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Here is a link to what I found to be a great article. It’s quite long, 30 pages, kind of like a short story - a non-fiction horror story. It’s an analysis of financial terrorism and it explains to some degree the process by which global bankers plunder nations.
It wasn’t a lot of new material exactly, but it cleared up a lot of stuff for me. It connected a lot of dots. Maybe someone else will get something out of it as well. If it wasn't so long I would have posted the whole article because i've noticed that sometimes just a post with a link can get lost. Oh well here's hoping... http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/07/15/167/
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Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue
by Barbara Ehrenreich As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. Large numbers of people must be fed and kept reasonably warm and dry. Trash has to be removed; medical care and rudimentary security provided -- to which ends a dozen or more committees may toil night and day. But for the individual occupier, one problem often overshadows everything else, including job loss, the destruction of the middle class, and the reign of the 1%. And that is the single question: Where am I going to pee? Some of the Occupy Wall Street encampments now spreading across the U.S. have access to Port-o-Potties (Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C.) or, better yet, restrooms with sinks and running water (Fort Wayne, Indiana). Others require their residents to forage on their own. At Zuccotti Park, just blocks from Wall Street, this means long waits for the restroom at a nearby Burger King or somewhat shorter ones at a Starbucks a block away. At McPherson Square in D.C., a twenty-something occupier showed me the pizza parlor where she can cop a pee during the hours it’s open, as well as the alley where she crouches late at night. Anyone with restroom-related issues -- arising from age, pregnancy, prostate problems, or irritable bowel syndrome -- should prepare to join the revolution in diapers. Of course, political protesters do not face the challenges of urban camping alone. Homeless people confront the same issues every day: how to scrape together meals, keep warm at night by covering themselves with cardboard or tarp, and relieve themselves without committing a crime. Public restrooms are sparse in American cities -- "as if the need to go to the bathroom does not exist," travel expert Arthur Frommer once observed. And yet to yield to bladder pressure is to risk arrest. A report entitled “Criminalizing Crisis,” to be released later this month by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, recounts the following story from Wenatchee, Washington: "Toward the end of 2010, a family of two parents and three children that had been experiencing homelessness for a year and a half applied for a 2-bedroom apartment. The day before a scheduled meeting with the apartment manager during the final stages of acquiring the lease, the father of the family was arrested for public urination. The arrest occurred at an hour when no public restrooms were available for use. Due to the arrest, the father was unable to make the appointment with the apartment manager and the property was rented out to another person. As of March 2011, the family was still homeless and searching for housing." What the Occupy Wall Streeters are beginning to discover, and homeless people have known all along, is that most ordinary, biologically necessary activities are illegal when performed in American streets -- not just peeing, but sitting, lying down, and sleeping. While the laws vary from city to city, one of the harshest is in Sarasota, Florida, which passed an ordinance in 2005 that makes it illegal to “engage in digging or earth-breaking activities” -- that is, to build a latrine -- cook, make a fire, or be asleep and “when awakened state that he or she has no other place to live.” It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens. The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Wal-Mart. As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy” -- the stock brokers and investment bankers -- were highly sensitive, one might say finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows” or “quality of life” ordinances making it dangerous for the homeless to loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces. No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown -- the deaths from cold and exposure -- but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina: "During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day because she would be ‘squatting.’ In early 2011, about six months into her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a hospital, and delivered a stillborn child." Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be distributed, latrines dug, rules -- such as no drugs, weapons, or violence -- enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement. There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless -- no signs denouncing greed or visits from leftwing luminaries -- but they have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA. All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.” What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine, their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn. But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks that slope downwards -- from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure -- leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’ couches or parents’ folding beds. In Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed -- the 99%, or at least the 70%, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work school teacher, and impoverished senior -- unless this revolution succeeds.
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#424 |
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"It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens....All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”
Frightening the lines that have already been drawn. Ehrenreich is brilliant, and she's been forecasting this movement for some time with seminal works like Nickel and Dimed. [QUOTE=Miss Tick;445066][B]Throw Them Out With the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue by Barbara Ehrenreich As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up..." |
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This is an excerpt from a work in progress that "plans on examining the nature, ideas, and institutions of power in our world, and to prepare a blueprint for change. That blueprint is The People’s Book Project."
I thought it was interesting. "While the Global Political Awakening is a present reality in the world, the conditions for a true global revolution and challenge to the global power structures has yet to manifest itself. There are movements in different places, through different peoples, with differing ideas, but they are not yet united in aim, ideology, or action. The elite are seeking to establish a system and structure of global government, and are working very hard to establish such consensus among the global elite, as well as to employ specific strategies of action to effect such a change. We must do the same in order to counter this process. Living in the era of the ‘Technological Revolution’, we are faced with an unprecedented dichotomy, whereby we are in the circumstances where for the first time in all of human history, a truly global oppressive system and structure of governance is made possible, and simultaneously, for the first time in human history, a global resistance and revolution against power structures is made possible via the communication and information revolutions, with the ultimate potential for all of humanity to become free simultaneously. This is unprecedented. Never before have all of humanity had the possibility of achieving liberation at the same time. Thus, we have never truly had a liberated human society. This is both the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity that humanity has ever faced. The elite see these developments in the same context, but with the perspective reversed. The elite see the greatest opportunity they have ever faced in human history as being to achieve the actual construction of a global government, never before possible, but now made plausible through advancements in technology; they also see the greatest challenge they have ever collectively faced in human history as being from a globally aware, active, and philosophically united world population seeking liberation and freedom. The elite are articulating these realities, and attempting to strategize and plan actions based upon these concepts. Brzezinski is perhaps the best example of this, as he has been articulating the notion of the ‘Global Political Awakening’ for many years, and has traveled to several of the more prominent think tanks among the imperial nations, warning the elites of the true realities of the world in which they seek to operate and dominate. So too must the people of the world begin discussing these ideas, issues, and realities in order to establish consensus in understanding and initiatives for action. So long as we remain divided by artificial separations such as seeking change within the context of the ‘nation-state’ (as many in the anti-globalist movement seek a return to nationalism as a “solution”), which keeps them divided from the rest of the world. Only through solidarity of philosophy and action on the part of the world’s people may we come to actually and effectively create true change. The elite understand this. It’s time that we do too." http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2011/...cal-awakening/
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Jailed Occupy Chicago Protesters Describe Harsh Treatment By Police, Plan To Picket Rahm Emanuel's Office, HuffPo
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It occurs to me that the violence began when one person decided to get over on another, not with the resistance - peaceful, permitted or otherwise - to such a notion. We have to remember this - that the violence and offense lies in the inherent nature of greed.
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Easier said than done, shop local. Do not shop Wal-Mart or go to McDonald's. You can only shop local if there is local farmers. There are not a lot! I went to a local grocery store, but guess what, it gets it's food from the same place Wal-Mart does and it was more expensive. Farmers sell their product to Wal-Mart and other major grocery stores because there is money in it for them. Why sit outside at a farmer's market all day and hope for someone to buy their stuff when a grocery chain will buy in bulk and take all the crop. I worked wholesale meat and produce for 8 years. We bought bulk from farmers and sold to grocery stores, restaurants, and schools. So farmers stuff does actually make it into stores and around town and stays in the U.S. McDonalds buys their beef from local farmers. . . I also worked 6 years in beef production. We got our cattle from local feed lots, slaughtered them, cleaned them up and distributed the meat to McDonalds and other major restaurants and grocery chains. We even shipped to Japan and handled organic meat for the customers that wanted it. I worked Quality Assurance so I know what is in the meat and how safe it is when it comes out of a meat plant. I have taken many tours from where the cattle comes from to how it is slaughtered, packaged, and shipped. You may not want to shop Wal-Mart or McDonalds, however you should research where they actually get their product from because some of it is from local farmers and from the U.S. We may not like McDonalds and Wal-Mart but they do provide many jobs for people in the U.S. Just a thought..
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for public assistance. Are you following what the Occupy Wall Street is about Ruffryder? Walmart would be part of the 1%. Personally, I come here to see what is going on with the movement, what NEW idea's people have to contribute and to see what others are doing to affect change. Based on your post below....you are totally ok with the direction our country is going ? Including what the Walmarts of the world are doing. Let us have our space to discuss how we want to affect change, and you just keep doing the same old, same old. OK? |
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also, farmers are not making money selling to Walmart. they are just as trapped in that system as the consumer is. when a business like Walmart drives the prices down on everything, it's the farmer that eats that cut, not Walmart. so they end up getting caught in the grow more treadmill rather than the grow better sustainable life cycle because they have to grow more to make ends meet, if they can even do that. and they end up cutting corners, like migrant labor (which is a whole other discussion) that will work those thousands of acres of fields for well below minimum wage illegally. adding onto this...it's corporations like Walmart that have pushed, and got approved, the kinds of visas that allow people from other countries to come and work in agriculture that leads to illegals staying here after those visas have expired. it's actually NOT coming from hordes of people running across the border in the middle of the night. so there are huge impacts that institutions like Walmart represent that are grossly negative on the well being of the country as a whole, from immigration, to agriculture, to food laws, to economic depression and the list goes on and on. now farming organically is about 3 times as expensive (and that's a conservative number) as farming commercially. AND....out of season produce, i garauntee you, comes from other countries. the in season products that come from other countries are there because it's literally impossible for American farmers to produce those products for cheaper. their hands are tied. you can only drop the prices so much before you're out of business. which leads me to farm subsidies. what alot of people don't understand is that farming has become ONLY profitable IF it is subsidized. it's a hidden cost that most people aren't aware of. so when you get you paycheck, taxes taken out of your check go to subsidizing agriculture. the consumer is paying for that. THEN.....when you go to the store and you get an orange from Florida.... you're paying for that orange. again! but you're not complaining because that orange was only 50 cents. but how much have you already paid for that orange in the form of tax dollars? so what we have is this illusion of "cheap food" that really, isn't cheap at all. and we have no say in the matter....that's the real kick. AND....it's corps like Walmart that push for those ag subsidies, btw. they practically wrote them. so basically, corps like Walmart are deciding how our tax dollars are being spent for us. i dunno about you, but i kinda have a problem with that. oohhhh where do i start about the beef? *deep sigh* sooooooo.....once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there were some cows that became steak. i'm just kidding. this stuff depresses me. i need some humor. so what if it wasn't funny. so a couple decades ago there were roughly 5 meat corporations that owned somewhere around 20% of the beef supply...the remaining percentage was privately owned, ie cattle ranchers. today there are 4 that own 80 or 85% of that supply and there are less than six slaughter houses in the country that handles all of the nations commercial beef supply. during this time, monopolies (it's a theme here) emerged in the meat industry and in the name of driving prices down, we now have feedlots, injections, subsidized commercial corn (means it's not fit for human consumption) being fed to cows, and all kinds of shady dealings like cutting labor corners (insert illegal immigrant here) so that Walmart can sell beef at a certain price. see where i'm going with this? production in slaughterhouses have tripled because the beef industry, like the farmers, have to now produce in bulk to turn a profit. they're not making a whole lot of money either, or else they wouldn't need to produce in bulk. feedlots are a nightmare to the environment, as well. it creates a host of disease problems, a host of environmental problems, and it's a system entirely dependent on oil to work. all of which are bad and not sustainable forever. can i talk about McDonalds for a sec? the "beef" that makes up a McDs patty is actually the bits that are sent to a factory that (is also entirely dependent on oil) specializes in grinding them all up and then spraying it all with ammonia, wrapping it in plastic and shipping it out to your neighborhood drive thru. mmmm delish. a McD's burger bun has a grotesque amount of ingredients in it (like 80 i'm not kidding). i'm using the bun as an example, but that's basically the theme for the entire menu. it's not actually food. it's ....something ...else.....that is designed to taste and look like food. colleges offer degrees in this stuff. you can get a bachelor's in "food sciences" and then go to work for Kraft for 100 grand a year trying to make cheese that will never mold. or a bun that looks like bread but actually isn't. but no one offers a bachelors in sustainable agriculture. coincidence? i think not. ok what's next. oohhh quality assurance. i love this one. i cannot count how many times there has been a meat (of sort) recall in the past ten years there has been that many. and they've been huge, too...like in the millions of pounds kind of thing....not like oops we dropped a side of beef on the floor and it contaminated 300 pounds of beef, no. millions of pounds. millions! that's an astounding number to me. i think the most recent one was ground turkey. the one that sticks out, though, was the one that woke me up and that was 2 million pounds of ground beef that was recalled and it stopped me cold from buying commercial ground beef and i took my son off the school lunch program. children have died eating commercial beef in america. DIED. so please tell me about quality assurance. i would looooovvveeee to know more and i'm not being sarcastic at all. on side note, the beef industry had legislation passed that actually permits slaughterhouses that keep having "issues" from shutting down while also keeping the public from being able to sue them. i gotta say, i'm not feeling super confident about any quality assurances that might be in place, as you say. cuz....the proof is in the pudding, man. you can't deny that massive and commonly occuring meat recalls in this nation is a good example of quality nor is it very assuring. |
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For any of you who still shop at Walmart, PLEASE watch this documentary so you can at least be an INFORMED consumer.
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Occupy the Food System!
by Eric Holt-Giménez and Tanya Kerssen In the past few weeks, the U.S. Food Movement has made its presence felt in Occupy Wall Street. Voices from food justice organizations across the country are connecting the dots between hunger, diet-related diseases and the unchecked power of Wall Street investors and corporations (See Tom Philppot's excellent article in Mother Jones). This is very fertile ground. On one hand, the Food Movement's practical alternatives to industrial food are rooted at the base of our economic system. Its activities are key to building the alternative, localized economies being called for by Occupy Wall Street. On the other hand, Occupy provides a space for the Food Movement to politicize its collective agenda and scale-up community-based solutions by changing the rules that govern local economies. Of course, in the U.S., what we refer to as the "food movement" is really more of a loose "food network" of non-profit organizations and community groups (CSAs, food policy councils, community gardens, etc) with a sprinkling of bona-fide family farmer organizations and food worker organizations. There's nothing wrong with this. The network has blossomed over the past decade, creating an amazing social infrastructure that is actively using the food system to make us healthier and happier. In the Food Movement we re-learn and re-invent ways of farming, cooking and eating. In doing so, we put back in the social, economic and cultural values robbed by the industrial food system. But if the community gardens, CSAs, farm-to-school programs and sustainable family farms in the Food Movement are so great why isn't everyone doing it? The simple answer is, because the rules and institutions governing our food system -- Wall Street, the U.S. Farm Bill, the World Trade Organization and the USDA -- all favor the global monopolies controlling the world's seeds, food processing, distribution and retail. This should come as no surprise, the "revolving door" between government and corporate food monopolies is alive and well, and goes back decades. But it means it's unlikely that the Food Movement's alternatives will ever become the norm rather than the alternative fringe -- unless the Food Movement can change the rules and institutions controlling our food. To do that, the Food Movement needs politicizing. Why? Hasn't it worked to improve school food, legalize urban chickens and reform the farm bill? Indeed, it has made important strides in impacting food policy. But many community food organizations have become dependent on the diminishing funding streams from the very foundations that helped them get off the ground. The nation's economic downturn has further affected community organizations, forcing them to tighten belts, cut staff, eliminate programs and compete for scarce resources at a time when communities need them more than ever. This makes them vulnerable to cooptation. This is not to say that the organizations in the Food Movement don't deserve financial support. They do, and the existence of so many community food organizations is testament to positive cooperation with funders. But a broad-based movement is a different animal than an isolated community organization. For a movement, following a funding stream is the tail wagging the dog. Movements are about creating political will for the benefit of all. They converge, unifying and amplifying popular voices around a shared vision. Politically, movements cannot afford to be disarmed by money, silenced or divided. A movement to "occupy the food system" will need to put healthy food in our communities and community voices in places of power. A new, collective decision-making process is being fleshed out at Occupy sites across the country, and in the vibrant conversations on blogs, list servs and social media. It's about more than formulating "demands." As Naomi Klein commented in a recent visit to Food First, "Demands are about negotiation and compromise; this movement is articulating a broader vision." As the food movement moves into the new political spaces being opened up by Occupy Wall Street, a bold vision of food sovereignty is being crafted -- one in which food decisions, food resources and the food dollar are not controlled by Wall Street or by the food monopolies, but by local communities. This political "convergence in diversity" has the potential to take us from the strategies for survival to strategies for transformation. Another interesting article- http://motherjones.com/environment/2...-street?page=1
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OWS demand introduction of "Robin Hood" tax
Published: 25 October, 2011, 08:41 Edited: 25 October, 2011, 08:41 ![]() Occupy Wall Street activists have called for worldwide protests ahead of Saturday's G20 summit in France, demanding that the G20 leaders introduce a "Robin Hood" tax on high-finance transactions and currency trades by banks and institutions. Anti-corporate demonstrations are continuing across the US, despite tougher tactics from police, including mass arrests. In Chicago, 130 have been held and charged with camping out in a city park after closing time. Back in New York, where the rallies began over a month ago, dozens have been arrested in a police crackdown on activists in recent days. Author and activist David Swanson, who has been at the protests in Washington, believes neither the police nor the upcoming cold spell will stop the growing movement. “We are starting to hear talk from the police again that they are being pushed by someone in the administration higher up to drive us out of there. We’ll see what comes of that. We are not leaving,” he told RT. “We are protesting not just our government but its funders, its handlers, its think-tanks, and we are building a community and we are making decisions, and we are networking with the other ‘occupy’ movements around the country,” he said. “We’ll see what the police do and what the weather does to these occupations but, you know, the weather won’t shut down half of this country… and there are a lot of people camped out there that have no intention of ever leaving.” OCTOBER 29 – #ROBINHOOD GLOBAL MARCH This is a proposal for the general assemblies of the Occupy movement. Eight years ago, on February 15, 2003, upwards of 15 million people in sixty countries marched together to stop President Bush from invading Iraq … a huge chunk of humanity lived for one day without dead time and glimpsed the power of a united people's movement. Now we have an opportunity to repeat that performance on an even larger scale. On October 29, on the eve of the G20 Leaders Summit in France, let's the people of the world rise up and demand that our G20 leaders immediately impose a 1% #ROBINHOOD tax on all financial transactions and currency trades. Let's send them a clear message: We want you to slow down some of that $1.3-trillion easy money that's sloshing around the global casino each day – enough cash to fund every social program and environmental initiative in the world. Take this idea to your local general assembly and join your comrades in the streets on October 29. for the wild, Culture Jammers HQ
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JaGG, I hope you are still following us!!
Here is the revised *Obama Home Loan Program* as it was dubbed. I'm glad they did revisit this. (It didn't take long either!) http://www.governmentrefinanceassistance.com/ |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40ijx...ayer_embedded#!
Hartmann: What if I prove scientifically that 147 corps run the world? and if this is true do you really trust food sources, vaccinations and medical research? You can rebel against taxes because its an immediate tangible thing but the picture is much larger then that. Are you going to ignore it and keep on the way you have or become proactive in changing it?
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Next time one thinks of Vacationing in Hawaii, pause, watch this and reconsider how that supports the occupation of Hawaii.
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I just want to say that it seems like its just a handful of us who are regular posters in this thread, which saddens me. I wish we could get a lot more participation, because this movement is about ALL of us. Perhaps we can each pm our friends and invite them to join us here and participate?
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