From AnonOps

 Here's the deal... the video that went with this was DELETED from YouTube.  That is to say it was CENSORED.  Ponder THAT for awhile.

The video was censored, but you can read the content here:

Greetings, people of the world. We are Anonymous.

As many of you are aware, over the past several days, significant demonstrations have been held in protest of the corrupt financial system that favors the richest 1% of our nation; while the remaining 99% have to deal with things such as abuse of our civil rights, overseas outsourcing of our jobs, and living off minimum wage while gas hovers around $3.50 a gallon. The minimal attention given to these demonstrations has caused growing concern, with rumors of media blackouts and repealed news coverage becoming increasingly harder to deny.

We would like to thank those in our national media that chose to cover the truth about the events of the wall street occupation. Your contribution to society will not go unrecognized.

Unfortunately, this coverage has not been sufficient, we must now take efforts to spread the truth into our own hands. It is now up to us, the people of this great nation, to act for ourselves. We must share the truth through our social networks, by texting, instant/private messaging, posting, and blogging to our friends and relatives. We must take to the streets and speak of the truth in our coffee shops and mall outlets. Our voices will be heard.

Bloggers, dedicate your blogs to Occupy Wall Street,

Website owners, Write an article about Occupy Wall Street,

People in urban areas, Pass out and post up flyers about Occupy Wall Street,

Social network users, Flood your twitter accounts with OccupyWallStreet hashtags, post videos, articles, and any news about Occupy Wall Street.

Share this call to action, and encourage others to do the same.

To those currently occupying, stay strong, always know that you have our support.
We will not allow tyrannical police to oppress and bully you. Stay peaceful, stay vigilant, and know that you are making our nation proud.

To the police who wish to remain tyrannical, we will continue to show our support for the peaceful protesters. You will be exposed for the inhumane offences you commit, and everyonewill know just who you are and what you have done. Your information will be posted everywhere and mirrored everywhere.

If you strip the freedom away from our peaceful protestors, then we shall strip your privacy away from you.

To the people of the world:

You are Anonymous.
You are Legion.
You are the media.
You are the voice of truth.
You can not forgive.
You can not forget.
They should expect us.

Voter Suppression

Clearly there have been several efforts to suppress voter registration this last year.  The Wisconsin installation of a required ID card that is supposed to be free but only if you know to check a box on the application; otherwise there will be a charge that staff will not prompt you on.  Similar things have been happening in Texas, Alabama and other states.  The effort to put polling in difficult to access places were the poor will wait for long periods to vote... unlike rich areas where there is no waiting.  Some bills have even been introduced to undo mail in voting.

 

The Slow Burn Revolution

The last few weeks has seen the resurgence of public protest over many issues.  The tar sands Keystone XL pipeline where over 1200 people were arrested in Washington D.C. while exercising their first amendment rights to protest was a kickoff a few weeks back.  Currently the Occupy Wall Street protest is a good deal more violent (perpetrated by the NYPD) than others that are going on.  I have been to four protests (some called rallies) of a smaller scale here in Vancouver.  None of these has received national media attention until there was violence.  The media then tried to say that protest is by its nature violent and should we allow it.  Allow it?

Wait, it is a right we have in this country to protest.  It is a right we have to have access to our representatives.  The summer recess by Congress had representatives going to their home districts and having various pay-to-access schemes going on to limit the representatives access.  Many in the Tea Party did NOT want to face the electorate and many did NOT want to hear complaints of their performance during the debt "crisis".  

This activist surge will continue.  It has been building for thirty years and is about to become more and more visible despite the major media trying to minimize it.  Hopefully it will not get more violent but the longer this goes the harder that will be to carry out.    

 

NYPD officer who did the macing... prior incidents.

Getting Your Arms Around the Issue

Briefly said, there are two articles that may help one visualize the problem of not taxing the richest 400 families in the country.  (Taking the rich off of welfare).

The Tea Party Refuses to See Common Sense 

Visualizing the Size of the Money! 

A Climate Change Deniers Nightmare

Imagine that you woke up in the morning and there was widespread acceptance that Global Warming / Climate Change was real!  You may already know that it is real because you have read enough of the scientifically based information to KNOW that it is real.  It is not a matter of dogma or ideology; it is not a matter of right thinking; it is not even a matter of conflicting scientific information (because there is not any).  

We have examples every day now that the change is occurring and will continue to occur.  So, why does anyone fight the notion that climate change is happening?  If you own an oil company you pretty much have a vested interest is denying that anything remotely like climate change is happening because of the products you sell.  And that is where the misdirection and misinformation comes from.  Oil companies have, indeed, hired people (I hesitate to say scientists) to refute the claims of scientists.  When you look at the poor examples of information and fuzzy thinking they offer in their "refutations" you come away with a sense of disbelief that anyone can think that all the people can be fooled.

Here's an article that explores a bit of this:

Global Warming: Why Americans Deny 

So, when you wake up and there are no more deniers around... what will you DO today that is different than yesterday? 

A Plan for Congress

I lifted this from a comment by emom58 on a Huffington Post article about the Republican's current attack on the budget soon-to-be-in-crisis:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. No Tenure / No Pension.
A Congressma­n collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participat­es in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressio­nal retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediatel­y. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participat­es with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressio­nal pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participat­es in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressme­n are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make this contract with Congressme­n. Congressme­n made all these contracts for themselves­. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislator­s, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

This is something that has struck a chord with me for a long, long time but it gets buried every time more important things come up.  The capitol fairy dust settles just long enough every so often and we can see the problem caused by congress not playing by the rules we all have to.  This part of the system is so broken we would need a National Referendum to make it happen.  We cannot really do THAT until we strike corporate person-hood.  Monied interests would pound us with national ad campaigns to prevent this from becoming law.  Perhaps we DO NEED a National Referendum system to break the back of the Washington D.C. crowds lack of response to real problems of the country.  

While it is clearly Republicans who are posturing with their tired and dis-proven theories, holding us all hostage in the meantime, there is little the individual can do because they (the elected) persist and do not listen to their constituents.  I have written and protested outside the office of Jaime Herrera Beutler's office in Vancouver to say that her Tea Party aligned votes are a Bad thing.  Her automated response has completely ignored any of the points brought to her.  Her votes speak volumes however.  There are polls that show with crystal clarity that she is in opposition to her constituents but she ignores all that.  She will not meet with us and does not hold town hall meetings to give voice to us.  It is We the People that count not our representatives, especially when they do not represent.

The Value of Infrastructure

 We have heard lately, over and over again, that there is class warfare occurring here in the U.S.A.  Well, yes, there is and has been but it is FROM the direction we are hearing the accusation.  The richest of us have been on the assault for a long time.  What response is there to this accusation?  

Here's a little bit of a clip from Elizabeth Warren with a clue:




The thing that has become incredibly apparent is that GOP will accuse others of exactly what they are constantly doing.  It is amazing that this is what happens in the talking points all the time.

A Single Statistic Says More...

Yesterday a single statistic came across the airwaves that slapped me hard.  In 2000 there were 31 million Americans living in poverty but after ten years of Republican tax cuts and deregulation there were 46 million living in poverty in 2010.  If anyone needs something to chew on I would say this is on the list.  The current "crisis" is a created crisis.  This is an indictment of the Republican policies; clearly the Republican agenda has put us on a path toward bankrupting the middle class.  Unless you miss the point entirely this single statistic lays to waste the bogus theory that the rich are the job creators.  No, there has been a huge transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy class.  The money has been flowing, no, flooding to the top.


The stupidity of saying that pointing to the obvious is "class warfare" is much more obvious as well.  We, the middle class have been under assault for over thirty years (actually a lot longer) with Reaganomics and other theories that have been proven to be plain wrong.


Today we have to work hard to halt the assault on the assets of the working middle class.  In fact the assault by the right wing groups funded by the likes of the Koch brothers is so pervasive that we see it more than once a day even if we do not watch the television.

 

Talking Heads, Talking Spin

Yesterday, Sunday, I was watching one of the talking heads editorial shows and about fell out of my seat.  It was ABC and what’s-her-nose Amanpour (This Week with Christiane Amanpour) had the usual guests.  I knew I was in for some spin when George Will started off the commentary and spun way right subtly bashing President Obama.  Shortly that was followed by Coke Roberts (who I always thought a bit left) taking up the right spin.  What?  The move to the right is so thorough and all pervasive that I did not even get a hint that these folks had a clue just how far they had gone.

Anyway, it was not depressing or upsetting it was just surprising and really let me know just how fast the spin could be applied.  It tells me how much work the on-going battle takes.  It goes way beyond one person’s life time.  The continuous assault is astounding.

I am not feeling that this something to whine about like the Right Wing constantly does.  It is a call to action.  Politics is not a debate today; it is an action that does not stop.  It is taking over a party and pushing it to be great. 


Now Faux Nooz is always going on about being vilified and so forth and scolding everyone in sight for Their hate talk.  Here is Andrew Breitbart that will never make onto a scolding by Faux Nooz.

All that is unlike this idiot (a right wing blogger) saying that his side has all the guns!!  Can we say, “Delusional,” altogether?

The Boy in the Bubble

Having had a few of those non-fact-filled discussions lately I have to say that this resonated with me just a little too much!  

The climate change deniers, the mixed up misdirection of where and how a problem started, the actual Reagan record, the it-doesn't-matter-what-you-think-I-am-speaking-from-a-superior-position nonsense when it is bereft of facts and all that sort of thing.

The sound bites from the right are just wrong headed but this did make me feel a little better.

Framing the Argument

So, I have been reading a book called; The Ass Is A Poor Receptacle For The Head: Why Democrats Suck At Communication, And How They Could Improve by Barry Eisler ($2.99 at Amazon for the Kindle) and can more clearly see that Democrats are far more polite and truthful than the opposition.  There is likely no way to change the core of that but there is perhaps a way to liven up the discussion between the two parties in a positive way.

One of the problems I currently have is with the vilification of the term “stimulus” to aid the recovery of the country from its economic problems.  The Republicans got out in front of that and made it a Bad term.  It now carries so much baggage that it can no longer get out of bed in the morning.  Here is a Good term for the same thing and it can be presented and hammered home it can turn the tide: positive infusion of working capital.  It does not have to be said altogether to work either.  Used as just “positive infusion” it then sounds like the Republicans are trying negative infusion (tax cuts) to help us.  To get past they will have try to deny it first.  We win a few electorate points.

Another thing that bugs me is that if I had a chance to introduce the former Vice President Cheney it would only be as War Criminal Dick Cheney.  That needs to continue to be hammered home.  He is slated to be arrested in several European countries if he ever attempts to visit.

Back on point, it is the positive addition of capital that we need.  From an e-mail I sent Randi Rhodes:

“The wrong message is framed by saying anything about stimulating the economy!! The right, check that, the correct message is to positively influence the outcome. To be positive change is occurring and positive that we need working capital now being held back by our multinational corporations... we can access that working capital by a proper tax structure... no, a positive tax structure.”

I do not think there is anything wrong with meta-messaging that the words, “work” and “infusion” are connected.  This form of taxing is not totally negative.  Taxes equal the Capital we use to recover from the recession.  

Again, more later, I hope.

Recap on Where We Are

Overall there are a number of core ideas that bring the economy into focus and are in stark contrast to the ideas from the conservative side of the aisle.  There is a theory out there that we can cut our costs of government and make it do more for us.  The idea seems to be that if government is smaller we will, somehow, grow the economy.  There is no connection made as to how, exactly, that will happen.  There is a bullying by the media to say that this IS how it works but there is a lack of fact to support it.

In addition, there is still the theory that if the rich get richer we will see more money trickle down to those of lesser means.  The last decade has seen the rich get richer at the expense of the poor.  The current minimum wage as adjusted for inflation is at the lowest it has been in 50 (fifty) years!  Corporate America is now sitting on over $2 Trillion in profit that they will not put back into the economy because they say they are fearful that the "down turn" is not over.  They won't place money back into our economy because they don't have customers.  They don't have customers because they will not pay a proper tax on what they have made.  The current effective rate is the lowest it has been in 60 years!  They will not help government stimulate the economy and create jobs.  One in six people in the U.S. is living in poverty today.  So many are in under employed situations that the MEDIAN income has been going down (recently went down to less than $50,000 /year per family).  Real wealth has to be created by a work force that makes "things".  A financial instrument is not a thing.  Seventy (70%) percent of the economy is CONSUMER SPENDING!  A slight uptick in wages results in a broad boost to the economy.

Henry Ford paid his worker 3 times the going rate to get more consumers in the economy.  He literally created a vastly broader middle class.  It worked.  The tax system was progressive and recognized that the worker bees were the engine that made the economy work.  Today the Ruling class feels entitled to more and more money without giving anything further to the workers who made it possible.


For a time I thought that unions had been necessary for a time but had outlived their usefulness.  Today I no longer think that the unions will ever outlive the need to have them there.  Between 1945 & 1975 there were 35% of all workers were in unions.  That was a period of high growth in the economy.


More on this later when we explore the need to change our export policies and correct the direction we are going with the Right in charge or at least dictating what the discourse will be.

 

What the Country Needs to See

Although the likelihood is that the Republican House will never let the supporting legislation out to the Senate everyone should see the ad in support of the proposal.  Here is the ad.

A link to the President's supporting web site:

The American Jobs Act 

If we keep up the pressure on both the "Gang of Twelve" (the Super Committee) to identify the cuts AND support the Jobs Act the political landscape will change ever so slowly.

Focusing on the Big Lies...

Here is a video that got to me because of its clear headed-ness.  For the low information voter it is the Big Lie that has been bludgeoned by the talking heads with the repetitiveness of the message to keep them (the voters) ill informed.  Here is someone who KNOWS whereof he speaks.  The old Trickle Down nonsense is proven to be total crap.  Why would anyone believe what has already been shown to be false?  It is in the repetition that the weaker mind is captured and held captive.

 

Now, before you watch this you need a very good internet connection and to realize it is almost an hour long.  Robert Reich is a giant in the field of economics.  There is no question but that he has a thorough understanding of how the economy works.  I was about a quarter of the way through this when I figured I better start over with a pen and notepad in hand.

There are so many right winger ideas that are bankrupt out there that this is but one aspect of what has to be corrected. 

Jobs Speech

The problem with speeches is that they do not have to predict the future.  You can say anything but unless you can push to make the vision real it's just a speech. 

The President has only one avenue to make half of what he said a reality.  He asked the people to call their representatives, the people we hired to do a job, and explain that they need to get to work.  This does work.  If you have been watching the changed demeanor of the Representatives as they have come back from their districts over the August recess you may have noticed that most are a good deal more demure than just prior to the recess.  They heard, up close and in their collective faces personally, that they were doing a piss-poor job.  The rating of the President may be low but Congress has fallen off the chart.  If you want to have a new form of leadership then you should be calling, writing and visiting your Representatives' offices. It really does work.  It does not even have to be the ones that you disagree with... call on the ones you agree with as well.

For many politics is something to argue about but not DO...  for me it is an active, nearly alive, thing that must done.

Speaks for itself.

What happened to the First Amendment

There has been a movement by the Tea Partier Rethuglicans to raise money by gaining access to YOUR representative at a donation cost.  It is then a way to ARREST people asking legitimate questions of their elected official when they (the representatives) don't like the questions.  How can the police go along with this action?  Have we sunk so far that even thinking of the First Amendment does not occur to the police?

That the protesters have to be sitting in the back of the room and are screened before being allowed into the room and further surrounded and harassed as they ask their questions is very telling of the Nazi-like view of the Tea Party Congressional Representatives.  All during August this sort of meeting was repeated again and again.  Here in district 3 in southwestern Washington state our representative held zero town hall meetings but had a few carefully selected groups at meetings (Coffees) with previewed questions.  Even at these meetings she was unable to take the off cue questions.  She does not meet with constituents.  She talks about her views but does not accept much in the way of questions.  It is a bad way to start this decade.

Real Voting

While the Koch brothers do their fund raising and Obama Bashing and the Faux Nooz folks yammer on about their non-movement strategy for the up coming session of congress, there is a real disgust surfacing in many ways from ordinary people.  One of the thoughts that I am sure you may have had is that you do not want to be part of either party.  You may want to be an independent or decide to be part of a third party.  I have been pondering what that means for quite awhile now because in some ways I went down that road several years ago.

In the 70's and 80's I was leaning toward Libertarianism but was a Republican.  In Arizona that slowly became problematic because the Republican party started drifting to places I did not want to go.  When the anti-science, pro-radical-Christian-religionism took hold of the Arizona party and started putting stuff in the in-box for legislation to ban abortions (never mind who pays for it), gay bans, lowering the minimum wage, arresting and detaining the homeless and on and on and on, I stayed with the party because of, it turns out to be a mistaken idea, the belief that Republicans were the fiscally conservative stance.  It was not that I was against bigger government so much as that I wanted controls on government growth.  That was wrong headed but at the time I did not fully realize how and why it was wrong headed.  The sentiment was that, "government was the problem," as Ronald Reagan said.  That was not exactly where I was coming from but it was where that sentiment was leading.  As the so called Moral Majority took hold it was harder and harder to be the new form of Republican.  All this was before Fox news and the heavy handed commentators slamming their guests.  It was easier to have a political discussion then.

Leaving out the middle stuff for the moment here is where it led.  As a fiscal conservative I abandoned the Republican party in most ways but still called myself one (sorry it was true).  I experimented with the idea that perhaps the Green Party or the Nader group wold lead somewhere but here is what that brought me to.  The Electoral College does not have a single vote that will elect a President from one of the third party choices.  Not one.

To effect policy or to promote the common good what we vote for (or against) comes through one of the two "real" parties.  That was when I looked harder at what the basis of the two parties was really about.  The light bulb went on and I came to embrace the Democratic party as a still fiscally conservative person.  That does not mean what you might think... in fact currently I am leaning more and more toward the progressive end of the scale.  Yes, I "admit it" and realize that there is not a single electoral college vote for progressives either.  There are votes for Dem's who happen to be more progressive.   

The next thing to explore would be the deeper history of the country and what and how the lessons of the past will effect us all.  Rereading the Constitution is a great place to start.

Faux Nooz

This is a post to get past what could turn into a very, very long rant but I will try to keep it simple and short.  For Fox (S0-called) News to say that this speech was Hate Talk is to raise my blood pressure several notches.  Watch the whole speech to see just how doctored this is.

Firstly, the entire speech shows what the doctored snippet does not show.  What Faux Nooz fails to get is just how pissed off the people of the country really are.  It is not exactly Hate but rather a lot of total disgust at the tactics and aim of the Repuglican/TeaBaggers and most of all the Lying SOB's saying anything they think will get their viewers outraged and mobilized.  To add that what the unions mean by, "taking the SOB's out" is something other than reporting the news.  It IS a political statement to get the Crazy Factor out of the government.  Facing the electorate this time around (in 2012) will take them by surprise if this is the level of the juvenile, idiotic and baseless B. eff-ing S. that this organization (thank you very much Rupert Murdock... a$$wipe) gives us.

Faux Nooz Strikes AGAIN!!

Read the comments to get a real sense of how pissed off the ground swell is.

The secondly is, we need some sort of fairness in media.  Unfortunately what the old Fairness Doctrine was turned into something that was anything but fair.  There is a NEW solution out there to guarantee fair REPORTING instead of money tweeked Koch brother rhetoric and (again, so-called) opinion.

Congress' Lower Approval Rating.

Is it any wonder that Congress has such a low approval rating?  Well, no, it is not even slightly puzzling after the atrocious behavior during the debt limit "crisis".  The opposing ideas are so far apart, the inability to compromise so intransigent and the underlying philosophy of publicity full of fear mongering that it was a miracle they parties ever moved at all!

What does this usually mean when a society moves to extreme positions?  Where are we headed?  How do we change the conversation?  Why, at this particular time, has this come about?  Where did civility go?  There are plenty of related questions but the solutions seem elusive.

From the Huffington Post there have been a string of articles about the slide down the polls for most members of Congress. "65 percent say they want their own House representative tossed out in 2012, compared with 53 percent of respondents generally." In other words, there is more specificity on ones own Representative than for the body as a whole.  The headline for the following day was that 87% disapprove of Congress altogether.  This may be unprecedented.  The Tea Party has lost much of its support due to its rancorous reactionary conduct during the debt limit debate.  In fact, it appears that most of the focus of these polls is figure out what sort of influence the Tea Party is likely to have during the 2012 elections.  There is clearly a shift toward raising taxes so it appears that perhaps the Tea Party negotiating tactic of not budging an inch during discussions is working against their agenda.  The coupling of the tactical blunder of non-negotiation and the steadfast refusal to raise taxes is cratering the Right wing argument that we can cut our way to prosperity.  In fact, one of the sounds bights that is gaining traction has become, "would you rather have cuts and austerity or peace and prosperity?"  This saying does not connect all the dots but the contrast contained in it does get the label for each party clearly stated.  The lessons of history seem to have gotten fogged over as well.  When FDR faced the same sliding economy he spent money on public works and pumped money into the economy.  In 1937, under pressure for conservatives (Republicans), he relented for a time and the U.S. went from creating jobs to sliding back down the razor blade.  He reversed himself and went back to spending to get the economy growing again.  What we will never know for sure is whether this tactic would have eventually led to a fully recovered economy without the intervention of World War II or not.  Clearly though as history has gone full cycle we are at the nexus of the same choices.  What FDR did not have was a Congress of Tea Partiers to hinder the progress.  It seems their sole objective is to ruin the economy and try to say that it is all President Obama's fault.  That is a weak argument but the tactic has been to repeat and repeat the same message until a few begin to believe it.

Huffington Post article one. 


Huffington Post article two. 

A New Depth is Plumbed By the GOP

 

Here's a little article on the GOP in Gabielle Giffords' district in Arizona auctioning off the same type of gun that was used to shoot Representative Giffords and kill six people.  This has a sleaze factor so large I can't even fathom that something in the mind of SOMEONE in the GOP did not go, "Wait a minute, this is a bad idea."  Apparently these sociopathic jerkweeds need to be brought up short and slammed to the ground.

Call the gun free of enuendo... perhaps not. 

To auction anything like this as a fund raiser for a political party is just plain crazy.