America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don't even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground -- we're digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.
I’ll go the polling station with the same level of enthusiasm I experience when buying a roll of toilet paper and leave in a cloud of guilty shame, as if I’m exiting a porno theater. I’ll hide my face from respectable humanity, toss that silly “I Voted” sticker into the nearest trash can, and spend the day beating back the disturbing suspicion that somehow, someway, I’ve been an accomplice to a crime. Or, at the very least, an enabler of corruption. Or, worse, I’ll just feel like a simple sucker, an ordinary chump who’ll get exactly what he deserves.All the same, I’ve considered the arguments and have reluctantly concluded that the Administration is right. We have to vote for their side because the alternative is worse. Far worse. Unthinkable, in fact. Just watch the video of that simian thug slamming his foot on a woman’s head at a Rand Paul event to get a glimpse of where the extreme Right will take us given half the chance. These people carry guns. They relish violence. The think the Founding Fathers intended for this country to be a Christian theocracy. They believe God hates gays, Muslims and liberal elites with equal ferocity and will gladly bash us in the head if we disagree. They’re pissed off and they want a Fuhrer.
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It’s like having to choose between cancer or a heart attack. Both will kill you, but one will take a little longer and you might get a few painkillers along the way. Voting for the Democrats might be a futile, even self-defeating rearguard action, but it might buy us enough time to complete our emigration plans should Republican presidential nominee Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney be forced to choose Sharron Angle as a running mate 2012.I’ll cravenly vote for the lesser of two evils, again, then go home and scrub with soap and water.
Privacy advocates forcefully criticized the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday after the agency dropped its inquiry into a privacy breach by Google.
The company had collected and stored private user information, such as passwords and entire e-mails, without even realizing it. Google's action remain under scrutiny abroad.
Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, characterized the development as the FTC giving Google "a free pass."
"The FTC keeps giving Google a free pass to collect consumer data card," he said. "While Canadian and other regulators are in hot pursuit of Google's wifi data collection practices, the FTC has dropped its own investigation."
He said Google's "flip flips on this issue--no we didn't collect, yes we did" are one reason a stronger investigation would have been appropriate. He also questioned whether Google's political clout helped it through the privacy debacle.
Chemist Bob Naman described the brownish, rubbery tar balls that are a product of BP's dispersed oil that continue to wash up on beaches across the Gulf:"Those are the ones kids are picking up and playing with and breathing the fumes that come off them when you crush them in your hand. These will affect anyone who comes into contact with it. You could have an open wound and this goes straight in. Women have a lot more open mucus membranes and they are getting sicker than men. They are bleeding from their vagina and anus. Small kids are bleeding from their ears. This stuff is busting red blood cells."
Dr Ott said: "People are already dying from this… I’m dealing with three autopsy’s right now. I don’t think we’ll have to wait years to see the effects like we did in Alaska, people are dropping dead now. I know two people who are down to 4.75 per cent of their lung capacity, their heart has enlarged to make up for that, and their esophagus is disintegrating, and one of them is a 16-year-old boy who went swimming in the Gulf."
The butchering of animals by hand became a dying art. But now it's back. "These days, people want to know again where their meat is coming from, just like they want to know where the rest of their food is coming from," says Wilson, who finds the three-hour experience of butchering a lamb "meditative and relaxing. It's one of my favorite times."I couldn't help but think of the military when reading that. In war, human beings become "just one of the chickens." We don't like to think about the cold-bloodedness and horror of war. We focus on the uniforms and the medals and abstract words like "honor" and "service" and "patriotism." Yes, it's very profound.
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"I think if you choose to eat animals, you have an obligation to honor the animal's sacrifice by eating the whole animal," says Deborah Krasner, whose new book, Good Meat: The Complete Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Meat (Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 2010), includes many offal recipes, including one for pig-ear lardons. "Pigs' ears are like bacon to the nth power. You braise them, then deep-fry them, then they're the most wonderful fatty garnish for anything from oatmeal to salad," says Krasner, who raises, slaughters and butchers her own livestock in Vermont.
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"My sheep are beautiful and fluffy and they have faces that look at me. They run to the fence when they see me. But they're not pets. When I put a chicken upside-down in the killing cone, put its head through the bottom and wield the knife, getting ready to cut its throat, I'm not thinking, 'This is Maggie.' I'm thinking, 'This is just one of the chickens.'
"It's hard, because you're seeing death. You're the agent of death. The blood comes gushing out, you funnel it into a bucket of leaves to collect it for compost, but it makes you hyper-aware of the concept of lifeblood. It's very profound."
The United States has dropped out of the "top 20" in a global league table of least corrupt nations, tarnished by financial scandals and the influence of money in politics, Transparency International said on Tuesday (link).We're no. 22! We're no. 22!
Somalia was judged the most corrupt country, followed by Myanmar and Afghanistan at joint second-worst and then by Iraq, in the Berlin-based watchdog TI's annual corruption perceptions index (CPI).
With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the 18-person panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission, harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food.
Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress. The commission route allowed him to concoct a majority right-wing constituency in a bottle, so to speak, by weighting the membership with pro-corporate players.
No one doubts that the panel is rigged to recommend cuts that Democrats (and a few Republicans) would be prepared to fight tooth and nail if proposed by the GOP. Blood would flow in the halls of the House and Senate, and in the end the assailants would likely lose. But by packaging the poison in a commission, Obama is allowed to behave as if the entitlement debate has oozed from the ether, demanding to be made manifest.
Workers abandoned their "class war" generations ago, believing this accommodation was a victory, but capital is having the last laugh, forcing higher production out of fewer workers and leaving the rest to fight for the scraps.
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Austerity is "in", Markets are up, and soup lines are long. Could the IWW see a comeback? Halleluejah I'm a Bum! Halleluejah Bum Again! Halleluejah give us a hand-out to revive us again!
The final insult is listening to the politicians solemnly declare that "it is only fair that we all share the pain." And seeing the workers nod in pious agreement. We? Really? The Tea Party brilliantly wedged so-called "progressives" by framing stimulus and bail-outs as socialism, something they could never defend, yet these Dems know how insane they sound defending "free markets". Checkmate.
We're living through the greatest economic dislocation in 80 years, and most people are terrified. The notion that a system based on profit and greed is a good idea doesn't seem to hold water for increasing millions of people. So an alternative that talks about sharing the wealth, the rich not getting everything, good jobs for all, good education, ordinary people having control of their lives instead of billionaires -- all of these ideas make a lot of sense to people.
When Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his explosive 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Thomas vehemently denied the allegations and his handlers cited his steady relationship with another woman in an effort to deflect Hill's allegations.Here's the avant garde Clarence Thomas on internet porn:
Lillian McEwen was that woman.
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McEwen's memoir describes her own "dysfunctional" family in the District and, ultimately, a long legal career. She charts how she developed an "inner self" to escape the chaos of her childhood. Her story also includes explicit details of her relationship with Thomas, which she said included a freewheeling sex life.
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"He was obsessed with porn," she said of Thomas, who is now 63. "He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting."
McEwen added that she had no problem with Thomas's interests, although she found pornography to be "boring."
According to McEwen, Thomas would also tell her about women he encountered at work. He was partial to women with large breasts, she said. In an instance at work, Thomas was so impressed that he asked one woman her bra size, McEwen recalled him telling her.
Presented with some of McEwen's assertions, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Thomas was unavailable for comment.
"If a publisher chooses to send its material into a particular community, this Court's jurisprudence teaches that it is the publisher's responsibility to abide by that community's standards. The publisher's burden does not change simply because it decides to distribute its material to every community in the Nation. Nor does it change because the publisher may wish to speak only to those in a 'community where avant garde culture is the norm,' but nonetheless utilizes a medium that transmits its speech from coast to coast. If a publisher wishes for its material to be judged only by the standards of particular communities, then it need only take the simple step of utilizing a medium that enables it to target the release of its material into those communities."The idea of "community standards" pretty much crumbles when the people making and upholding those standards are subverting them in their working lives, don't you think?
But the remarks themselves seem less consequential than how tame they are compared to stuff I hear on cable TV basically every day. I'm in the business of keeping a reasonably close eye on what people are saying on cable TV about these sorts of things. And bigoted remarks about Muslims are so commonplace and accepted these days that Williams remarks seem pretty tame by comparison. So it made me wonder: this crossed the line? Maybe they were sick of him and this was an excuse to let him go. But if he was in good standing at NPR, it just doesn't compute to me that firing was the logical response. Having said all this, unlike speech and carrying fire arms, there's no right to punditry. So it's pretty hard for me to see this as some crying outrage or any need to make a federal case of it. Basically, I think my response is, who cares?Way to go mainstream, Josh!
Yep, there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do on aisle nine at NPR. Their journalistic standards have fallen significantly since they decided to throw away excellence in reporting in order to make the conservatives comfy. But that’s not the mission of a news organization. They are supposed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”. It wasn’t NPR’s liberal reporters that gave them the reputation of being liberal in its heyday. It was that NPR was so effective at reporting the truth with high standards and integrity. And as we all know from Stephen Colbert, “the truth as a strong liberal bias”. That is why Republicans tried so hard to bring CPB down during the Bush era. When you hear the truth, extremist conservatism ala Fox starts to sound really stupid. So, I applaud NPR for taking this step. They did the right thing in order to start on the long road to recovery.
Two premium chicken producers, Bell & Evans in Pennsylvania and Mary’s Chickens in California, are preparing to switch to a system of killing their birds that they consider more humane. The new system uses carbon dioxide gas to gently render the birds unconscious before they are hung by their feet to have their throats slit, sparing them the potential suffering associated with conventional slaughter methods.Hmmm. I wonder if the Nazis also considered their methods stress-free and humane?“When you grab a chicken, turn it upside down and put it on the line, it’s stress, stress, stress,” said Scott Sechler, the owner of Bell & Evans. “Our system is designed so that we put them to sleep without stress and we kill them without stress.”
The Nazis began experimenting with poison gas for the purpose of mass murder in late 1939 with the killing of mental patients ("euthanasia"). A Nazi euphemism, "euthanasia" referred to the systematic killing of those Germans whom the Nazis deemed "unworthy of life" because of mental illness or physical disability. Six gassing installations were established as part of the Euthanasia Program: Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hadamar, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein. These killing centers used pure, chemically manufactured carbon monoxide gas.
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In 1942, systematic mass killing in stationary gas chambers (with carbon monoxide gas generated by diesel engines) began at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, all in Poland. As victims were "unloaded" from cattle cars, they were told that they had to be disinfected in "showers." The Nazi and Ukrainian guards sometimes shouted at and beat the victims, who were ordered to enter the "showers" with raised arms to allow as many people as possible to fit into the gas chambers. The tighter the gas chambers were packed, the faster the victims suffocated.
President Obama may be skipping a trip to a prominent Sikh holy site in India due to worries that wearing the appropriate headgear may reinforce incorrect rumors that he is in fact a Muslim, rather than a Christian.What's worse, being forced to wear a stupid hat or being too cowardly to wear the stupid hat?
The New York Times reported Tuesday that plans to visit one of India's most famous attractions had been nixed after it became apparent that the president would be required to cover his head with either a traditional Sikh turban or a skull cap like some Muslims wear. Requests to wear an altered baseball cap were not initially approved.
The Wall Street banks’ foreclosure system is a mess. Their total disregard for mortgage laws and standards is what created the foreclosure epidemic in the first place. Now, their total mismanagement is catching up to them. As of today, some of the largest mortgage lenders – JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and GMAC (now called Ally) – have been forced to halt foreclosures in 23 states and growing. We can’t rely on Wall Street banks to follow basic rules. We have to hold them accountable. At very least, they must provide the mortgage notes.To today's financiers, a mortgage note is an antiquated notion, like paper stock certificates. Sort of a ceremonial object from a simpler time, before banks became fraud mills. Given the pliant nature of Congress when faced with the demands of corporate America, authentic mortgage notes are likely to become a thing of the past.
When Wall Street banks securitized, packaged, sold, and resold our mortgages, they created a system where it is often impossible to figure out who actually owns mortgage notes and therefore has the authority to foreclose on properties. But the big banks are getting tangled up in their own web. Recent events have exposed a handful of banks that are throwing families out of their homes even though they don’t have the mortgage note that proves they actually have a legal right to do so. There have been instances of two banks trying to foreclose on the same home, and in at least one case, of a bank trying to foreclose on a house where the homeowner had never even taken out a mortgage with anyone in the first place.
Whether you are facing foreclosure, have an underwater mortgage, or are just a concerned homeowner, it’s important that you contact your bank and demand to see the original note on your mortgage. It only takes a few minutes using our free online tool.
A former member of the Goldman Sachs.... “I don’t get it. It doesn’t feel like this is fraud. Maybe there is sloppiness, but at the end of the day, people took out mortgages they can’t pay back. Now I worry that if anything, the government is making something that is just a clerical error into something that would be nefarious or whatever.”
“It seems a lot about it is, like, notaries,” the Goldman source said. “I didn’t know anyone even focused on what a notary did! It almost struck me as some kind of anachronism that must have had some value in the past—which I don’t understand.”
What is done is done. What needs to be done is this. The liberal wing of the Democratic party must be SEEN to take out Obama. There must be a primary challenge. If there is not, liberalism will be discredited for at least a decade, time America cannot afford, since liberal solutions work and conservative solutions, whether pushed by right wing Dems or Republicans, don’t.
The reason the banks are fucked again is, if they’ve been foreclosing on people they didn’t have the legal right to foreclose on, then those people have the right to get their houses back. And the people who bought those foreclosed houses from the bank might not actually own the houses they paid for.John Carney:
And it won’t matter if a particular case—or even most cases—were on the up-and-up: It won’t matter if most of the foreclosures and evictions were truly because the homeowner failed to pay his mortgage. The fraud committed by the foreclosure mills casts enough doubt that now, all foreclosures come into question. Not only that, all mortgages come into question.
People still haven’t figured out what this all means—but I’ll tell you: If enough mortgage-paying homeowners realize that they may be able to get out of their mortgage loan and keep their house, scott-free? Shit, that’s basically a license to halt payments right the fuck now. That’s basically a license to tell the banks to fuck off.
What are the banks gonna do—try to foreclose and then evict you? Show me the paper, motherfucker, will be all you need to say.
This is a major, major crisis. This makes Lehman’s bankruptcy look like a spring rain, compared to this hurricane. And if this isn’t handled right—and handled right quick, in the next couple of weeks on the outside—this crisis could also spell the end of the mortgage business altogether. Of banking altogether. Hell, of civil society. What do you think happens in a country when the citizens realize they don’t need to pay their debts?
If this isn’t handled right, then this will be the second leg down, in the American Death Spiral.
The lame duck session of Congress will pass a bill that essentially papers over the misdeeds of the banks that originated mortgage securities. Every member of Congress and every Senator who has been voted out of office will cast a vote for the bill. And the President will sign it.
Will the public be outraged? Probably. Financial bloggers will scream from the high heavens against another bailout of the banksters. Congress may try to create some cost for banks in exchange for the forgiveness, perhaps requiring more mortgage modifications.
But the much feared put-back apocalypse will be laid to rest.
If you’re skeptical about the possibility that this will happen, you have greater faith than I do in the ability of the political system to resist doing favors for bankers.
[source]All Serious people know that it's critical to let Bygones be Bygones and that Serious National Security officials must meet with one another across partisan lines to share their wisdom and insights. Still, the fact that Obama is not only shielding from all accountability, but meeting in the Oval Office with, the person who presided over the Bush White House's torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War, speaks volumes about the accountability-free nature of Washington culture and this White House.
John Aschroft was probably right that "history will not judge kindly" what these Rice-led officials did. But that's obviously not true of contemporary amoral Washington or its current President.
If US workers see the government taking away one Social Security benefit by postponing retirement eligibility, millions will conclude that they can no longer count on Social Security for their livelihoods after a lifetime of labor. They will start to save much more money to make up personally for what the government's retirement system is taking away. That will further reduce consumption expenditures by Americans, leading US employers to lay off the workers they no longer need to produce what American consumers no longer buy. It will thus deepen the recession and worsen unemployment.
Here's still another reason. Retirement provides millions of people with time to do all sorts of important tasks with significant economic consequences. For example, retired people provide their families and others with baby-sitting and child-care services that are crucial in a country that provides too little of these and often at unaffordable prices. Already squeezed young families with children will lose such services when grandparents have to wait additional years before retiring with Social Security benefits. That loss has serious economic costs attached. To take another example, retirees provide crucial staffing as volunteers in countless social service agencies across the country. US presidents have been urging such volunteer efforts for years as an urgently needed supplement to the insufficient services government provides for people. Postponing retirement will deprive those agencies of millions of such volunteers at just this time of crisis when need for them is greatest. Where is the accounting for the social costs of depriving these agencies of the volunteers they rely on?
"Attorney General Eric Holder says the federal government will enforce its marijuana laws in California even if the state's voters approve a ballot measure to legalize the drug," Pete Yost reports for the Associated Press.What a crap president.
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"We will vigorously enforce the CSA against those individuals and organizations that possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana for recreational use, even if such activities are permitted under state law," Holder wrote.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday asked a federal court to put a hold on a judge's order that declared the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy governing gays in the military unconstitutional, NBC News reported.It's called cowardice.
Asked directly at a town hall sponsored by MTV/BET why he hasn't used the power of his office to repeal the controversial policy, President Barack Obama said he's working to end the policy, but explained it can't be done with the "stroke of a pen," and that it has to be done orderly.
"This is a not a question of whether it's ending," he told the audience. "It will end on my watch."
Obama said the administration is "moving in the direction of ending this policy," but added that he has an obligation to follow existing rules.
My childhood, in Birmingham, bestowed the knowledge: do not underestimate the danger of ignorant, angry people in large groups.Cross-posted at no friends no followers no bullshit.The feelings of drift of contemporary life in the US: its media empires -- with content as weightless in meaning and resonance as the electrons that transport the images, and the Internet’s pixel fiefdoms, in combination with the ad hoc, fast-buck-driven architecture of suburban nothingvilles gives present day life in the US a flimsy, provisional quality.
President Obama’s aura of weightlessness, his quality of emotional remoteness, only exacerbates the nebulous sense of unease on the irrational right who think with their guts not their minds. Conversely, guns feel real to these adrift denizens of the nation’s spleenland. The weapon’s weight in their hands wards off their unfocused sense of dread; its heft, momentarily, mitigates the unease inherent in feelings of being helplessly unmoored . . . Looking down the precise beauty of its barrel distills hazy hatreds into identifiable targets. Momentarily, the ground feels solid beneath their feet. Hence, guns must be stockpiled; massive amounts of ammunition stored for ballast. The mystifying events of the era . . . so muffled by the white noise of uncertainty, must yield to something as clear and decisive as the crack of a rifle shot.
Human beings will never transcend being capable of dwelling in madness on a collective level. David Hare quotes Rebecca West, in the introduction to his play, The Secret Rapture: “Only half of us is sane: only part of us loves . . . [desires] happiness, wants to die in peace . . . in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable . . . and wants to die in a catastrophe . . . and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
The actuality of revolution means that one cannot perpetually defer a decision, action, or judgment; it means that one undertakes it, fully exposed to one's lack of coverage in history or even in the revolutionary moment. It means that one has to trust that the revolutionary process will bring about new constellations, arrangements, skills, convictions, that through it we will make something else, something we aren't imagining now.Perhaps this seems less surprising, less far-fetched, now that, for a decade, many of us have been making something else together. We've been linking and connecting, doing more than forwarding kitten photos. We've been building alliances and awareness, sharing knowledge of crimes, inequalities, violence, exploitation. We've been hearing the right claiming their revolution and we've been swept up in the reality of their counter-revolution. We've heard the neoliberals and financial despots claim that they are entitled to 90 percent of the wealth and we know, and now because we are connected know that we know, that they are wrong.
It could be that now is when ideas that have become abstract and hard to comprehend, ideas like the proletariart as the subject-object of history, may start to make more sense. To me, now, the idea of the subject-object of history indexes feedback loops, self-organized networks, emergent formations where we are bringing ourselves into being as something new; we are the objects of ourselves. We are already making our setting. The point is to make it differently and to take back what is being taken away--products of our work, opportunities to share, spaces to live, healthy food and environments.
The actuality of revolution is the press/pressure that we feel, that we can't put off but must redirect.
Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor and former Air Force lecturer, will present findings on Capitol Hill Tuesday that argue that the majority of suicide terrorism around the world since 1980 has had a common cause: military occupation.
Pape and his team of researchers draw on data produced by a six-year study of suicide terrorist attacks around the world that was partially funded by the Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency. They have compiled the terrorism statistics in a publicly available database comprised of some 10,000 records on some 2,200 suicide terrorism attacks, dating back to the first suicide terrorism attack of modern times - the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed 241 U.S. Marines.
"We have lots of evidence now that when you put the foreign military presence in, it triggers suicide terrorism campaigns, ... and that when the foreign forces leave, it takes away almost 100% of the terrorist campaign," Pape said in an interview last week on his findings.
An internet voting system designed to allow District of Columbia residents to cast absentee ballots has been put on hold after computer scientists exploited vulnerabilities that would have allowed them to rig elections and view secret data.Professor Halderman writes:
The system, which was paid for in part by a $300,000 federal grant, was hijacked just 36 hours after Washington DC elections officials began testing it ahead of live elections scheduled for next month. Scientists from the University of Michigan pulled off the hack to demonstrate the inherent insecurity of net-based voting.
“None of this will come as a surprise to internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major websites suffer from on a daily basis,” one of the scientists, J. Alex Halderman, wrote on Tuesday on the Freedom to Tinker blog. “It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology.”
The pilot system, which was built on open-source software, was deployed a week ago Tuesday, and just 36 hours later, the team was able to take full control of it. Even though their attack caused computers that were used to cast votes to play their alma mater's fight song, it took elections officials until Friday to suspend the site.
What this means for Internet voting
The specific vulnerability that we exploited is simple to fix, but it will be vastly more difficult to make the system secure. We've found a number of other problems in the system, and everything we've seen suggests that the design is brittle: one small mistake can completely compromise its security. I described above how a small error in file-extension handling left the system open to exploitation. If this particular problem had not existed, I'm confident that we would have found another way to attack the system.
None of this will come as a surprise to Internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major web sites suffer from on a daily basis. It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today's security technology.
We plan to write more about the problems we found and their implications for Internet voting in a forthcoming paper.
The nation is on the edge of anarchy with reports of homes being literally stolen, bank employees breaking into occupied dwellings to change the locks on houses they had not yet foreclosed on, multiple sales of the same property, improper foreclosures on houses where there was no mortgage at all, service of process that never happened and was attested to, literal forgery of court documents (e.g. process service filed that pre-dated the lawsuit itself) and other outrages.
If this is not stopped immediately there is every reason to believe that the people of this nation will come to the conclusion that the bedrock of society - private property ownership - has been intentionally destroyed by a band of brigands with the explicit cooperation and permission of the government. Should that conclusion be reached - that our government has conspired with private parties to expropriate the homes of the citizens - history says that the outcome is likely to be extremely unpleasant and irreversible.
We are running out of time to do the right thing.
Witches will always greet themselves with words like: Blessed Be or Mary Me. In addition to that you will find the tone of conversation to be very open about life, about not judging others, about helping animals, about healing, interest in crystals and their properties. And if any of these comments of qualities can fit within your life you may have some witch within you too. So when you meet people and you wonder could they be a witch, could they not be a witch? Use some of these clues to tell. And thank you for watching with Sandra Cheryl Richardson on how to tell if someone is a witch.Open? Not judging? Helping? Healing? It doesn't sound like O'Donnell is a witch!
Here is an interesting message I received from a teacher of black students in the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) last February:
“Today, I asked a class for which I was subbing (high-school English students, about a dozen, all-black, at one of CPS's actually nice high-school facilities) what they thought of Obama. Their initial reaction was one of, for lack of a better way to say it, pride and joy.”
“But upon closer inspection, this turned out to be a rather shallow sentiment. For when I asked them if they expected any real changes under Obama, they all said no.”
“So while they are (currently) happy he is in the White House, they know full well that he will be no different from any other president -- and it's not something they only know ’deep down.’ They know it pretty close to the surface.”
Gene Cranick’s house burned down in Obion County, Tennessee. Fires take place every day, but Cranick’s house burned down because he hadn’t paid a yearly $75 fee for fire protection. It sounds a bit like mafia extortion, but rural Obion County residents living outside of the city limits have to pay for emergency protection, something which ought to be a public service. In Cranick’s case, fire fighters literally stood by and watched as his home and his dogs and cats went up in flames.Jeffrey Sachs:
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There isn’t even a veneer of a social contract any longer. The ruling class rules, steals our public resources, and we are left with nothing, not even an expectation of a fire department doing its job. It is clear that America is an empire, and it is beginning to crumble. The recession that causes localities to deprive people of essential services won’t end any time soon. It is more than a recession, it is the beginning of something far worse, and we will all suffer because of it.
America today presents the paradox of a rich country falling apart because of the collapse of its core values. American productivity is among the highest in the world. Average national income per person is about $46,000 – enough not only to live on, but to prosper. Yet the country is in the throes of an ugly moral crisis.
Income inequality is at historic highs, but the rich claim they have no responsibility to the rest of society. They refuse to come to the aid of the destitute, and defend tax cuts at every opportunity. Almost everybody complains, almost everybody aggressively defends their own narrow, short-term interests, and almost everybody abandons any pretense of looking ahead or addressing the needs of others.
Their job each evening is to deliver the talking points of the Obama administration (the TARP money saved us from a Depression, ad nauseam) while painting Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as some kind of fascist threat. Schultz is particularly obnoxious because he tries to ooze this folksy populist charm while serving up White House propaganda. Last night he ran into somebody who was in no mood for the bullshit, a middle-aged Black woman named Mignon Veasley-Fields whose unemployment will be cut off after 99 weeks, the outer limit that Democrats have failed to extend. She will tell Schultz that she does not plan to vote in November.
