Wall Street Still Busy Raping Main Street - No Bailout For The Victims

  















(Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com)
 
The 2008 Wall Street Banking Meltdown is far from over.
The banks got bailed out by their victims and the victims received no help at all and are still out on the curb while Wall Street continues to impede economic recovery and job recovery for Asian speculation.
Some local govts. found a way to keep people in their homes at the real market value but the banks want them to back off because the raping of homeowners is not nearly complete.
Bought and paid for politicians are anxious to help.

 From The Nation 

To Rescue Local Economies, Cities Seize Underwater Mortgages Through Eminent Domain

In Richmond, California, home prices plummeted 58 percent since their peak. Now the city is trying out a new way to help homeowners refinance—and halt the slide into foreclosure.

Peter Dreier

July 12, 2013  

In 2005, Rodney Conway and his wife, Vicki, paid $340,000 for their 950-square-foot two-bedroom home in Richmond, California, a blue-collar city in the Bay Area. Today the home is worth about $140,000. But the couple still owes $320,000 and makes monthly mortgage payments to the Bank of America. “We’re basically renting this house for $2,000 a month,” said the 52-year-old Conway, who was disabled while serving on a Navy ship in Lebanon in 1983.
With her office job and his disability income, the Conways can barely make ends meet. “We don’t take trips or go to restaurants. We just went to a movie for the first time in a year,” said Conway, who spent twenty-six years as a letter carrier before being laid off in 2009. “I’d like to be able to give my wife a nice birthday present, but I can’t afford it.”
In almost every part of the country, entire neighborhoods—and in some cases, whole cities—are underwater. They are not victims of natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Like the Conways, they are drowning in debt, victims of Wall Street’s reckless and predatory lending practices.
Since 2006, when the speculative housing bubble burst, home prices have plummeted; homeowners have lost more than $6 trillion in household wealth. Many now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Despite rising home prices in some parts of the country, more than 11 million American families—one-fifth of all homeowners with mortgages—are still underwater, through no fault of their own. If nothing is done, many will eventually join the more than 5 million American homeowners who have already lost their homes to foreclosure.
The nation’s worst underwater “hot spots”—disproportionately black and Latino areas—are places that banks targeted for predatory lending, often pushing borrowers into high-interest, risky loans, even when they were eligible for conventional mortgages. Many have lost their jobs or seen their incomes fall as a result of the recession and are having difficulty paying the bills.
Dallas, Las Vegas, Miami, Houston, San Bernardino, Tampa, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Atlanta, Orlando, Stockton, Reno, Modesto and Detroit are among the most troubled “hot spots,” but there are many other communities with huge inventories of underwater mortgages and where home prices are not participating in the recovery.
The problem is contagious. Communities with many underwater homes bring down the value of other houses in the area. Foreclosures alone have drained at $2 trillion in property values from surrounding neighborhoods, according to a Center for Responsible Lending study. The resulting decline in property tax revenues has plunged some cities into near-bankruptcy, lay-offs and cuts to vital public services.
Many economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Mark Zandi, agree that the best solution is “principal reduction,” where banks lower the borrower’s mortgage principal. This is not an act of charity but a way to reverse the economy’s freefall. If underwater mortgages were reset to fair-market values of homes, it would help homeowners and communities alike, and pump about $102 billion into the economy annually, according to a Home Defenders League report.
But homeowners who have asked banks to modify their mortgages typically get a cold shoulder or a bureaucratic runaround. So far, the Obama administration and Congress have been unwilling to require intransigent banks to reset loans.
Faced with this quagmire, a growing number of cities—with the support of community groups and unions—are taking things into their own hands. Thanks to a legal strategy initially formulated by Cornell University law professor Robert Hockett, city officials have discovered that they can use their eminent domain power—which they routinely use to purchase property for sidewalks, infrastructure, school construction and other projects—to buy underwater mortgages at their current market value and resell them to homeowners at reduced price and mortgage payments.
Richmond is the first city to pursue this strategy. Its city council—with the support of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which for years has organized homeowners against predatory banks—recently voted 6-0 (with one member absent) to make offers to buy underwater mortgages. If lenders refuse, the city will take them by eminent domain and work with a group of friendly investors (Mortgage Resolution Partners, or MRP) to refinance the loans with the Federal Housing Administration.
In this city of 103,000, dominated by a big Chevon oil refinery, home prices have plummeted by 58 percent since the 2007 peak. Homeowners lost over $264 million in wealth last year alone. Thousands of Richmond homeowners have lost their homes to foreclosure, and many others, like the Conways, are just hanging on. About 12,000 families—half of all homeowners with mortgages in the city—are underwater. The city government, which has lost millions of dollars in property tax revenues, has cut funds for road repairs and significantly reduced the number of municipal employees, including librarians. Meanwhile, it has had to spend scarce funds to deal with abandoned buildings, crime and drugs, and other problems caused by the foreclosure epidemic.
If banks reset Richmond’s underwater mortgages to fair market value, homeowners would save an average of over $1,000 per month on their payments. If those savings were spent on local goods and services, it would generate about $170 million in economic stimulus and create at least 2,500 jobs.
This situation is particularly bizarre for homeowners whose mortgages were sold by banks to pools of private investors—an industry gambit called “private label security” (PLS) mortgages. The trustees for these mortgages—owed by dozens or hundreds of distant investors as part of a pool—claim they lack the authority to modify them.
Richmond is initially targeting these PLS loans so they can get the homeowners into sustainable mortgages with reduced principal. MRP, Richmond’s funding partner, has agreed to a set of community-drafted principles to make sure that investors don’t exploit desperate cities and homeowners. It has pledged, for example, that the program won’t cost taxpayers a dime. MRP will earn a flat fee per mortgage. Homeowners can voluntarily opt out of the program.
Wall Street is up in arms. Since several cities began discussing this strategy last year, industry lobbyists have been fighting back. In a coordinated effort involving letters, phone calls and meetings, some of the nation’s most powerful lobby groups—including the National Association of Realtors, the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders, American Securitization Forum, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)—have tried to dissuade local officials from pursuing the eminent domain strategy.
In April, for example, SIFMA officials Kim Chamberlain and Tim Cameron traveled from New York to Richmond to persuade Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and her Council colleagues to back off.
“We’re not going to be intimidated by these Wall Street folks,” said McLaughlin, a former teacher who has been mayor since 2006. “It is pretty outrageous to hear them opposing this. They’re the ones who caused this crisis in the first place. And they don’t have a solution. The city has every right to do this.”
The Wall Street lobbyists have threatened to mire local governments in expensive lawsuits if they use eminent domain to take troubled mortgages. But MRP has agreed to cover the costs of any potential litigation, so most city officials recognize that this is mostly an empty threat.
The lobbyists have also warned local officials that if they go through with these plans, banks will increase the cost of future borrowing or even shut down credit entirely. They couch these warnings as if they were mere predictions. But they’re threats—part of a coordinated, industry-wide credit boycott. This is another form of “redlining” (lending discrimination), which violates the nation’s fair lending and antitrust laws.
A recent editorial published by The Wall Street Journal echoed the industry line that the eminent domain strategy is both illegal and ill-advised.
To pre-empt local governments, three Republican congressmen from California last month sent a letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan on behalf of the industry, asking HUD to deny FHA financing from mortgages taken by eminent domain. Last year the financial, real estate and insurance industry topped the list of contributors to all three politicians—Gary Miller ($366,000), John Campbell ($484,000), and Ed Royce ($1 million)—according to OpenSecrets.org.
“We are concerned that the proposed use of eminent domain would slow the return of private capital to the housing finance system, and threaten our fragile housing recovery,” they wrote Donovan.
Sound familiar? Throughout the last century, business lobby groups have consistently warned that government action to protect consumers, communities and workers—mandatory seat belts, the minimum wage, consumer protection laws, workplace safety rules and others—are “job killers” and business destroyers. Their dire warnings were bogus, but they repeat them so often that they often sound convincing.
Like their predecessors, the bank, securities and real estate lobby groups are crying wolf. They can file nuisance lawsuits, hire lobbyists and get the occasional hired-gun economist from a conservative think tank to peddle their propaganda, but cities have a legal right to use eminent domain to restore community wealth stripped by reckless banks.
Even so, Wall Street’s intimidation ploy has worked in a few places. Earlier this year, elected officials in San Bernardino—where half of all homeowners are underwater—backed down after industry lobbyists swooped down on that troubled community an hour from Los Angeles. But in Richmond, Seattle, Newark and other cities—where community groups and unions have mobilized angry homeowners and their neighbors—local officials are determined to move forward, aware that they have the law and economics on their side.
“Wall Street is scared and using all its political muscle to stop us, “ said Amy Schur, campaign director for ACCE, which is working on this strategy with homeowners and local officials in several cities, “but we know that David beat Goliath.”
”We hope our city provides a model for other cities,” said Richmond Mayor McLaughlin, “and that this becomes a national movement.”

About the Author

Peter Dreier

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy...

The Rich - More Unethical or Just Less Ethical?

Thanks to the Daily Kos for this article.

New Study: The Rich are more Unethical

by Bud Meyers

Wed Jul 03, 2013

It's been said that money is the root of all evil. But does money really make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? New research released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says "yes".

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods, reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were also more likely to:

• exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3),
• take valued goods from others (study 4),
• lie in a negotiation (study 5),
• cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6),
• and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.

Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms --- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge --- has marked the upward surge of mankind." ~ Gordon Gekko, 1987
Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on other new research from the University of California, Berkeley collaborating this, and the impact of wealth on people’s behavior in a new 10-minute video from PBS (posted at YouTube)

This might help explain why some people like Wal-Mart's Christy Walton can rake in $1.2 million a day in unearned income with stock dividends, while at the same time, refusing to pay her employees a living wage in earned hourly income --- costing the taxpayers $6,000 per employee in government entitlements (aka "wage subsidies"). It seems that some of these people just can't help themselves...they're mentally ill!
* Download supporting information at www.pnas.org (PDF) --- "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy." (* This was also posted at the www.economicpopulist.org)
Forbes: Why (Some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs "The incidence of psychopathy among CEOs is about 4 percent, four times what it is in the population at large. They lack the things that make you human: empathy, remorse, loving kindness."
BusinessInsider: 20 Signs You are a Psychopath - After CEOs, lawyers are the second most psychopathic profession in the world.
TIME: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths - "Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be over-represented in the business environment."
Forbes: The Top 10 Jobs That Attract Psychopaths - 1. CEO, 2. Lawyer, 3. Media (Television/Radio), 4. Salesperson, 5. Surgeon, 6. Journalist, 7. Police officer, 8. Clergy person 9. Chef and 10. Civil servant
Bud Meyers: STUDY: 10% on Wall Street are Psychopaths - "Studies conducted by forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent."

Psychologist Paul Piff and related research. The strategy of psychopathy: primary psychopathic traits predict defection on low-value relationships Proc R Soc B 2013 280 (1757)20122773 Abstract Full Text (HTML) Full Text (PDF)

• Reply to Francis: Cumulative power calculations are faulty when based on observed power and a small sample of studies Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2012 109 (25) E1588
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  • Full Text (PDF)
• Evidence that publication bias contaminated studies relating social class and unethical behavior Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2012 109(25)E1587
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Democrat or Green Party! Should America Dump The Democrats?

Thanks to Sasha Brookner for posting such an interesting letter.

The "Greens" are often put forward as ultra-left, crackpot lefties, but when you listen to Jill Stein and other Greens or read the Green Party Website about their party platform about social and political reform, what you find instead are intelligent, practical, reasonable and sustainable solutions to most of our social and political issues.  Things you never hear about from Republicans and Democrats.

The Green Party is not about super-goofy, tree hugging, nut jobs - but instead makes a strong, reasonable and practical statement about the role of government and the protection and nurture of society.

I don't belong to a political party, but I do really appreciate the perspective and ideas of the Green Party.


From Blue to Green: Why I Left the Democratic Party

The Huffington Post
March 21, 2013
by Sasha Brookner
“Of two evils, choose neither.” ~ Charles Spurgeon
In the 16th century, the Eastern Orthodox Christians had a unique aphorism: “Better the turban than the mitre.” They were referring to the preferable conquer of the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks rather than the Western Roman Catholic empire. Today, that lesser of two evil principles isn’t about maintaining freedom of religion; rather it’s used by Democrats to justify genocide, drones, Guantanamo, rendition, kill lists and cutting heat subsidizes for the poor under the past its sell-by date defense that Republicans would double these demons. It is evident that this perpetual comparative doctrine has reached steroid proportions. Although President Barack Obama may wear the “turban” when it comes to certain domestic policies, such as gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research, when it comes to foreign policy, corporate interests, and saying farewell to Magna Carta, both the Elephants and the Donkeys are wearing the Bishop’s hat.
In 2008, I complacently cast a vote for the so-called Marxist, Muslim, crypto-Mau Mau leader. At the time, I thought his rhetoric on hunting down Osama bin Laden and his cadre of non-threatening, Pashtun goat-herding boogie men was simply posturing for xenophobic independents. I mean this was a devoted peaceful father who didn’t spank his children and volunteered at soup kitchens. We’re talking about a man who turned down a lucrative corporate gig for grassroots basement community activism. Goodwin Liu was on his short list for the 9th circuit; hell, he sat in front of feminists and spoke about rescinding the Hyde Amendment. If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could have ever made their utopian government functional, this was the guy who could swing it. Don’t laugh at me. Over the next four years the nausea and culpability I felt for casting that less than prescient ballot and not supporting Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney would take it’s toll on my conscience and nervous system.
“He’s playing chess!” Obamacrats screamed emphatically when it was abundantly clear the Ivy Leaguer was failing horribly at checkers. While Republicans transformed into strategic tacticians taking chapters from Sun Tzu’s Art of War and marching their elephants over the Alps, Democrats were busying themselves reading Iyanla Vanzant. Obama’s bi-partisan agenda skyrocketed to epidemic proportions – apparently a pre-existing condition for which he was previously denied treatment – leaving him perpetually naked every time he walked away from the political poker table. Frustrated amidst even his moderate ideas being obstructed by the GOP, he would come out of his economic meetings and relieve his stress going H.A.M on Kabul. He even felt the need to make the stomach-turning Jonas Brothers drone joke in protection of his precious daughters – who, unlike little girls in MENA, will never come close to seeing glimpses of war. In his autobiography, Obama said, “War might be hell and still the right thing to do.” I’m sure this bit of philosophical reflection holds true only as long as it’s not his family experiencing that “war” or “hell.” Our president only has a predilection for playing commando leader with other parents’ children. And when resistance fighters return fire Michelle offers their families big bear hug condolences and rhapsodizes over how valiantly they died for our freedoms. Watching the Obamas donate money to veterans’ organizations is like watching pimps offer charity to domestic violence shelters.
Obama’s political tenure reads like acute moral fragmentation. He has ordered some of the most catastrophic cuts to our civil liberties while throwing in a couple Lily Ledbetter Acts to keep liberals placated. Congressional obstructionism was not the culprit when our president renewed the egregiously Orwellien Patriot Act via non “sunlight before signing” autopen. It was not to blame when he refused to shut down Cheney’s beloved interrogation facility in Cuba even though half the tormented water drown prisoners have been cleared. A few Wall Street bankers received “consent orders,” but no prison buddies named Bubba. Meanwhile, our heroic Bradley Manning rots away half naked in a cell, two more Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas were recently shut down and Obama’s lust for war has extended from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Mali and Yemen. We haven’t even entered into his beloved drone curriculum which makes Bush’s water boarding look compassionate. The current administration’s three billion dollar a week jingoistic kill brown people program could have easily been invested into eradicating homelessness, canceling student debts, rebuilding 98,000 elementary and 25,000 high schools, and providing superlative pro bono job training – all of which pose a much greater threat to our country than desert nomads across ocean divides who draw their diabolical plan of attack against America with sticks in the dirt. Boehner and crew’s impediments were not the issue when our chain smoker president broke his campaign promise to respect state’s rights and started hunting down medical marijuana dealers. Watching a man who consumes a product that leads to the death of 6 million users annually go after the hemp guys was like watching a drunk driver moralize to cranberry juice drinkers. Instead of learning from the preeminent philosophers throughout antiquity who preached mastery of self before mastery others, Obama has used his tenure in office having romantic affairs with the Disposition Matrix, Illegal Wars, and NDAA’s Section 1021(b)(2) which allows for indefinite detention and cold-blooded murder of U.S. citizens at his Tuesday discretion, all of which would have gotten the younger Barack laughed out of his Harvard law classes. But hey, aren’t his daughters adorable? And that Michelle she sure can Hula Hoop. I wonder how her vegetable garden is doing? And Bo! Democrats love them some Bo.
Although George W. Bush was possibly the most repugnant president in United States history next to Woodrow, Harry and Richard, the only U.S. Constitutional passage he was familiar with was the Second Amendment. Obama on the other hand is a constitutional legal eagle, meaning he’s actually heard of George Mason and the Fifth Amendment. This makes his lack of deference to the only legal text that could perhaps arguably make us “exceptional” even more egregious. Regrettably, Obama’s entire candidacy has been viewed through a lens of proportionality, the 112th and 113th Congress have been incomparable secret weapons. Contrasted against a group of anachronistic, pseudo-Christian crusaders with an ongoing agenda to criminalize 12-year-old incest victims who abort embryos, Obama would have to be Pol Pot to fall below the bar set up for him. The “liberal” party has taken to genuflecting in front of a man who can only look decent next to psychopaths.

8 reasons why I now go Green, not the machine

1) Because Naderization Doesn’t Scare Me
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” ~ Mohandas Gandhi
If I hear another President Roseanne Barr Macadamia Nut joke, I’m going to tell the Taliban people are burning Qurans and start giving out home addresses. Our world can no longer afford to make Green Party jokes; they’re just not funny amidst our current political climate. It is offensive to think I would succumb to Spoiler Controversy extortion by the so-called progressive party whose current claim to fame is attempting to raise the minimum wage by a radical buck and a half. Now there’s a joke for anyone who’s looked at a calendar lately or skimmed through Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Considering our president can’t even pass a paltry $9/hour through Congress, he might have well have opted to start with what economists compute is the 2013 accurate livable wage sum – $21.72. Clearly over the past five years, if we’ve learned nothing at all, it’s that our presidential elect was never gifted in the art of negotiations, continuing to start every bill to exit poverty with the lowest possible numeral, eventually exiting stage left with the number below that.
Democrats have taken to blackmailing wanderers considering Green with an indictment of Ralph Nader who they contend handed over the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, but who actually took 1% of votes equally from both Republicans and Democrats. They might as well blame the Socialist Party, the Electoral College, the quarter million Democrats in Florida who voted for Bush, eco-friendly tree huggers who wouldn’t have touched Gore with a 10 ft. long stick. Or, they could blame the real culprits – Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy, O’Connor, and Rehnquist.
In 1996, Ralph Nader spent less than $5,000 in his bid for presidency; yet he won over almost 1% of the American population. In 2000, he campaigned for roughly $300,000 and received 2.8 million votes. Imagine what numbers Jill Stein could pull if she garnered 5% support and qualified for millions of dollars in federal funding. Before clearing our memory cache, remember the original Republicans emerged as a third party back in the 1850′s with only a single issue, abolition. Unlike the early Republicans and Free Soil Party, Greens have an injustice conquer list that makes the Fair Sentencing Act look reactionary. In addition to the biotic crisis, their objectives include supporting grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community based economics, feminist and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal & global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability. How could any sentient being support men obsessed with war over the Green Ten Key Values?
I know, I know this presidential election (like all since 1991) is “too important” to support the Party of Peace. I mean, think about it. If Republicans had taken the Oval Office it would have been conservative pandemonium. The Patriot Act would still be in effect; the Corpus in Habeas wouldn’t have to be produced; Guantanamo would be bustling; drone architect John O. Brennan would be appointed chief counter-terrorism advisor; Wall Street bankers would escape prosecution; Erik Prince would further his million dollar no-bid private military contracts; Planned Parenthoods would be defunded; millions of Mexican immigrants would be deported; billions of our tax dollars and military supplies would be sent to Israel to continue Gaza occupation and we would have militarily invaded and bombed the hell out of six new countries….
Oh wait.
Obama’s charm, wit, wife and ostensible liberal demeanor somehow made Democrats start liking these things again – or perhaps they were anesthetized to them to begin with and Blackwater, Fallujah and Iraqi children were just used as scapegoats when the guy they disliked was in office. Throughout the Bush regime, Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary, was a regularly sought-after anti-war speaker at Democratic events; but phone calls abruptly halted when Obama took office. Democrats play the same partisan politics as Republicans, using the ritual sacrifice of brown babies to the U.S. military industrial complex as pretexts when the Grand Ol’ Party is at the wheel. One could witness this pathology on Real Time with Bill Maher when Democrat strategist James Carville practically screamed at conservative political commentator, S.E Cupp, after she brought up her concern over drone attacks. What could be more depressing than when cold-hearted Republicans want to discuss the death of hundreds of babies while defensive Democrats shake their heads exasperatedly to shield their party’s deity from critique? I can’t imagine if the Mormon guy had used his magic underwear to catapult himself into office and left his Inaugural Ball early to bomb Yemen that Democrats and MSNBC wouldn’t be having seizures. Instead news that several Yemeni citizens died in a blast after cocktail hour was far less important than the Jason Wu gown Michele sparkled in at the Ball.
When I hear the regurgitated echo from Democrats that exercising suffrage on behalf of the Green Party is nothing but a “statement vote,” I can’t help but roll my eyes at their myopic vision and obstinate support of this Ineptocracy.
Going Green is a long-term strategy vote.
The Abolitionist and Feminist Suffrage movements knew they weren’t going to win the 13th or 19th amendment the first year, or the year after that, or hell, even 50 years down the road. The time-line of civil rights progress is never swift. How botched have our Poly-Sci classes become when self-identified liberals who denounce war still vote for it in perpetuity like meat eaters who claim they detest the killing animals, choosing to ignore the vision and growth of the Green Party as temporarily unviable. One can even cast aside those lessons from Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli, and consider our foremothers. They didn’t bleed, sweat and cry for sixty years so we would be intimidated into exercising suffrage for a demagogue who works in the shadows of obscurity, killing off our sisters around the globe. I know for certainty Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t march in Selma and Montgomery so we would someday have a black president who would be bombing orphanages in Africa under the guise of safeguarding his beloved middle-class. Statistically speaking, I have a greater chance of being struck by lightening or gobbled up by a Carcharodon Carcharias than blown to smithereens by a man wanting to be Shaheed, according to this skewered logic we might as well pull a Jacques Cousteau and take to the oceans to kill off the great white shark population. We can even force minimum wage workers to fund the excursion, since it’s for their own benefit.
Even the recent drone sightings on American soil and the Congressional passing of the FAA Reauthorization Act projecting that 30,000 unmanned aerial vehicles will be flying our friendly skies by 2020 isn’t enough to get Democrats to tear off their tacky bumper stickers. The trite response “Well would you prefer Romney?” has become fixed in the Democrat echo chamber. No I wouldn’t prefer Romney, I would prefer liberals stop cowardly supporting mass murderers and men running our constitutional pages through Fellowes and Ativas and instead work towards assisting Jill Stein in garnering 4.6% more of the electoral vote so the Green Party can inch closer to overthrowing a corporate duopoly more concerned about catering to Goldman Sachs and Halliburton than the Bill of Rights.
Got it?
2) Because of Obama’s Cognitive Dissonance
“It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous men were thus bound together that in the agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How then were they dissociated?” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Barack Obama is a member of the Chamaeleonidae family, he has more incarnations than Hindu deities and trying to measure his shape-shifting would have driven Euclid to insanity. His two-faced rules of conduct are steeped in a distorted sense of violent patriotism and delusional valiance. Dr. Jekyll’s eyes water up over senseless U.S. violence, like the mistaken identity murder of Chicago teen Hadiya Pendleton, while Mr. Hyde pre-emptively strikes any breathing foreigner rumored to dislike America with Arabic Hadiya corpses written off daily as mistaken identity collateral damage. This is indeed a strange case.
While American MQ-9 Reapers and MQ-1 Predator drones make their 24/7 rounds, Obama justifies Zionist proclivities and Gaza genocide with a straight faced outcry of “No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” This is a fascinating statement because Obama’s prized UCAV’s have become perfectly acceptable descending upon third worlds, causing severe emotional and psychological distress to families at best, and dismemberment at worst, while Israel is the only region in the Middle East given Western permission to defend themselves.
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once summed up “bad faith” as the belief that one individual could operate in two completely different patterns of behavior and find a way to reconcile the duplicity. That paradigm was clearly visible during Obama’s tearful vigil in the death of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in contrast to his callous indifference after he ordered the slaying of 21 children in the Bedouin village of al-Majalah on December 17, 2009. The Yemeni children didn’t even receive an admission of guilt let alone crocodile contrition, proving Obama’s moral compass doesn’t function well when pointed East. Our first black president has taken a chapter from the Antebellum, making it clear that brown foreigners are three-fifths of a person in contrast to American’s full human agency – not even worth body counts.
Obama has become the self-righteous fingerwagger of no return. He loves to moralize to Russia about their imprisonment of feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot, but refuses to discuss his own prison industrial complex which houses more men per capita than 196 countries. Obama was all keen on sermonizing Burma over the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, who is no more remarkable than American political prisoner exile Assata Shakur. On Syria, Obama said: “The Syrian government must stop shooting demonstrators and allow peaceful protests.” On his 99% constituents tasered and pepper sprayed by militia looking cops during Occupy Wall Street?
Crickets.
Our government’s lectures to the rest of the world’s system of jurisprudence for dissenters seem a little awkward amidst the recent arrest of Organic Consumers Association‘s Alexis Badden Mayer peacefully protesting outside of the White House and the ongoing prosecution of our truth-telling freedom fighters under obscure Acts implemented during Word War 1. Obama seems to have a great deal of outrospection about the failures of foreign governments but utterly lacks interest in curbing our own human rights abuse record.
Obama took it to a new low when he used Malala Yousafzai as a scapegoat for the Afghan war, calling her shooting “reprehensible, disgusting and tragic.” Huh? Out of all the Malalas you have been responsible for recklessly depriving life, you want to shine a spotlight on this girl and fund her medical treatment? Our Apaches didn’t land at Al-Majalah or Garani to fly any of those Malalas to top tier UK hospitals on private jets. Spare me the idea America is actually blowing up half of the Middle East on behalf of little girls trying to acquire an education. Remind me how many schools we’ve built over there again? Zero. How many have we accidentally bombed? Good question. Using the Malala logic we’d be in the Democrat Republic of the Congo right now, not best friends with the crypto-leader of the M23′s. And, please, don’t get me started on Susan Rice.
The Obama administration has shown they have a very selective commitment to human rights – not to mention an expensive habit of dropping million dollar bombs on ten dollar tents.
3) Because Insurance Run Healthcare Sucks
“We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies – they’ll get a seat at the table, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN.” ~ Barack Obama
If you don’t recall a single meeting about implementing universal healthcare broadcast to the American public, it’s not because you were on the cable television network’s wrong digit. It’s evident this lack of on-camera discourse was because Obama cut a corporate friendly backroom deal before Michelle had even finished decorating the East Wing. Oh and not even a mere mention of the 2008 Hyde Amendment pledge. Obama’s appropriation of Republican Bob Dole’s aged well-being plan would ultimately be a blow job to United Health, Johnson & Johnson, Kaiser and Blue Shield providing them with 30 million additional clients of which they can appropriate 70% of patient profits. Anyone with medical coverage who has ever requested and been denied an MRI is cognizant that insurance run hospitals produce sub-par care. When we make human suffering a commodity, for-profit providers continually block expensive but necessary scans and refuse to let doctor’s inform their patients about cutting-edge modern technological advancements like VNS Therapy as to not upset their brethren anti-depressant pill market. Contrary to popular belief, Obama’s Affordable Care Act won’t lay the groundwork for Universal Healthcare; conversely it will hand over more tax dollars to these billion dollar juggernauts to use as additional funding to lobby against Vermont’s favorable Single Payer system. While Democrats had control of the House and Senate in 2009, Obama could have at least made a good faith attempt to put his campaign promise up to the floor for a vote.
Subsequently, it would be nice if Obama fans could stop perpetually using insurance run healthcare to balance every atrocity committed under this administration. Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Muammar Ghaddafi provided their people with actual universal healthcare, and nobody brought it up when they were using poison gas, instituting forced labor camps or firing rockets into little girls’ bedrooms.
4) Because Democrats Are Not Saving Our Birth Canals
“For millions of women, federal programs are their only means of getting healthcare. Abortion is the only medically necessary health service excluded from Medicaid coverage. Failure to provide a service that only women need is discrimination.” ~ Barack Obama (2008)
Fast forward to Wednesday, January 21, 2009 when Women’s Reproductive Rights became a distant 100th on the Planned Parenthood minister’s “To-Do” list. He only once mentioned the organization’s name on the national stage while campaigning against Romney in 2012 – and even then it was safely in the context of cheering for mammograms and cervical cancer screenings, not abortion. Receiving pamphlets on gestational phases is not the polemic issue for religious nuts and skirting around bio-ethical conversations pertaining to our fallopian tubes has become disrespectful. The moment Democrats begin to justify Planned Parenthood clinics because they uniformly don’t offer abortion services, they appropriate Republican values, deprecating their most important and necessary function. We don’t need conversations in support of mammograms, we need full fledged, third rail electrocution conversations about the elephant in the room: terminating an embryo/fetus to reduce the number of unwanted children in this country flooding the foster care system and being raised by mothers still reading Judy Blume.
Democrats still attempt to blackmail women with the notion that if we don’t go for the lesser of two evils that feminist’s adored family planning clinics will cease to exist. Newsflash: This past month, two Planned Parenthood clinics were shut down in Texas, completely disregarding Norma McCorvey’s historical legal precedent. In Arkansas, a 12-week abortion ban is advancing in the House. In New Mexico, they’re creatively working to criminalize rape victims who abort embryos as “tampering with evidence” while mandatory delightful vaginal ultrasounds are being forced upon women in attempts to guilt them into having unwanted children. This past month, four clinics were forced to shut down in Wisconsin after losing $1.1 million in state funding. Thank god poor women have Obama in office! Even amidst Congress auditing the hell out of everything Planned Parenthood, from their suction tubes to fax cartridges, and the 50+ bills that have been brought to the floor to defund and/or criminalize the termination of pregnancies, Obama has remained mum on the subject. He hoped he could avoid the conversation by throwing $15 Ortho Tri-Cyclen scraps to middle-class women who have health insurance. It worked. And not to fret ladies of the ignored lower socio-economic class, you can continue to obtain free birth control at (yup you guessed it) Planned Parenthood.
5) Because Democrats Also Love Playing G.I. Joe
The grandiloquence War on Terror is merely a euphemism for ruthless ethnic cleansing indulged upon by a group of resource grabbing oil loving drunk with power geopoliticans who could use a good ethics of war reading from Cicero’s De Officiis and the Mahabharata.
Under Article 2 of the Geneva Code, Obama’s wars overseas does indeed constitute Genocide, defined as the “deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.” Genocide includes imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group and we can cue Robert Gibbs who justified Obama’s murder of 16 year old Abdulrahamn Anwar al-Aulaqi by his lineage empathetically issuing the quote, “He should have had a far more responsible father.” Genocide is also defined as forcibly transferring children of one group to another which is seen by the estimated 2.3 million Afghan Refugee Camp regulars.
Meanwhile Obama continues to delude the American public of his success, bragging about the 22 men with white turbans tilted over their left ears he’s wiped off the map. The only omission is, as Stanford, New York University and Policy Mic have reported, there is one Taliban death to every 50 civilians killed. When you kill a man’s child you go to war with their father it has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda; subsequently, we’ve engendered thousands more Arabs who now hate America and that 22 number starts looking a little less remarkable. In a region where the U.S. should be trying to win over supporters from jihadist influence, drones prove alienating and the pedantic Quran reader’s most effective recruiting tool. The mercurial rise of the once marginalized Muslim Brotherhood can also attribute their Arab Spring ascension to power as an alternative to Western imperialism. Hassan al-Banna’s descendants are definitely not beneficial to the Malalas. Our politician’s adrenaline pumping game of Cowboys and Indians has also precipitated military suicide rates that surpass combat deaths in 2012, hitting a 349 record number.
It is difficult for men and women who haven’t lived on the outer reaches of empire not to let war become an abstraction. The West may talk about drone warfare being “bad” or “questionable” over Frappuccinos but it rarely conjures up any genuine emotive response, less my beloved Code Pink cheerleaders. It has become abundantly clear over the past decade that a Fatima Akbar will never achieve parity to a Sally Smith.
The Scandinavian Committee who slept on Gandhi but awarded the United State’s 44th president a Nobel Peace Prize should be mortified to find out their compassionate patriarch of mankind runs a torture facility in the Wardak province of Afghanistan and incarcerates their other Peace Prize nominees. Unlike the eight African-American Nobel Peace Prize winners that came before him, Obama’s prestigious accolade has become a white elephant. Contrasted with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in 1964 took his award as a duty said: “The Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”
6) Because You Tilt at Windmills
“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.” ~ Miguel de Cervantes
What both parties keep shielded from the American public is that neither the Taliban nor Al-Qaeda own a single armored tank, let alone F-22 frequent flier mileage. Jihadists are often goat herders who reside in dirt huts with no voltage. Their lack of electronic sophistication was transparent upon a glimpse into the King of Al-Qaeda’s “lap of luxury.” Homeboy looked like he could only get reception via tin foil on the antennas of his compound’s 80′s style TV. Bin Laden’s constituents haven’t mastered basic air travel, what are they going to do, ride their camels across the Atlantic Ocean to institute Shari’s Law? In case everyone failed to notice, they had to hijack our planes for 9/11, so wouldn’t a better plan of self-preservation simply be keeping them off flights headed this way? Apparently not, because you see these guys have the combined IQ’s of Ghazali and Khaldoun and the military tactics of Saladin. This is why wardens are too terrified to have them transferred from Guantanamo to federal prison because unbeknownst to science, The Students and The Base have metal springs in their feet so they can jump over 100 ft high electrical fences. They can pass through walls by melting underneath doors then reforming on the other side. And don’t let them touch you with a Quran or you’ll instantly turn to stone, then crack. Mass propaganda has transformed these non-tech savvy nomads into the Voldemorts of the world actually capable of inciting an American holocaust of Third Reich proportions. Over the past 11 years there hasn’t been a single attempt by a Jihadists to sneak a bomb onto a plane from one U.S. city to another (CIA false flags don’t count) while polls show the majority of Afghans didn’t even know what “America” was until we started blowing up their neighborhoods.
More recently, Obama authorized millions of dollars to be sent across the globe to support the Yemeni military, even amidst our country at 10% unemployment, 650,000 estimated homeless and 40 million children not receiving adequate nourishment. Our government cut off head subsidizes for the poor in 2011, closed mental health clinics and cut funding for domestic violence shelters, but suddenly has a Carte blanche to bankroll a third world’s counter-terrorism operations because one underwear bomber hailed from the region. Yes we must defend destitute Americans from the threat of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula living in one of the driest, poorest and least developed country in the world. Patriotism is all about cutting safety nets then assuring the people who need them that our government loves them so much they will be protected from Salafism. Thank you President Obama for defending us from our 1 in 1 billionth chance of becoming victim to Yemeni terrorism – and continuing to funnel money away from struggling Americans for DARPA’s Vulture Program so we can have futuristic war robots – while the Soup Kitchen down the block is having another coat drive. Regardless of if you’re a fan of doing the impossible extermination of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Mujahideen and anyone wearing a burka, the war against “terror” has statistically been completely counterproductive to that goal. Several years ago there were only about 150 members of AQAP. After ongoing strikes from drones, tomahawk missiles and cluster bombs there are currently 1500 members. How can Obama sophists contend this is a “smart war” or a “war of attrition” when playing Whac-a-Mole on the bad guys is doubling their membership exponentially? The misguided War on Terror has been the most dim-witted battle since the domino theory days. It’s like a war on acne and the more you pick and squeeze the more depressing your pimple problem becomes. We torture Osama’s Egyptian friends, he blows up East African U.S embassies, we bomb anti-malarial drug producing pharmacies in Sudan and then act surprised when Al-Qaeda starts issuing “America Die” manifestos. Confucius once said “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Our target countries practices the same Code of Hammurabi as the rest of us – an eye for an eye and the Twin Towers die. Unfortunately, we’re not all as mature as Sweden who handled the 2010 Stockholm Bombings by simply stepping up their self-defense, which according to our Castle Laws, happens at home.
7) Because My Entire Life History is Stored on a Super Computer in Utah
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” ~ The Fourth Amendment
The majority of Obama’s loyal supporters have no clue that he’s ordered AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon to systematically turn over their customers’ personal correspondence. Somewhere near the Church of Latter Day Saints, there is a mega computer that has access to every single e-mail/text you’ve ever sent your friends, co-workers or weed dealer. Most simply brush it off as “Well I’m not planning a suicide bomb mission so who cares” but this invasion of privacy has very little to do with 72 Virgins. These correspondences have been handed over to NSA, FBI, CIA and every other government acronym who is now privy to any naked photo you’ve ever sent a lover, perhaps a note telling a friend you cheated on your taxes, psychiatric records that could deny you future government job opportunities and whether you have a library book check-out preference for J.D Salinger, Mark Twain or god forbid the Quran. The interesting detail about the Patriot Act’s “sneak and peak” clause is that it’s been used much more frequently to snag drug dealers than locate Jihadists. So back to those weed dealer correspondences…
8) Because I Hate Personality Cults
A few weekends ago, I was walking down Crenshaw Blvd. in South Central Los Angeles and noticed a woman selling candles with Obama’s face plastered on them, Virgin Mary style. I couldn’t help but think how eerily reminiscent it was to Kim ll-sung. The same lady selling Saint Obama candles also had some First Lady earrings for $5 a pop. I’ll pass. When Michelle’s new bangs conjure up more talk in the African-American community than the National Defense Authorization Act, it’s time to check the celebrity fan club. Personal brand narratives should be inconsequential when electing politicians and I would be embarrassed by any woman voting for Sarah Palin because her X chromosome genetic strain would provide role model status to young girls.
Obama has made war so acceptable to his loyal African-American supporters that when Lupe Fiasco argues otherwise in front of Hip-Hop crowds he’s booed off stage. Remember when anti-war songs were cool in the black community? We can never forget Bob Marley’s “War” or Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Black people were right there in the front row waving their hands side to side. There was never a time where Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops got booed off a stage when he asked why our government was sending kids overseas.” In one era, Muhammad Ali could proudly be remembered saying:

“No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slave masters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.”

Fast forward 50 years later to find the famed boxer saluting the first black president at inaugural soirees. Nowadays anyone who dares sell out by speaking up against Obama’s imperial violence, from Cornel West to Tavis Smiley, are immediately shunned by the same community that is rarely even referenced by their beloved president. This is the same community that once rallied in New York on April 4, 1967 with tearful eyes listening to Dr. King’s anti-Vietnam War speech, “A Time to Break Silence.”
Tragically, our president could bomb Uganda off the map and those who have created a fictive kinship with the first family would get more riled up if they found out Barack was cheating on Michelle with a white woman. There is something diabolical about a black man who refuses to speak on direct issues related to the black community from the Jim Crow neo-slavery prison industrial complex, police brutality, Troy Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal and disproportionate black unemployment levels because his family’s melanin content alone is deemed sufficient. I guess you can’t expect much more from a president that admires Reagan, the man responsible for the iconic “black welfare queen.”
Cynthia McKinney calls Obama “the more effective of the two evils” perhaps because he can encourage extra judicial killings all too familiar to the African-American community and still win hearts by belting out a rendition of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together.” Unlike backing gay marriage for the LGBT community, birth control for Women and The Dream Act for Latinos, he doesn’t need to worry about offering one piece of legislation directly targeting African Americans because he knows he has that vote by design. He can woo Harlem fundraisers through vocal chords, then revert back to telling the black man uptown if he wants anything changed he should “take off his house slippers.” Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass would be so proud.
Jill Stein may not sing love songs from the 70′s, have a fashion savvy husband or chill with Oprah Winfrey, but legislation that directly affects me, my community and my sisters around the globe is far too important to vote for voyeurism over policy. I rather a white woman that fights on behalf of the black community, than a black man who has statistically paid less attention to race in Executive Orders and podium appearances, than John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter.
*****
When you cast a ballot for either corporate binary it’s inevitable that you’re voting in the interests of Goldman Sachs, DynCorp, Exxon Mobil and Monsanto. As both Democrats and Republicans continue to loot the U.S Treasury to fund armed forces, expand indefinite detention to ordinary U.S. citizens, nonsensically send billions of our tax dollars to corrupt foreign governments while forcing the elderly to work cash registers at K-Mart clutching defibrillators, there will be alternatively only one party left to choose from.
Hillary won’t get my vote in 2016. I’m not riding the donkey anymore.

Can We Have A Humane Economic System?

 I was reading an interesting article in The Nation this morning that discussed how wrong economists, especially highlighting Paul Krugman, were about globalization and how while it is obvious to most "people" that the politics of global trade economics were disastrously wrong (except for the 1%), somehow economists and politicians, including current world leaders don't seem to get it - and won't discuss their utter failure.
After I found myself fairly impressed with the article, I read the comments that followed and was equally impressed by a general consensus that while I was firmly in the intelligent observer camp, I was also helplessly naive about economic history and the general uselessness of (probably) all experts in that field.
Also interesting was the idea that "you can't go back".
This is something that I have no problem accepting in so many areas of life but have never really considered as an unalterable, universal principle - though now I am beginning to consider it might be that way.
Once the factors in an equation have changed, the equation must also change; you can't just go back to what seemed to work before and expect it to work again when things are different.
Pandora's box, as it were, has been opened and all that came out is not going to get stuffed back in no matter how much we want it or how hard we try or how much we pay, pray or envision.
While I do have some specific ideas about Global Trade and Capitalism, which are primarily that we should eviscerate them and return to local production and local consumption, taking the immoral, ill gotten gains of opportunistic capitalism and returning it to the victims of "voodoo economics", put basic services in the hands of "the people", and make the Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness a reality for all people instead of just a privileged and corrupt few, I am not planning on going into great detail about that right now.
I do think that considering this article is a good thing, but hope we can recognise that neither the problem nor the solution are an either/or, black/white kind of thing.
Recognising that you have a problem is always the first step to resolving it.
We should recognize that we do have a tremendous problem that is likely to explode in our faces in an astronomical manner.
The solution?
Well, we know we can't just tap the "way-back machine" for that, but we do have to adjust our view and actions to those that retard excess and embrace equality and a restoration of the liberties, freedoms and opportunities that offer a life of opportunity and dignity that includes the prospect of everyone enjoying the expectation that they are free and able to pursue and achieve happiness.
I also recommend the accompanying 10 min. video.
Here is the article.
http://www.thenation.com/article/173593/why-was-paul-krugman-so-wrong?utm_medium=email&utm_source=HeadlineNation&utm_term=&utm_campaign=

Here are a couple of the comments that caught my attention.
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The sad reality is that "experts", all of them, every one, totally suck at making accurate predictions. Krugman is not special that way at all.

Read Future Babble by Dan Gardner for good evidence of this thesis.

"In 2008, as the price of oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; a few months later it plunged to $30. In 1967, they said the USSR would have one of the fastest-growing economies in the year 2000; in 2000, the USSR did not exist. In 1911, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe; we all know how that turned out. Face it, experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. And yet every day we ask them to predict the future — everything from the weather to the likelihood of a catastrophic terrorist attack. Future Babble is the first book to examine this phenomenon, showing why our brains yearn for certainty about the future, why we are attracted to those who predict it confidently, and why it's so easy for us to ignore the trail of outrageously wrong forecasts."

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Greider steps back into the past and lives there. The refurbishing of American industry is not going to happen to any great extent, the game of the planned industrial economy as Germany has used is over because economic growth is over. In fact using real inflation rates the US hasn't grown since 2000.

Growth is over because the "powers that be" in the US, the EU and Japan have decided to save the oligarchs with zombie economies rather than write off unpayable debt. This has worked well for the 1% as their wealth and income since 2009 has soared. Not so good for the rest of us consumers.

Growth is over because the world has reached peak energy, (especially oil,) water, soil and the ability of the earth to provide ever increasing commodities while trying to absorb ever increasing amounts of pollution. The price of fuel and climate change are soon going to starve many in the less wealthy countries.

Greider needs to get up to speed on the realities of the 21st century before he starts recommending any sort of economic plans to be adopted. Greider still thinks the growth party will make a roaring comeback while debt gets piled ever higher, climate change gets even nastier and oil gets ever more expensive and harder to find ...
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And here is the video.



In this RSA Animate, celebrated academic David Harvey looks beyond capitalism towards a new social order. Can we find a more responsible, just, and humane economic system?

This RSA Animate was taken from a lecture given as part of the RSA's free public lecture programme. The RSA is a 258 year-old charity devoted to driving social progress and spreading world-changing ideas. For more information, visit http://www.thersa.org

Surviving Progress - Documentary Film

I watched the excellent documentary film Surviving Progress today and wanted to make it available to everyone.
This is a very important message and is extremely well presented.
I wanted to post the actual film here but it is still too new to download.
Everyone is encouraged to view and consider this message.
Here is a trailer.


If you have a Netflix streaming account you can watch this film here. 
http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=70235273&trkid=2450709

When I am able to I will post the actual full film here or perhaps on the church website.  Yes, it's that good and important.

Jill Stein Slaughters Opponents - Including Obama/Romney in 2nd Presidential Debate

I believe that anyone who would watch the Democracy Now Expanded Debate would easily and overwhelmingly vote for Jill Stein, the Candidate for the Green Party.

Thanks to Democracy Now all candidates who were willing to participate, who could actually win in the electoral college were represented for the American People to consider - except one who refused his invitation.  (plus he's kind of a dick)

Watch this "Expanded" Debate a little further down this post.

What we saw was the two corporately owned candidates, Obama and Romney, evade questions for most of the time and fall back on their old worn talking points.

Especially at the very beginning they both repeated their TP's virtually word for word in both their answers and their follow-up responses.  It was almost funny.

Where Romney couldn't evade, he simply lied. Fact checkers will be flooding the media with calling him on his BS for days, while some of it was caught in real time by both the moderator and the President.

The Third Party Candidates who participated - Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) declined again - featured Jill Stein of the Green Party, Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party.

Where Romney and Obama evaded issues, Anderson and Goode seemed to not understand the question or the issue.

Anderson was pretty right-on about a few things and called Romney and Obama out on some of their misrepresentations.

Goode's answer to every virtually question was about green cards and unfettered access to military grade weapons for all with no restrictions whatever.

Only Jill Stein directly addressed the issues presented and offered concrete solutions with some specific examples of how her plan would proceed and why it would work.  More specifics are available on her website www.jillstein.org

She also was the only candidate who showed an understanding of the real underlying causes of our problems and offered solutions to remedying those causes.

I was so impressed with her.

She stood head and shoulders above the field.

 And she represented herself as capable of leading our nation in a productive, positive and responsible manner, with a quick turnaround in our most pressing problems.

 If you haven't voted already, you really owe it to yourself and your family to watch this expanded debate.

In many states you can still get an absentee ballot (that is how I'm voting today) and many states do not require a "reason" to justify obtaining one.

Regardless of how you choose to vote.  Please vote.  Vote your conscience.

I'm voting for Stein.

Sadly, the "downticket" Green Party candidates in Michigan are not so impressive, so I will likely vote mostly for Democrats for local offices and other Federal Offices.

Though not perfect (no one is) I appreciate my current Congressman, Sander Levin and Senators, Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow.

In protest of the GOP anti-American, NeoCon "Tea Party" takeover, I will NOT vote for any Republicans this time.

The conduct of the GOP in both Federal and Michigan Legislative and Judicial bodies is undeserving of support and worthy of prosecution.

Ethos - Who's Pulling Your Strings?

Jill Stein - C-SPAN Interview 9-30-2012 & Stein in tonights Presidential Debate

I admit I'm not too impressed with most of the Green Party candidates running in Michigan.  I'm really sad about it and will likely vote for mostly Democratic candidates.

I like Stabenow and both Levins even though they could be better on some things.

I will NOT vote for any GOP candidates this time around.

But for President I am very impressed with Jill Stein and plan to vote for her.

I encourage everyone to consider Stein and to watch tonight or later, an expanded Presidential Debate on Democracy Now that gives equal time, in real time, to Jill Stein and the Justice Candidate Rocky Anderson.

Here is a very good interview she did on C-SPAN Sep 30th.

Are The American People Really Awake - Yet?

I am reposting an excellent article describing the impact of the recent 2012  Republican and Democrat political conventions in the United States.

So many other things have recently happened in the Middle East that affect Americans views of partisan policies that the divide described is widening by the day.

Since the "Bush Years" there has been a tremendous change in America.

As a nation, the majority of the people have been knocked down.  As they get up again as they surely will, it is uncertain how those individuals and institutions who engineered the collapse of not just the whole of American society, but the whole world will be treated and what kind of new culture will emerge.

This look at the political posture of America is only an introduction to a much bigger story that is rapidly unfolding around us in such a huge and world-wide way that nobody really knows what will emerge,

The one thing that is happening is that the people of the USA are awake or awakening.

With that awakening is the realization that the principles that made the USA possible have been under attack, perhaps destroyed, certainly suppressed.

This suppression of Liberty has been sold to those who listen as a necessary and good protection for individual self-interest.

The "common good" has been vilified by unscrupulous so called elites, and rejected by a huge portion of the regular people of this nation who are now suffering from the deception.

Will the people of the USA rise to the occasion,  root out the enemies of Liberty and trust their future to the "American Way?

I don't know the answer but here is a prelude.


Sun Sep 16, 2012

Why Obama's lead is even better news than you think

by Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

"The lead that President Barack Obama currently enjoys in the polls is very good news for the nation. I don't just mean that in the sense that the better candidate with the better policies is leading. Not just that it appears America will be spared yet another Republican president who feels that a smirk passes for foreign policy. Not just that the middle class won't be devastated by another round of gift giving to the 1% and corporate incentives to ship jobs overseas. Not just that the deficit won't be driven skyward by more trickle down mythology and military adventurism. Not just that the climate will not continue to race toward Venusian while a Republican commander-in-chief pretends that global warming is a joke.

Nice as all those things are, there's something even more important behind these poll numbers.

There's a deep conviction among conservatives that it's not the message that's wrong, but the messenger. Mitt Romney, like John McCain, is too leaky a vessel for their hopes. He's tainted with the sin of past compromise and lapses in conservative orthodoxy. Even though all of the deep crimson conservatives who piled into this season's competition foundered so badly that they could not win a majority of votes even from highly conservative Republican primary voters, the right is convinced that if the banner of conservatism were only held by pure hands, they would gain the victory they richly deserve. Presumably by capturing all those conservative Democrats out there.

The inability to move the electorate solidly into the conservative camp is especially frustrating because the Republicans have the one thing on their side that is supposed to ensure an easy victory. In short, the economy sucks. With this Excalibur of issues in their hands, they expected to slice through the incumbent administration like government surplus cheese product. Romney was selected for this fight specifically because, even though the rightest wing if the party didn't trust the ex-gov's purity, the merely righter GOP voters believed Willard's prowess with high finance made him best suited to wield this weapon.

But extreme and ultra-extreme Republicans alike got it backwards on both counts, and that's what so exciting. It's not the messenger. It's the message.

With apologies to H. L. Mencken, the Republicans are about to go bust by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Over the last three weeks, Americans got a chance to see both the Republican message and the Democratic message back to back.  And what they saw left two very different impressions. One party came across as exciting, committed, and informed. Speaker after speaker ascended to the podium and was able to articulate both deeply held convictions and convincing detail on policy.

The other party came off as modern Republicans. Nasty, shallow, and thoroughly unconvincing, the GOP convention boiled down to little beyond platitudes and sneers. While Eastwood's one-sided and halting ramble was the horrifying (and pitiful) climax of the event, the convention's heart came in the disdainful grunts of RNC chair Reinhold Reince Priebus. If someone was trying to create a satire of the prototypical 2012 GOP leader, they didn't need to alter one spittle-dripping snarl of this sophomoric whine. Priebus' leaned on the podium and thrilled those the room with his disdain. So did Chris Christy. So did Paul Ryan.

America got the message just fine -- Republicans don't like us very much. And by us, I mean everybody outside their shrinking tent.

That's because the Tea Party purge isn't coming. It's past. Conservatives want to blame Romney and the "Republican establishment" for their difficulties, but there is no establishment. Rather they are the establishment. Only realio trulio conservatives, those who are so unswervingly vigorous in their beliefs that fact checkers are held as an abomination just slightly ahead of gay marriage, remain in the fold. The Tea Party is no longer a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. The Tea Party is the Republican Party. The speech's down in Tampa might well have been authored by a guy in a sparkly Uncle Sam suit with a Lipton's bag dangling from his stovepipe hat.

This isn't the party of Lincoln. It's not even the party of Reagan or Goldwater. The new Republican Party has been cleansed of anyone unwilling to kiss the ring of Limbaugh and swear allegiance to the writ of Grover. That makes it a smaller, less flexible, less capable party. A party that's not about anything except a sort of smug self destruction. If conservatives can't see that, don't worry, everyone else can. Americans tuned in to watch, and what they saw was that the resulting product isn't just ugly. It's... sad.

Not only did the Republicans fail to obtain a noticeable bounce out of their gathering, they achieved an unprecedented level of negative momentum that's expressed in far more than just Romney's slide in the polls. You might assume that viewers taking time to watch the Republican convention would be those inclined to vote for the GOP in the first place, and yet polls show that actually watching the convention made voters much less likely to go with the GOP. The ones most likely to stick with Romney following the convention, were those who didn't see anything of Tampa.

In addition to losing ground on the head to head race, the Republicans came away from the convention with a worse position on every issue polled. Following the two conventions, President Obama was viewed as not just better able to handle foreign policy (even pre-smirk) and not just better equipped to end the war in Afghanistan, but also as the top choice to improve the economy and even business. Long held Republican advantages in both business and military issues were snuffed out practically overnight.

Why? Because the American public was paying attention.

You know what? The economy does suck, but poll after poll shows that Americans remember why it sucks. Four years of pure obstructionism designed to ensure that things do not improve have not worked. That is, they've succeeded quite well in preventing anyone from towing the car out of the ditch, but they haven't made people forget who was driving when we ran off the road.

Only two years ago, the billionaire backers of the Tea Party managed to mask their money grab as a populist uprising. Two years ago, they got a majority of Americans to vent their frustration on Democrats, President Obama, common sense, history, science, and anything else that didn't get out of the way. But two years can be a long time.

The best news over the last weeks is that the politics of pure obstruction and vitriol are played out. The American people are awake. They see that the Republicans have nothing to offer but the same plan that created the problems in the first place. Many of them are starting to realize that the biggest problems we face aren't unknowable forces of nature, but very familiar sources of obstanance in the House and Senate. More than any time in the recent past, Americans seem to be willing to look at what people are saying, rather than just listening to the tone.

American voters listened in to Tampa, considered the content, and delivered their reply. That reply was, "bullshit." They were being lied to, and they knew it. To quote from a real, pre-purge Republican, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

For the Tea Party Republicans, time is up. They've taken their play book from the original Know-nothings and are headed toward the same path -- toward becoming a footnote in history books."

So is the GOP really going to turn to dust?

Is the "Tea Party" going to be seen for the ignorant and wrong thinking anti-American reality that it is?

Will the "99%" rise to the occasion and restore the American Dream and in the process extend the opportunity to the rest of the world to avoid total collapse?

Like it or not, "As goes America - So goes the World".  That really is true.  Where are we all going?

PS.

Along the same lines is this timely article.

Simon Black on January 31, 2011

"The need for most species to gather into larger collectives is a primal, animalistic instinct. Whether flocks of birds, schools of fish, colonies of ants, or packs of wolves, it is a natural inclination for animals to form larger units for their mutual protection and productive benefit.

Human civilization has shown the same tendency. Mankind’s first collectives were families and tribes based on common language, customs, lineage, and geography. As tribes grew and formed into kingdoms and vast empires, though, the core power in a civilization became concentrated in the hands of a few.

History is filled with examples of tyrants who mercilessly oppressed their people; in fact, the entire concept of the feudal system which dominated the earth for over 1,000 years was based on this idea that the masses exist to serve the ruling class, not the other way around.

We like to think that civilization has evolved far beyond that point… that the modern world is one in which, for better or worse, the will of the majority dictates the rules. Unfortunately, this notion is nothing but an elaborate illusion– feudalism is still alive and well today.

Certainly, there are varying degrees of it, and some nations are far more open about it than others. Western democracies decry brutal dictatorships in Burma, North Korea, and Cuba, all while a small cadre of bankers and bureaucrats sets up a system designed for their personal gain at the expense of everyone else.

Incredibly, the ruling class has managed to establish a society in which ‘the majority’ demands their rule, capitulates to their authority, and fills their coffers with taxes, bailouts, and loans.  Maintaining the status quo is their ultimate objective, and we can see that in today’s headlines.

As waves of food riots have spread across the world, the various ruling establishments have reacted by digging in and defending their own interests… turning police and military forces loose on the people to put down insurrection under the ridiculous pretense of “keeping the peace.”

The tactics that have taken place in Egypt over the last several days are particularly telling: the government has taken out Internet and telecommunications architecture, at least at the consumer level, in an effort to quell the rebellion… and I think Egypt is a preview of things to come.

Governments will now neutralize any asset that civilians can use to unify their efforts and establish command & control.  This includes cutting communications architecture, sending troops in the streets, and enforcing curfews.

I suspect that other measures on the table include cutting critical infrastructure like water and power, and contriving ‘security emergencies’ and dubious terror threats.

Unsurprisingly, lawmakers in the United States are getting ready to reintroduce a bill that gives President Obama the power to seize control over, and even shut down the Internet.

So long as we’re all obedient servants and don’t rock the boat too much, they’ll keep the lights and the phones on. The moment we stop digesting their imploding paper currencies or pour into the streets demanding accountability, they’ll flip the switch and go into self-preservation mode.

Ironically, such measures can be surprisingly effective. It’s psychological warfare, really– the establishment can demonstrate with surgical precision how dependent we are and how much control it can exert over us. (it’s like that old joke “the beatings will continue until morale improves…”)

This is feudalism, plain and simple, and it doesn’t really matter who’s in control. If the established ruling class fails to preserve their power, they will only fall to a new ruling class… but the mentality will remain: “do as you’re told, and we’ll keep the machine running.”

Modern society has evolved to the point that there are numerous, complex networks in place to take care of our basic necessities, freeing up our own individual capacities to focus on other productive interests– our careers, leisure activities, etc.

We don’t have to worry about producing our own food or generating power anymore because the system does that for us… so instead, we can focus our time and energy on things like professional endeavors which help us to afford our platinum cards and houses full of Chinese manufactured knick knacks.

This dependency, however prosperous it may feel, comes at an opportunity cost… and I think the recent events in Egypt and around the world underscore very clearly that this opportunity cost is freedom.

Real freedom, after all, has nothing to do with a bank balance full of fictitious zeros, or a credit score that gives people the means to further indebt themselves… but rather the degree to which one can be unplugged from this dependency.

Understanding the nature of the opportunity cost is critical, as is taking steps to reduce it. This can include planting multiple flags, investing in agricultural property, stocking up on food and water, installing solar paneling at your home, alternate RF or satellite communications, etc.

Measured preparation is the key. There is no reason to panic or expect the end of the world… but merely to identify vulnerabilities and risks, and then devise a plan to mitigate them. This will be a guiding principle for [a] resilient, sustainable community..."

Michigan's Emergency Manager Law Designed to Take Down Democracy Nationwide

Sugar Law Center for Economic & Social Justice
Since March 2011, the Sugar Law Center has been at the center of a struggle for fundamental rights in the heartland. Like Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana, Michigan has a giant bull’s-eye painted by corporate interests over its unions, public services, and even democracy itself.
While Sugar Law is a national organization, our location in Detroit placed us at Ground Zero for one of the most outrageous current attacks on voting rights and collective bargaining: Michigan’s Public Act 4, the “Emergency Manager law.”
This antidemocratic legislation, passed March 16, 2011, empowers the governor to use communities’ financial woes as a pretext to abolish local democracy. Any municipality or school district the governor declares to be in a state of “financial emergency” can be taken over by the state, and put under the control of an unelected Emergency Manager (EM) responsible only to the governor.
EMs wield preposterous power, far beyond finances. They can tear up union contracts, take over pension funds, fire public employees, dismiss elected officials and even dissolve local governments.
The Emergency Manager agenda is narrow: balance the books and pay the bondholders.
The EMs have no mandate to provide for sustainable or stable finances, nor for the services needed by residents. No action an EM takes is subject to review by local officials or voters. They have no set term, so can remain in office indefinitely —but even if local elected officials resume governance, they are bound by the EM’s plan for two years after his or her departure.
Today, ten Michigan cities and school districts are under state control through emergency managers or “consent agreements” implemented under threat of emergency manager. Over 900,000 Michigan citizens, including more than half of the state’s African-American population, no longer have local democratic rights.
There is an emergency. It’s an emergency for democracy. And Sugar Law is working with wonderful allies to defeat this model before it spreads throughout the country.
The Lawsuit
Sugar Law’s challenge to PA-4 has benefited from the support of a team of outstanding attorneys. Our argument in Brown, et al. v. Snyder, et al. filed in June 2011, focused on four ways the law violates the Michigan Constitution:
• PA-4 suspends home rule, by giving managers power to repeal local laws, ordinances, charters and contracts.
• PA-4 effectively eliminates citizens’ rights to vote for and petition local government on matters of local concern.
• PA-4 violates the separation of powers, by allowing the executive branch and its agencies to exercise legislative duties.
• PA-4 allows the Legislature to enact unfunded mandates, by using local taxpayer dollars for such purposes as managers’ salaries and staff.
Our challenge frightened Governor Rick Snyder’s team. In August, the governor sent an “Executive Message” urging the Michigan Supreme Court to use an obscure court rule in order to shortcircuit judicial proceedings. The governor’s request for an “early determination” on the law by the Supreme Court would eliminate the “discovery” process
Mike Kononpacki
Democracy Emergency in the Heartland
First Responders
Reprinted from the Sugar Law Center Summer 2012 Newsletter FOR ECONOMIC & SOCIAL JUSTICE that occurs in lower courts. In discovery, the trial court’s fact-finding procedures would require the state to disclose emergency managers’ actions and the costs they incur. Without discovery, PA-4- authorized emergency managers do the people’s business in secret.
Sugar Law opposed this effort by the state to avoid disclosure. The Supreme Court ordered both sides to submit briefs on the question by December 14, 2011.
Today, ten months after the state’s urgent request, and seven months since the written arguments, there has been no further action by the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, the trial court in Ingham County proceeded with the lawsuit.
The judge ordered discovery, but the state continued to resist disclosing even the most basic information. In fact, even after the trial judge ruled against the state, the state appealed her decision. On June 27, the Court of Appeals ruled that the state had no obligation to provide the requested information
In sum, the state is fighting us on every possible front about the substance of the law and even the right of citizens to see how government decisions are made. And this anti-democratic attitude extends to every aspect of the law’s impact in Michigan—and beyond Michigan.
What It Means Michigan’s Public Act 4 is at the leading edge of the national movement against democracy and human rights. Its importance is all the more evident when you look at where it’s being applied, who benefits from it, and how the powers that be are stifling popular resistance to the law.
Where They Claim “Emergency” Michigan now has seven cities and three school districts under state control.
Emergency Managers are in charge in Benton Harbor, Pontiac, Ecorse, Flint and the school districts of Detroit, Highland Park and Muskegon Heights. The cities of Detroit, River Rouge and Inkster are governed by coerced “consent agreements”— the ostensibly non-EM solution that still removes authority from the elected local officials, and which the state puts in place under threat of an EM. Every one of these ten local entities is majority African- American and Latino. And under both EMs and consent agreements, conditions are deteriorating further.
Public Act 4 is an affront to the rights of all Michigan voters, not only people of color. But the law has not aroused as fierce an opposition as it should, partly because it is perceived by many white Michigan voters as a way to solve problems created by black politicians. Embedded within arguments for the law is an assumption that poor people and people of color are too incompetent or too corrupt to be entrusted with local self-government.
The reality, of course, is that the crisis results from decades of institutional racism, financial deregulation, and policies transferring wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy. Communities with limited resources—like wealthy communities—do sometimes suffer from officials’ failures and corruption.
But far more significant for the plight of poor and minority communities are the persistent burdens of inadequate investment, employment, education, health care, law enforcement, housing, tax policy, insurance and transportation.
The EM model aims to sell voters the corporatist argument about why government does and doesn’t work, and achieves its aims by dividing communities from their black neighbors. The effect of the model on communities taken over is to increase their disaffection and lack of belief in the system. Why vote, when elected officials are stripped of power by unelected appointees? Like poll taxes and tests 50 years ago, this law disenfranchises the poor, especially people of color. It appeases whites in the 99 percent with a sense of superiority as a substitute for actual engagement in self-government.
While Public Act 4 is presented as simply a technocratic solution to financial problems, it is in fact part of the broader national campaign of voter suppression to disenfranchise the voters most likely to question corporate oligarchy.
And Why
Public Act 4’s provisions authorizing single-handed destruction of unions might seem enough of a reason for pro-corporate ideologues to promote it.
But that is only part of the story.
The law explicitly requires that the pain inflicted by financial crisis be borne entirely by government workers and local residents, while bondholders and banks are protected from loss.
Section 18 of the law provides that EMs must maintain local services “within
The Wall Street bankers lose nothing, while workers and residents pay more every day.
Mike Kononpacki the resources available.” The very next sentence requires “payment in full of the scheduled debt service requirements on all bonds, notes, and municipal securities.”
While services depend on revenues, debt service waits for no man.
City workers lose wages, benefits and, in many cases, their jobs. City residents lose services and safety. As Michigan AFLCIOPresident Karla Swift wrote in a Detroit News commentary, “The Wall Street bankers lose nothing—while workers and residents pay more every day.”
Swift also punches a hole in the argument that union-negotiated pensions are the problem. “We are told that the massive burden driving Detroit under is pension obligations,” she writes. “Yet the Detroit Financial Review Team’s report says pension payments in 2011 were $110 million, while the city pays $600 million a year in debt service. In a fiscal crisis, we are told, promises made in a prosperous era cannot be kept—not if they’re promises to workers about their retirement. But promises made to investors are sacrosanct.” Appropriate, responsible state action when a city is in financial crisis would include exacting concessions from bondholders.
If the city were allowed to negotiate an orderly restructuring of its debt—such as bankruptcy—creditors would have to accept later or lower payments than they would like. But the Michigan law and the governor will not allow either municipal bankruptcy or any other means of exacting sacrifice from bondholders. Only workers and residents have to take less…and less…and less.
As Wall Street banker (and Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary) Andrew Mellon said, “In a crisis assets return to their rightful owners.” Meaning, of course, people like him.
Their Goal: Make Resistance Futile Sugar Law’s court challenge is not the only effort to get rid of PA-4. On February 29, a statewide coalition submitted more than 225,000 petition signatures to Michigan’s Secretary of State to put repeal of the Emergency Manager law on the November ballot. Since the state’s election law requires only 161,305 signatures to authorize a repeal referendum, the thousands of committed campaign volunteers celebrated. The law would have to be put to the voters.
Or so it seemed—and so it would have gone in a society ruled by law. In fact, state law provides that once a law has been certified for a repeal referendum, the law is suspended until the vote. Every EM would be off the job. But when the state Board of Canvassers met April 26, the two Republicans on the Board voted not to certify the referendum. Their rationale?
Defenders of the law invented a straw to grasp at: a bogus claim that the title of the petitions was the wrong font size.
Sugar Law joined the other attorneys challenging PA-4 to demand that the state Court of Appeals override the Board of Canvassers. Various procedural twists and turns by the Court of Appeals have extended the process, but as of this writing, we expect that Michigan voters will have the chance in November to repeal PA-4. The tortuous process and delays in certification, however, mean that the EMs are keeping their authority for the time being. And with every week—every day—they rule, these technocrats are doing more to dismantle public services and destroy community engagement.
As Michigan Goes, So Goes the Nation?
The scheme in Michigan to replace local democracy with rule by corporate consultants is just one part of a larger plan to bust unions, dilute democracy, and roll back every advance of the Great Society and the New Deal—even the Progressive Era. The magical “manager” model—the so-called solution of intractable budget problems at the expense of workers and residents—has its sights on the rest of the U.S.
In Pennsylvania, legislators have changed the state’s laws to restrict aid to financially stressed communities and prohibit restructuring of debt through the bankruptcy process or other pressures on bondholders. They appointed a financial “receiver” for Harrisburg, the state capital, which carries hundreds of millions of dollars in debt as a result of a failed incinerator deal. The result of this punitive plan, as city councillor Brad Koplinski put it, would be full payment of “everyone on Wall Street,” while “the taxpayers would be left holding the bag.”
In Indiana, meanwhile, a version of PA4 takes effect in July. As in Michigan, reductions in state funds for cities and school districts are driving local fiscal crises. As in Michigan, state legislators have used local distress to justify a law enabling shredding of union contracts, firing of public employees, and elimination of local elected officials’ powers. So far, Indiana’s law is Michigan-lite, because an EM is appointed only as a condition for receiving emergency funding from the state. But given the current law’s overwhelming approval by legislators (96-0 in the state House, 48-1 in the Senate), a tightening of the screws will not be hard to get through if resistance gets in the corporate interests’ way.
Imposition of emergency managers must be understood in the context of the many other methods conservatives are using today to suppress democracy— especially among people of color and people in poverty. Laws requiring photo ID at the polls, state purges of voter rolls, and other obstacles are being intentionally erected to prevent widespread electoral participation.
It’s no coincidence that legislators in many states are taking up the same set of tools to consolidate power. The Michigan think tank that promoted Public Act 4’s shock-doctrine approach, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, is part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a national network of “freemarket” advocates working to design and pass state-level pro-corporate laws. ALEC members, heavily funded by deep-pocketed reactionaries, have been quite effective recently in spreading their gospel: austerity for people combined with tax cuts and subsidies for corporations.
The Front Lines
When Public Act 4 hit Michigan, the Sugar Law team stepped up. Our guiding principle is the inseparable connectionbetween economic and racial justice, civil rights and civil liberties. A law that simultaneously attacked all these fundamental principles required that we respond.
The bold avalanche of corporate power unleashed since 2008 has deepened the damage wrought by Wall Street.While PA-4 served as the “perfect storm” for Sugar Law, a broader progressive movement has responded similarly to the corporatist attacks. Occupy answered with a message that put questions of class in the national conversation more clearly than at any time since the 1930s. The unions picked this up with 99% Spring, using the power of the organized on behalf of everyone.
Sugar Law Center and Michigan communities are on a front line, but it’s not the only front line and we’re not alone.
Sometimes it feels like the corporate, anti-democratic agenda is winning—but we know a lot of dedicated folks are pushing back.
Our battle here in Michigan is allied with all those around the nation who are demanding: whose city is it? whose society? whose country? In the world we are fighting for, the answer to every one of those questions is: all of ours.
Frank Hammer


STAFF
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Legal Director
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS SUGAR LAW CENTER FOR ECONOMIC & SOCIAL JUSTICE is a national nonprofit public interest law center, dedicated to defending the rights of working people and their communities.
We work for economic and social justice by demanding legal and moral accountability from corporations and government. When people anywhere in the U.S. face workplace or social injustice,
Sugar Law Center and its broad network of cooperating attorneys provide representation to enforce their legal rights.
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