LONG HISTORY OF STOPPING PROGRESS:

MEET THE BILLIONAIRE BASTARDS WHO WANT TO CONTROL OUR LIVES:

The Koch brothers clearly have a financial stake in blocking reform. Koch Industry oil refineries are major carbon dioxide polluters, and Georgia-Pacific, a Koch Industries timber subsidiary, is one of the largest contributors to the loss of carbon-sink capacity. According to the EPA, Koch Industries is responsible for over many hundreds of oil spills in the U.S. and has leaked millions of gallons of crude oil into fisheries and drinking waters. Their opposition is a long family tradition of trying to shift the country to the far right. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David helped to found the John Birch Society in the late 1950s. The John Birch Society harnessed Cold War fears into hate against progressives, warning that President Kennedy, Civil Rights activists, and organized labor were in league with communists. His sons continue to galvanize hundreds of thousands of middle class people into supporting the Kochs’ narrow agenda of cutting corporate taxes and avoiding consumer regulations to the ruin of our equality and democracy. IMO, the Koch brothers are traitors guilty of treason against the constitutional government of the United States and
should be broke and in jail.

The Kochs are dirty oil thieves who hide their evil deeds.

While Charles and David Koch remain largely unknown figures to the majority of the American public, with 52 percent recently reporting they have never heard of them, the reality is that the brothers are arguably the most powerful and influential people in Washington — and they’ve never even been elected to office. The public is largely unaware that the Koch brothers are doing everything they can to suppress voter rights, re-segregate public schools, weaken Environmental Protection Agency regulations and privatize Social Security. They are basically fascists – Mussolini’s original definition of ‘fascism’ is ‘corporate merger with the state.’ Say hello to the new masters. Or vote against all their sleazy corrupted candidates and fight for our democratic constitution and a free republic.

SIGN PETITION – OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED – WIN THE UNITED STATES BACK FOR WE, THE PEOPLE.

*We the People, Not We the Corporations*
On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United and other related cases, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

*We Move to Amend.*
http://movetoamend.nationbuilder.com/petition

Click image above for larger view of “The Palace”

HOW TO FIGHT CORPORATISTS reprise

SECOND POSTING: Our corporatist-corrupted world is so volatile that readers asked us to re-post this for good ideas and moral support.

Mr. Pugger at the T.V.

Repeata por favor: WHY?

Word is that jobs – employment – and the economy are the priority.  Global warming and climate change must take a back seat.  However, one isn’t exclusive of the other.  The two are compatible and complementary.

For example, make every roof in the United States white.  Spend bailout money for labor and materials to Re-roof the Nation, changing every single dark-roofed structure in the country, using ONLY U.S. manufactured materials and union family-wage labor.  This simple action will significantly lower the planetary temperature, and start the nation moving on the rehabilitation and restoration of our environment.

Get real.  Quit subsidizing the poisonous consumer culture.  Why do we support a consumption-based capitalist system?  Why are there no options to lifetime indenture to a corporate behemoth?  Why are we dutifully trudging forward on a downward path to oblivion?  Why are we giving up, surrendering individuality, self-sufficiency, and independent living for a voluntary enslavement to a destructive ethos that is killing the planet?

Why are our leaders so clueless?  The facts are plain, the evidence overwhelming, and the results self-evident before our very eyes.  We’ve flunked any “stewardship of the earth” test in favor of an “eat everything in sight” survival panic.  We have overgrazed our range.  Starvation may finally depopulate our habitat.  Climate change may cleanse it via our extinction.  Hopefully, tenacious life will find a new way with a new shepherd who truly minds the flock, instead of one whose only thought is to fleece and eat it.  JL/12-09

https://johnlegry.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/how-to-fight-corporatists-reprise/

10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You By Scott Thill, AlterNet.

Tired of getting pushed around by faceless big business? Here are 10 ways to push back!

Our global culture is rife with users, and we just sit back and take it.  No more.  Drop these bombs.  You’ll get change faster than you can say, “Teabag this!”

1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.  You’ll end up there anyway when your suburb runs out of water and malls.  One can have a good credit rating again — meaning above 660 — within two years after a foreclosure.

2. Unplug your cable. The easiest way to kill the so-called news networks is to cut them off at their enablers.  Pull your cable bill’s plug, or shut down your satellite.  Cable companies balk at offering channels on an a la carte basis and instead raise the price of their mediocre bundled offerings.  You don’t need old-school TV anymore.  In our digital age, you can go online for news and entertainment.  Streaming video sites like YouTube, or torrents, which are the future now, offer most favorites.  The BitTorrent protocol houses the people’s media library, dedicated not just to pimping out the same crap seen on network and cable, but often stunning artistry left for dead by the side of the mainstream.  Murdoch and other media asshats will hate you for unsubscribing, but you won’t miss 80 percent of the shit you watched when it’s gone.

3. Kill your landline. Chances are, your carrier is a privacy sellout you’re already paying double.  If you have a cell account, you don’t need a landline, so they’re just jacking you for money.  Nowadays, there are easier ways to chat up your pals, from Twitter and Facebook to Apple’s iChat, for free, riding the Internet.  Bottom line? Landlines are just ways to chain your wallet to the wall.

4. Reacquire your wealth. The easiest way for the Federal Reserve to pick your pocket is through your accounts and investments, which can be liquidated in the blink of a discount window‘s eye.  Withdraw cash, close accounts, and take it somewhere besides Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase or another bailout addict.  Right now, worry about another economic clusterfuck.  Banks left standing after the financial crashes are fatter than ever, hoarding cash instead of lending it to survive the next crisis they have already priced into the market.  Thanks to Congress, the Fed and the last two administrations, they’ve got your cash sitting in their vaults, whistling while they wait.  Take it out.

5. Pacify your portfolio.  Chances are you still own a retirement or investment portfolio. If you haven’t checked it out recently, chances are it’s poisoned by hyperleveraged funds invested in oil, housing, malls, SUVs or a shady Ponzi scheme.  Get out now, unless you want to be a dick about it.  Commodities like oil and food are hot, but they’re infested by destructive speculators.

The easiest way to make change in capitalism is by manipulating your money.  Make sure your retirement isn’t invested in Exxon or worse.  Put your money in solar stocks, and forward-looking investments, if you must fund anything.  In capitalism, you are what you pay for, not what you say about what you pay for.

6. Take credit. If you have more than two credit cards, you’re simply asking for trouble.  Scoring over $38 billion in corrupt overdraft fees and dragging their well-heeled feet on foreclosure modifications, banks aren’t done squeezing the public out of its last pennies.  Stop them, cut off the money.  No extra credit?  Great, no extra crap.  Pay off the cards you keep by any means necessary, and then pay off monthly.  That pisses off credit card companies no end.

7. Avoid CDs and DVDs: At least, stuff that isn’t in collectible form.  There is still a place for material goods in our mounting environmental chaos, but it is shrinking fast, like natural resources.  Discs are wasteful and obsolete; plastic uses oil, paper uses trees and water.  You can get anything you want these days online.  CDs and DVDs are the easiest fat to axe.

8. Stop buying bottled water, factory-farmed beef and new cars, especially hybrids.  The first offense is an oil industry bailout, the second is a climate-change massacre, and the third is a waste of time and money.  Electric cars will be here soon; walk or use public transportation until then.  Have to drive miles to work? Consider how much it costs, and add that to the paycheck you could get closer to home.  Our climate crisis demands that we kill as many emissions as possible to keep the planet from overheating.  A few more degrees and we could be looking at outright extinction of the human race.  Ergo, also decrease the amount of methane farted out by hordes of cows in Cow-schwitzes across America.  If you think carbon dioxide is a killer, it’s nothing compared to methane.  Throw in the heresy of using oil to make plastic bottles to store the same water that’s no more pristine than what’s already in your tap, and you have the hat trick from hell.  If you can do only one thing on this admittedly ambitious list, do these three things for instant impact.

9. Do not watch whiny bitches.  Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and other compromised gossips ranting about everything from Tiger Woods to Barack Hussein Obama are a waste of everyone’s time, except of course the people who pay them to spout their nonsense, and those who watch it to confirm their already mindless prejudices and political objectives.  Spend your time reading and ranting about more important matters.  Like your sex life.

10. Start or join a third party. “You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”  Our country is run by a single party comprised of political animals assembling on the fence.  They will do whatever they can to stay in power, even if it is madness.

The two-party system you have today is already a three-party system, housing a well-meaning minority, middle-way sellouts and batshit loonies.  Someone needs to babysit all those kids.  Why not you?  Worried about leaving your party?  Don’t be; it already left you.  READ MORE:

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144679/10_ways_to_screw_over_the_corporate_jackals_who%27ve_been_screwing_you?page=entire

Here are some good ways to fight back and unplug from the corporatist state.  

10 Ways to Stop Corporate Dominance of Politics** (Adapted abstract from Fran Korten, YES! Magazine – Link below).

The Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in politics is outrageous.  What can be done?  10 ideas:

1.   Amend U.S. Constitution to declare that corporations are not persons and do not have the rights of human beings.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards and constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin speak out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and call for a mass movement of people to support a constitutional amendment. Visit FreeSpeechforPeople.orgto learn more and get involved!

READ MORE:http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/145361/a_constitutional_amendment_to_wrench_control_away_from_the_corporations/

2.   Require shareholders to approve political spending by their corporations. Britain has required shareholder approval since 2000.

Thomas Paine, American patriot and author warned us to watch, guide, and stop the powerful elite if we want humanity in general to succeed.  Paine proposed that any bill that enriches a corporation or grants a corporate charter should be enacted in one session of the legislature, and confirmed in a second, AFTER A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE, to stop corporate raids on the public treasury.

READ MORE: https://johnlegry.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/independence-day-2009/

3.    Pass Fair Elections Now Act for federal financing for Congressional elections.

4.    Give qualified candidates equal amounts of free broadcast air time.

We need a reformed public ownership of uncensored airwaves, subject to strong democratic citizen oversight.  Free PBS and the Wilson Center!

5.    Ban political advertising by corporations that receive government money, hire lobbyists, or collect most of their revenue abroad.

6.    Impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.  Representative Alan Grayson (D-Florida) proposes this, calling it “The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act.”

7.    Prohibit companies from trading their stock on national exchanges if they make political contributions and expenditures.  Another Grayson, which he calls “The Public Company Responsibility Act.”

8.    Require publicly traded companies to disclose in SEC filings money used to influence public opinion.  Grayson calls this “The Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act.”

READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/politics/145339/grayson%3A_fight_now_or_%27kiss_your_country_goodbye%27_to_exxon%2C_wal-mart

9.    Require the corporate CEO to appear as sponsor of political commercials that his or her company pays for.  A personal favorite: let’s see these sleezebags shill their own dirty work.

10.  Publicize reform options, inform the public of who is making contributions to whom, and activate the citizenry.  Citizens must act.  Grassroots anger at corporate power is high, and when the public is angry, action is inevitable.

Fran Korten, “10 Ways to Stop Corporate dominance of Politics”

TEABAGGER MEMORIAL

HOW TO FIGHT CORPORATISTS

Mr. Pugger at the T.V.

Repeata por favor: WHY?

Word is that jobs – employment – and the economy are the priority.  Global warming and climate change must take a back seat.  However, one isn’t exclusive of the other.  The two are compatible and complementary.

For example, make every roof in the United States white.  Spend bailout money for labor and materials to Re-roof the Nation, changing every single dark-roofed structure in the country, using ONLY U.S. manufactured materials and union family-wage labor.  This simple action will significantly lower the planetary temperature, and start the nation moving on the rehabilatation and restoration of our environment.

Get real.  Quit subsidizing the poisonous consumer culture.  Why do we support a consumption-based capitalist system?  Why are there no options to lifetime indenture to a corporate behemoth?  Why are we dutifully trudging forward on a downward path to oblivion?  Why are we giving up, surrendering individuality, self-sufficiency, and independent living for a voluntary enslavement to a destructive ethos that is killing the planet?

Why are our leaders so clueless?  The facts are plain, the evidence overwhelming, and the results self-evident before our very eyes.  We’ve flunked any “stewardship of the earth” test in favor of an “eat everything in sight” survival panic.  We have overgrazed our range.  Starvation may finally depopulate our habitat.  Climate change may cleanse it via our extinction.  Hopefully, tenacious life will find a new way with a new shepherd who truly minds the flock, instead of one whose only thought is to fleece and eat it.  JL/12-09

Here are some good ways to fight back and unplug from the corporatist state.  

10 Ways to Stop Corporate Dominance of Politics** (Adapted abstract from Fran Korten, YES! Magazine – Link below).

The Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in politics is outrageous.  What can be done?  10 ideas:

1.   Amend U.S. Constitution to declare that corporations are not persons and do not have the rights of human beings.

Congresswoman Donna Edwards and constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin speak out against the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC and call for a mass movement of people to support a constitutional amendment. Visit FreeSpeechforPeople.org to learn more and get involved! READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/rights/145361/a_constitutional_amendment_to_wrench_control_away_from_the_corporations/

2.   Require shareholders to approve political spending by their corporations. Britain has required shareholder approval since 2000.

Thomas Paine, American patriot and author warned us to watch, guide, and stop the powerful elite if we want humanity in general to succeed.  Paine proposed that any bill that enriches a corporation or grants a corporate charter should be enacted in one session of the legislature, and confirmed in a second, AFTER A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE, to stop corporate raids on the public treasury.  READ MORE: https://johnlegry.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/independence-day-2009/

3.    Pass Fair Elections Now Act for federal financing for Congressional elections.

4.    Give qualified candidates equal amounts of free broadcast air time.

We need a reformed public ownership of uncensored airwaves, subject to strong democratic citizen oversight.  Free PBS and the Wilson Center!

5.    Ban political advertising by corporations that receive government money, hire lobbyists, or collect most of their revenue abroad.

6.    Impose a 500 percent excise tax on corporate contributions to political committees and corporate expenditures on political advocacy campaigns.  Representative Alan Grayson (D-Florida) proposes this, calling it “The Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act.”

7.    Prohibit companies from trading their stock on national exchanges if they make political contributions and expenditures.  Another Grayson, which he calls “The Public Company Responsibility Act.”

8.    Require publicly traded companies to disclose in SEC filings money used to influence public opinion.  Grayson calls this “The Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act.”

More details are available on the congressman’s Web site. READ MORE: http://www.alternet.org/politics/145339/grayson%3A_fight_now_or_%27kiss_your_country_goodbye%27_to_exxon%2C_wal-mart

9.    Require the corporate CEO to appear as sponsor of political commercials that his or her company pays for.  A personal favorite: let’s see these sleezebags shill their own dirty work.

10.  Publicize reform options, inform the public of who is making contributions to whom, and activate the citizenry.  Citizens must act.  Grassroots anger at corporate power is high, and when the public is angry, action is inevitable.

** READ MORE: Fran Korten, YES! Magazine http://www.alternet.org/rights/145441/10_ways_to_stop_corporate_dominance_of_politics

10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You By Scott Thill, AlterNet.

Tired of getting pushed around by faceless big business? Here are 10 ways to push back!

Our global culture is rife with users, and we just sit back and take it.  No more.  Drop these bombs.  You’ll get change faster than you can say, “Teabag this!”

1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.  You’ll end up there anyway when your suburb runs out of water and malls.  One can have a good credit rating again — meaning above 660 — within two years after a foreclosure.

2. Unplug your cable. The easiest way to kill the so-called news networks is to cut them off at their enablers.  Pull your cable bill’s plug, or shut down your satellite.  Cable companies balk at offering channels on an a la carte basis and instead raise the price of their mediocre bundled offerings.  You don’t need old-school TV anymore.  In our digital age, you can go online for news and entertainment.  Streaming video sites like YouTube, or torrents, which are the future now, offer most favorites.  The BitTorrent protocol houses the people’s media library, dedicated not just to pimping out the same crap seen on network and cable, but often stunning artistry left for dead by the side of the mainstream.  Murdoch and other media asshats will hate you for unsubscribing, but you won’t miss 80 percent of the shit you watched when it’s gone.

3. Kill your landline. Chances are, your carrier is a privacy sellout you’re already paying double.  If you have a cell account, you don’t need a landline, so they’re just jacking you for money.  Nowadays, there are easier ways to chat up your pals, from Twitter and Facebook to Apple’s iChat, for free, riding the Internet.  Bottom line? Landlines are just ways to chain your wallet to the wall.

4. Reacquire your wealth. The easiest way for the Federal Reserve to pick your pocket is through your accounts and investments, which can be liquidated in the blink of a discount window‘s eye.  Withdraw cash, close accounts, and take it somewhere besides Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase or another bailout addict.  Right now, worry about another economic clusterfuck.  Banks left standing after the financial crashes are fatter than ever, hoarding cash instead of lending it to survive the next crisis they have already priced into the market.  Thanks to Congress, the Fed and the last two administrations, they’ve got your cash sitting in their vaults, whistling while they wait.  Take it out.

5. Pacify your portfolio.  Chances are you still own a retirement or investment portfolio. If you haven’t checked it out recently, chances are it’s poisoned by hyperleveraged funds invested in oil, housing, malls, SUVs or a shady Ponzi scheme.  Get out now, unless you want to be a dick about it.  Commodities like oil and food are hot, but they’re infested by destructive speculators.

The easiest way to make change in capitalism is by manipulating your money.  Make sure your retirement isn’t invested in Exxon or worse.  Put your money in solar stocks, and forward-looking investments, if you must fund anything.  In capitalism, you are what you pay for, not what you say about what you pay for.

6. Take credit. If you have more than two credit cards, you’re simply asking for trouble.  Scoring over $38 billion in corrupt overdraft fees and dragging their well-heeled feet on foreclosure modifications, banks aren’t done squeezing the public out of its last pennies.  Stop them, cut off the money.  No extra credit?  Great, no extra crap.  Pay off the cards you keep by any means necessary, and then pay off monthly.  That pisses off credit card companies no end.

7. Avoid CDs and DVDs: At least, stuff that isn’t in collectible form.  There is still a place for material goods in our mounting environmental chaos, but it is shrinking fast, like natural resources.  Discs are wasteful and obsolete; plastic uses oil, paper uses trees and water.  You can get anything you want these days online.  CDs and DVDs are the easiest fat to axe.

8. Stop buying bottled water, factory-farmed beef and new cars, especially hybrids.  The first offense is an oil industry bailout, the second is a climate-change massacre, and the third is a waste of time and money.  Electric cars will be here soon; walk or use public transportation until then.  Have to drive miles to work? Consider how much it costs, and add that to the paycheck you could get closer to home.  Our climate crisis demands that we kill as many emissions as possible to keep the planet from overheating.  A few more degrees and we could be looking at outright extinction of the human race.  Ergo, also decrease the amount of methane farted out by hordes of cows in Cow-schwitzes across America.  If you think carbon dioxide is a killer, it’s nothing compared to methane.  Throw in the heresy of using oil to make plastic bottles to store the same water that’s no more pristine than what’s already in your tap, and you have the hat trick from hell.  If you can do only one thing on this admittedly ambitious list, do these three things for instant impact.

9. Do not watch whiny bitches.  Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and other compromised gossips ranting about everything from Tiger Woods to Barack Hussein Obama are a waste of everyone’s time, except of course the people who pay them to spout their nonsense, and those who watch it to confirm their already mindless prejudices and political objectives.  Spend your time reading and ranting about more important matters.  Like your sex life.

10. Start or join a third party. “You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”  Our country is run by a single party comprised of political animals assembling on the fence.  They will do whatever they can to stay in power, even if it is madness.

The two-party system you have today is already a three-party system, housing a well-meaning minority, middle-way sellouts and batshit loonies.  Someone needs to babysit all those kids.  Why not you?  Worried about leaving your party?  Don’t be; it already left you.  READ MORE:

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/144679/10_ways_to_screw_over_the_corporate_jackals_who%27ve_been_screwing_you?page=entire

TEABAGGER MEMORIAL

“We the Corporations”

He worked for one nation indivisible.

 The merger of corporations with the state is Mussolini’s original definition of fascism.  Look it up.

IMPEACH THE SUPREME COURT FIVE!

“We the corporations”

On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law. In a democracy, the people rule.

We Move to Amend.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to:

• Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.
• Guarantee the right to vote and to participate, and to have our votes and participation count.
• Protect local communities, their economies, and democracies against illegitimate “preemption” actions by global, national, and state governments.

Signed by 66,763 and counting . . .  CONTACT: http://www.movetoamend.org/

Bust Up the Health Insurance Trusts February 25, 2010 by Robert Reich’s Blog by Robert Reich

Years ago I worked at an agency in Washington called the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC predates the New Deal. It was set up in 1914 during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, at a time when many of America’s industries had combined into giant trusts that had enormous market and political power. The FTC was designed to root out such unfair practices. It ought to take on the health insurance trusts. A few weeks back I mentioned that my health insurer here in California is Anthem Blue Cross. So far, my group policy hasn’t been affected by Anthem’s planned rate increase of as much as 39 percent for its customers with individual policies — but the trend worries me, as it should everyone. Rates are soaring all over the country. Insurers have been seeking to raise premiums 24 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 20 percent in Oregon and a wallet-popping 56 percent in Michigan. How can insurers raise prices as much as they want without fear of losing customers?

Astonishingly, the health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws, which is why a handful of insurers have become so dominant in their markets that their customers simply have nowhere else to go. But that protection might soon end: President Obama on Tuesday announced his support of a House bill that would repeal health insurers’ antitrust exemption, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled that she would put it toward an immediate vote. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/02/25-3 

US Banks Veto ‘Socialist Pay’ in Secret Talks February 28, 2010 by the Independent/UK by Margareta Pagano

America’s top bankers quashed attempts by their British counterparts to persuade the industry to bring down salaries in response to public outrage after the world’s governments spent billions rescuing the system.

Chief executives from the world’s banks discussed the plans at a secret dinner held at Claridge’s, the London hotel, last October, at which several leading British bankers are said to have suggested that the sector should take greater responsibility for its part in the crash, and do more to reduce the vast bonuses paid to staff.

But the recommendations were met by stiff opposition from the US banks JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, according to one source. “Some of the US bankers were furious about attempts to reduce pay throughout the industry, arguing that any such move smacked of socialism and would be fiercely resisted,” the source said on Friday. “It’s not the way the Americans like to go about their business.”  READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/28

GOP to the Unemployed: Drop Dead (You Bums) March 1, 2010 by Unsilent Generation by James Ridgeway

On Sunday, unemployment benefits officially ended for hundreds of thousands of Americans, thanks to maneuverings by Senate Republicans to prevent a vote that would have extended those benefits. Unless the extension is passed soon, some 1.1 million of the nation’s unemployed will see their unemployment expire in the coming month, and 5 million will lose benefits by June.

The House finally voted to extend benefits on Thursday, after several days of stalling and posturing. But in the Senate, the measure was blocked by Kentucky’s Jim Bunning. Politico reported that late into Thursday night, Bunning held out against repeated Democratic attempts to pass the extension by unanimous consent. In response to entreaties from colleagues across the aisle, other Republican senators rose to defend Bunning’s right to obstruct the vote, and Bunning himself was heard to utter, “Tough shit.” READ MORE:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/01-3

Ralph Nader Was Right About Barack Obama March 1, 2010 by TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives. 

Obama lies as cravenly, if not as crudely, as George W. Bush. He promised us that the transfer of $12.8 trillion in taxpayer money to Wall Street would open up credit and lending to the average consumer. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), however, admitted last week that banks have reduced lending at the sharpest pace since 1942. As a senator, Obama promised he would filibuster amendments to the FISA Reform Act that retroactively made legal the wiretapping and monitoring of millions of American citizens without warrant; instead he supported passage of the loathsome legislation. He told us he would withdraw American troops from Iraq, close the detention facility at Guantánamo, end torture, restore civil liberties such as habeas corpus and create new jobs. None of this has happened. READ MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/01-0

Thomas Paine - Author-Patriot, 1737-1809.