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i've said many times that FICA is complete and utter bullshit. the same goes for other ratings agencies. |
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Bradley Manning came to mind when the first stirring of the National Defense Act thingy that encompasses all US citizens into the anti-terror threat started. i thought....hell hasn't it already happened to Bradley? christ. |
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and what happens when these are the jobs that are available? |
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yep. i skipped walmart. i only got ONE thing at target.
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Absolutely!
I have thought a lot about the fact that we all are going to have change some things in order to really support the working and middle classes economically. As long as we buy like crazy from big box and large chains that import from countries like China, we contribute to large, publically traded corporations. Then, there are the arguments about stores like WalMart bringing jobs into locales. And major Japanese auto producers do now have plants in the US and employ US workers. It is a very complex balance, I think. I buy at independent businesses, but I live in a place near a major urban center, so I have choices. And I have made choices about this due to political ideology. I do pay a little more for things due to choosing the Mom & Pop businesses, but I am not raising a child any longer and only financially responsible for myself. I hate it that solar panels were designed and developed in the US and now are only produced in other countries and sold back to us. Even if you want these made in the USA, forget it. We do live in a global economy and do some of our own exporting. But, at the helm of trade, multi-national corporations hold the power. Yet, we don't want to give up less expensive products that frankly are most likely made by people in other countries paid very low wages and work in conditions that are inhumane. But, we keep buying these goods because they cost us less. Now, with the wage disparity in the US, I don't see us changing this much. People look for bargains, or at least a lower price because the 98% does not have much disposible income and it has been shrinking. There are many variables to look at about how we consume goods and how we can actually change things without harm to one or more segments of the kinds of work we do and where we do it. Just not simple. |
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i've never had personal experience with this...BUT....i've known a few people who work in large companies where the old non chinese boss gets replaced with a new chinese boss and then the non chinese people under him/her get laid off and chinese workers are hired in their place. i've seen this happen quite a few times to friends of mine. i'm not sure what relevance this has if any i just thought it was interesting. as for consumerism and chinese products....people have been ranting about buying American for decades now. but try actually doing it. it's near impossible. and the products on store shelves aren't the only things coming from China. for every one retail item there is ten times as many hidden products coming from China than the public is even aware of. Chinese honey (springs to mind from a different convo) comes here by the barrel full and it's not even legal. and we unwittingly buy it in plastic bears, cereals, and any processed food that claims to have honey in it because the labeling is all bullshit. we are drowning in much more Chinese imports than even we are aware of on the retail end. |
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How 2011 became the year of compassion: OWS didn't just reject unfair aspects of our economic system. It reclaimed the idea of communal solidarity
By Rebecca Solnit ![]() Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names and obliging the media and politicians to do the same. The breadth of this movement is one thing, its depth another. It has rejected not just the particulars of our economic system, but the whole set of moral and emotional assumptions on which it’s based. Take the pair shown in a photograph from Occupy Austin in Texas. The amiable-looking elderly woman is holding a sign whose computer-printed words say, “Money has stolen our vote.” The older man next to her with the baseball cap is holding a sign handwritten on cardboard that states, “We are our brothers’ keeper.” The photo of the two of them offers just a peek into a single moment in the remarkable period we’re living through and the astonishing movement that’s drawn in… well, if not 99 percent of us, then a striking enough percentage: everyone from teen pop superstar Miley Cyrus with her Occupy-homage video to Alaska Yup’ik elder Esther Green ice-fishing and holding a sign that says “Yirqa Kuik” in big letters, with the translation — “occupy the river” — in little ones below. The woman with the stolen-votes sign is referring to them. Her companion is talking about us, all of us, and our fundamental principles. His sign comes straight out of Genesis, a denial of what that competitive entrepreneur Cain said to God after foreclosing on his brother Abel’s life. He was not, he claimed, his brother’s keeper; we are not, he insisted, beholden to each other, but separate, isolated, each of us for ourselves. Think of Cain as the first Social Darwinist and this Occupier in Austin as his opposite, claiming, no, our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other. And this movement, he’s saying, is about what the Argentinian uprising that began a decade ago, on December 19, 2001, called politica afectiva, the politics of affection. If it’s a movement about love, it’s also about the money they so unjustly took, and continue to take, from us — and about the fact that, right now, money and love are at war with each other. After all, in the American heartland, people are beginning to be imprisoned for debt, while the Occupy movement is arguing for debt forgiveness, renegotiation and debt jubilees. Sometimes love, or at least decency, wins. One morning late last month, 75-year-old Josephine Tolbert, who ran a daycare center from her modest San Francisco home, returned after dropping a child off at school only to find that she and the other children were locked out because she was behind in her mortgage payments. True Compass LLC, who bought her place in a short sale while she thought she was still negotiating with Bank of America, would not allow her back into her home of almost four decades, even to get her medicines or diapers for the children. We demonstrated at her home and at True Compass’s shabby offices while they hid within, and students from Occupy San Francisco State University demonstrated outside a True Compass-owned restaurant on behalf of this African-American grandmother. Thanks to this solidarity and the media attention it garnered, Tolbert has collected her keys, moved back in and is renegotiating the terms of her mortgage. Hundreds of other foreclosure victims are now being defended by local branches of the Occupy movement, from West Oakland to North Minneapolis. As New York writer, filmmaker and Occupier Astra Taylor puts it, Not only does the occupation of abandoned foreclosed homes connect the dots between Wall Street and Main Street, it can also lead to swift and tangible victories, something movements desperately need for momentum to be maintained. The banks, it seems, are softer targets than one might expect because so many cases are rife with legal irregularities and outright criminality. With one in five homes facing foreclosure and filings showing no sign of slowing down in the next few years, the number of people touched by the mortgage crisis — whether because they have lost their homes or because their homes are now underwater — truly boggles the mind.” If what’s been happening locally and globally has some of the characteristics of an uprising, then there has never been one quite so pervasive — from the scientists holding an Occupy sign in Antarctica to Occupy presences in places as far-flung as New Zealand and Australia, São Paulo, Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Los Angeles and Reykjavik. And don’t forget the tiniest places, either. The other morning at the Oakland docks for the West Coast port shutdown demonstrations, I met three members of Occupy Amador County, a small rural area in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its largest town, Jackson, has a little over 4,000 inhabitants, which hasn’t stopped it from having regular outdoor Friday evening Occupy meetings. More at - http://www.salon.com/2011/12/22/how_...ion/singleton/ |
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http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2...de_given_p.php
Occupy L.A. "Occupy The Rose Parade" Given Permission To March At The End With The Crazies Article makes a good point- thinking about the mega-buck floats in this parade yearly sponsored by big corporations. Any thoughts? |
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While I understand the operatic appeal of this, I don't know that I believe that most parade watchers are really interested in reevaluating their political ideologies. I think they just want to see a parade. It also occurs to me that at some point I would like to see an America more focused on substance than fluff. I'm not sure that making your presence known and shown at the latter is very effective.
Occupying homes about to be foreclosed and small stores on the brink of bankruptcy and frankly small farms that are struggling to survive makes more sense to me. Two things I would like to see OWS be more prominently - 1) The best of America through volunteerism, activism and civil change. 2) The next of America through exactly the same. I volunteered in DC with a queer group called Burgundy Crescent which matched queer-identified volunteers with a wide variety of volunteer projects within and outside our community. I never regretted a single experience, and I thought we do more good work and fostered more goodwill than anything I had ever participated in. I think OWS could do the same and create goodwill and effect real change by ensuring that people stay in their homes, their businesses and on their farms. This kind of action is immediate, positive and effective. What do you think? Quote:
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I am glad that the actions of the autumn got the public's attention, but I believe that the changes we all need will only come from a MOVEMENT, and that takes a lot of community relationships. I think these modern times are being propelled by sound bite and spectacle, but I have been part of successful community organizing, and it took a lot of time, long conversations, and visible and invisible commitment to the long term. Kind of like any healthy relationship. I am happy to see the actions against foreclosures and in support of small businesses and farms. I think they will prove successful tactics.
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I’ve been mulling over the discussion of 3rd party candidates but haven’t had time to comment until now. I certainly think we would benefit from having more than just two parties/candidates to choose from. I do, however, think that most 3rd party Presidential undertakings are largely vanity campaigns (e.g. Nader in 2000) that effect very little positive change and can be damaging in a bunch of ways. They are damaging in that they help perpetuate the notion that 3rd party candidates are not (and by extension, never will be) viable candidates. But they are also damaging because, you know what, the lesser of two evils can still be a hell of a lot better than the greater of two evils.
I know a lot of other factors contributed to the results in 2000 (suspect counting in Florida, the archaic Electoral College system by which a candidate can get more votes and still lose, etc), but none of that would have mattered had Nader not been on the ticket. Gore would have won the state conclusively, even with only a portion of Nader’s 97,000+ Florida votes. With Gore in the White House, we don’t go to war in Iraq, and those thousands of lives and trillions of dollars would not have been needlessly squandered. With Gore in the White House maybe 9/11 is averted (the outgoing Clinton administration warned the incoming Bushies that Al-Qaeda was where they needed to focus their attention, the Bushies said, basically, "Fuck off.") but even if it isn't, do we honestly think Gore would have torched the subsequent global goodwill as quickly and thoroughly as Bush did? Or that Gore would have so shamelessly exploited the tragedy to militarize law enforcement, justify torture, etc? And those are just a few things off the top. Would the EPA have been defanged, or the response to Hurricane Katrina been so anemic, or the home loan mess/stock market crisis been handled the way it was? I think 3rd party Presidential candidates can play a valuable role even if they are not viable, as pot-stirrers. They can put questions on the table, or in some debates put them directly to the other candidates, that the two major parties would prefer to avoid and that the corporate media is uninterested in asking. But once that role has played itself out, they need to step out of the race unless there truly is so little difference between the two major party candidates that it literally does not matter which one wins (and when has that been true??). To remain in the race for the hell of it strikes me as ego and/or as a way to pad the future book deals and appearance fees. As I said, I think we would benefit from have viable 3rd (and 4th) party Presidential candidates. But we are far from that being realistic, and we are moving further from it, not closer. Campaign finance has always been a monumental hurdle for candidates outside the 2 parties, at least for those who are not billionaires, and that situation has only worsened with the easing of restrictions on corporate donations to campaigns. The Electoral College structure itself bolsters up the two party system and if no one candidate receives a majority of Electoral College votes (a plurality is not sufficient) then the House of Representatives choose a President. So a 3rd party candidate would have to win the EC outright, not just get more votes than any of the other candidates, because realistically the House is going to choose based on party affiliations rather than who received the most votes. That doesn't even address the fact that if an outsider somehow managed to win the Presidency, they would have few if any allies in the House and Senate and their ability to get things done with be severely compromised. So before we start getting too excited about the possibility of 3rd party Presidential candidates, I think we need to look at some serious, far-reaching campaign and election reform, and we need to focus on getting 3rd, 4th, and 5th party candidates into the House and Senate in noticeable numbers. That would yield immediate results because then neither of the two parties could count on gaining clear control of the House and Senate and they might be forced to engage in actual governing. Once those pieces are in place, I think we can start talking about a real 3rd party Presidency. |
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Dylan, MSNBC had one guy on, wish I could remember his name, independent and supported all the things I am for, like gmo lgbtqi rights and environmental regulations. But for the life of me I can't remember his name or his party. It's CRS folks, don't get old...
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"Many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners and your customs. We would be better pleased with beholding the good effects of these doctrines in your own practices, than with hearing you talk about them".
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Good article and info, Corkey. Thank you!
"In the next year, he'll have to harness both that experience and savvy for the task he has now set himself: launching a new political party, the Justice party, and running for president in 2012. His agenda is a familiar one on the left. Broadly speaking, he wants to break the hold of corrupting corporate influence on the two main parties and give a voice to ordinary working people. It also chimes with the general thrust of the Occupy movement, even though the latter has steered clear of engagement with electoral politics." Quote:
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But what you say about serious election reform is the number one thing that has to happen for any 3rd (or 4th, etc.) party to emerge and become viable. Our campaign funding as it is, especially post the Citizens United decision, must be changed in order for this to happen. It can only change with an amendment to the Constitution and that is a long haul plus, think of the lobbying that would go on to stop such an amendment. The 1 & 2% do not want such reform because they would lose the strong hold they have on politics. Bought and paid for. You get right to what really hinders our being able to assemble a 3rd party that could actually build momentum. Thanks. |
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75 Years Ago Today, the First Occupy ...a note from Michael Moore
Friday, December 30th, 2011 Friends, On this day, December 30th, in 1936 -- 75 years ago today -- hundreds of workers at the General Motors factories in Flint, Michigan, took over the facilities and occupied them for 44 days. My uncle was one of them. The workers couldn't take the abuse from the corporation any longer. Their working conditions, the slave wages, no vacation, no health care, no overtime -- it was do as you're told or get tossed onto the curb. So on the day before New Year's Eve, emboldened by the recent re-election of Franklin Roosevelt, they sat down on the job and refused to leave. They began their Occupation in the dead of winter. GM cut off the heat and water to the buildings. The police tried to raid the factories several times, to no avail. Even the National Guard was called in. But the workers held their ground, and after 44 days, the corporation gave in and recognized the UAW as the representative of the workers. It was a monumental historical moment as no other major company had ever been brought to its knees by their employees. Workers were given a raise to a dollar an hour -- and successful strikes and occupations spread like wildfire across the country. Finally, the working class would be able to do things like own their own homes, send their children to college, have time off and see a doctor without having to worry about paying. In Flint, Michigan, on this day in 1936, the middle class was born. Full article here: http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mi...y-first-occupy |
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Wondering about how important it might be to block as many GOP candidates from office on the way to building a viable 3rd Party? That way, at least less damage will be done to many of the core issues for the OWS movement.
Also involvement in local politics as a building block toward this aim. Just thinking about this- one for actual ways to see an actual path created that will speak to Occupy issues and solutions. There has to be a way to bring this movement to a place that effects real change. |
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