Rise Up or Die

I’m not a fan of Cornel West, nor do I think Eric Holder should be fired over the AP “scandal.” However, everything else about this article is right on time. It’s an EXCELLENT READ and a call to ACTION!!

Native Americans KNEW the air, land, mountains, rivers, oceans, animals, birds…everything is SACRED. Sacred to our well-being and lives. The greed of the wealthy, corporations and politicians is destroying us all, including them. How evil and stupid is it to think removing mountaintops in poor areas — that break the wind and help control climate — would not cause extreme disaster weather around the globe?

The winds begin in the West Coast. The beautiful mountain ranges here BREAK THE WIND as it reaches turbulent weather in the Mid West and tornado alley. These storms continue to the East Coast. With nothing to break their weather, the East Coast can expect horrendous hurricanes and colder weather. You can see that in your area. The seasons are changing and are extreme.

Native Americans KNEW that the oil and jewels deep in the ground are the VEINS aka the blood of the earth. It takes hundreds, even thousands of years for fossil fuels to regenerate. Trees too. The Rain Forests of Brazil have been a buffer for the entire planet. It too, has been decimated. The ice caps in Antarctica have melted, animals are migrating to areas they’ve never been before, while we are worried about Dancing With The Stars and the latest soap opera on the idiot tube.

Native Americans blessed the animals and food they ate because they KNEW it was for our sustenance and without it we could not live. Our food is being controlled and manipulated in labs to the point where we call it MONSTER FOOD. You wouldn’t want to give these GMO foods/seeds to a dog. It is changing our DNA.

Native Americans knew the water is PRECIOUS. We can go weeks without food, but only a few days without water. It is the MOST CRITICAL need for all life. Corporations have polluted our drinking water. Water is about to be privatized…and it will be expensive.

As this article says, it is time to rebel. ~MY

 

Rise Up or Die

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones” — the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace — to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones — in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery — is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Continue reading this article…

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What a year was 2012

 
Reblogged from THE OBAMACRAT
 
What a year!

 
Racism. Prejudice. Fear. Hatred.

 
Death and Destruction. Voter Suppression.
 
 
Natural Disasters. Handgun and Assault Carnage.
 
 
Lying Politicians. Jealousy. Envy. Incompetence.
 
 
Selfishness. Murder and Mayhem. War On Women.
 
 
War On LGBT Community. Homophobia. Islamophobia.
 
 
Homelessness. Bigotry. Fear.
 
 
War On Veterans. Cuts To Food Stamps (TANF).
 
 
Welfare. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid.
 
 
Disability/Troop Benefits. Tax Cuts For Millionaires /Billionaires.
 
 
Corporations Are People. Tax Increases On Poor/Middle Class.
 
 
N.R.A. Idiocy. Fast and Furious Lies. Benghazi Fiasco.
 
 
Global Warming Denied. Missing Exploited Murdered Children.
 
 
Women’s Rights Denied. Americans Massacred.
 
 
Fiscal Cliff. Government Waste. Do NOTHING Congress.
 
 
Obstructionist TeaTardedRepubliCANTS.
 
 
Saints Disgraced. Birtherism.
 
 
Jerry Sandusky. RepubliCANT Primary Fiasco.
 
 
British Petroleum. X.L. Keystone Pipeline.
 
 
Fracking. Union Busting.
 
 
The Lyin UnFitt Mitt Romney Family. Romnesia.
 
 
Lyin Paul Ryan. Ted Nugent. Meatloaf. Grover Norquist.
 
 
Karl Rove. Conservative Talk Radio. Faux Spews (Fox News).
 
 
Wall Street. Wells Fargo. Bank Of America. Citi Corp.
 
 
Record Foreclosures. Occupy Wall Street
 
 
Susan G. Komen For The Cure. Abortion Clinics
 
 
Defunding Planned Parenthood. Legitimate Rape.
 
 
Attacking The First Family. Gas Prices. David Petraeus.
 
 
The 47% “MITTstake”. Bain Capital.
 
 
Clint Eastwood Speaks To An Empty Chair. Todd Akin.
 
 
Sandy Hook Elementary School. Sikh Temple,
 
 
Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Aurora, Colorado.
 
 
Clackamas Town Center, Oregon.
 
 
Cafe Racer Espresso in Seattle, WA.
 
 
Racist Rampage Tulsa, Oklahoma.
 
 
Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, MN.
 
 
Oikos University, Korean College. Oakland, CA.
 
 
Chardon High School in Chardon, OH. Syria.
 
 
Trayvon Martin. MARISSA ALEXANDER
 
 
Jordan Davis. Troy Anthony Davis. George Zimmerman.
 
 
Micheal Dunn. Janepsy Carballo. Daniel Adkins Jr.
 
 
Jamonta Miles. Hernando Torres. Diego Ortiz.
 
 
Whitney Houston. Hurricane Sandy.
 
 
JP Morgan Chase & CEO Jamie Dimon.
 
 
High Gas Prices. Sheldon Adelson. Donald Trump.
 
 
Amanda Todd. Michael Clarke Duncan.
 
 
Elizabeth Collins. Lyric Cook-Morrissey. Junior Seau.
 
 
Lance Armstrong. Tavis Smiley. Cornell West.
 
 
To say that I am still reeling from this past year’s events is an understatement. Yet, with all the shocking, horrible, obstructionist, evil actions that hit our nation like a tidal wave, there was plenty of love, courage and a fighting spirit that saw us through this eventful year. Let us all promise to get involved and engaged in 2013 to prevent another 2012 from happening again…or at least keep the man-made events to a minimum.
 
 
There are some great clips at the link

 
 

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BEST video ever…Tax the Rich: an animated fairy tale

 

Best video ever! This one is great to share with your family and friends that just don’t get it. This is a keeper! 🙂

 

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Michael Moore: Morning in America

by Michael Moore

Congratulations everyone!!

This country has truly changed, and I believe there will be no going back. Hate lost yesterday. That is amazing in and of itself. And all the women who were elected last night! A total rebuke of Neanderthal attitudes.

Now the real work begins. Millions of us — the majority — must come together to insist that President Obama and the Democrats stand up and fight for the things we sent them there to do. Mr. President, do not listen to the pundits who today call for you to “compromise.” No. You already tried that. It didn’t work. You can compromise later if you need to, but please, no more beginning by compromising. And if the Republican House doesn’t want to play ball, do a massive end run around them with one executive order after another — just like they have done and will do if given the chance again.

We have to have Obama’s back. As he is blocked and attacked by the right, we need to be there with him. We are the majority. Let’s act like it.

And please Mr. President, make the banks and Wall Street pay. You’re the boss, not them. Lead the fight to get money out of politics — the spending on this election is shameful and dangerous. Don’t wait til 2014 to bring the troops home — bring ’em home now. Stop the drone strikes on civilians. End the senseless war on drugs. Act like a pit bull when it comes to climate change — ignore the nuts, and fix this now. Take the profit motive out of things that any civilized country would say, “this is for the common good.” Make higher education affordable for everyone and don’t send 22-year-olds out into the world already in massive debt. Order a moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions. Enact economic policy that will create good-paying jobs and spend the money that’s needed to do that. Make your second term one for the history books.

Finally, thanks must be given to the Occupy movement who, a year ago, set the tone of this election year by getting everyone to talk about the 1 percent vs. 99 percent. It inspired Obama and his campaign to realize that there was a huge popular sentiment against what the wealthy have done to the country and there was something wrong if just 400 rich guys owned more than 160 million Americans combined (all those moochers and bums). This led to Romney’s “47 percent” remarks and THAT was the beginning of the end of his campaign. Thank you Mother Jones forreleasing that secret tape, and thank you to the minimum wage worker who placed a camera on the serving buffet next to the candle. This morning’s headline in the Washington Post says it all: “At Romney headquarters, the defeat of the 1 percent.” Thank you Sandra Fluke for enduring the insults hurled at you and then becoming an important grass-roots leader against the war on women. Thank you Todd Akin for… well, for just being you. Thank you CEOs of Chrysler and GM for coming out forcefully against the Republican(!) candidate, saying he lived in “some parallel universe” when he lied about Jeep. Thank you Governor Christie for your new bromance with Obama. You know, you really didn’t have to!

And you, Mother Nature, with all your horrific damage, death and destruction you caused last week, you became, ironically, the undoing of a Party that didn’t believe in you or your climate changing powers.

Perhaps they’ll believe now.

Once again, thanks to all of you who brought a nonvoter to the polls. In a last-minute effort to get Obama an extra million votes he wasn’t counting on, I enjoyed talking and texting with your loved ones and friends yesterday who weren’t going to vote — but then changed their minds after a little nudge and some TLC (“Damn! Michael Moore? I’m getting in the car right now to go vote”).

To my fellow Americans, I think you’ll agree: it was nice to wake up this morning in the United States of America.

P.S. If you missed them, I think you might enjoy reading my tweets from last night and reliving this historic victory 140 characters at time.

Follow Michael Moore on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MMFlint

The Republican Strategy – 09.09.12

THIS IS WHAT THE CRUX OF THE REPUBLICAN ARGUMENT REALLY IS
by Benjamin T. Moore, Jr.
 
 
If you’ve been paying attention and listening closely, the Republican argument for why we should vote for Mitt Romney is… RECOVERY HAS NOT BEEN FAST ENOUGH! This is what it all boils down to. They really and truly have NOTHING else! What would they do differently? Well, that’s a secret! Like Mitt’s taxes, Dick Cheney during the 911 attacks, Mitt’s plan is carefully hidden in some “non-disclosed” location. We’re supposed to trust him! Why on earth anyone would do such a foolish thing, I have no idea. Nevertheless, that is all they’re giving you with regard to any plans.

Everybody agrees that when President Obama took office, we were facing an economic Armageddon. Pundits were tossing around the word “Depression” as though it were an inevitability. The only question was, would it be as bad or worse than the “Great Depression?” Our manufacturing industries were on the brink of collapse. The housing bubble had burst and pundits were prophesying that “we hadn’t seen nothing yet!” Republican shills were getting rich by peddling Gold Investments. Lear Financial made a bundle of money off of fools buying Gold when it was/is at record highs, telling them not to worry, it’s going to go even higher! The message to their followers was simple: The sky is falling and you’re under it!

We were in two shooting wars. Wall Street was crumbling, people were losing their shirts in their investments, IRAs and pension funds. People were losing their jobs and their homes. Big Banking Houses were going under. If America were a Ship, it would be named the Titanic. George – Edward Smith – Bush had just climbed into the last lifeboat and handed over the office of Captain to the Black guy. They were taking the money and running and counting on the ensuing chaos to cover their tracks. It was a perfect plan! The Black guy would take the fall and they’d get away clean!

What they never counted on was, this Black guy had a brain! He got to work and began fixing the problems one by one. He saved our automotive industry. We were hemorrhaging over 700,000 jobs a month. We are now adding 10’s of thousands of jobs a month. President Obama saved Wall Street. He put the brakes on the plummeting housing market. Contrary to predictions, foreclosures are down. He turned the tide of the cost for college tuition. He signed into law equal pay protections for women. The chaos they’d envisioned that would cover their tracks has not happened. I suspect there are people who are terrified that we might actually get around to looking into where all that money went.

President Obama has already brought one war to a close and is winding down the other. Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive! He *CUT* taxes on the middle class. Women now are economically protected in the work place. We’re safer, more profitable and more stable. Remember all of this has been done with ZERO Republican support! Imagine where we’d be if the Republicans had acted like grownups? Imagine what our stock market would look like if the Republicans had actually put country first instead of causing our credit rating to be downgraded. Here’s what I know about debt. You cannot pay it down if you decrease your income stream. When the full faith and credit of the United States is downgraded, paying down our debt just got harder.

Are we where we want to be? HELL 2 THE NO! However we’re making forward progress. Are we moving as fast as we’d like? HELL 2 THE NO! However, let’s call it like it is. The Republicans have been fighting to block and stop progress every step of the way. So when they say, President Obama hasn’t turned things around fast enough… make a note of which party has been stomping on the brakes. Don’t forget and don’t forget to vote in November!
 
 

 
 

Free $10 Million Loans For All!

Reblogged from Rolling Stone | Matt Taibbi…

• I hope everyone saw ex-Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation chief Sheila Bair’s editorial in the Washington Post, entitled, “Fix Income Inequality with $10 million Loans for Everyone!” The piece might have set a world record for public bitter sarcasm by a former top regulatory official.

In it, Bair points out that since we’ve been giving zero-interest loans to all of the big banks, why don’t we do the same thing for actual people, to solve the income inequality program? If the Fed handed out $10 million to every person, and then got each of those people to invest, say, in foreign debt, we could all be back on our feet in no time:

 

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

Every time I watch a Republican debate, and hear these supposedly anti-welfare crowds booing the idea of stiffer regulation of Wall Street, I wonder how many audience members know that Bair’s plan is more or less exactly the revenue model for all of America’s biggest banks. You go to the Fed, get a buttload of free money, lend it out at interest (perversely enough, including loans right back to the U.S. government), then pocket the profit.

Considering that we now know that the Fed gave out something like $16 trillion in secret emergency loans to big banks on top of the bailouts we actually knew about, you might ask yourself: How are these guys in financial trouble? How can they not be making mountains of money, risk-free? But they are in financial trouble:

• We’re about to see yet another big blow to all of the usual suspects – Goldman, Citi, Bank of America, and especially Morgan Stanley, all of whom face potential downgrades by Moody’s in the near future.

We’ve known this was coming for some time, but the news this week is that the giant money-managing firm BlackRock is talking about moving its business elsewhere. Laurence Fink, BlackRock’s CEO, told the New York Times: “If Moody’s does indeed downgrade these institutions, we may have a need to move some business around to higher-rated institutions.”

It’s one thing when Zero Hedge, William Black, myself, or some rogue Fed officers in Dallas decide to point fingers at the big banks. But when big money players stop trading with those firms, that’s when the death spirals begin.

Morgan Stanley in particular should be sweating. They’re apparently going to be downgraded three notches, where they’ll be joining Citi and Bank of America at a level just above junk. But no worries: Bank CFO Ruth Porat announced that a three-level downgrade was “manageable” and that only losers rely totally on agencies like Moody’s to judge creditworthiness. “A lot of clients are doing their own credit work,” she said.

• Meanwhile, Bank of America reported its first-quarter results yesterday. Despite that massive ongoing support from the Fed, it earned just $653 million in the first quarter, but astonishingly the results were hailed by most of the financial media as good news. Its home-turf paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, crowed that BOA “Posts Higher Profits As Trading Results Rebound.” Bloomberg, meanwhile, summed up results this way: “Bank of America Beats Analyst Estimates As Trading Jumps.”

But the New York Times noted that BOA’s first-quarter profit of $653 million was down from $2 billion a year ago, and paled compared to results of more successful banks like Chase and Wells Fargo.

Zero Hedge, meanwhile, posted an amusing commentary on BOA’s results, pointing out that the bank quietly reclassified nearly two billion dollars’ worth of real estate loans. This is from BOA’s report:

During 1Q12, the bank regulatory agencies jointly issued interagency supervisory guidance on nonaccrual policies for junior-lien consumer real estate loans. In accordance with this new guidance, beginning in 1Q12, we classify junior-lien home equity loans as nonperforming when the first-lien loan becomes 90 days past due even if the junior-lien loan is performing. As a result of this change, we reclassified $1.85B of performing home equity loans to nonperforming.

In other words, Bank of America described nearly two billion dollars of crap on their books as performing loans, until the government this year forced them to admit it was crap.

ZH and others also noted that BOA wildly underestimated its exposure to litigation, but that’s nothing new. Anyway, despite the inconsistencies in its report, and despite the fact that it’s about to be downgraded – again – Bank of America’s shares are up again, pushing $9 today.

•  Speaking of BOA, you can help the bank improve its website….

 

 

The Road We’ve Traveled

 
This is the MUST SEE movie on the economic crisis President Obama faced coming into office in 2009 and where we are today. Please share this 16 minute movie widely. Unless you are a millionaire or part of the 1% who is doing well in this nation, you need to see this. And you need to share it. Widely.

 

OCCUPY WALL STREET Comeback Rally

 
Did you really think the Occupy Movement would just go away? As promised, they’re back and planning some great occupations this year. Check this one out…
 

OCCUPY WALL STREET Comeback Rally