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Jon Stewart Calls Corzine a ‘Motherf*cker’ for Supporting Wall St. Fraud
The contrasting political and financial versions of former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine (D) was on Jon Stewart’s mind Tuesday evening. The Daily Show host displayed how Corzine preached strong regulations on Wall Street’s bets on risky derivatives in his eventual losing campaign against Chris Christie in 2009, only to have his MF Global, a financial firm he formerly led, go bankrupt thanks to those very same bets on European markets. Read more
Good Election News!
After election defeat, Ohio gov. says it’s ‘time to pause’ anti-union efforts
Looks like the Mississippi Life Begins At Conception and Ends At Birth initiative might be going down too, but not called yet.
- Ohio union-busting law goes down. 63% no.
- Maine vote-suppression law goes down. Oh noes, gays and lesbians might be able to vote!
. . . it’s official!
You've seen the Greek and before that the Icelandic reactions to their governments' announcement of austerity measures. Are you ready for our Congress to "GO BIG" (which they've announced they now feel free to do)? Are you prepared to enjoy the American Austerity coming from a 4 trillion-dollar reduction in the debt (which these mllionaires will never feel personally)?
Me neither.
Once we understand that the banksters and their bought-and-sold Congress stooges are not intelligent people working hard who knew what they were doing but are just greedy criminals, we will begin to take back our country.
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) is one of 40 House Republicans who say that increased revenues must be part of the Super Committee deal to reduce the nation’s debt. Those Republicans joined 60 House Democrats in signing a letter calling on the Super Committee to “go big” and cut $4 trillion instead of instead of the $1.5 trillion they are aiming for.
“Will you support more revenues?” Fox News host Mike Wallace asked Simpson Sunday. “Either from raising tax rates or cutting deductions as a part of the plan to cut the deficit?”
“You have to,” Simpson declared. “The reality is you can’t get to $4 trillion without including additional revenue. We might have different ideas about what those revenues will look like. I think you could get additional revenues by actually lowering the tax rates and eliminating all of the exemptions underneath and that type of thing. And I think you’d have an economic boom in this country and the revenue would come in to the federal government. So, more revenue is key to this.”
“Grover Norquist, a name with which I’m sure you’re familiar, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, has a pledge that you and all but six House Republicans have signed to oppose any net increases in taxes — exactly the opposite of what you just said to me,” Wallace noted. “How many House Republicans do you think will follow you, are willing to break their pledge and, quite frankly, put their political futures at risk to make this deal?”
“I signed that in 1998 when I first ran,” Simpson recalled. “I didn’t know I was signing a marriage agreement that would last forever and I think the majority of members of Congress that you have to have additional revenue.”
Watch this video from Fox News Sunday, recorded Nov. 6, 2011.
Reading Wolves in the City today I finally saw clearly the argument of those who want to pretend that nothing bad has really happened since 9/11 scared us to death and caused us to go to war against the middle east, and that the Israelis are just like us and are our friends and would never, never, never try to cleverly guide events! Please click on the link and read it all if you can stomach the truth. I have a huge number of Jewish friends, but no Zionists like these guys. Don't try to tell me that they're just like us. And take a look at the middle-class revolt in Israel, which is occurring now, indicating that they're starting to figure out what's been done to them in the name of the banksters.
To see the truth in black and white used to be enough to impeach a President (see Nixon's smoking gun tape) and put wrongdoers in jail (see Jack Abramoff's latest and he's out in 3.5 years). Speaking of Abramoff, we might want to rethink the sentences that people receiving many millions for their crimes get.
Americans want real accountability. On Thursday, Robert Reich wrote that while the biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy . . . [t]he biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent."
The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see.
Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.
But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this.
It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Super Committee” - six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings - will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013.
Have your eyes already glazed over?
Diffident Democrats on the Super Committee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich - not even a tiny bit.
President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” - which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.
Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway.
The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.
The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less.
I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012.
Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more - and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.
Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy - 1968 and 1989? [1848?]
I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game - an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards.
Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.
Bank of America Loses Foreclosure Class Action Motion to Dismiss in New Jersey – BEALS v. BOA
650,000 Americans Joined Credit Unions Last Month:
To put that in perspective, there were only 600,000 new members for credit unions in all of 2010.
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