probably one of the biggest bylines of the 21st century. We have all heard them. From WMD’s in Iraq to President Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, the streets of America has taken on a certain mental illness appearance. After all, what is more backward than a thought process that views removal of habeas corpus, due process and the Bill of Rights, while instituting torture, and warrantless wiretaps as preserving freedom while viewing universal cheaper healthcare for all citizens as tyranny? The belief President Obama as a socialist is a another popular absurdity since he is a president whose major proposals have been recycled Republican ideas from his healthcare plan, to charter schools, to cap and trade, and who negotiated a deal with Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts. He also backed the “gang of six” proposal to offer up the only things remaining that are progressive, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to cuts. He may even go down in history as the biggest tax and budget cutter in a history, a sort of Reagan on steroids when you throw in defense spending. But to see how the corporate state is successful in advancing, we need to take a look at the absurdities an even wider audience than just the Tea Party also believes.



If the rich and powerful (those that control a corporate state) are going to control the public’s money to benefit the rich and powerful, they need lies that convince the larger public to vote against their interests. What better way than to repeat half truths and falsehoods enough to fool the people into thinking it is in their best interests as well?

Probably the most successful one has been on the subject of taxes. There is probably no one in America, believer or non believer, that doesn’t know it by heart after 30 years of repetition. It is, of course, the claim that lower income tax rates, particularly at the top, leads to economic growth, job creation, and eventually, more tax revenues into the treasury. So let’s look at the claim and Bush’s declarations in the above and test it against the evidence since the claim of supply siders and Freidman is that it is a law of sorts of economics. As noted in a report by Pat Garofalo of ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress, as we have passed a decade now of these tax cuts, growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post war expansion. Overall, monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since 1945, household income was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967 according to the Center for American Progress. So much for the added fantasy tax cuts lift all boats. The only boats that have been lifted have been the top 1 %. And the report also showed that in June 2001 when the first Bush Tax cut was enacted, the economy had 132 million jobs and three years later in 2004, it had 131.4 million jobs. Michael Collins writing at OpEdNews looked at jobs from 2000 until 2011 and noted that in 2000 there were 135 million jobs for a workforce of 144 million and today, 139 million jobs for a workforce of 154 million with 10 years of tax cuts in that span. That span represents negative job growth given population increase. This is because demand increases jobs, not the tax rate. This policy behaves just the way it is designed, to redistribute the public wealth to the top. Remember, Clinton increased the top rate a few percentage points and the job growth rate under his Presidency was 16.2 %. He left office with running surpluses which led the Congressional Budget Office to estimate if there were no new legislation or rule changes, budget surpluses would be sufficient by 2006 to pay off all of the federal debt available for redemption. About the only laws of economics these tax cuts follow are running deficits and added debt to the national debt and the bad thing is they are still with us.

Other lies are needed to soften up the public for the shift to a corporate state from a democratic republic and we have seen them on full display. As we have seen, tax cuts framed as income and as the primary economic driver to economies had to be established instead of the sometimes limited stimulus and a contributor to deficits and debt that it is, in order to defund the public sector for control, privatization, and take over. Normal government functions have to be seen as something else and only as a cost with no real benefit. The public sector had to be relabeled as “big government” and framed as always overreaching and a threat to freedom instead of public service and benefit. Spending money and taxation which is how all governments function no matter the ideology had to be reframed as always a economic drag and the single cause of deficits and debt except for the military industrial complex and security spending (which benefits the corporate state). Public sector workers had to be attacked as if they were not American but a public enemy, their modest incomes and pensions as some sort of “socialist” attack on “freedom” and public schools and universities as “far left social engineering” that have to be defunded and privatized for profit. So far, this defunding of the public square has cost us approximately 1 million jobs (which has further contracted the economy, reduced revenues, and decreased demand this economy so desperately needs). Defunding public institutions, public safety nets, firing public employees, etc. does not help the economy as a whole, does not preserve one private sector job, does not increase demand for any private sector product, and does not increase the salary of any private sector worker.

So how is it believed it will help? Why do people believe that income taxes have reached oppressive levels though according to Dennis Cauchon in an article in USA Today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis determined that in 2009, federal, state, and local income taxes combined consumed just 9.2% of all personal income, the lowest since 1950 and well below the historic level of 12% for the last half century? Why do people believe that business in the US is over regulated despite being one of the least regulated 1st world industrialized countries? Why do they still in spite of the collapse of the financial sector and housing market due to removal of the New Deal regulation, the Glass-Steagall Act (sorry tea partiers, it had nothing to do with ACORN, Jimmy Carter, poor minorities, or Mexicans, but with CDOs, credit default swaps, and an unregulated derivatives market)? Why do people believe “free trade” agreements instead of reciprocal trade will spur economic growth and export expansion in the United States when it has taken manufacturing in the US close to its death bed, shipped American jobs and technical expertise overseas, and taxable profits offshore? Why do people think union busting is good for the economy while it reduces wages overall and while there is no such thing as a low wage country which is prosperous? Why do people believe we can cut our way out of near depression conditions when it cannot be done? The answer is corporate propaganda and belief in things not real.



A very important key to success of the “shock doctrine” and its ability to erase the society it is replacing is to rewrite existing laws to favor Freidman’s vision of corporate utopia. Therefore, the rights of the people have to be subjugated to rights of the corporate entity. This process has reached unprecedented success in the last ten years. The Roberts court which is packed with right-wing extremists from the Federalist Society, a group of radicals who believe in an alternative Constitution and legal precedence history, delivered a powerful blow to the concept of a democratic republic in the Citizens United decision which has given the whole political process over to corporate money and influence based on a quack opinion that money is free speech. This is being followed up currently by newly minted “tea party” legislatures that are currently allowing state laws to be rewritten by corporations to subjugate rights of the people to corporate rights, a kind of counter revolution to the belief and tenants of the founding fathers and their restrictions on corporate charters. The corporate state is finalizing its shift as the supreme authority.



The debt ceiling raising, something that is normally done when this artificial economic restraint gets in the way of the nation’s ability to operate freely in matters of situation and economics, has provided the corporatists an opportunity to seize upon another shock of contrivance to further their ideological control. The debt ceiling has been raised unceremoniously many times including seven times during the previous administration and 18 times during the administration of the supply side Jesus of the corporatist movement, Ronald Reagan. Perhaps it is long overdue for people who do not want to be ruled by forced ideology to take this opportunity as well to think of alternatives of corporate rule before the door closes a final time.