Tag Archives: politics

November 15, 2011 · 10:11 pm

House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable

Who wrote this law?  Herman Cain?

I think after this, we can safely classify the House GOP Caucus as a vegetable.

I’ve seen some idiotic bills come out of the GOP Caucus.  I’ve seen some blatant bills where it’s obvious payback to campaign contributors and lobbyists.

This is an excellent example of both.

From ThinkProgress.org:

Earlier this year, the USDA made an attempt to bolster the nutrition guidelines for the federal school lunch program. Under the new guidelines, for instance, school lunches would be limited to one cup of starchy vegetables a week and the ability of schools to count tomato sauce on pizza towards their fruit and vegetables requirement would be scaled back. But House Republicans, in a new spending plan unveiled yesterday, have done away with those changes:

The spending bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The department’s proposed guidelines would have attempted to prevent that.

The changes had been requested by food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers. Some conservatives in Congress have called the push for healthier foods an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat.

According to a bill summary released by Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee, these provisions are meant to “prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations.” What they will actually do is ensure that a steady flow of dollars continues toward certain favored food manufacturers, at the expense of children’s health.

“We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program,” said Amy Dawson Taggart, the director of Mission: Readiness, a group advocating for healthier school lunches. “It doesn’t take an advanced degree in nutrition to call this a national disgrace.”

via House GOP Classifies Pizza As A Vegetable To ‘Prevent Overly Burdensome’ School Lunch Regulations | ThinkProgress.

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November 15, 2011 · 8:57 pm

Colin Powell: Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations Are ‘As American As Apple Pie’

Seems he’s in the minority on this- at least among the GOP.

Mayor Bloomberg certainly doesn’t seem to agree with this opinion…

 

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are “as American as apple pie,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell said during a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. According to Powell, there is plenty of justification for the movement’s outrage, but also some reason for concern over its direction.

Powell began by recalling his upbringing in Harlem and the Bronx at a time when his parents didn’t make much, but were at least able to find stable employment.

“I don’t think either of them ever made more than 50 or 60 dollars a week,” Powell said. “Both my parents worked for as long as I can remember, they always worked, they always had work.”

But this sort of job stability is no longer present, the retired four-star Army general said, a fact that is now serving as a catalyzing force for the Occupy movement.

“People are concerned now that there is not that source of an income, there isn’t that work source that I remember,” Powell continued. “What you’re seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they’re directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.”

via Colin Powell: Occupy Wall Street Demonstrations Are ‘As American As Apple Pie’.

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November 15, 2011 · 8:24 pm

Cairo on the Hudson

I’ve been trying to follow the news about the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park.

The problem is, there isn’t any.  Or at least not much….

That is because New York Mayor Bloomberg is acting more like he runs Cairo than New York.

I still can’t quite believe he actually implied Freedom of Speech  and  Freedom of Assembly are situational, not intrinsic American Rights.

I still can’t believe he actually stopped the Media from covering the eviction by arresting journalists.

I can believe the mainstream media is not covering this as it is all Corporate owned now…

This is simply not the way things are supposed to work in America….

The actions of the Mayor of New York and the NYPD under his direction make Zucotti Park look like Cairo during the Arab spring or a potential Tiananmen Square.

These were not actions consistent with respect for Democracy and peaceful protest and assembly.

These were the actions of an oligarch protecting the assets of the 1%.  He moved against the many to protect the interests of the few.

He just proved the Occupy Wall Street movement is right- and very necessary…

Hopefully, this will only make the Occupy Wall Street movement grow stronger.

I’ll be watching nervously and hopefully.

This is scary stuff when Americans are treated this way by the Police and the agents of the Ruling Class….

Here is a report from reporter Josh Harkinson at Mother Jones.  I’m just trying to do my  bit to spread the news, since the mainstream media sure isn’t.

 

“Can I help you?” an burly officer asked me, his helpfulness belied by his scowl.

“I’m a reporter,” I told him.

“This is a frozen zone, all right?” he said, using a term I’d never heard before. “Just like them, you have to leave the area. If you do not, you will be subject to arrest.”

By then, riot police were moving in, indiscriminately dousing the peaceful protesters with what looked like pepper spray or some sort of gas. As people yelled and screamed and cried, I tried to stay calm.

“I promise to leave once the arrests are done,” I replied.

“This is a frozen zone,” one cop insisted. “You could be injured.” His meaning was clear.

“No, you are going to leave now.”

He grabbed my arm and began dragging me off. My shoes skidded across the park’s slimy granite floor. All around me, zip-cuffed occupiers writhed on the ground beneath a fog of chemicals.

“I just want to witness what is going on here,” I yelped.

“You can witness it with the rest of the press,” he said. Which, of course, meant not witnessing it.

“Why are you excluding the press from observing this?” I asked.

“Because this is a frozen zone. It’s a police action going on. You could be injured.”

His meaning was clear. I let myself be hustled across the street to the press pen.

“What’s your name?”

His reply came as fast as he could turn away: “Watch your back.”

 

via Exclusive Video: Inside Police Lines at the Occupy Wall Street Eviction | Mother Jones.

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November 10, 2011 · 8:06 pm

Wall Street Transaction Tax Would Raise $350 Billion

This makes way too much sense to ever become law….

This is not aimed at true investors, but rather at the Market manipulators who treat Wall Street much the way other gamblers treat Las Vegas…

Unfortunately, these same people, who would pay this miniscule tax, now own most of our Senators and Congressmen.  Therefore, they will say it’s better to cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security than to implement this transaction tax….

 

A minuscule tax on financial transactions proposed by congressional Democrats would raise more than $350 billion over the next nine years, according to an analysis by the Joint Tax Committee, a nonpartisan congressional scorekeeping panel.

The analysis was sent Monday to the offices of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the lawmakers who proposed the tax, and provided to The Huffington Post.

The Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act would impose a tax of 0.03 percent on financial transactions, meaning that longterm investors would barely notice it, but traders who move rapidly in and out of positions would feel its sting and, the authors hope, reduce the volume of their speculation in response.

via Wall Street Transaction Tax Would Raise $350 Billion.

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November 10, 2011 · 5:26 pm

Bank Of America Charges Debit Fees for Unemployment Benefits Debit Cards

This is just disgusting….

I can’t say this often enough:  If States, Federal and Local Governments are going to contract with these banks to manage Government Benefits, these contracts should specify that these banks cannot charge these poor people fees to use the benefits.

This is robbery of the poor and most vulnerable by the rich, politically powerful, government bailed-out banks who assume these people don’t have the power to fight back.

B of A already gets a percentage of each charge from the merchant.  That’s fine as that’s how the credit/debit card system is meant to work.  The cost is- or should be- built into consumer  pricing….

These additional fees are at the very least immoral and should be illegal.

I’ll say it again:  Bank of America is just plain evil….

From the Huffington Post:

Bank of America recently aborted plans to charge ordinary banking customers $5 a month to use their debit cards in the face of national outrage. But the bank has quietly continued to mine another source of fees: jobless people who depend upon the bank’s prepaid debit cards to tap their benefits. Bank of America and other financial firms — including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase — have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits in 41 states. These contracts typically allow banks to collect unlimited fees from merchants and consumers.

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Sue Berkowitz, director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, a Columbia nonprofit that represents low-income people facing foreclosure, food insecurity and other problems. “It should not cost you any more to use a debit card than if they had issued you a check.”

For the state, handing Bank of America responsibility for unemployment benefits secured cost savings, said Berkowitz, but they have come at vulnerable people’s expense.

via For Bank Of America, Debit Fees Extend To Unemployment Benefits.

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November 10, 2011 · 12:57 pm

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests

Brilliant article in “Rolling Stone” by Matt Taibbi.  Finally, someone truly both gets and can articulate the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Here is a very brief excerpt and a link to the full article.  I strongly encourage you to click the link and read the entire article.

It’s not very long, so don’t be afraid….

 

…Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It’s about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one’s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it’s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

via How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

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November 9, 2011 · 5:05 pm

National Review: Cain Is More “Authentically Black” Than Obama

I knew it was only a matter of time before the GOP started this…

They are so proud to have a Black Republican they just don’t know what to do….

All I can think of is Bernice on “Designing Women” when here dementia acts up and she starts singing “Black Man, Black Man”…..

From a great Mother Jones article critiquing this idiotic article in the National Review:

The comparison between Cain and Obama isn’t so much “volatile” as it is flattering to conservatives who, having latched onto Cain as a racial alibi, an explanation for the fact that the party of Lincoln hasn’t broken 20 percent of the black vote since Richard Nixon, desperately need a symbolic figure of racial absolution. The only time conservatives aren’t using trite arguments about black authenticity as an explanation for ongoing racial disparities is when they’re relying on them to show everyone how well they understand the soul of the Negro. Hanson doesn’t bother to explain how it is that the overwhelming majority of black people haven’t discerned that Barack Obama is a fraud and that Herman Cain is the second coming of Marcus Garvey, but that’s because their “brainwashed” opinions don’t actually matter. The sole purpose of establishing Cain’s racial authenticity, premised as it is on Hanson’s rather limited view of what constitutes “the black experience,” is for Hanson to flatter himself and his ideological allies as racially enlightened.

Link to full Story:   National Review: Cain Is More “Authentically Black” Than Obama | Mother Jones.

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November 4, 2011 · 6:47 pm

Occupy Wall Street More Popular Than Justin Bieber On Twitter

Well, there is some comfort here….

Occupy Wall Street is a serious, grass-roots uprising of normal citizens try to force society into recognizing and dealing with income inequality and the Corporate ownership of our government.

I guess that’s a little more important than some no-talent, plastic pre-pubescent “entertainer” who is a manufactured product of the very mass-produced culture generated by these corporations, strictly  to make money from gullible Americans, and forced down their throats via distribution, broadcast and media empires owned by said Corporations…

Besides, I’m still not convinced Justin Bieber isn’t really a 24 year-old Lesbian being marketed by the Corporations as a  teenage boy.

Call me cynical, but remember Milli Vanilli…

From Huffington Post:

The Occupy Wall Street movement topped Justin Bieber as the most popular story on Twitter, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Despite the teen heart-throb’s over 14 million Twitter followers, Occupy Wall Street was the top story on Twitter between October 24 and 28, followed by Bieber, who has made the New Media Index charts three times in the last five weeks. Steve Job’s death, the news of which broke October 6, came in third and the 2012 presidential elections ranked fourth.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was the third most popular news story on blogs (Bieber didn’t make the cut!) and the New Media Index notes that the protests “inspired very different conversations on blogs and Twitter.”

“On Twitter, the tone was markedly pro-protestor, with Twitter users sharing images and videos of police using tear gasduring protests in Oakland,” wrote the New Media Index in its report.

Recent analysis by Google found that search interest in Occupy Wall Street had waned slightly from its peak on October 15.

An NMIncite study released October 19 concluded that social media “buzz” about Occupy Wall Street “reached its peak on October 6th with 13,133 messages being posted in one day,” though the New Media Index’s findings suggest conversations about the movement are up again on Twitter.

Bieber enjoys such high popularity on Twitter that employees at the social media company have joked that the star has his own servers.

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter,” tweeted Dustin Curtis last year.

via Justin Bieber Less Popular Than Occupy Wall Street On Twitter.

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November 2, 2011 · 9:40 pm

Big Banks Extracting Fees On Unemployment Benefits

These big banks are just plain evil….

I was in BB&T last week and saw a sign saying they would charge either $8 or $12 to cash a check drawn on their bank for people without an account of their own.  That should be illegal.

And now I see this?

Evil… just plain evil.

If banks are going to administer Government benefits, they should be required, by contract, not to charge the people receiving the benefits.  They still make money from merchants when debit/credit cards are used and that’s fine.  It’s soaking the beneficiaries, who can least afford it, that is just plain wrong….

Evil…just plain evil.

I don’t know why anyone deals with these banks who doesn’t have to do so.  The rest of us should be moving our money out to Credit Unions or, at the very least, local community banks….

Out of work and living on a $189-a-week unemployment check, Rob Linville needs to watch every penny. Lately, he has been watching too many pennies disappear into the coffers of the bank that administers his unemployment check via a prepaid debit card.

The state of Oregon, where Linville lives, deposits his weekly benefits on a U.S. Bank prepaid debit card. The bank allows him to make four withdrawals per month free of charge. After that, he must pay $1.50 for each visit to the ATM and $3 to see a teller. Managing his basic expenses, including rent, bus fare and groceries, typically requires more than four withdrawals, he says. Unexpected needs — Linville recently bought a sport coat for $20 to prepare for a job interview — entail more. He’s afraid to withdraw his full benefits in one shot, knowing that the bank could sock him with a $17.50 overdraft fee if he exceeds his balance. So he pulls out small amounts of cash as he needs it, incurring about $15 in fees in the last two months he says.

“I’m so broke,” Linville said, his voice expressing resignation that this is simply how the world works. “But I don’t really have any other options.”

Across the nation, people receiving a range of state-furnished benefits — from unemployment insurance and food stamps to cash assistance for poor families — are facing similar options and reaching the same conclusion. In 41 states major banks and financial firms have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits via prepaid debit cards. And banks are increasingly extracting hefty cuts of these funds through an assortment of small fees. U.S. Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and other institutions hold contracts to distribute these benefits on prepaid debit cards.

via Banks Extract Fees On Unemployment Benefits.

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November 2, 2011 · 8:37 pm

The Median Net Worth Of A Member Of Congress Is Five Times Higher Than The Median American Household

And we wonder why they just don’t get it?

They live in an alternate universe!

These guys and gals live in a little bubble called Washington, DC, sheltered by their wealth, and have no idea how the real world operates…

Nothing will change as long as the Congress is run by the rich for the rich….

 

Part of the reason the richest 1 percent of Americans have captured our politics is because they are able to finance political races, issue campaigns, and lobbyists. But the other reason some of the richest Americans have been able to control our politics is because they themselves have gotten elected to positions of power at a much higher rate than the rest of us.

As Roll Call points out today, the estimated median net worth for a member of Congress in 2010 was $513,000 (this is strictly an estimate as assets are reported in ranges). Meanwhile, the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s David Rosnick points out that the net worth of the median household in the United States that same year was closer to $100,000:

via The Median Net Worth Of A Member Of Congress Is Five Times Higher Than The Median American Household | ThinkProgress.

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